Movement For Life, A Revolutionary Program That Allows You to Take Control of Your Own Health and Well-Being (Feldenkrais based) 1886616000, 9781886616004

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Movement forLife

Anat Baniel

(c) Copyright 1994 by Anat Baniel All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form without prior written permission from the publisher. Published by NovaMotion, LP 3105 MacArthur, Northbrook IL 60062 ISBN 1-886616-00-0 Printed in the United States of America

To my beloved teacher,Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais, with my deepest gratitude.

Acknowledgments Sharon Trotter's vision, courage and trust in both the Feldenkrais®

Method and in me made this book and this project possible. Thank you, Sharon. I want to thank my students, from the very young babies to the very old men and women, as well as everyone in between, who put their trust in me and taught me what is possible. My gratitude also goes to my father, Dr. Avraham Baniel, who read through the text in its early stages. He patiently lent me his brilliant scientific mind and knowledge , helping me in the process of writing this book. I want to thank my dear friend and colleague, Dr. Eilat Almagor, on whose friendship, wisdom, and knowledge I could always count. I want to thank Dr. Walter Witryol for encouraging me to write a book for over a decade and for always being helpful and generous with his knowledge. To Larry, thank you for your wisdom, kindness, and guidance. Thank you Michael Pearce , Randy Peck, and Whitney Pearce for patiently walking the creative path with me. I felt great relief and hope when Robin Parks and Geoff Harmon stepped in. Thank you both for your swift and solid guidance and support and also for being such good editors. I want to thank Sheila Lane for the many hours she spent typing and retyping, and for her constantly expressed interest and delight with the text. I want to thank my mother , Malka Baniel ; it was always obvious to her that I should and could write this book. Marcy Lindheimer , thank you for being such a good friend, for pitching in useful ideas , and for providing such marvelous emotional support. Last, but not least, I want to express my love and thanks to Sacha, my child, for being an inspiration as to what is possible! Thank you, also, for being so patient with Mommy during the final weeks of this project.

-A.B.

Tableof Contents

Introduction .................................................................... 1 Chapter 1:Movement is Life............................................. 5 Learning and Movement; The Pleasure Principle in Movement; Aging and Movement; Characteristics of Good Movement; Movement is Life

Chapter 2:BrainandInformation .................................... 23 The Brain; The Organization of Movement; Creating Order in Disorder; The Quality of Organization in Movement

Chapter 3:MindandBody.............................................. 33 Introdu ction; Body Imag e

Chapter 4:ThePowerof Imagination inMovement .......45 Introduction; Why Is it Easier to Lift an Arm Than to Imagine Lifting an Arm?; Imagining Takes Learning and Practice

Chapter 5:FeelingandMovement .................................. 53 Introduction; The Ability to Feel and Its Relationship to Movement

Chapter 6:Change ........................................................... 61 Introduction; Habits; Change; Know Thyself

Chapter 7:Growth andMovement .................................. 71 Introduction; Using Gentleness Instead of Violence; Internal Wisdom and Freedom of Choice

Chapter 8:TheAchievement Process andMovement .....83 Introduction ; The Learning Process

Chapter 9:PainandMovement ....................................... 91 Introduction ; The "No Pain, No Gain " Myth; What Do I Do If I Feel Pain?

Chapter 10:Whatis Possible? ......................................... 97 Limitations; What is Possible

Chapter 11:Exercise ...................................................... 105 Introduction ; Mindle ss Exercise -Mindful

Movement ; Fitness ; Posture

Chapter 12:Health andWellness ................................... 119 Introduction ; The Flat Stomach Myth ; Beauty and Brain s

Chapter 13:It's EasierThanYouThink........................ 129 Introduction ; Aging With Movement ; If It 's So Easy, Why Does it Work So Well?

Conclusion ..................................................................... 137

Introduction

*

Theories, ideas, thoughts and beliefs become meaningful to us through personal , subjective experiences . That is what happened to me. I was only 4 years old when Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais entered my life. Dr. Feldenkrais was working as a physicist at that time and was looking for a place to teach his newly discovered movement approach; he was also looking for people to instruct. Dr. Feldenkrais was introduced to my father , a scientist who was very interested in Dr. Feldenkrais' teachings. As a result, Dr. Feldenkrai s began using my parents' living-room as the site of his movement instruction . I watched these lessons and wondered about the movements I saw. At the age of 7 I began taking ballet lessons . Within a few months my posture deteriorated severely. I quit that class and began studying with another ballet instructor , herself a student of Dr. Feldenkrais . Once a week she taught the class one of Dr. Feldenkrais ' lessons, which we children called "the lessons on the floor." The impact that these lessons had on me was enormous. At the end of each lesson I found myself feeling better than before . At the young age of 8 I was learning how I might use my awareness to alter and improve my movements and general well-being . Because of these lessons I found that my movements in gymnastics class had improved and I found that I could do movements I had never been able to do before. My posture also improved . When I turned 11, my family moved; my studies with my dance instructor ended and so did "the lessons on the floor." At 17 I severely injured a hip joint during gymnastics class. At 18, I sustained a spinal injury

Introduction

1

that forced the doctors to operate on my lower spine. From that moment forward, I suffered from recurring back pain as well as a sciatic pain in my leg, and acute, reoccurring headaches. I was told that my leg would be paralyzed by the time I was 40. Despite all this , I continued to be very active. I kept up my dance training, but my leg and pelvis movements became very asymmetrical. That, coupled with the pain, stunted my progress and made my life very uncomfortable a lot of the time. Nothing I tried helped to improve my situation. While studying to become a clinical psychologist, an inner voice, a desire , began to emerge. I came to realize I wanted to work with people through movement and directly with their bodies. It took two more years before I remembered "the lessons on the floor." I immediately went looking for Dr. Feldenkrais and found him in his studio, in Tel Aviv. I began taking lessons with him. After the first five lessons my headach es were gone. I felt an immediate change for the better in my entire internal experience. Dr. Feldenkrais allowed me to observe his work with other students and with them I saw similar transformation s occur. Again and again this was the case. I decided to join his training program and within a few weeks found that I could perform dance movements I had never been able to do, despite my years of training. My lower back and leg pains disappeared ; the peculiar twist of my pelvis was also gone. I exper ienced not only an improv ement in my movement abilities but also an emotional and mental improvement that my years of dance training and schooling had not been able to provide me with . My way of thinking and feeling was changing; I was becoming a freer and stronger person. From that moment forward I have continued to grow and to experience ever increasing possibilities: This has becom e a way of life .

2

Introduction

My own experience made me want to help others have the same kind of experience. I wanted to show other people how they too could delight in their movements. I wanted to help others grow and discover their own possibilities. Once I began teaching, I realized that this goal was attainable: each of my students showed a remarkable capacity to grow and improve the way they moved in their own unique ways. It was remarkable. I was fortunate to have Dr. Feldenkrais there for the first 10 years of my practice, helping and guiding me while insuring my own continuous growth and understanding. I was also fortunate to have so many people of different ages and backgrounds put their trust in me and allow me to try and help them learn and improve the ways that they move, act and feel. Now, after 20 years of teaching the Feldenkrais® Method and witnessing thousands receive the incredible benefits of the Movement for Life program, I have decided that I will make the program and its benefits available to even more people. One of the great ways to reduce suffering and limitations is to lessen ignorance. Movement for Life is one more step towards the goal of increasing one's self-knowledge so that, in turn, one can reduce one's own limitations and suffering . In this book we will look at what is possible for each one of us to achieve in terms of our movements, our power, our strength, as well as our mental and physical functioning in general. I will discuss movement in depth, explaining to you how movement -

any movement -

can be easy and

pleasurable to do. I will also explain why pain and injury are almost always the result of poorly organized movements. We will explore the paradigm shift that needs to take place in order for us to make what we now consider impossible possible. I will challenge many common, long-standing beliefs. I will explain

Introduction

3

why the "No Pain , No Gain" maxim is false. I will tell you why force and willpower often prevent you from achieving your goals. I will tell you why an emphasis on muscles and on repetitive exercises has kept you from reaching higher levels of performance, and why such an approach often leads to injury . I will explain why getting older need not be equivalent to a loss in mobility, swiftness, or strength. Most importantly , I will tell you how to make the paradigm shift from the automatic movement and thinking you engage in now, to a more fully integrated movement process that will free you from many limitations and will open up an endless world of new possibilities , regardless of your age. Changing beliefs as well as ways of thinking is not easy. It is my opinion that this only occurs when a person directly experiences the truth of something new and effective. It is easy for me to say to you, Moving gently is

more beneficial and will provide you with the outcome you truly desire. But you must feel the truth of this -

for yourself and with your body -

before

your old beliefs, your old ways of thinking, change. The movement lessons on the tapes will provide you with the opportunity to feel and experience all that is discussed in the book. The movement lessons will provide you the basis from which you may form new understandings and new actions, at the same time that you 'll receive many movement benefits and an improved sense of well-being . Reading the book will provide you with some of the theoretical and philosophical background which, in turn, will amplify your understanding of the lessons and ability to perform them. Remember : the changes in your movement and your thinking processes will transfer to all of the areas of your life, helping to enhance your life in the areas and in the unique ways you need. I wish you a pleasurable and fruitful journey.

-Anat

4

Introduction

Baniel, Corte Madera, California

Chapter One

Movement is Life

*

"Movement is life; without movement, Zife is unthinkable. " - Dr. Mos he Feldenkrais From the moment of conception, movement never stops. Even conception itself requires movement: the egg moves into the uterus; the sperm moves to the egg. There is a constant movement of molecules in every living cell of our bodies. Normally when we think of movement we think of the voluntary movements of our bodies . Yet every movement is really the result of a vast sum of tiny movements , regulated directly and indirectly by our brains. Our bodies are built for movement. The many different joints and muscles allow for a huge variety of possible movements. The structure of our bodies -

our heavy head s sitting high over the narrow base of our feet -

makes it easier for us to move than to not move. But the joints, bones, and muscles alone are not enough for us to be able to move. We have all seen an athlete who can move, doing things no one else can. As well , we have all probably had the experience of not being able to move in a certain way only to find that we may eventually learn that movement. The hidden "player" behind these experiences is the brain. It is estimated that between 96 and 98 percent of the brain's activity during waking hours is involved with organizing movement. At birth , the human baby has no voluntary movement. The brain must receive input from the outside world and the body in order to gradually

Chapter One

5

acquire the ability to command the muscles in specific patterns of movement. As we mature, movement is so much a part of every aspect of our lives that we take it for granted and are often unaware of it. For example, many of us are unaware that our ability to see relies upon a series of continuous, very fast movements of the eyes. If, however, an optometrist places a certain chemical in our eye that stops movement , seeing becomes impossible. The human brain has an enormous number of cells. Each one of these cells can form a very large number of connections. As a result, it is possible for everyone to move in many more ways than those that they have learned. Another unique quality of the human brain is its ability to continuously increase the quality of any movement. The brain may function on a higher or a lower level. In other words, it is possible for our brain to organize any movement in a better way. The better the organization of any movement, the more pleasurable it feels. In fact, any movement that our body is built to do, no matter how big or small, slow or fast, can be pleasurable and easy to do.

• Learning and Movement "To learn is a natural pleasure, not confined to philosophers , but common to all men." -Aristotle At birth, human babies have no voluntary control over their movements . Soon, they learn to use their lips, tongues, and jaws for sucking; they learn to use their eyes for focusing and tracking. Aside from the time they engage in eating, digesting, and sleeping, infants and babies spend most of their waking hours gradually learnin g how to make their bodies fulfill their various needs and wants.

6

Chapter One

If you watch a young infant, you will see it flailing its arms and legs. Notice the arms: there is plenty of movement there, but it is not voluntary. There is no predictable outcome to these movements; they seem to be random. Yet over the years this same child will be able to catch toys with her hands, draw pictures, write, caress, and comb her hair. By the time she is 25 years old, she may be the pianist that you pay to see at the concert hall. What is the process through which such an incredible transformation is possible? In a later chapter I will answer this question in more detail, but for now suffice it to say that the energy the child absorbs from the food she eats is transformed into a higher grade of energy; in turn, this higher grade of energy organizes and enables more complex movement patterns. In the first few years of life the process of acquiring new movement patterns (and with them new patterns of thought and feeling) occurs very rapidly. By the time most people have reached sexual maturity they have learned to do the basic necessary movements of life. From this point forward this learning process slows down or completely stops. Most people continue through life automatically repeating what they already know how to do. You may ask: What is wrong with that? What is wrong is that this process of learning new patterns of movement and of refining and improving existing patterns needs to continue throughout life. For a long time scientists believed that after a person reached maturation the person's brain was permanently "hooked up." Recent research, however, suggests that this is very far from the truth . When adults involve themselves in learning, new patterns and new connections can be formed by the brain. In other words, as adults we can continue to learn new movement patterns just as we did during our childhood. What research does confirm, however, is that adults who do not involve themselves in learning lose existing connections. Continued learning will not only enhance our

Chapter One

7

ability and freedom to move, it will also prevent us from losing our already existing abilities and skills. Most of us are left to our own devices as we grow and learn to move; the quality of what we have learned is often a matter of luck. Judging by the number of people who suffer from back pain, neck pain, and a general limitation of movement, luck alone does not seem to be the best path to learning movement. What is best is the process we used as an infant and as a child: the brain upgrades energy to a higher potential, creating new patterns of movements and thought. When we stop this process of learning and rely on already existing patterns, our movements become automatic. We are no longer able to respond fully to what we feel nor are we able to respond to changes in our environments. The number of movement patterns we use begins to shrink and we become creatures of habit. Often we decide that a person is old because their skin is wrinkled or because their hair is grey. A much better gauge of age is to ask: How does this person use their brain? Does this person still feel, still learn new ways of moving and thinking? Does this person continuously evolve and define himself or herself?

It is never too late to start using your brain the way you did as a baby, when information coming from your senses was constantly used to form new patterns. The moment you resume doing this your vitality will increase. As well, many things that you gave up doing or found you were never able to do suddenly become possible. You become stronger and healthier; your thinking also becomes clearer. Most exercise regimens, though beneficial in many ways, do not provide us with much new information . This is because these regimens are repetitive and use a very limited variety of movements. As a result, such exercises alone are not sufficient in forming new patterns. We need a process

8

Chapter One

or regimen that provides us with new information through which we learn to do new movement configurations: this will be discussed later. When Henry was 69 years old, he suffered from a torn aorta. Luckily, he was 2 minutes away from a hospital where the doctors were able to perform open heart surgery and save his life. In the course of this traumatic event, Henry also suffered a mild stroke. I first met Henry two weeks after his surgery. He could hardly move, was slightly spastic on one side of his body, and was deeply depressed. Henry's problem was not in his muscles or bones, for they remained in the same good shape as before the stroke. The problem was that Henry's brain was not organizing his movements as well as before. These are the questions I asked myself before I began Henry's lesson: Was Henry's brain able to learn to respond to information coming from his body and his environment the way he did as a child? Could old patterns of movement be activated and new ones formed? The first few minutes of the lesson felt like an eternity; nothing happened and it seemed as though there was no brain function at all. Then changes started to occur. Rapidly, Henry gained control over the movements of his legs, arms, and back. Two days later, Henry was able to stand up and walk a few steps. When I saw Henry again a few weeks later he was at home. Though functioning, he looked and acted like a very old man. He told me: "I wish I could play golf again, and do it as well as I did ten years ago." I said: "You can do it; just follow the program." He did.

