Spontaneity and Summer Spine Essentials

At the Feldenkrais^® Institute of New York our theme for July is Spontaneity. If you've done Awareness Through Movement® (ATM®) exercises, this may seem at least a bit incongruous. In ATM, everything seems planned. Each movement is carefully described. Often, movements are nearly identical except for a seemingly minor change in one component. Where is there any room for spontaneity in a structure like this? Even within a structure--any structure--spontaneity is there for you to find. In an ATM exercise, you are always encouraged to do only what is easy, only what feels pleasurable. If that means, to remain comfortable, you have to alter the instructions the teacher gives, well, that requires some spontaneity.

But more important is the realization that what we do in an ATM exercise is training. The human body, like all efficient systems, is nearly always capable of performing the same action in a variety of different ways. Your brain assembles or "organizes" movement—dictates which muscles will be activated and in what sequence and level of contraction, while also inhibiting other muscles from acting. Every Feldenkrais experience you encounter presents your brain with more options for how to organize movement. The specific way a movement is organized in the brain is dictated mostly by habit and, depending on how "well-organized" we are, by the circumstances under which the movement is performed. (I'm getting to the issue of spontaneity, I promise.) The training done during ATM exercises provides you with more organizational options for doing any number of different movements. And the more options you have available, the more spontaneous your movement becomes, changing and optimizing depending on what you're doing and why you're doing it. As you do more and more Feldenkrais work, your ability to be spontaneous increases.

So what does this have to do with my workshops, Summer Spine Essentials? The spine is the central core of support for over half your body mass. If you improve the movement of the spine, you improve the potential for nearly every movement you do. In addition, many common aches and pains, both the obvious ones like neck and back aches, and some less obvious like hip, knee and ankle problems, can often be helped by improving the ability of the spine to move effectively.

Summer Spine Essentials is made up of three related workshops, beginning on July 10th, when we'll explore turning and twisting. This workshop is great if you have neck problems, shoulder issues or back pain. Further, improving the ability of the spine to turn contributes directly to the ability to more easily bend forward and back, the theme we'll explore on Tuesday, July 17^th. In the third workshop on July 24^th, we'll look into how you can use your entire spine to move in all directions. As you improve your ability to sense all of your spine, you'll be able to better detect what parts of your spine are working too hard and what parts aren't doing the job they should be.

As you become better able to sense and utilize your spine, you can use that information to improve your posture, be more comfortable standing or walking, and sitting will become more effortless in nearly any situation. You'll also be able to better help yourself solve and prevent neck pain and backaches.

Spontaneity is usually something we believe we have or do not; something we're comfortable with or we're not. But as you do more Feldenkrais work, you may be surprised to find that you become more and more spontaneous. As your nervous system gains more tools to use in movement assembly, resulting in more spontaneous movement, you'll likely find an increase in the spontaneity of your thinking and feeling, as well. As a human organism, you're all one system. When you change and improve one part (like the way you move) the rest of the system responds in kind.

I invite you to join me for any or all three of the Summer Spine Essentials workshops. The cumulative experience of all three will be the best, but if you can only make one or two, each evening will stand on its own.

Why not try out a little spontaneity today? Use this link to find out more and register for any or all of the Summer Spine Essentials workshops. I hope to see you there.

Move. Moving... and Movement

This past Thursday, my wife and I moved out of our house in Brooklyn. We now live upstate in New Paltz, New York, where she's a college professor. We're going to keep an apartment in Brooklyn so I can commute in once a week and keep working at the Feldenkrais Institute.

We're beyond the place where we rent a truck and move ourselves or beg our friends to help us. Fortunately, we've used a Brooklyn moving company a couple of times in the past and they were phenomenal—on time, honest, economical (for movers), very quick but still careful.

Although we used the same company, last Thursday was different from those other times. The movers arrived at 8:00 am, as promised, and we were entirely packed and ready to go. All they needed to do was wrap some furniture pieces and get it all into the truck. They showed up with four guys and past experience told me they'd be in the truck and on their way around noon, maybe 1:00 pm at the latest.

At around 10:00 am, two of the movers were sent to another job. They were gone before I knew they were leaving and when I asked the guy who was supervising our move, he assured me that two other guys were on their way over. But with only him and one other man working, things slowed down considerably. I began wrapping furniture myself and carrying things out to the truck. By noon, when no replacements had arrived I the office and spoke to a woman who gave me a heartfelt apology and assurances that replacements were "in transit." At two o'clock when help had still not arrived, I called again and spoke to the owner. Perhaps you can imagine, I was just a little perturbed at that point. He really is a nice guy, although at the time, I had no appreciation for that. He told me again that help was on the way and that "it would be made right" for me on the final bill. I said that would be nice but what I really wanted was to be finished moving before Friday. I got more apologies and, amazingly, a half hour later two more men showed up.

We finally left our house in Brooklyn at 5:00 pm. We stopped at a storage facility to drop a few things off that are going to the new Brooklyn apartment and left the city to go upstate at 6:00 pm, ten hours after we began. We still had to make a two-hour drive and then unload at our new place. I've been in better moods.

The two-hour drive took three because it was Thursday before a holiday week and we'd managed to hit rush hour at its height. We arrived at our new place at about 9:00 pm and things actually got a little better from there on. The movers had us unloaded by 11:15 pm and I managed to get into bed a little before 1:00 am.

We got back in the car at 7:00 am the next day to drive back to Brooklyn to close on the sale of our house. This seemed like pretty good planning when we'd anticipated saying good-bye to our movers around 6:00 pm the evening before. But under the circumstances, my mood wasn't improving.

I need to digress just a bit here to say that nine months ago when we at the Feldenkrais^®  Institute were planning our slate of workshops for 2012, it seemed like a great idea to me to teach a five-hour Feldenkrais workshop on Saturday, June 30^th. As I was driving back to New York at 8:00 am on five hours' sleep, having lugged boxes the entire day before, the thought of teaching all the following day made me want to shoot someone, mostly myself. But what are you going to do? (I don't much care for guns.)

I had been intelligent enough to arrange to stay with a friend on Friday night so I didn't have to drive back and forth to New Paltz again but I woke up at 6:30 am on Saturday with a sore back, a headache and a six-hour workshop that began before noon.

So, what did I do? After contemplating pretending to be ill or deliberately ingesting something that I knew would give me food poisoning, I did what any Feldenkrais practitioner would do. I did Feldenkrais work. I went over all the lessons I was going to teach in my workshop and although I abbreviated most of the work, by the end of the three hours I spent doing Awareness Through Movement^®, I felt immensely better. My back was no longer sore; my headache was gone; I felt awake, yet calm. I felt ready to do what I needed to do. The particular ATMs^® I did were irrelevant. I could have picked anything. What I needed and received from the Feldenkrais work was to be reminded of how much wasted energy I'd been expending, of how to move (and live) in a more efficient and pleasurable way, of how to breathe easily and in concert with every activity I undertake.

Even after doing Feldenkrais work for more than twelve years, I need these reminders over and over again. We all do. A process that continues to evolve in my thinking is that I look forward more and more to doing ATM, to the curative power of being reminded of what it's like to feel more human. And to be able to sense myself and the changes that occur within me in a finer and more detailed way as experience accrues. It's a process that I believe will continue for the rest of my life. I look forward to that, too.

By the way, the folks who came to the workshop on Saturday seemed to have a great time. And our new house in New Paltz is lovely. We've moved and we'll keep moving. So far, so good….