Today, a year later, Henry is doing well and it's hard to keep track of him. He works, travels with his female companion and, most importantly, is full of vitality. He feels good and he looks great. Because of his illness, Henry had to learn to involve himself again in

Chapter One

9

the process of organic learning of movement, a process he more or less abandoned 55 years earlier. His story demonstrates that regardless of age or physical limitation, any person may learn and put into practice patterns of movement that improve health and well-being. Henry 's recovery illustrates the power involved in learning these new patterns of movement. It is never too late to learn to use our bodies more fully and effectively.

* The Pleasure Principle In Movement "All the animals, excepting man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it. " - Samuel Butler Does it feel good to move ? Are there movement s that you like to do because when you do them you get pleasurable sensations? Unfortunately, most of us are raised to notice the sensations associated with movement only when those sensations are painful. Our belief systems as well as the demands of daily living force us to disreg ard the pleasure that could be associated with movement. Yet moving can feel wonderful. When we organize our movements well , we feel great. At 13 months , Erin was unable to move: she couldn't roll, crawl, or use her hands for playing and she cried most of the time. When I saw her the first time, it was apparent that every time she moved she experienced a sharp pain in her left ankle. To avoid this pain , Erin avoided movement. However, once the pain was gone (after three days of lessons), Erin started crawling. When we move well it feels good. If moving felt bad or painful when we were babies we would have avoided moving just like Erin did and our development would have been arrested. Most of our movements were learned spontaneously as we grew up. As adults , some of us chose to learn a

10 Chapter One

movement discipline that increased our movement vocabulary, for instance, some kind of sport, exercise or dance. As is most often the case, little emphasis is placed on the quality of these movements, precisely because little is widely known about this issue. As a result, many people find that even basic movements like bending down or turning the head have become uncomfortable or even painful. Pain and discomfort affect us the same way they affected Erin when she was a baby, limiting our movement instead of encouraging us to explore our bodies' capabilities. Deidra is in her late 30s. She recently participated in one of my twoday workshops. She told me she was in a lot of pain a result of three different back surgeries. She told me she would not be able to do much in the workshop. I replied that she should do very little, stopping if the movements caused her any pain. If she did find it necessary to stop, however, I asked that she simply imagine herself doing the movements. At the end of the first day, Deidra came up to me with tears in her eyes. "It's incredible," she said. "I haven't moved this much for a very long time." By the end of the second day, Deidra was even more ecstatic: "I haven't felt this well in years. I feel that I have been given my life back." Movement that is well organized feels good to do. Movement movement -

any

is meant to be pleasurable; when the brain has the relevant

information it needs to organize the movement well, it is pleasurable. Movement for Life will help you rediscover the pleasure in moving. The lessons will guide you into a discovery of what is pleasurable for you. You will learn to use the feelings of comfort and pleasure as your guide to increased mobility and power.

Chapter One

11

*Aging and Movement "How old would you be if you didn't know how old you are?" - Satchell Paige Our beliefs about aging are pervasive and powerful. We expect to become weaker and less flexible the older we get. We expect to lose the swiftness and accuracy of our movements, becoming slower and less coordinated. We expect to feel more aches and pains, gradually losing more of what we were once able to do. Little in the world we know today challenges these beliefs. We do not expect to be able to do more at 40 than we did at 20. We don't expect to be able to learn, at 60, movements we were unable to learn at 20 or 30. But, as was mentioned earlier, the human brain is structured so that it can continuously form new patterns. In contrast, animals like cats, dogs, and horses are born with their brain "pre-wired" to a great extent. They have a lot less learning to do before they become fully functioning adults and their ability to learn is substantially lower than that of humans. At birth we humans have very little, if any, preprogramming in terms of the motion. At first, this lack of "pre-wiring" may seem disadvantageous. (After all, who wouldn't want to move as well as a cat?) Besides, what is the advantage of a system that demands that we learn every movement, and that provides us with an astronomical number of possible movement patterns? The advantage to our system, however, is that it provides for the vastness of human individuality. When we explore different ways of doing a movement, we gradually find our own ideal way of doing that movement. Since we are all different, we each need to develop our unique, personal way of doing every movement. As we grow and learn more, we change, yet we

12

Chapter One

need to keep adjusting to these changes by fine-tuning our movements. Our brain's ability to create new patterns allows the quality of our movement and action to always increase. It makes us the most adaptable of nature's creatures . It gives us the possibility of freedom and choice. Edith started following the Feldenkrais® Method of movement learning at age 50. Even though she was in "good shape," her flat feet caused her much pain. As a result, she was extremely unhappy. She wanted me to help alleviate the pain in her feet. She began the program by learning movement configurations she had never used before. The pain in her feet disappeared; her flexibility and power grew daily. Edith felt so good so confident -

and

that she began downhill skiing for the first time in her life.

As well, she enrolled in several dance classes. Today, at 73, Edith is vibrant and mobile, leading a life that is much more fulfilling than the life she led at 50. Of course, this is very different from what we have come to expect. Even professional athletes -

those whose movements we aspire to

are affected by poor movement patterns. In our culture, a top athlete is

considered old at 30. How can this be? How can a highly trained athlete, operating at top performance levels , start losing her/his abilities? Is it that the cells of the body can no longer metabolize as efficiently as those of a 25 year old? No. The problem is how movement was learned, specificall y, what was missing in the learning process. Often times, the trainin g of an athlete is goal-oriented from the start; their learning is aimed towards a very specific outcome. Certain movements -

a relatively small number -

are repeated over and over again in an

attempt to improve the outcome. The few who happen to develop effective movement patterns make it to the top. However, in the process of learning they often fail to explore an ever increasing number of possibilities. Hence, their ability to fine-tune and adjust to inevitable changes is limited. They give

Chapt er One

13

up, unknowingly, on their ability to change, learn, adapt, and improve their movements. What could have been a process of ever increasing skill and freedom becomes a series of compulsive, fixed methods of movement. Lacking the knowledge to change, many frustrated athletes respond with excessive force rather than new information; they then receive the inevitable injury that begins the process of deterioration. Billy is a retired baseball Hall-of-Farner. At our first meeting I became very much aware of the injuries to his body that had been caused by his sport. While his spirits were great, every day actions like getting out of a car or bending down were very difficult. This man, once the embodiment of excellence in motion and still an idol to millions, could barely move. After his first lesson he told me something that I'll never forget. "I hated to play all those years. I hated to play," he said. "I hated it because they treated me like a body without a mind. You are the first person in my life that has shown me how to bring my mind into my movement." As long as we continue to approach our bodies and movements mindlessly, using force, we will continue to achieve less than is possible. We will also be encouraging the deterioration of our bodies. Aging will mean increasingly limited movement. We will lose some of the brain's ability to direct and adapt movement. But this bleak picture can be reversed at any time, easily and quickly. Recent research has shown that by doing even simple, basic exercises, older people have been able to reverse the process of atrophy in their muscles. The moment we subject ourselves to new information, the moment we start exploring and feeling new feelings, the moment our brains start forming new patterns, we immediately find ourselves doing what we could not do before. Tamara participated in the same workshop as Deidra. She was 82 years old and recovering from hip surgery. One hip had been totally replaced,

14 Chapter One

the other had a pin added to the joint. Tamara could not go down to the floor or stand up without her son doing most of the work for her. Since she could hardly move in the workshop, she felt as if she were in the wrong place. Still, Tamara did what she could and watched the rest of the time. After just two days of lessons (and to everyone's amazement) Tamara was able to swiftly rise up from the floor, unassisted. The brain thrives on new and relevant information. It makes us feel better and provides us with ever increasing energy as well as a strong sense of curiosity. Passing time is no longer an enemy, it becomes an opportunity to continuously refine our movement skills which, in turn, provides us with more and more options of movement rather than fewer and fewer. Using time this way gives us the opportunity to live our lives like artists; our lives unfold like works of art. By doing the Movement for Life program, you can reverse the process of aging. Instead of becoming stiffer and clumsier, you can become continuously more skillful in your movements . With this program your brain will get the information that it needs in order for you to be able to do what you once thought was impossible . Thousands have already experienced it; it is readily available to anyone, at any age.

* Characteristics of Good Movement What is good movement? By what criteria can we decide whether one is moving well or not? Usually these questions are not even asked. We assume that if we reach our goal then all is well. The movements done in our attempts to achieve goals are of secondary importance to us. Normally, our focus is on the outcome. This focus often leaves us neglecting the process by which we

Chapter One

15

reach these goals. In my work with musicians, I have come to realize that it is possible for a musician to create beautiful music even when some of the playing movements are done poorly . The poor organization of these movements creates a glass ceiling on the musician's ability to move to the next level of excellence, and often times result in injury. Achieving the goal is "what counts" and has been the main focus for everyone for a long time . Because of this, knowledge about better movement options has been slow to emerge . With most exercise routines the situation is similar. Even though the focus is on movement, the emphasis is placed upon the outcome. There seems to be very little understanding of the importance of how the movement is done. How many of you have repeatedly tried to bend over and touch your toes by pushing down hard? Maybe you managed to reach your toes (achieve your goal) but the way you did it pulled excessively on the short muscles while putting too much pressure on certain joints. As a result, an injury, or at least pain, may have occurred. Achieving our goals through poorly organized movement often works in the short run. However, when we do a poorly organized movement over an extended period of time, we start to feel the discomfort as injury sets in. If our livelihood does not depend on continuing this activity, we will give it up. This is why so many of us start a new exercise program only to find ourselves giving it up after a short time. A world renowned orchestra conductor asked me if I might provide him with some lessons that would decrease a debilitating pain in one of his shoulders. After a few lessons, when the pain was gone, he asked me why his pain had also stopped when he took a six week ski trip. I explained to him that the movement demands on his shoulders while skiing were minor compared to the demands put upon his hands, arms, and shoulders while

16

Chapter One

conducting. Even though the movement of his shoulders was poorly organized, it was still good enough for recreational skiing. Such poor organization in conducting, however, could cause damage to his body. Once he learned a better way of organizing his arm and shoulder movements and felt the difference such movements made, his pain was gone for good. How can we know if we move well? Is feeling pain the next day a measure of beneficial movement? Is sustaining the activity for a long time a measure of beneficial movement?

In the last few decades, it has become generally accepted that engaging in some form of movement activity is of great importance, if not essential, to our health and well-being. Research shows that exercise regimens, especially if coupled with good nutrition, can reduce our chances of getting cancer, can lower the risk of heart disease, may prevent osteoporosis -

the list goes on.

I want to take us a step further. How you move and what you do with your thoughts and feelings in relationship to movement is paramount to good health. Though many exercise regimens are beneficial, because of the way they are done they may ultimately be more destructive than beneficial. Also, many people find it difficult to maintain many of the traditional exercise programs; they find them too time consuming, too difficult, etc. The bottom line is this: the benefits we get from exercising are marginal compared to the benefits we can get if we were to incorporate our brains into the activity at a much higher level, continuously generating new information and improving the quality of movement as it is done. Any voluntary movement that is done well has the following characteristics: 1. Efficiency: When we want to do something, when we have a goal

in mind, there are many different ways to organize our movements so that we

Chapter One

17

may reach this goal. Let's take, for instance, walking up a flight of stairs. Imagine an adult, shortly after knee surgery, going up this flight of stairs. Contrast him with a healthy, vibrant 8 year old climbing the same stairs. Watching both, we react favorably to the child for she moves more efficiently.

In order to go up the stairs, different muscles in the body need to contract in order to allow us to move in that direction. The contrac ting muscles generate forces that are transformed into movement. There is no wasted energy. When movement is poorly organized, only a portion of the forces end up generating movement. The rest of the energy becom es destructive, generating excessive heat which damages the joints . In this same manner, exercising can be destructive despite its potential value. Tens of thousands have suffered sports-relat ed injuries caused by aerobics, running, tennis, basketball -

a variety of sports that many people quit as a result of

these injuries , most a result of inefficient movement, movements that were poorly organized. Efficient movement, on the other hand, feels easy to do and is also safe. Once the brain has the necessary information to organize the movement efficiently, the healing of previous damage can take place since the destructive forces are no longer active.

2. Minimum Energy: Any movement that is directed towards achieving a change in our location or position has a path of minimum effort.

If we move along that path, we exert the least amount of energy doing it. For example, when you lift your arm up in the air, there is a way of doing it where you exert the least amount of energy. A movement done this way always feels light , easy to do, and very pleasurable. Since it becomes so easy and pleasurable to move, a surge of vitality, as well as a desir e to move and do more, usually accompanies such movements. Learning to move this way is something we all can do. How to go about it will be discussed in later

18

Chapter One

chapters .

3. Reversibility of Movement: What does "voluntary movement" mean? A reflex is a non-voluntar y movement, one in which a stimulus will generate the same response regardless of intent. When you go to your doctor and she taps your knee with her little hammer, all's well if your leg responds with an involuntary kick. With voluntary movement, however, you may at any time decide to stop it, reverse it, or change your mind and do something else entirely. When you jump off a chair, the moment your feet leave the chair the movement stops being voluntary; you no longer control it and it is irreversible. What makes a movement voluntary is that it is reversible. So many of the movements we do, especially those which use force (and hence a lower grade of energy) stop being truly voluntar y. We have little contro l in how we do such movements, even less say in their outcome. But remember, this can be easily changed by the human brain.

4. Proportional Distribution of Effort: Not all the muscles in our bodies are created equal. Some muscle groups, like thos e in the pelvis, are shorter and thicker. This means that they can generate greater power over short distances. Some muscles, like those in the arms , are longer and thinner. They generate larger, less powerfu l movements. Other muscles are short and thin and enable us to do fine, delicate movements.

In good movement the effort put into every movement is proportionally distributed throughout the body . The big muscles do more of the work while the small er ones do less. When you lift your arm, the back and pelvis muscles need to participate in proportion to their size . Moving the arm in isolation is the basis for many of the injuries sustained by musicia ns, tennis players, computer operators, etc. in their necks, shoulders , elbows, and hands.

In good movem ent the whole self is present. When you twist your

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head to look to the left, the image of the movement in your brain includes the whole spine, the right hip joint, the left side of your chest, the right foot, etc. When this is the case you twist easily, comfortably, and efficiently. A partial image of the self decreases efficiency and may lead to injuries, limitations, pains, may even cause you to stop the movement for good. In good movement our brain uses high grade energy to command the different muscles; the movement becomes easy, the outcome, successful. No more mindless pushing and pulling, no occasional successes, no more quitting. When movement is guided by a brain that functions at its highest level, you become powerful and flexible regardless of age, weight, injury, or illness. As you can see, moving well has very little to do with imitating someone else or with achieving specific goals. It has to do with you becoming a master of your own body. When this happens, your thoughts can smoothly translate into easy and effective action; choice, comfort, safety, and mastery in movement become part of your daily experience. Through this program, you will acquire the qualities of good movement that will permeate every area of your life.

* Movement Is Life We need to move to live. The same movement can have very different qualities, depending on how it is executed. It can be easy, smooth, and pleasurable, or it can lead to pain, stiffness, and suffering. The quality of our movement decides, to a great extent, the quality of our lives . If you have lost, even for just a few hours, your usual ability to move, if, for example, you had a spasm in your back and couldn 't stand or walk, or a spasm in your neck and couldn't turn your head, you remember how that changed the

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quality of your life: the limitation of movement was a great loss. Now imagine being able to do, on a daily basis, what you couldn't do before. Imagine the quality of all your movements improving. Your ability to move freely and pleasurably will enhance your life: you will become more creative; you will be able to handle stress better; you'll have fewer accidents, pains and aches; you'll have vitality and your faith in yourself will grow.

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22

Chapter Two

Chapter Two:

BrainandInformation •

TheBrain

* "Everyone of us has in his little safe [skull] a very precious high grade energy; the highest grade energy possible, such energy that can fly to the moon, write poetry and even understand how we function." -Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais

The human brain is an amazing structure consisting of some 100 billion cells. These cells form linkages that make an infinity of patterns possible. On the average, each cell has 10,000 connections to the other brain cells . When we look at the number of connections in a human brain, we see hundreds of trillions of connections: within a single skull there are as many connections as there are stars in the universe. All this occurs in an organ that weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of three pounds! When we are born, our brains possess all the nerve cells they will ever have. Throughout our lives we all lose many of these cells . Despite this fact, the adult brain weighs about three times more than it weighs at birth. From birth forward, new connections are formed at an incredible rate. Until recently scientists believed that these connections were all formed during our growing years. Hence, by the time we became adults our "wiring" was fixed. Dr. Michael Merzenich conducted brain research during the past decade and found just the opposite to be true: "The adult brain is dynamic rather than

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static," he writes. "It continuously shapes and reshapes itself from experience through life." His research proves that the circuits of the adult brain are not fixed, in fact, the adult brain is capable of reorganizing and rewiring itself. Other research by Dr. Peter Huttenlocher demonstrates that the brain is not a static organ: it is a constantly changing mass of cell connections that are deeply affected by experience . You may wonder what this information (as astounding as it may be) actually has to do with you, with your ability to move, with your well-being and the quality of your life. This chapter will show you that how we use our brains and the kinds of information our brains receive can influence our ability to move , as well as influence our health and well-being. When the brain works at its optimum level, the benefits we receive far out weigh any that we may attain from just exercising. Once the brain receives the right type of information, the ability to move and organize actions leaps up to a new level, one previously found hard, or impossible, to attain.

*

The Organization of Movement As you grew from an infant to a small child you learned to

manipulate objects. You learned that some objects broke if you bent them too hard while other objects just bent further when you pushed them . You also learned other lessons : If you left a wooden toy outside long enough, it faded and deteriorated ; if you pulled on both ends of your chewing gum it stretched and lengthened . Many of the ideas you have about yourself and how your body functions were adapted from these experiences. So, for instance, if you have a hard time bending down and reaching your toes, it seems obvious that pushing harder on you back should help you bend further. (Even many movement instructors would tell you to push harder or might even assist you

24 Chapter Two

by pushing down on your back themselves.) If you want to spread your legs wider when you sit on the floor, you try to stretch the short muscles in between the legs (the abductors). Many of us who have tried to improve our movement skills in these ways have gotten only partial results. The process began in school, where many of us tried to imitate or follow someone else's directions for movements . We felt like "klutzes" when we weren't successful. As we grow older, we find that this straining imitation creates more and more pain and injury to our bodies. As a result, most of us give up many types of movement, believing that it is our age that makes such movements difficult, all the while forgetting that even in youth such types of movements were not always easy.

If pushing, pulling, stretching, and forcing were effective ways of achieving power and excellence in movement , many more of us would be flexible , powerful, and skillful movers . In actuality, however, few people find this to be the case. Most people, even very young children , wrestle with sizable limitations that affect their ability to move, and most people do not know how to overcome these limitations. So why don't we respond to pushing, pulling, and stretching, the way objects do? We don 't because we are different from these objects in two very important ways: we are alive and we have a brain. Being alive and having a brain bring into play very different kinds of influences and dynamics. These dynamics are so different that often times we actually achieve the outcome opposite the one we are expecting. For example, if you try to bend over and touch your toes and force your back in the movement, the next day your back will hurt and your range of movement will have decreased ; you'll be ever farther from reaching your toes!

If the muscles in your back and legs were like chewing gum, pulling

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would stretch and lengthen them so that reaching your toes would be easy. If the muscles stayed lengthened, however, you would never be able to stand up again! Of course muscles are not like chewing gum: they are live tissues regulated by the brain. It is the brain that decides whether or not a muscle is going to contract. When you bend down and cannot reach as far as you would like it is because your back muscles are too short. What does "too short" mean? It means that the back muscles are actively contracted, hence, shorter than their normal full length. When it is a habitual contraction you normally aren't aware that the muscle is actively contracted. Even if you do, you don't really know how to stop contracting it.

If you pull on your back muscles when they are actively contracted (shortened) by bending down hard, you are actually doing two opposing movements at the same time. Your contracted back muscles pull you up and your stomach muscles pull you down. This kind of opposing activity does not feel good and is destructive. Over time, this way of moving can cause pain and injury. In these forced movements we often focus on just the muscles , forgetting that our muscles are "slaves" to our brains: the muscles contract and decontract (lengthen) in response to the commands they receive from the brain. Our brains orchestrate all our movements and actions. If we would like to improve the way we perform a movement, looking to our muscles is a misdirection of focus since the muscles only do what the brain tells them to do. Hence, people who bend down forcefully, day in, day out, hardly ever improve their ability to perform this movement. Similarly, many of us exercise faithfully only to find very little improvement. This is because the brain keeps giving the same commands to the muscles. We must learn to think in terms of our brains' functioning. The commands the brain gives the muscles are what needs to be changed. The moment the brain gives new commands to the muscles, the muscles contract

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in a new pattern . If it is an improved pattern the final outcome is better: We are able to perform the movements we want to do ... the way we want to do them. In order for the brain to create new and improved patterns of movement it needs new and relevant information. Without new information the brain cannot organize movement in new ways. Further , the bett er the quality of the new information and the more relevant it is, the better our brains can organize our movements. Ultimately, the better the quality of organization of movement , the more we are able to do and the easier it becomes. When Tamara (the 82-year-old woman I mentioned in the previous chapter) was unable to stand up by herself , it was a result of the way her brain organized her movements. Her failure had nothing to do with age, flexibility, or power ; rather, it was a result of the way she was trying to do it. By doing a few lessons, however, Tamara's brain received and absorbed new information. As a result she was able to change the way she moved when she got up. These changes were very effective and the improved outcome was immediate. Though the other participants felt that it was a miracle, Tamara simply felt the naturalne ss of the new movem ents.

;,f

Creating Order in Disorder "Our quality is to take low grade energy and raise it to a higher potential, raise it to such a potential that it astonishes even ourselves. " - Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais Our brain is encased in our skull. We cannot see it, we cannot feel it

with our hands or in the usual way we feel other body parts. When we

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consider movement, it often becomes difficult to assign so much importance to the brain precisely because we are so removed from any direct contact with it. This understanding of the brain 's importance is a relatively recent conceptualization (for instance , the ancient Greeks believed that the brain was a cooling system for the body). Even though there is much yet to be discovered about the brain , many brain qualities (functions) are understood . Understanding some of these qualities is essential if you are to move beyond what you can observe and feel directly. We may ask, does every part of the body have a distinctive "job " to do? Looking closely we find that, in effect, every part of our bodies does have at least one "job " that it is designed for. Another way of saying this is that each part of our bodies has at least one distinct function. The ears facilitate hearing and balance ; the skeleton bears the weight of our bodies and serves as an anchor to the muscles; the heart pumps and circulates our blood; the muscles contract and decontract and allow us to engage in activities. What is the job of the brain? In order to answer that question we need to first understand the concept of "energy." Every manifestation of life involves the consumption of energy. Like all living organisms , human beings constantly consume and expend energy. In physics, energy is defined as the capacity to perform work. If you climb two flights of stairs you do a certain amount of work; if an elevator moves you up those same two floors , the elevator does the work . There are also different types of energy. The types of energy found in our bodies are electrical, mechanical , and chemical. We get our chemical energy from foods and this is stored in our bodies as sugar, fat, and protein . Chemical energy can then be converted into mechanical energy (through our muscles) and electrical energy (through our nervous systems). Any human

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activity requires a certain minimum of energy. For example, there is a minimum amount of energy required for us to climb two flights of stairs. Any amount of energy which exceeds this minimum is wasted energy and wasted energy, as a rule, is wasted as heat. All forms of energy convert easily into heat and, once changed, are very difficult to convert back into useful forms. Another way of looking at energy is in terms of the degree of its organization . The higher the degree of organization, the more it can influence other energies. To illustrate : a light bulb can have the same amount of energy as a laser beam , yet the organization of the laser beam 's energy renders it highly useful in eye surgery, a task a light bulb is completely unfit for. We refer to energy with a higher degree of organization as higher grade energy. The energy of the laser beam is of a higher grade than that of the light bulb. A living "thing" can take lower grade energy and transform it into higher grade energy. All animals consume food and through complex biological processes transform some of that energy into higher grades of energy, i.e., energy with a higher degree of organization. Of all known systems , the human brain is the most capable of upgrading energy to higher levels. With very small amounts of electrical and chemical energy the brain can bring about enormous changes in our bodies and our environments. It causes the contractions of the muscles in our bodies, enabling us to perform tasks . Hence , the brain's "job" is to organize all of our movements and actions. This job requires deciding which muscles to contract and when to contract them so that a harmonious, effective, action results. The muscles themselves cannot do this. Anyone who has seen a child afflicted with cerebral palsy has seen the illustration of this truth. Though the muscles of the child may be strong and powerful, most of the muscular work is wasted because the brain is unable to orchestrate these movements well. As a result, the child cannot move, or can only move spasmodically.

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The better and more efficiently a persoµ moves, the better the brain is doing its job. Movement is the mirror to the workings of the brain . Once these ideas are more familiar and better understood, a whole new world of possibilities opens up before us. Let me provide another example in order to help familiarize you with these ideas. Imagine a tray full of black and white balls. There is no recognizable pattern to the balls when you look at them. All you see are black and white balls randomly placed together. You walk away, and when you 're not looking your friend takes the black balls and organizes them into a pattern. When you turn back, you realize she has spelled your name. What just happened? In terms of energy, your friend has invested energy by moving the balls, thereby increasing the degree of order in the tray and creating more information. The black and white balls are now more than just physical objects; they also function as a representation of your name. You decide you love this tray so much that you ask your friend's permission to take it home with you. You carefully put it in the trunk of your car and drive home. To your dismay, when you open the trunk you find that your name has disappeared. Again, energy was invested in the syste m (the motion of the car on the tray of balls) only this time it resulted in less order and less information. In one instance the energy invested increased the degree of order and amount of information in the system (tray) and in another instance the energy invested did the exact opposite. The energy invested to create your name was of a higher grade; it was energy directed by your friend 's brain which created information and order. The random movements of the car did not have this quality. Such random movements create a non-directed , spontaneous change. This non-directed kind of energy reduced differentiation , which then resulted in less information and less order.

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We invest a Jot of energy in sustaining our brains, muscles and the rest of our bodies. But the functioning of the brain itself takes a surprisingly small amount of energy. This small amount of energy is of such a high grade , however, that it can easily provide all of the muscles with the intricate commands they require to achieve organized movement. The functioning of the muscles also takes energy, but that energy is of a much lower grade. In other words, when you bend to touch your toes it is your brain that tells your

muscles what to do. What the brain tells your muscles determines the outcome of the movement.

*

The Quality of the Organization in Our Movement Say you want to bend down and pick up a child from the floor. There

are many ways you can approach this task. You can do it in a way that feels safe and easy, or you can do it in a way that is difficult and eventually causes pain . Your brain organizes the movements in either example : the brain is sending down these commands to your muscles. What is different is the quality of the commands that the brain generates. The change in quality

reflects how well the brain is organizing movement. The brain is capable of organizing all kinds of movements , from the poorest to the most exquisite. We have all felt both these types of movements, moments when actions did not come together and moments when we moved so well we surprised ourselves. If the brain is such a remarkable system, how come it allows these poor movement patterns? Why does it not simply make all our movements exquisite? Leaming accounts for most of this problem. We are born with hardly any preexisting patterns of voluntary movement. In order for the brain to form these pattern s it needs information. The brain gets its information from

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the senses. To further clarify this idea, let me turn, again, to the example of touching your toes. If our pattern of movement employed to achieve this goal consists in simply pushing down hard, our bodies move as single , undifferentiated masses. Repeating this process, or pattern, over and over creates the same sensations and gives the brain no new information to work with. We have learned an inferior way of moving and when we operate this way, we use our brain on a lower level, expending a low grade of energy. What is remarkable about our brain is not these types of learned patterns, but our brain's propensity towards forming new patterns. Our brains are designed to learn a limitless number of patterns, a process that is easily employed at any time in our lives once we know how. Hence, we can learn to bend over and notice more and more parts of our bodies, perceiving what each part does through the whole trajectory of our move towards our toes. Through these new perceptions, our brains get information they can work with. Our brains may then be able to upgrade the level of energy we use in bending, thereby adjusting the orders given to the muscles so that the movement better fits the intention. The brain can function at its highest level. It may also function on much lower levels. As I mentioned before, the higher this degree of organization is, the higher your performance capabilities are. Once you start using your brain in this manner you will discover that many things you once thought were difficult or impossible become easy, safe, and simple . This process of upgrading energy is limitless: the more we do it the easier it becomes. The quality of our movement and thinking never stops growing and improving. Conversely, if we stop using our brain this way, if we stop feeding ourselves new and relevant information , we actually start deteriorating and gradually lose the abilities we do possess.

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Chapter Three:

MindandBody

*

"The unity of mind and body is an objective reality."

- Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais "Anat, my right leg doesn 't want to straighten." "My neck won 't turn to the right."

"My back hurts every time I bend down. " When I listen to people talk about their experiences or describe their limitations , often times I imagine at least two beings . There is "me" and "my leg"; there is "me" and "my neck"; there is "me" and "my back"; there is "me" and "my body." These two supposedly separate entities are in conflict. It is as if the body, or different parts of it, have wills of their own, wills

independent from the person whose body it is: "me" is somehow not a part of "my body." This separation of mind and body, which is known as "dualism," dates back far in Western history, and is deeply ingrained in the language we use. But is there truly a "my body " separate from the "me" or "my mind" that inhabits that body ? Nobel prize-winning biologist Dr. Gerald Adelman said, "No serious scientist will defend dualism ." Further support comes from Deepok Chapra, who writes ," .. . [A] new paradigm allows us actually to cross over the boundary that once divided mind, body, and spirit." Crystallizing this belief, Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais said, "The mind and the body are two facets of one

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objective reality. Each can exist separately as a concept [only] as long as there in no action." In the past few years there has been an acceleration in Western society's acceptance of the idea that the mind and body are intimately related. Medical doctors are now much more open to the possibility that certain ailments may have a psychological as well as physiological origin. Many doctors talk about psychosomatic problems, a very common one being lower back pain. Doctors agree that stress (a psychological condition) figures greatly in many cases of lower back pain. However, when we think "psychosomatic" we still think in terms of a "mind" that is separate from a "body," assuming that there is some kind of relationship between the two. Mind and body are not two separate entities that relate to each other in some fashion, but a unity, a whole that cannot be separated into individual parts. At any moment we sense, feel, think, and move; every action we do consists of sensing, feeling, thinking, and movement. The proportions of these four elements may change but all of them are always present. If any one of them were completely eliminated, action could not take place. Each of us is an integrated being that manifests self in a variety of ways. Manfred Clynes has found that across cultures, similar emotions will generate the same patterns of muscular contraction, for example, smiling or frowning. We see examples of this all around us. Many of us have had the experience of blushing when we are in love; colors seem brighter , we feel lighter , and our thoughts become optimistic. How a person lives one's life is determined by an idea of self: one is either a unified, integrated self or a self made up of two entities , mind and body. Each idea leads to a very different kind of life. When we accept the dualistic approach, we can (and often do) approach our bodies in a violent, coercive manner. Many types of exercise, both recreational and therapeutic,

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illustrate this type of approach. If something is "wrong" with our movement or if our body "doesn't do" what we want it to do, we use force and repetition in our attempts to "fix it" or "make it work." Often, feelings of dislike and anger are directed against one's body, seeing a "thing" which will not cooperate . The moment dualistic thinking is dropped, when it is no longer "me" against "my body," a unified, whole self emerges. No longer is it "my back" that hurts, but it is me hurting in the back. Since it is now the whole self that is hurting , you are no longer at war with an unruly "thing"; instead, you are free to search in all directions to discover what it is about how you are moving , thinking, feeling, and sensing that hurts. By abandoning the dualistic idea of self and replacing it with the idea of yourself as an integrated, unified being you will be able to tap into incredible knowledge: the potential within each of us to learn and to heal. What was often a struggle, even a losing battle, turns into an endless path of discovery and growth. A world of possibilities opens up and we learn to master our own lives.

•

Bodylmage "We act in accordance with our selfimage." - Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais When you move you somehow know where the different parts of

yourself are. Normally, when you walk through a door you don 't bump into the wall. When a person is under the influence of alcohol or, in the case of certain diseases, this capacity to move safely in space is no longer guaranteed. Since birth, our experiences have shaped the images we have of

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ourselves. While a comprehensive study of the subject of self-image is beyond the scope of this book, some understanding of what I mean by body image is essential. When I speak of body image, I am actually speaking of several different body images that operate within each of us. The Visual Body Image: This is the image of ourselves that we have formed from seeing ourselves (in a mirror, in photographs, etc.). This is the image people are most conscious of. It is also the image we most often try to manipulate. People try to be thinner or heavier, more muscular, have clearer skin, etc. A great amount of attention is paid to this image. Nearly all of our perceptions (both positive and negative) result from the visual image we have of ourselves. These perceptions may be more or less accurate yet they can also be distorted; take, for example, the anorexic, reduced to skin and bones, looking in the mirror and still seeing herself as a fat person. The Physiological Body Image: This is the configuration of the body that the brain "knows." In the brain there is an area on the cortex called the motor cortex. Certain cells in the motor cortex correspond to certain muscles. When these cells are activated, the corresponding muscles will contract. This map of the motor cortex, also called the homunculus, is refined through experience and through the acquisition of voluntary movement. As a result, a person that is born without arms will have no cells in his motor cortex for the movement of arms. Also, the more varied the use of a certain part of the body is, the more we make use of it, the larger its space is on the map. Hence, the area of the motor cortex that corresponds to the thumb is usually larger than that area that corresponds to the leg. The Emotional Body Image: This is probably the most unique and personal of the body images. For each of us, there are areas in our body where we feel ourselves very clearly; as well, there are other areas where we have a less clear feeling of ourselves, or no feeling of ourselves at all. The

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areas we feel most clearly are those areas we typically refer to as "me." For one person it might be their lips, for another their hands, voice, legs, or any other part of the body. We generally have a lot of control over these parts. An extreme example illustrating this can be seen by observing a person 's response in a moment of great fear. In such situations, many people often feel only a part of their self while losing control over the rest of the body. Such a person might be able to yell, yet unable to move; another person might "lose" her voice but be able to run fast.

The FunctionalBody Image: This is the image that is formed through our actions. The functional image can differ enormously in people; it is shaped by what the person has learned to do. The functional image of the arm, hand, and fingers of a pianist will differ greatly from the image cultivated by a person who uses their hands for only basic, daily movement. The development of all our self-images are intimately related to our experiences. In the case of a child born without arms, the child will have very few brain cells that correspond to the arms. As a result, few sensations and emotions will be connected to the arms. As well, there will be no arms in the visual , physiological, emotional, or functional images of this child. To compensate, the child may learn to use his or her legs and feet to do many of the tasks the arms might have done . As a result, the images of the legs and feet will be highly developed , much more so then the same images are in a person who has arms. All these different body images grow and change throughout our lives. Every new action we learn to do alters these images. A woman who learns to dance the samba at age 40 (or any other age) changes her visual image (how she looks to herself), her physiological image (the number of cells in the motor cortex that correspond to her legs and feet), her emotional image (how her body feels), and her functional image (that which she can

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now do). One of the most dramatic manifestations that proves the existence of a self-image in the brain is the phenomena of "phantom pain." When an adult loses a limb due to accident or illness, a peculiar thing sometimes happens. Even though the limb is no longer there, the person may still feel a sharp pain in the missing limb. At times, this pain is accompanied by a vivid image: for instance, the person might report that the limb is twisted, or stuck awkwardly beneath the body. Recent research shows that activity in the brain creates this phantom pain. The self-image of the missing limb, once formed, remains in the brain even if the limb is no longer there. By imagining that the missing limb is moving in comfortable ways, a person can manipulate the functional image thereby lessening, even eliminating , the phantom pain.

*

Developing and Harmonizing the Image of Self From birth forward, our personal experiences shape the development

of all the different aspects of our self-image. The different body images do not, however, evolve uniformly or fully. For most of us, only a small portion of our potential self-image is developed. If we compare a person who can speak 30 languages to a person who can speak only one, we will see how very different their physiological images of the lips and tongues are. Recent research has shown that the brain is able to "rewire" itself when presented with new information. People who were born with fused fingers that are surgically separated in adulthood, for example, are able to develop new cortical (or motor brain) maps for each of these fingers . Even though our self-image changes from action to action, changes or patterns tend to become habitual over time. Through my many years of working with people, I have come to realize that most problems and

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complaints can be best understood in terms of a rigid, underdeveloped, selfimage. When a person comes to me complaining of a limitation in movement or of a pain that is caused by a certain movement, I know that this person's self-image is incomplete, possibly distorted. Ken was a 22-year-old cellist with a promising career ahead of him. He was very distressed the first time I saw him because a pain in his right shoulder was making playing increasingly more difficult. I asked Ken to play something simple, which he did. As I watched him it became clear to me that the image he had of himself playing centered on his right arm only: his back, chest, pelvis, legs, and feet had never become part of the image of the movement of playing the cello. As a result, Ken's self-image was incomplete. I asked Ken to continue playing and while he played, I helped him feel how to bring these other parts of his body into participation. In a few minutes the pain was gone. A few months later, a close friend of Ken's told me that the pain had never come back. The kind of image we develop of ourselves depends on how we learned the movement in the first place. Most of us have been trained to focus on the final goal when we are learning a new skill. As a result, we tend to focus our attention upon only a very small part of ourselves, creating a functional image that is partial and, ultimately, insufficient in its ability to perform the movement well. We get "stuck" in a limiting and often uncomfortable pattern of movement. All Ken needed to do was to learn how to involve more of himself in the movement. Having done this, the pressure that caused the pain disappeared and with it, the pain. What is it that distinguishes a Olympic runner from a weekend runner? They both move one leg in front of the other, have both feet in the air between steps, swing their arms, etc. The distinction is found in the process, in the kinds of commands the brains gives the muscles. While running, the

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better runner has a more complete image of his body . That runner 's brain uses higher level organization -

a higher grade of energy -

to control the

movement , thereby bringing more parts of the self into the image of the action . As a result, less energy is wasted. When we do something and focus only on the outcome , we often end up limiting and distorting our body image. This , in turn, limits our ability to perform. When we focus on only a very small portion of ourselves , a portion that we perceive as most relevant, we very often neglect other important aspects of the movement because they don't seem related. We push hard and hope it will work. We use our brains in an inferior mode , wasting much energy, and thereby risking injury and harm. By incorporating more of ourselves with well-coordinated movements, every movement we do becomes easier. We become more flexible, stronger and better coordinated. The self image of babies and young children changes on a daily basis . Often they are able to do one day that which was impossible the day before. New movements, new thoughts, new feelings continually emerge. Scientific research has shown that adult brains are capable of forming these new patterns just as readily and rapidly as children can. Forming these new patterns enables adults to once again possess the power to change their body image. New integrated body images will match reality better. For example, the visual image of our body size will become more similar to its actual size. Changes in one image area tend to overlap and encourage change in other areas, too. How we feel ourselves to be, how we see ourselves , can be improved , thus improving what we can actually do. The better developed and more fully connected these body images are, the more a person becomes balanced, capable , and healthy. In other words, when you want to bend down and touch your toes, you will feel how to mobilize all the related parts of

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yourself so that you can touch your toes. Rarely is the body of a person who can touch their toes significantly different than that of a person who can't. It is what the brain does that is different. You can learn to use your brain so that the image of your body and the image of the movement you make are perfectly in sync, thereby making every movement easy and safe.

*

Model for the Ideal Body in Movement When you think of the ideal body, what do you think of? If you are

like most people you will visualize a man's or a woman's body that looks a certain way. The ideal of what a beautiful body is changes from era to era as well as from culture to culture. For us, the magazines, movies, and television are instrumental in shaping the "beautiful body" image. In the past 10 or 15 years, exercise videos have also played a significant role in influencing how we look and what we need to do to achieve that look. Perhaps the single best known exercise video is Jane Fonda's first. Millions have followed its example and joined aerobics classes . The focus upon the visual image -

on looks -

has become a

monstrous tyrant in American's lives. Millions are obsessed with losing weight. Many of the exercise routines are aimed very specifically at both weight loss and a reshaping of the body and muscles. How we look can be of great value to our self esteem and sense of well-being. We can learn a lot about a person from the way they look. Yet how a person looks can tell us very little about what that person can do and how they feel. When you look at a photograph of a beautiful young model in a magazine, can you tell if she plays tennis or sings? Further, can you tell if she has a pain in her back? Do you know how she feels about herself? When

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you see a photo of a young male model with a flat stomach, with a well developed upper body, can you tell if he swims, if he can touch his toes, if he can speak three languages, if he likes himself? Most likely not. The tragedy inspired by our cultural emphasis upon looks manifests itself in our attempt to derive a sense of worth out of our ability to mimic someone else. Instead of this type of behavior, we could be developing the individual, unique abilities we possess, using and perfecting them as best we can. Few pianists have "pia nist's hand s," i.e., hands with long, delicate fingers. Some of the best ballerinas have very short legs. What we can do has much more to do with our learning process than our physical make-up, with how we use our brain not how we are structured. The human brain has the unique capacity to form new patterns and to organize the movement of the body in new and more effective ways. When we shift our focus to our functional body image, a whole new world of possibilities immediately opens to us. The human body is built to move; the human brain is built to organize the movem ent and to learn an infinite number of movement possibilities. Since we can only act and move in accordance to our body image , it is extremely beneficial that we spend some time expanding and harmonizing our self-image by learning new ways to move. And, surprisingly, this provides all the same benefits that exercise routines claim to offer: we become vibrant, our muscles get toned and, without exceptio n, we look better. Karl was 40 when he first came to see Dr. Feldenkrais . Karl arrived with his arm in a sling, explaining that he had torn a muscle while using a weight machine in his private gym. He was confused and depressed for he felt he had been doing all the "right " things. Karl continued to take lessons with me and in a few months his life

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was transformed. His focus changed and new possibilities opened up for him. He became free to explore and discover what he liked to do. He became strong, free to lead a very full and satisfying life. He said, "I wish I had done this 20 years earlier; I would have had a better life." Now I would like you, the reader, to imagine an okay skeleton and good enough muscles: this is what most of us do have. Imagine that these muscles and bones are attached to a brain that knows how to command those muscles to walk easily, bend over, twist, run, play an instrument, golf well, ski, touch gently, lift powerfully, as well as anything else you wish to imagine. In short, imagine an ideally functioning body. Such a body, whether young or old, tall or short, heavy or light, would still be an ideal body. With Movement for Life, you will have an opportunity to focus on what you can do and how you can do it. You will focus not on what you look like (even though you will look better), but on how well you can do what you would like to do, and how well you feel doing it. You can learn to feel what works well for you. While your self-image grows , your movements approach the ideal. You will then feel the exhilaration of exquisite movement, a way of life that you were born to live.

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Chapter Four:

ThePowerof Imagination in Movement ~ The Possible's Slow Fuse is Lit/ By The Imagination - Emily Dickinson In chapter three I discussed the different body images, suggesting that it is possible to change those images for the better . I have also discussed the motor map of the brain -

the homunculus -

explaining how a very

active, very specialized part of ourselves (a thumb, for instance) will occupy a much larger space on this map than a larger area with less specialized movement (a leg, for instance). Remember also that research has shown that this map can change quickly and significantly when new movement skills are acquired. Whether you are 3 months old or 100 years old, this change is possible. Realizing that the brain can form new patterns with new information regardless of age destroys the old myth that change is not possible after puberty. Another study carries this new principle even further. In this study, two groups of people where given a movement to practice. One group actually did the movement while the other group only imagined doing the movement. The scientists found that the changes in the brain's motor map where identical in both groups: imagining the movement was just as effective as actually doing the movement. This discovery proves that the brain is able to organize movement in ways that defy conventiona l wisdom. One familiar group has taken this knowledge and used it to great

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advantage: professional athletes. They and their coaches have realized how valuable visualizing is for top performance. The athlete learns to visualize that which he or she is about to perform, like a mental rehearsal. Similarly, Movement for Life routinely uses the mental image of movement as a means to remove muscular limitations. Suzanne was in one of my seminars. While lying on her back, she found that tilting her right leg out to the floor was impossible. She believed that this was due to a back problem she had. I asked Suzanne to stop moving. Pressing the leg slightly while supporting it, I asked Suzann e to imagine that the floor was coming up to her right leg. Suzanne repeated this image several times and found, to her surprise, that she was then able to actually move the leg to the floor without effort or pain. To demonstrate the power of imagining movement , I often lead my students through a movement lesson that emphasizes only one side of the body. I then ask them to feel the changes that occurred and compare them to the side that wasn 't worked on. I then ask them to imagine themselves doing the same sequence of movements on the other side. At the end of this exercise, I ask them to compare the changes of each side. Usuall y they find greater improvement on the side that they imagined the movement occurring. This is almost always the case, despite the fact that performing the movements takes 20 to 30 minut es, while imagining them takes only 5 minutes or less . My experience with thousands of people has proven over and over again that imagining the movement, both visually and kinestheticall y, and imagining the feelings and sensation of this movement , can dramatically change the qualit y of the movement. This process also allows you to increase your movement repertoire, adding new moveme nts as well as movements that previously were impossible. Hence, this process is more than just a

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mental rehearsal of things you already can do; it is an extremely efficient and effective way to go beyond your limitations. In this program, I ask you to imagine and think. Not only are you asked to see yourself moving, you must also feel and sense the movement you are imagining. You are asked to use your imagination and focus on different parts of your body, all the while performing the movement in your imagination . This way the body image grows and becomes more complete . New information comes to the brain and imagining becomes not just a rehearsal of what you already know, but a means to learn something new, as well as dramatically improve something you already know . You can learn to use imagination and thinking to create new patterns of movement and action. As a result, lifelong limitations will quickly disappear. It is so effective that many feel it is magic and it is, to the extent that life and the very way we function is magical.

*

Why is it Easier to Lift an Arm than to Imagine Lifting an Arm? A student once asked me: "Why is it easier to lift an arm then to

imagine lifting it?" This may seem like an odd question but try to remember the last time you actually thought through an action before performing it. Probably, you do the action without any thought, out of habit or familiarity. Probably most of the people you know move in a similar manner . We spend more energy lifting and lowering an arm than closing our eyes and imagining it. Moving an arm up and down burns more calories uses up more energy -

than sitting still and imagining the movement.

Similarly, jogging takes more energy than closing your eyes and visualizing yourself jogging . What we are looking at in this program, however, is not the

amount of energy used but the quality of energy used.

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As was mentioned in an earlier chapter, energy can have different degrees of information . The more information there is to the energy, the higher grade that energy is; the higher the grade of energy, the more it can affect other energies. Imagining and thinking are energies of the very highest grade. Hence, to imagine lifting an arm is more difficult because it requires creating this higher grade of energy. Mechanically lifting the arm as an exercise or "mindless" movement is easier because the energy spent lifting and lowering the arm is of a lower grade . The biggest disadvantage of automatic movement is that the brain operates at a level where new patterns of movement cannot be formed . As a result, change, improvement, and healing cannot take place. Imagining is a great way to move away from functioning like an automaton and towards becoming the creative, vital, and mobile human beings we are born to be. Once we tap into this incredible resource , our ability to move shifts to a new level. We start defying our own limitations: a 72-year -old woman easily assumes difficult yoga positions; a runner breaks her own personal record four times while running easier; a baby who couldn 't crawl starts crawling - the list and the possibilities are endless. Movement for Life opens this world of possibilities up to you.

•

Imagining Takes Learning and Practice Imagining movement is a skill. Like other skills it can be developed

or neglected. Like other skills it also requires a bit of getting used to. When you learn to ride a bike or when you learn to play tennis you find that your proficiency is rather minimal at the beginning. Once you decide that you want to learn, however, you find that your skills develop rather quickly. With this mental commitment backing you up, you are able to master the skill.

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This holds true for the skill of imagining movement. If you haven 't done this before it may seem impossible. The desire to learn , coupled with some guidance , allows you to make this skill a tool with which you can improve your movement beyond the limits you feel are possible . In order to imagine, the brain needs information to work with. If you want to imagine somersaulting backwards you need to have enough of the basic and essential piece s of this movement. In imagining movement , the basic and essential information comes from the muscles and joints . This is kinesthetic information. We cannot imagine or think in a void . We need the input from the senses and the body. But getting the input still does not mean much unless the brain makes good use of it. The ability to imagine and to use our thinking in order to do what we want is a developed ability, one that we must build. Everyone understands building a muscle. This program requires a similar building of the powers of imagination and thinking . The ability to command your imagination and your movement can evolve and grow providing you with abilities unknown to most people. Xantha came to me after knee surgery. Knee problems and surgery contributed to a serious deterioration in her quadricep muscles. Xantha 's doctor sent her to a physical therapist. In order to strengthen the muscles , the therapist recommended that Xantha should lift weights she attached at the ankle. Despite dedicated attempts , this procedure didn't work. This is a very common scenario . I have known many physical therapists who have recommended similar therapies only to end up with patients experiencing similar failures. Why did this happen? As is most often the case, the brain starts atrophying muscles in response to an injury. Xantha 's leg became unreliable due to her knee injury. As a result, the quadricep started deteriorating even though she kept using her

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leg. Who "told" the muscles to atrophy? Who affected the metabolism so that they did atrophy? Xantha's brain. When the brain perceives that the leg is again reliable, then this process reverses itself. Recent research has shown that when a muscle is injured the muscle will not contract. What has also been found is that by using gentle, unfamiliar movement patterns, along with the imagining of the full movement, the muscles in the injured area start contracting again. Xantha is a prime example of this truth. After two lessons with me she regained full use of her legs. Within a week, Xantha had full regeneration of her quadricep muscles without needing to do any special exercises. Once her brain contracted these muscles, daily use was sufficient to regenerate them. At the age of 65, Adam fell and broke his tibia (the large bone between the knee and ankle.) Adam was familiar with the Movement for Life Method and had been very well trained in the process of doing movements in his imagination. He called me shortly after being placed in a full-leg cast. He was in considerable pain and was not up to doing much. This was further complicated by the fact that I was more than 6,000 miles away. Adam's familiarity with the program, however, allowed me to instruct him over the phone in a certain movement sequence he knew. I asked that he do this movement in his imagination only , on the injured side , 10 minut es a day, three times a day. As time passed, I provided additional new movements for him to imagine his injured leg doing. Six months later, when the cast was finally removed , Adam telephoned me . He was ecstatic. "There is no atrophy in my leg muscles!, " he said. "The doctors can 't believe it!"' No doubt many may find it hard to believe, especially if you know that a casted, injur ed limb and the connected muscles begin to atrophy almost immediat ely. Yet this remarkable ability is in each and every hum an being . Not only is this ability useful for situations when you are injured , but it is

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useful in improving every movement we do or would like to do. Xantha and Adam both demonstrate the enormous potential we have not only to reverse deterioration and injury, but to achieve ability and power beyond what we believe possible. What this program offers is the tools necessary to intentionally use the power in your brain to shift you to new levels of ability, well being, and health. Learning to use imagination is an important part of learning to focus and use what really works; it also helps you in creating new ways of doing what you want. Many years ago, Dr. Feldenkrais wanted to test some of his ideas about the relationship between thinking, imagination, learning, and the ability to move . Together with Dr. Efraim Katzir (a renowned neurophysiologist) they designed an experiment. Dr. Feldenkrais led a group of people through 10 movement lessons. In each lesson, the exercise was actually done on one side then imagined on the other. With each lesson, Dr. Feldenkrais alternated the side to be imagined. By alternating, Dr. Feldenkrais found that the group was able to learn lessons faster and faster and the improvements were more drastic. We too can train ourselves to use our brains in ways that provide outcomes hours of repetitive, semiautomatic exercising can never give us because in repetition, no new improved patterns are formed. In this program , the lessons provide you with new information that you can then use to form new, dramatically more efficient patterns of movement and thought.

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Chapter Five:

FeelingandMovement

*

"Seeing 's believing, but feeling 's the truth "-Thomas Fuller, MD Humans are born to be feeling beings. As it is with movement, our ability to feel is also subject to growth and evolution. Feelings are a process, not a "thing, " and our ability to move is closely related to our ability to feel. Neal is a professional violin player. A persistent pain in his neck and shoulders made it impossible for him to play. Frustrated by months of this, Neal came to see me. After listening to Neal describe his problem, I asked him to play for me. After just a few minutes of observation I was able to see the problem : his technique isolated all his movement to the neck and shoulder area. It seemed obvious to me, but clearly Neal was unable to feel or discern the source of his difficulties. How could this be? Robert is a successful business man in his 30s; he is also an amateur athlet e. When he came to me his muscles were highly developed and powerful yet he still suffered from chronic back pain and stiffness. Though these limitations did not completely stop his participation in sports, they did make the experience uncomfortable and frustrating. How could this be? Neal and Robert 's cases are not unique . Both were good at something they loved; both spent time developing and honing their skills. But both focused on the outcome rather than the actual process. Robert exercised constantly, repeating exercises he was familiar with while ignoring how he felt during this process. His muscles grew larger but his physical probl ems grew also. Similarly , Neal spent hundred s of hours practicing, his

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teacher emphasizing the importance of the music, ignoring how Neal felt during this process. As a result , Neal also learned to ignore how he felt while playing . Neal and Robert, two intelligent, capable, dedicated people found themselves injured, in pain, and deeply confused. In your life you may have experienced similar frustrations. Learning to do something, you followed all the suggestions and examples, did all the "right things," tried hard, yet still ended up feeling pain and discomfort. Perhaps you even sustained an injury. At that point did you feel limited , untalented? As mentioned before , every intentional action is made up of feeling, thinking, sensing, and movement. If you completely eliminate any one of these ingredients it becomes impossible to act. Feelings , like thoughts or sensations, are not things but a process, something that is created by us all the time. Hence, feelings are a very important part of our ability to move and act. Feelings are our source of information. A baby can feel from birth ; how skilled that baby will become in the ability to feel will depend on the learning process the baby goes through. Feelings are subject to differentiation. Just as we need to differentiate movement, we also need to differentiate our feelings in order to move and function effectively . A new born baby finds ways to move, but they are not the same movements an adult will use. The movement patterns are constantly refined. The same is true for feelings. Each one of us has the capacity to feel and we can constantly refine this capacity. We can learn to perceive finer shades and experience new, more complex feelings. The more developed our capacity to feel is, the more information our brain has to work with when organizing our movements. Hence, an awareness of our feelings is of the utmost importance whenever we put together an action or a movement.

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Both Robert and Neal 's problems reflect what can happen when feelings are excluded from the movement process. Though their skills are very different , their injuries resulted from a similar ignorance of feelings. A closer look at both cases will further illustrate this point. Let me start by discussing Neal's movement. When playing the violin, Neal held his shoulder in an uncomfortable position. His back and chest were rigid, thus further increasing the pressure in his shoulders and his neck. Yet Neal was unaware of this discomfort. He simply didn't feel it. When the discomfort turned to pain, Neal became aware of a problem yet he could not identify it. All he knew was that his shoulders and neck ached so much, playing became impossible. Neal 's ability to feel himself and his body was underde veloped. Equally important, it was under-used. Through discussion with Neal, I learned that this lack of "feeling evolution" could be traced all the way back to Neal's childhood, when he first began playing the violin. From the beginning, Neal was asked to focus only on the outcome -

the music -

with no emphasis placed on how he felt while he was playing. (Unfortunately, this sort of thinking is often the rule rather than the exception.) As a result, Neal learned to ignore his discomfort. Instead of learning to use his feelings as a guide for his movements , he learned to ignore them, learned to not let them get in the way of his music. When pain threatened to end his music career, however, he could no longer ignore his feelings. The movements Neal learned lacked the necessary incorpo ration of his feelings. As a result he adopted ways of moving that gave him the musical outcome he wanted. Unfortunately, these ways proved to be injurious over time. By ignoring his feelings, Neal was froz en in an early and unhappy phase of development; his growth was stunted. The only way a person can

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----------------------------~~--~---

continue the differentiation and maturation of feelings is by paying attention to them. If Neal would have brought into account his feelings at the onset of his musical career, he would have discovered and used better patterns of movement, patt erns that would have made him feel better and, hence, made his music better. Robert's story is very similar. By the time he decided to participa te in athletic activities, Robert had already been well trained to ignore his feelings. He followed the only course he knew, working towards specific goals while ignoring how he felt during this process. Though pain did occur, Robert chose to ignore it and focused upon his improvement only. He continued to reach goals and this seemed worth the pain. Unfortunately, ignoring feelings does not eliminate the need for them; more often then not, it causes further problems. To compensate for the pain, Robert's brain organized the movements in patterns that became self-defeati ng. As a result, Robert was no longer able to reach his goals. And his pain continued to increase.

If, like Neal and Robert, our ability to sense and feel is so important to our functioning, to our well being, why is it that so many of us are deficient in these areas? In our culture, feelings more often than not are ignored. Starting at a very young age, children are asked to mask and ignore their feelings. Not only are expressions of feelings discouraged, punishment often reinforces the idea that feelings are not to be expressed. The result is that a child 's sense of safety is compromised when the feeling part of them is engaged. They quickly learn to divorce themselves from their feelings and start building a mask. After a period of time, we all learn to identify with our masks and we no longer know what we really feel. Our feeling world has not grown and evolved with our physical world . We have lost a wonderful resource: the knowledge of how to involve our feelings with our movements. Rarely have I come across someone who approaches feelings as

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something to be explored, to be learned, to be refined . Even if our experiences were different and we grew up being encouraged to explore and understand our feelings, we may not have learned how to actively incorporate our feelings with our movements. Most adults have very little knowledge of their feeling world. Most adults fail to realize that there ar.e feeling options open to them, that, like movement, free choice guides their feelings. In fact, when we seek to improve the way we move we must listen to and use the information our feelings provide. That information is essential for healthy, vibrant, effective movement. Neal and Robert were somewhat reluctant and rather disoriented in their first lesson with me. The concept seemed too simple, the movements puzzled them. As is always the case, their confusion was replaced by awe.

"How can such small delicate movements have so much impact?" "I am hardly doing anything. How come the pain is gone? " "I can bend over! I can do things I couldn't do before!"

"I feel so good!" Once we regain the ability to feel and then allow those feeling s to guide our movements, we, like Neal and Robert, will make similar exclamations as we too move into a new world of activity.

*

The Ability to Feel and Its Relationship to Movement

"Nothing is little to him that feels it with great sensibility" - Samuel Johnson Imagine that you are walking down a very noisy street and that I am walking behind you humming. You do not hear me over the noise of the crowd. Later in the day you are sitting in a quiet room and I am sitting there with you, still humming. In this room you are distinctly aware of my music .

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Similarly, if you are in a brightly lit room a flashlight will seem useless. If the power goes out, however, the flashlight will safely illuminate your way. When any of our senses are stimulated we will not notice a change in the degree of stimulation unless the stimulus is intensified or weakened. The greater the intensity of the original stimulation, the more we need to increase the change to feel a difference. Conversel y, the gentler the original stimulation is, the more we are able to perceive changes in it. As mentioned before, our brains need information in order to form patterns that will regulate our activities. The greater our ability to feel differences, the greater our potential for learning becomes. In turn, finer perception of differences can lead to greater intelligence. When you want to execute a movement, learn a new movement, or improve a movement you already know, you must feel what you are doing. Importantly, you also need to feel differences in what you are doing so that the brain is able to establish new and better patterns. Feeling the differences in the sensations coming from our muscles and joints , coupled with the feedback that accompanies the outcome of such movements, is the basis for learning and organizing all movement. Whether you want to improve your tennis serve, increase you flexibility in a yoga or aerobics class, or lift things without pain , your brain needs new information so that it can form new patterns, hence, provide the outcome you desire. Thus, the greater your ability to feel fine differences, the greater will be your brain's ability to form efficient patterns. In this program you will learn to reduce the force and the intensity of your movements. You will become aware of your feelings, learnin g to use them as a guide. Through this process you will soon be able to do what once seemed difficult or simply impossible. By eliminatin g unnecessary efforts and by feeling finer and finer differences in what you do, your brain gets the

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information it needs in order to create effective, powerful, and safe movement. Most of this process probably goes against what you now know. Most people believe very strongly that the more force they put into what they do, the more outcome they 'll get. In reality, however, just the opposite is true. The more gentle and the more attentive you are, the faster you can learn, the faster you can improve. Once you know how to do something correctly, then you may do it as fast and as powerfully as you wish . Robert trained by employing excessive force all the time. His stamina is to be commended but, unfortunately, that energy was misdirected. By forcing his movements, Robert provided very little information to his brain. Though he did the best he could, he reached a plateau and started suffering injuries. The Movement For Life program contradicted many of Robert's deeply ingrained beliefs. Initially, he was very confused because of this. He could not understand how such a program could work. Robert's stamina came into play. He persisted in the program and found that, indeed, the program not only worked but it worked wonderfully. He no longer suffered from back pain ; he developed greater flexibility and his performance improved. Going back to his old ways is something Robert would never consider. It would be like going back to riding a tricycle instead of driving the Ferrari he was used to. Neal was equally hesitant , equally confused when he began the program . He came to me after several months of physical therapy, after doctors recommended surgery. In comparison, my program seemed too simple . Neal started by fighting the process. "I don ' t want to feel so much ," he complained. "I just want to be able to play the way I used to." The irony of his statement is, of course , the fact that the way he used to play was

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precisely what caused the injury : Not feeling created the problem . Neal had seven lesson s over a five week period . During that time he learned to feel what he was doing. As a result he learned a new, comfortable, and safe way of playing his violin . From that point forward he has been playing his violin without pain. The stories of Neal and Robert demonstrate that it is never too late to resume the process of developing our feelings. We all need our feelings . We all need to continuously evolve our ability to feel in a finer way. These feelings are the essential information our brains need to be able to form effective movement patterns . We can learn how to use our feelings so that we might move better. It is an easy process to learn and the results are immediate . As adults we can very easily restart this process . As adults we can learn and change as fast as babies . When we do this we reverse the typical process of aging, becoming vital, strong, and flexible. Our imagination and creativity are freed and because we are no longer dependent children, we reap the benefits of both adult experience and childhood mobility . Through this program you will learn to feel finer and finer differences; the more you can feel, the more you are able to effectively guide your movements. With this program you will learn to reduce the effort you exert, you will increase your ability to feel, you will develop your capacity for awareness, all in the service of improved movement, power, and freedom.

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Chapter Six:

Change ~ "What is more enthralling to the human mind than this splendid, boundless, colored mutability! -Life in the making. "- David Grayson If we reduce a person to the atomic level we find that nothing is

permanent, everything is in continuous motion. Probably very few of us ever think of ourselves in such terms, however. We see ourselves as having a certain "personality." There are things we like as well as things we do not like about ourselves. We know, quite well, what is difficult for us and what is easy. We possess a multitude of habits, many of which we are unaware.

If asked if there is anything they would like to change, chances are most people will come up with something like this: I want to lose weight. I'd like more tone to my muscles . I want to sleep better. I'd love to have more energy. If only I could get rid of my aches and pains.

I want to feel better about myself.

If only I could concentrate better . I wish I could do more of what I want to do. Of course, I could go on and on with this list. The point is that most people would like to change something about themselves. I want to begin discussing change by looking at what most often stands in the way of change: habits.

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•

Habits "Man like every other animal is by nature indolent. If nothing spurs him on, then he will hardly think, and will behave from habit like an automa ton."

-Albert Einstein In human s, learned habits funct ion the way instincts functio n in anima ls. A newborn infant already has a lot it can do nonvoluntarily: the heart beats, the body temperatur e is maintained, breathing continues . Graduall y, individual patterns of behavior are formed , initiall y arou nd feeding, sleeping and the need for close contact with a caretaker. A baby, feeling the discomfort of hung er or wetness , reacts by crying in an attempt to alleviate the situation. Once voluntary movement starts , habits start forming, too. The more the child can do, the more habit s the child can form. Many of the habits of an infant or a child will change, quite readily, with changing circumstances. A commo n example is the change in posture that occurs in many children once they attend a school where they are required to sit for many hours , watching a teacher at the blackboard. Like these children, we form our habits in accordance with our internal abilities and our external experiences . Life without habits is unthinkable. Imagine having to figure our how to stand and walk every mornin g. Imagi ne having to discover what to eat every time you are hungry or imagine having to figure out how to get to your job every day. Our brain is structured to form patterns of perc eption and movement. How and what we perc eive visually , auditorily, and kinesthetically is highly individualized and subject to habitual patterns. We also evolve hab itual

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modes of thinking , feeling , and moving. We develop these habits over a long period of time. It is my belief that each one of us has developed the best and most useful habits we could given the circumstances under which these habits were formed and with the information the brain had to work with. We need our habits to live and feel safe, yet how come so many of us have habits we want to change? What does it take to develop a habit we can be happy with ? The habits we would like to change were often formed under unfavorable conditions. David is a Tenth Don Rank in Nin-Jitsu. When he came to me for his first lesson he was still a Fourth Don and had been unable to advance further for some time. As our work together progressed, David realized that fear and discomfort had been a part of most of his training. These feelings had not left David free to explore different possibilities . As a result, his brain was unable to receive enough information to form the most effective movement patterns . Though under duress, David 's brain still formed patterns of movement that served him to a point. These movement habits , however, were limiting: they prevented David from moving up to the next level. Working with me, new movement possibilities were opened to him. His brain received new and relevant information and David quickly moved from the Fourth to the Tenth Level -

the highest Level possible.

Almost without exception I find that David 's case is everyone 's case . The brain does not receive the necessary information required to form effective movement habits . Instead, it processes the available information and creates habits that limit. It is not the person, their body, or their brain that is at fault; it is simply a matter of missing information. My continuing work with thousands of people constantly reinforces this understanding . There is also another common reason that accounts for an ineffective habit. When circumstances change, a habit that was perfectly useful before

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may no longer work. Again, new and relevant information is required so that the old habit may be adapted to the specifics of the new situation, hence, creating an improved habit. Earlier chapters have illustrated that our brains are structured to do just this sort of adaptation. Recent research shows an incredible variability and elasticity in the connections and patterns formed by the brain. In light of this, the earlier conceptualization of the brain as a wiring system that, once set, remains fixed, appears faulty. In actuality, the brain cells make certain connections early in life. These connections are not set. Instead, they migrate and form new ones, as if to say, "Let's check how this works out." This process continues and they migrate to form connections elsewhere , as if to say, "Let's check if this works out better." When faced with changing circumstances, adult brains continue to change and form new patterns rapidly. While habits are essential to proper functioning, the brain is structured so that habits can change readily and quickly. Let me interrupt here, for I believe it is of great importance that I make a distinction between habit and compulsive behavior. For many of us our habits have remained unchanged for many years. Most likely they are no longer habits but are instead rigid, compulsive , movement patterns that do not respond to new and relevant information . No matter what the demands are, the compulsive movement patterns stay the same. We always stand the same way, we always bend down the same way; the repertoire of our movements, thoughts, and feelings is fixed and limited. Usuall y, we are unaware that our movements are compulsive. Once it causes a problem, however, our compulsive habit finally catches our attention. Tyler, a lawyer in his early 30s, joined one of my workshops . Tyler

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seemed to move well and had no particular problem. I started the session by asking the group to sit on the floor. I then asked the members of the group to lift their right arms up towards the ceiling. Tyler couldn't do it. I asked him why, and he replied that for the past few months a sharp pain in his right shoulder prevented him from lifting his right arm above his right shoulder. I asked him to try the movement a few more times so that I could watch him. As he did this I could see that Tyler was lifting the arm the exact same way every time -

the way that created the pain. It was apparent to me that Tyler

did not know that there could be other ways that he might lift his arm . Using my hand, I helped Tyler feel how he could move his back, pelvis, and head in slightly different ways so that the resulting shoulder movement then allowed the arm to lift without pain. The process took no more than 3 minutes. Tyler thought it was magic; many in the group thought it was a miracle. Tyler experienced how easy it was to change a habit; the most important requirement was that the brain receive the necessary information. Tyler was able to transform a compulsive and destructive habit into a healthy, constructive habit. A healthy habit is one you can revisit any time and bring to the foreground of your awareness. New, relevant information will affect that habit. When your habits are healthy, you have much more control over them and can alter or adapt them as your needs require. By doing this program you will be revisiting some of your habits. Remember that each time you do a lesson you create new possibilities for yourself by using your brain in a better way. The energy in your brain will be upgraded so all your activities will become more efficient and easier, thereby increasing the quality of your life. These lessons keep the brain operating in an open, changing manner. You'll find yourself becoming more flexible in your movement and in your thinking and you will feel great!

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*

Change "To remain young one must change. The perpetual campus hero is not a young man but an old boy."

-Alexander

Chase

When David was finally able to move from Fourth to Fifth and eventually Tenth Position in Nin-Jitsu , he knew that something had changed. When little Erin finally began crawling after just 20 minutes of her first lesson, her family knew that Erin had experienced a big change. When 82year-old Tamara could stand without the help of her son, she knew that a big change had just occurred . Similarly, we perceive change around us all the time: the time of day, the moonlight or sunlight, the weather, the seasons the list is endless . So much about us changes from birth until full maturity that as adults our parents will remember the few childhood behaviors that haven't changed and say with amusement , "She has had that trait since she was a baby." Many of you may have turned to this book because as adults the opposite tends to be true for us: we find ourselves trapped by limitations and unchanging behavior. You may feel caught in a groove, not knowing how to create new possibilities, perhaps convinced that to hope for such changes would be futile. What is it that changes in us when we perceive change? What is it that can change readily and easily? Of course you know the answer to that question by now: it is our brain that facilitates the change. Our brains are built to change, built to respond quickly and efficiently to the changing demands outside and inside our bodies.

How does the brain change? The fundamental building block of

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change is differentiation.We are born with all the nerve cells we will ever have, but with just a small portion of nerve connections. The brain takes the information that our senses give to it and differentiates new patterns and new configurations. These are used, in turn, to create new thoughts, new feelings, and new movements. The result of this process is a body whose muscles move in new ways, whose bones calcify better, whose metabolism improves; it is a body that comes to life for a person whose sense of well-being soars. When I talk about change, then, I refer to the obvious changes in the bone and the muscle. However, these are secondary. The primary change is the new way of acting that is acquired. Change occurs when we learn new and better ways to act. The old ways are not used once new and better actions are learned. Once you become aware of a change and you like it, it becomes a part of you. More importantly, this process of growth and differentiation is also the process of maturation, a process of personal evolution that helps us becomes the unique, whole person we were meant to be. It is the lack of evolution that makes people rigid, that limits them physically and mentally, that keeps them from ever evolving into their true selves

*

Know Thy Self "If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation. " - George Santayana Miranda, a 45-year-old woman, decided that she wanted to change.

She wanted to become more flexible and improve the muscle tone of her body. She bought a series of video exercise tapes to help guide her through

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the process. Miranda liked what the videos promised and she felt sure that she would succeed. On the tapes , a very young model demonstrated rigorous routines as an instructor called them out. Miranda positioned herself in front of her television and attempted to imitate the model. It didn't work. After just a few days of this process, Miranda simply gave up. She thought she was too old to keep up; she wondered if maybe she was lazy. The bottom line is that Miranda failed to effect her desired change . Mirand a's failure is very common and there is a good reason for it. Imitation , especially the imitation of new movement skills, is one of the most ineffective ways to bring about change. The new and relevant information that the brain gets from watching someone else do something fails to take into consideration the fact that each person has a unique , individual configuration of movement. Hence, the video shows Miranda what it is that the model can do with new and relevant information but fails to address what it is that Miranda needs to accomplish the same movements. Hence, Miranda's brain is denied the new and relevant information she requires to progress towards her goal. Imitation occasionally works, especially during the intense periods of socialization in a child's growing years. But in order to effectively imitate, a person needs to be aware of how the precise details of the action shape and control the whole action so that the person can then copy accurately. For adults , imitation can be useful only to the extent that watching someone else gives you an idea of something that might work for you. Hence, when you watch an aerobic video and the instructor kicks her leg up high and tells you (or yells at you) to do the same, you need to see not only what she does with her leg, but what she does with every other part of her body. For even if the focus is on the leg only, the action takes place in the entire body. Watching such a tape requires that you become acutely aware of

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what you are doing so that you can bring about the necessary changes and duplicate the instructor's actions. Most people cannot do this at all. Instead, most people mimic as closely as they can the movement the instructor is doing. Usually this causes pain or discomfort, feelings that make most people give up. Giving up trying to imitate the movement of others is probably the most intelligent thing we can do for ourselves . Despite the larger similarities that we all share, we still must discover our own unique way of doing everything. We are each a unique being. We each inherit our own individual genetic code. No two life experiences are identical. We each have had to learn from scratch all the movements and actions we know how to do. We each have our own unique handwriting, our own way of walking, our own voice patterns, and so on. When you watch the aerobic instructor kick her leg, you can learn to kick your leg too. But in order to succeed, you need to discover how to do it in your own way; you need to learn the specific configuration of your own mind-body that allows you to safely and effectively create the kicking action. In other words, when we want to change anything about ourselves we should rely upon that century old dictum: know thyself The multitude of teachers that request their students to imitate actions do their students a great disservice by ignoring the fact that the human brain is built to generate an unlimited number of ways of doing the same thing. The hundreds of different human languages each contain hundreds of different ways to say "love" and each "love" stresses its own cultural nuances. Similarly, each human movement contains the unique and precise nuance of the individual who moves; each movement reflects the language of self. It is important for you to know that you can learn to do the movements the aerobic instructor does. You have the bones , the muscles , and

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the brain to succeed. What you lack is the process that will get you there. You must first learn to feel what you are doing. Through a growing awareness of the self and an exploration of different possibilities, you will discover your way of doing the movement. That way will be harmonious with your structure, temperament, previous experience, and true desires. Your brain will have the information it needs in order to create your own unique way of doing those movements ( or any movements that you wish to make). Movement For Life, from the very first moment, teaches you to use your awareness to guide your movement. You will discover your own way of moving. You will be the center of your attention, not your teacher. Possessing this self-knowledge, you will find yourself doing things that even hours of imitation could not enable you to do. Changes made utilizing this self-knowledge will make your life more comfortable . You will continue doing more of what you want to, finding that these changes occur with ever increasing speed. More differentiation and new patterns allow this new freedom and facilitate your new behaviors. Importantly, you are not changing into someone else; you are evolving into a richer and fuller expression of your true self. Healthier and stronger, you will like this new self much more than the old.

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Chapter Seven:

GrowthandMovement ~ "Growth itself contains the germ of happiness. "-Pearl S. Buck "A childlike man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention . "

-Aldous Huxley Some understanding of our process of growth can be very useful in helping us find effective ways to improve our movement skills. As adults, it is important that we understand how the human growth process remains the same throughout our lives. Some of this information will be familiar to you. I will be combining familiar terms with new terms, my goal being to illustrate how important it is that any attempt at learning better movement needs to be in harmony with these characteristics of growth. When the sperm finds the egg they fuse and immediately divide into two identical cells. Those two cells also divide into two identic al cells, resulting in four attached cells. This process continues and a small ball of identical cells is formed. The cells continue multiplying , but after awhile they stop being identical. A new process sets in and by the time the embryo is 8 weeks old, the human form is easily identifiable. This is the process of differentiation and integration. The cells differentiate by dividing and

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becoming different kinds of cells, i.e., cells that become bone, skin, the nervous system, or the muscles. These cells are integrated into specific groups to form the human body. Without differentiation and integration the growth process could not occur. While in the mother's womb, the embryo does not have to negotiate gravity nor does it have to satisfy needs like food, shelter, or temperature: the mother satisfies all of them. Once the child is born, new demands are immediately placed upon the child. There is the need to breathe, to eat, to digest and eliminate; there is gravity, light, sound, and changes in the temperature. With these new demands come new options. Space is wide and open. The limbs and the rest of the body can move. As well, there is stimulation from interaction between the child and other people. There is touching, holding, talking , and listening, and much more. The growth process continues with great speed. The infant can now grow in ways it could not before. But now the child needs to start making sense out of this flood of stimulation . The child accomplishes this by becoming an active participant in its world. Gradually the infant develops voluntary and consistent patterns of movement that help define for the infant predictable patterns in the incoming stimulation -

a differentiation and

integration of the surrounding world . For example, the child will learn to focus its eyes and track moving objects. Soon, its head will follow its eyes and the infant will be able to see further. This developing ability to move is matched by new patterns that are continuously being formed in the brain . Hence, the processes of differentiation and integration occurs in the brain as well as the rest of the body. What is still missing and waiting to be formed are the many, many nerve connections that can only be formed through experience . For these connections to be formed, however, the brain must be able to make sense out

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of the situation -

the information the brain receives must be relevant. For

instance, the very first time a baby is presented with a nipple, the sucking movements are reflexive. Very soon, however, the movements become voluntary: the baby has learned to associate its own position in space in relation to the breast, and the contact with the mother with the sucking movements and the banished hunger. As the child learns and acquires new movement skills, new patterns develop in the brain. Once a new differentiation has been integrated it opens up the possibility for the next level of new differentiations. Because of the immense number of possible movement patterns that the human brain can make, no two people go through the exact same developmental process. One child may learn to crawl backwards first while another learns to stand first and later drops to all fours and crawls. Despite the astonishing diversity in human movement patterns, a child still must move from a series of simple differentiations to progressively more complex differentiations. Though the newborn may learn to identify the mother quickly, it certainly would have no understanding of the alphabe t. Similarly, if you tried to teach a toddler who was just learning to walk how to jump on one leg, you would undoubtedly fail. Take the same children five years later, however, and hopping as well as the alphabet become actions and systems they can do and understand. Successful growth means order. Certain things need to happen first, be learned first, before others can take place. In growth and organic learning, the order of what is learned is of utter importance. What our environment presents to us further shapes what it is we will learn. Yet no matter what we are presented with , the order of learning is decided by the level to which the brain has developed. A child will not be able to crawl if it cannot roll over, lift the head, or know how to bear the weight on its arms and legs as they

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push against gravity. Certain connections, as well as a certain levels of differentiation , need to exist before new connections may occur. If, as adults , we want to improve the quality of how we move ,

understanding and using this same process is terribly important. Whether we want to take up a new sport or exercise, or increase our mobility and strength as we age, we must rely upon this process to help us reach these goals. Unfortunately, most training programs are very ignorant of this process. Most ask that all the students merely follow the same movements , never considering whether or not all these students have the prior necessary movement patterns that allow them to enact the new movement. What such programs forget is that every movement requires a person to develop a sequence of successive patterns, each of which must be learned before the final goal can be reached. Once a person goes through the sequential process, however, the person will be able to perform the movement successfully and safely. At any age this process applies and works. As a baby, Artur Rubinstein , the renowned pianist , probably first learned to bring his hand to his mouth. His behavior typifies the behavior of most babies. If you held him in front of a piano he might have banged indiscriminately on the keys. Two, three, five decades later, however, those same hands were able to create the most beautiful music. The hands were necessary in this creation. What was most important, however, was the growth process whereby he learned to form a multitude of complex and subtle patterns in his nervous system. Without this process, his hands could never have created the music. In principle, anyone's brain can form the necessary patterns to make them a concert pianist. In actuality, these patterns only emerge in a very few people. I believe that what distinguished a great performer from the rest of us is their brain 's much advanced ability to differentiate and integrate , hence,

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absorb and create relevant information.

It is amazing to me that most people still believe that mere repetition is the key to improving movement. There is a routine offered for every person, of every age. Whether promoting high or low impact, dance or aerobic classes, free-weight lifting, or machine lifting, all these approaches demand numerous repetitious of a relatively small number of movements. In the process of repetition, nothing new is created, hence, no new information is perceived by the brain . In fact, most of the routines demand so little of the brain that you could probably do them in your sleep if there was some way to activate your body only. With this program, however, every movement skill I want the student to learn is introduced as part of a process. This approach mirrors the natural process of growth that we all went through . This approach allows for the variations of the individual, insuring that the student successively acquires all the necessary underlying patterns of the movement required. The order in which the movements are presented is selected very carefully to insure ease, integrity and effectiveness throughout the process. The miraculous results so often reported by the students are not miracles at all, just simple reminders of what we experienced as a baby: if we get what we truly need, we learn and grow extremely fast. Conversely, when we employ a dualistic approach and think of our bodies as things that must be whipped into shape, we are actually limiting our movement patterns, hence, becoming stuck in limited patterns of bad movement. It is important to remember that while increased differentiation and integration increases our intelligence, decreased differentiation and integration can reduce our intelligence. Certain types of exercise, done improperly, can decrease differentiation . I remember standing on the subway in New York City one

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warm summer day a few years ago, watching a young man walk towards me. He wore a muscle shirt that left most of his shoulders and chest bare. It was obvious that he had spent many hours developing the muscles of his upper body for they were big and impressive; he seemed very proud of this achievement. Watching him walk, however, I noticed one peculiarity: his movements were stilted and graceless. Instead of moving the opposing arm and leg when he walked as people normally do, he stiffly moved the right arm and leg together, alternating with the same movement on his left side. The repetitious nature of his weight training process failed to increase the complexity and refinement of his movements. His movements suffered from the quality of energy that created them; the decreased differentiation made his movements mechanically inhuman .

If we operate automatically , without actively engaging new movements (and thereby establishing new patterns) we will only deteriorate. Anyone can reverse the process of deterioration, however, and grow in new directions. Growth requires increased differentiation, complexity, and information. It also requires that we upgrade low grade energy into higher and higher grades. But this will not happen by itself. We must invest ourselves in the process . The rewards are enormous. We become increasingly skillful. We also become vibrant, full of energy and curiosity. Boredom becomes a forgotten experience; fatigue and lethargy become forgotten memories. We become healthier and stronger. We must remember that our nervous system is designed to improve our movement abilities as we grow older and throughout our lives. Our thinking, our feeling, and our sensing are designed to become richer and better with time.

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•

Using Gentleness Instead of Violence "Nothing is so strong as gentleness and nothing is so gentle as real strength." - Ralph W. Sackman In order to build a house, a person must follow a careful and lengthy

process . A sufficient amount of dynamite, however, can destroy all this work in seconds. The process of building the house is one defined by a highly complex series of differentiations. Blowing up a house, however, is an act that is completely undifferentiated. One of the characteristics of violence is its undifferentiated force, a force that can cause damage and destruction. Webster'sDictionary defines violence as "a use of force to injure or damage; roughness in action, great force or strength of feeling, conduct, or language." Jason is a 6-year-old boy. One day his school teacher sent him to the school office to retrieve a pair of scissors that the teacher needed. On the way back to the classroom, Jason noticed some flowers and a bush that he decided needed trimming. When several minutes had passed and Jason had not returned, Jason's teacher instigated a search. Jason was eventually discovered at his gardening, but not before all the adults involved had grown very anxious. Though correct in their concern, their behavior towards Jason was misdirected. Instead of explaining that Jason's failure to return had caused them to become concerned, the adults simply told Jason that what he had done was bad. Jason felt frightened and ashamed, for he thought the adults were mad because he had been gardening -

that is what he thought he had

done wrong. The adults labeled Jason's actions as bad, but they failed to differentiate what it was that had specifically upset them. Their admonitions

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merely functioned as an undifferentiated release of their fear and frustration and Jason became the victim of a forceful, somewhat destructive act. A differentiated approach would have involved carefully explaining the situation to Jason, taking into account Jason's creative gardening while also explaining that his absence worried the adults. This nonviolent differentiation would thereby have served to also teach Jason a lesson about life, hence, allowing him to grow a bit. In order for the brain to proceed with the processes of differentiation and integration, we need to feel safe. One cannot learn to walk a rope without a safety net underneath; one cannot explore and do new things when any mistake might be fatal. When you were growing up you had to feel safe in order to explore and discover new connections within and outside of yourself. When those on whom you depended responded to your actions with great anger or scolded you severely, your tendency was to inhibit the activity in order to insure your future safety. How many of us as parents find ourselves telling our children, "Don't do that -

you can hurt yourself!" instead of saying, "If you want to

do that, we need to look for a safer way of doing it," thereby exploring increased differentiation? Many of us, most likely. Unfortunately , most of us were raised in environments where too much force was used in an attempt to help us grow and behave well. As a result, we all have many aspects of ourselves that have been inhibited or stunted. We say that we have a mental block or are not talented in certain areas; often times we are simply unaware of the lack. We adopt the same violent attitude toward ourselves that others created and directed at us. If we are approached in a forceful and undifferentiated way we tend to inflict a type of violence upon ourselves by perpetuating these inadequacies that others inflicted upon us. Hence, when

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we walk into an exercise class where the music blares at us and the teacher yells at us to try harder, to move faster, we revert to old patterns and assume that there is something wrong with us. As a result, we don't even recognize that the exercise process itself is too violent, hence, essentially ineffective. When Jane Fonda uttered her famous "feel the burn," tens of thousands of people accepted it as a desirable experience. Just try to get a cat or dog or a cheetah to "feel the burn!" They know abuse when they feel it and so they avoid it. When we are asked forcefully to do the same repetitive five or ten movements because it 's good for us, too few of us realize that following these suggestions is actually an abuse to our systems. We say, "I should be exercising, but I'm too lazy," which is yet another undifferentiated attack upon ourselves. In order to be able to accomplish anything we need to learn how to do it. In order to learn how to do it, we need new and relevant information. In order to receive the necessary information, we need to reduce the force so we can feel more of what we are doing and how we are doing it. Then new patterns can be formed in the brain and these can then guide us. We need to slow down, be attentive to ourselves, be curious about ourselves, learn to observe ourselves and our environment. Primarily, we need to be gentle with ourselves. It is with gentleness that we become strong and mobile. I have worked with thousands of people. The moment they started shifting away from self-inflicted violence each and every one of them was able to achieve things that surpassed all their expectations. Violence only leads to destruction. With this program you will discover the power of gentleness. Once you realize how effective this approach is, you can use it to guide your usual exercise or activities and discover that by reducing force, intensity, duration and speed, your results will improve tremendously. I have a friend, Mallory, a wonderful voice teacher, who called me

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with a problem. She had a student she was unable to help. Mallory told me that she had tried all the relevant techniques with her student. All this hard work and effort failed and the student was becoming fatigued and very frustrated. Despite my ignorance in the field of voice teaching, I understood the basic problem: the student was not learning . The student needed new information . My advice to Mallory was simple: "Cut the lesson in half -

to 30

minutes. Continue doing exactly the same exercises but reduce the force tenfold. Also, have your student practice the exercises 10 times slower and have her do fewer repetitions . Despite the fact that it will feel to you as if you are doing nothing, this will help." Mallory called me the following day: "I did what you told me, even though I was very unsure about it, but my student loved it! The changes in , her abilities were almost immediate and the improvements in her voice are incredible!" Violence, by nature, is defined by an increase in force; differentiation is reduced and all these actions lead to destruction. Effective human action demands just the opposite. When we gently engage high level energy and organization, growth and healing take place . Our mind-body reaps the benefits of this process.

*

Internal Wisdom and Freedom of Choice "The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice. " - George Eliot I have discussed the uniqueness of the human being's potential to

learn and form infinite patterns of movement, of thought, of feeling, and of action. Let me now return to this in order to examine finer details of this process .

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If you were to compare a human infant to an infant monkey, you would discover that initially the young monkey seems much brighter . It can move about, can swing from trees, while the human baby can barely crawl. By the time the monkey is 5 or 6 years old it is sexually mature and can reproduce. The human child can 't even compare. In other ways, however, the human child has surpassed the monkey. A 5 or 6 year old can speak two or three languages, can write, can understand basic arithmetic, and has a sense of humor. These are things the monkey will never achieve. The monkey's brain becomes committed much sooner than that of the child. The monkey's movement patterns are formed early, allowing it to move in complex ways much sooner than the child, but this is all the monkey will ever be able to do. Unlike the monkey, the human child will always have the ability to change and improve, to learn and progress into new areas. The human child and the human adult can learn to do the same movement in many different ways. This is the basis for free choice that humans possess. Just as there are thousands of different languages , thousands of different ways to say the same thing, so too are there thousands of different ways to move. When we have only one way of doing a movement, we are acting in a compulsive manner. Further, we risk injury and failure if the only way we know does not work well for us. When we have only two ways of moving, our actions are still compulsive. But the moment we have three or more different ways of performing a movement, then is the moment that we truly have the freedom of choice. When we have these choices available movement is easier to do and makes us feel better for we are functioning at the truly human level, taking full advantage of our uniqueness and our power. Compulsion is behind many of our limitations . These limitations cause our pain and our suffering. When we move compulsively by limiting

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our movem ent possibilities, we are using our human brains at merely the animal level. Since we lack the pre-wiring of instinct that animals possess, this low level brain functioning is not good for us. We merely move poorly and experience greater limitations. Once we introduce free choice into our movement, we can then achieve the wonderful feeling of freedom and vitality that human mastery allows. When movement is guided by free choice, when the possibility of movements increases and we are allowed to choose the best way to move, our inner, human wisdom flourishes and guides us continually forward into newer and better choices. The lessons in this program are designed to release you from the automatic form of compulsive movem ent by increasing your free choice. You will learn to use these choices to make yourself powerful and free. Once you experience the process you will learn that it can be utilized elsewh ere, improving many different aspects of your life.

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Chapter Eight:

TheAchievement Process

andMovement

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"There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail." -Eric Hoffer Bertrand was an avid amateur golfer who had been working on improving his swing. For a long time Bertrand had only focused on his final goal, that being to swing his club a certain way and thereby improve his game. He watched video tapes of top players and tried to follow their suggestions, but to no avail. By the time he came to my class he had developed shoulder and back pains. He was also very stiff and could hardly swing at all. Similarly, all of us have probably wanted to be able to do one specific thing well. We may have wanted to be a great quarterback or a prima ballerina, or the class valedictorian. To achieve these goals we tried our best, we listened to advice and tried it out, yet we still couldn't reach our goals. After awhile we began to lose faith in ourselves. Many of us eventually gave up trying. We gave up on our dreams. When two people put the same amount of time, effort and enthusiasm into an activity, what is it that allows one person to excel while the other person does not? The typical answer is talent. One person is "talented" musically and the other person is not. One person is a "born athlete " and the other person is not. However, I believe that what we call

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talent is actually only a matter of chance. Some people discover more of the information that is necessary for the specific performance, hence , perform better. This accounts for those people who do seem to have certain spontaneous inclinations to excel in some things rather than others. But even the best pitcher could not pitch a no-hitter at age 3, and the best musician had to learn to read and perform music . Unfortunately, most of us fail to think in these terms, fail to understand that we merely lack information. As a result, we tend to repeat only those things that we do successfully while inhibiting those things that haven't worked well. By investing only in those things that we already know, we develop only a few aspects of ourselves and ignore our larger potential. The learning process is incredibly important yet most of the time it is left to chance. Even when we are taught how to do something, the teacher sidetracks the true learning process by emphasizing the final goal only. Our teachers tell us and show us what we should be doing. We are repeatedly admonished to do it "right." We try to achieve the goal that is set for us but if we are missing some of the underlying movement or perceptual skills necessary to achieve this goal, we will constantly fail. Frustrated, we try harder , sometimes causing injury and pain. Eventually, failure causes our self-esteem to plummet; we quit and believe that we are untalented because we can 't do something right. Unless chance favors us, however, we will never be able to do it right until we move, step by step, through the learning process. I remember watching a television program that showed a world renowned violinist teaching a master class. His student was a 15-year-old girl who, while playing, seemed tense and quite stiff. The teacher took her violin and showed her how to play right. He was terrific; his movements were free, exquisitely coordinated and the music he made was sublime. After watching

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him, the young student took her violin back and then gave it another try. She was just as limited as before. The two went back and forth like this a few times and by the end of the session she actually played worse. The teacher was at a loss. Was she simply lacking talent? I suspect not, for it was obvious to me that her biggest problem stemmed from the fact that she lacked information. Watching his brilliant performance gave her no information as to what she was doing. It also gave her no new information about what it was she was doing wrong or what specific movements she might do differently to improve her performance. She left the lesson feeling inferior, ashamed of her limitations, certain she had failed. Both people made the same mistake: they focused on the final outcome only. How to play like the master was the only objective instead of engaging in a process through which she will play increasingly better in her own unique way. This is probably the most common mistake we all make and the one that most stunts our growth and limits our ability to move well. It is not the lack of talent that causes us to fail; rather, it is the way we go about realizing that goal. Having a goal or a dream is very important in our achievement process. Reaching goals and fulfilling dreams helps us realize our full human potential. However, the dream alone is not enough. An effective process must be used in order to achieve such ends. Thus , in order to acquire a new skill or refine an existing one we need new information to help us form new patterns of movements. Repetition of what we already know brings little change, regardless of how hard we try. We need to stop moving automatically and become aware of what and how we are moving. We need to shift our attention away from the goal and instead pay attention to our feelings and sensations. Once we become aware of what and how we move, we are able to refine variations of the same movement. One way I try to enhance my students' ability to do this is by asking

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them to make as many "mistakes" as they can imagine. These "mistakes" teach the students to move away from their compulsive, automatic method of movement. It also provides the students' brains with new information with which new and improved patterns of movement can be spontaneously formed. A few years ago, while teaching in Europe, a very famous cellist came to me complaining of pain. The pain caused his music to suffer and the entire situation scared him. Watching William play for me, I was struck by how terribly compulsive his movements were. After trying and failing at several approaches, I was momentarily at a loss: I didn't know how to bring about a positive change. Not knowing what else to do, I asked William to play a very simple song that he had learned as a child. A bit reluctantly , William followed my suggestion. When he finished, I asked him to play it again, but to play it badly. When he finished, I asked him to play it badly again, only to find another way of doing it. He repeated this process several times, the stipulation being that each time he must find another bad way of playing. By the fifth repetition he was challenged; it was surprisingly difficult to find new, bad ways of playing. But it was also at this challenging fifth repetition that the compulsive movement ceased. William 's shoulders came down, his chest and neck muscles loosened and his pain disappeared. What is it that these different ways of bad /wrong playing did? In order for William to play badly he had to change the way he moved. As long as William focused on playing well, he merely continued to maintain the painful moving habits. But once he was able to invent new ways of playing badly, he shifted his attention to creating new movement variations. His brain could then receive new information to work with and within 20 minutes , his playing movements had completely changed . William 's case represents merely one method. There are many

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different ways for a person to get involved with this process and thereby generate new and relevant information. All lead to new levels of performance. Every time my students participate in one of these processes, they get remarkable results and they get them quickly. It is necessary to fully understand that focusing on the final goal, rather than the process, is terribly detrimental to our ability to move correctly. This point is of such importance that I will again turn to the movement process of infants and babies in order to further the point. Remember that in their first few years of life, infants and children acquire more movement skills than the best athlete collects throughout an entire career. If you watch a newborn for the first few weeks, most of its movements seem random and aimless; they provide no outcome that we can see . It is hard to imagine how these movements will ever turn into relevant, intentional movements. If you watch closely, you will see that through contact with people and objects, some parts of the random movement gradually stop being random. For instance, a baby lying on its back will naturally follow something with its eyes. In this movement the head will turn to one side and be pulled back. The lower back might, at that second, arch randomly, thereby pulling the head back even further and helping the child follow the moving object -

the mother, for instance . Once the head is pulled

back enough and one side of the lower back arched enough, one side of the pelvis will lift, causing the child to roll to one side. The entire series of movements comes as a total surprise the first time. By the third time, however, the movement series is intentional. Having discovered how to roll onto its side, the child can do this any time in order to track a moving object. On its side, the baby now lifts its head to follow the object. The spine twists with the lift and plop! the baby is on its belly, yet another surprise. Rolling onto its belly is a wondrous achievement

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for a few-month-old baby who couldn't do it before. A baby spends its time indulging in pleasurable movements and activities that seem to have no purpose yet somehow turn into remarkable skills. These seemingly random, purposeless variations are the experiences -

the information -

that the brain needs in order to form effective patterns

of movement. No baby tries to achieve a "sto mach roll " or a "crawl"; they are simply busy with what they are doing and feeling at the momen t. They are completely absorbed with the process. The outcome is incidental to this process. Though the details of the process vary from baby to baby , all babies who involve themselves in this process will learn to do these things. The same holds true for us as adults. If we go through the process we need to, we will acquire the skill we need. Returning to the 15-year-old violinist, what process could provide her with the information she needed in order to play better? Several movements needed to be changed. When she was playing, her head and violin were pressed to her chest. As a result, there was no relative movement between her head and her torso. Her shoulders were lifted , an act that further helped her fixate her head to her violin . She probably learned to do it this way when she was little and started to play and felt like she might lose the violin if she moved . By immobilizing her head and shoulders she greatly limited the freedom of movement in her arms and elbows, a freedom necessary if you are to play the violin well. Without telling her why (knowing what's wrong with us has little value in helping us get better) the teacher could have helped elimin ate these problems by asking the student to try some small variations in her habitual movement pattern . For instance, he may have initially asked her to move with her head , shoulders, and chest all pressed together , right and left, then up and down , which would stimulate the already existing movement pattern. Through this exercise the student would be on the way to acquiring volunta ry

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control as well as an awareness of what she was already doing . The teacher may then ask her to move her head and shoulders one way and her pelvis the other, which would be the beginning step in achieving differentiation. Within a few minutes the student could learn to move the head one way, the shoulders another and this would have freed the rigid pattern. She then would have found the freedom to move her arms and could then create the music she wanted to create in her own way . The same kind of process (though of course defined by a different series of specific movements) could similarly assist Bertrand in improving his golf game. By providing his brain with the relevant information he lacks, Bertrand can form new patterns of movement and lower his score. But he must first learn to shift his focus to the process. Focusing on the outcome only allows Bertrand to repeat, over and over, that which he already knows.

It is this limited information that traps him in his groove, that makes it impossible for him to improve. The ability to generate higher grade energy is built into all human brains. Infants and babies do it spontaneously all of the time. This ability is never lost and it can be awakened any time, at any age. It is our human prerogative. Not only can we reawaken this ability, we can also intensify it. We can learn to learn better and better. Focusing on the final goal in the process of learning limits and even stops the process of growth. When the growth process stops, we gradually become more and more like automatons. Habits rigidify and become compulsive. We have only the same limited options at our disposal and even these eventually begin to deteriorate . Focusing on the process , however, brings growth back to life. When we focus on the process , we no longer experience failure. The unfolding process of increased differentiation and new patterns is gratifying and

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exhilarating. We feel our continuous growth as a natural part of a process just like a baby experiences the shifts and changes of movement. A baby would never think, "Gee, I'm 11 months old, I should be walking" and neither should we think similarly. When we stop worrying about achieving the final goal, we end up achieving more than we hoped for. The importance of the goal does not disappear, it's just that the process itself releases our potential for growth, always demonstrating to us that we are able to surpass those things we hope for.

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Chapter Nine:

PainandMovement

*

"Beauty cannot disguise nor music melt/ A pain undiagnosable but felt. " -Anne Morrow Lindberg Probably the greatest motivator we know is pain. Babies immediately communicate their pain or discomfort by crying . As we grow up we learn to inhibit such crying as long as the pain is not too intense for us. If, as children , we were punished or made to feel ashamed for showing our pain, many of us learn not to show our pain as adults , even if the pain is great. But no matter how we react to pain it always affects us. The ability to feel pain is an integral part of any healthy living being. But if pain is such an adverse experience wouldn't we be better off not feeling it? The answer is no, for the value of pain is that it informs us of danger. When we feel pain our attention immediately focuses on the source and our brain is immediately recruited to try to stop the pain. Pain seizes our attention because it informs of some immediate or imminent danger or damage that threatens us. Any intense stimulus is potentially destructive. An intense light shining directly into our eyes causes pain and could cause damage. An extremely loud noise will cause pain in our ears and might damag e our fine sense of hearing. Pressure that is too strong is painful and can cause bones to break. The eyes need light to see, the ears need sound to hear, the bones need pressure to grow and move, yet all can be damaged or destroyed if the

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required stimulus is too intense. Pain is a remarkable mechanism built to protect us from injury and destruction. Any force that is generated by our muscles and that does not translate into effective movement may potentially turn into destructive energy. Any force that does not move the body in the correct direction results in pulling and in heat, both of which damage our joints and our muscles.

*

The "NoPain, No Gain"Myth If there ever was one single slogan or popular belief that misguided

multitudes of people, "no pain, no gain" is it. "No pain, no gain" actually means that if you want to gain ( i.e., achieve, learn, acquire, or succeed) you must feel pain and be in pain at least some of the time. Of course this belief is most prevalent in the world of exercise, fitness, and sports. This belief, and the exercise routines that promote it, create an exercising experience that is grim and punishing for many people. With many more people now participating in exercise and sports programs, the incidence of sports-related injury has skyrocketed. Athletic injuries now account for a large percentage of all emergency room cases. The United States spends over $1 billion a year in money and manpower to treat and care for sports-related injuries. Further, it is estimated that tens of millions of Americans regularly run the risk of incurring sports related injuries. How can something as healthy and enjoyable as exercising and sports cause so much injury and suffering? Unfortunately, the way that most exercise programs are done will often lead to pain and injury. Most people do not know how to organize their movement well enough their activity safely -

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how to engage in

so they simply do the best they can to move through

their sport or exercise. This poorly organized movement damages the body and pain signals such damage. By not knowing what part of their activity actually works, the belief is gradually formed that pain is a necessary part of the process. Many go as far as to believe that they haven't actually had a good workout unless they feel pain. My friend Louisa once said to me, "Co me on, Anat, a little pain is not such a big deal. I feel great from my exercise routine. So it takes a few days for the pain to go away if I do too much, so what! I look great, my body is toned, and I don't want to stop." What Louisa does not know is that she can get these outcomes and even better ones in a way that will cause no pain. Since exercising with excessive force and insufficient information provides us with some improvement, we believe that excessive force and pain are a necessary part of the process. What most people don 't know is that excessive force and poorly organized force destroys body tissue. Louisa failed to understand that pain is her body's way of telling her that some aspect of her movement is causing damage. If Louisa simply slowed down, reduced the force of her movements , and explored alternative ways of doing these movements, her brain could figure out new ways of doing these movements that would prevent the pain. Once she had these new patterns available, she would be able to increase her activities again. Not only would her movements be safe and painless, she would improve in ways that she never had been able to improve before. You cannot train an animal to endure pain. A cat will immediately look for a way to stop the pain it experiences. As people, we may be able to learn to ignore pain up to a point. What we must learn is that ignoring pain does not stop the damage that is going on. Over time, if we insist on doing movements in destructive ways, injury and severe pain are inevitable. As a result , so many of the people who exercise eventually come to find

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themselves injured and unable to continue. Nothing is wrong with the exercise -

it's the way it's done that is the problem.

When discomfort and pain occur, the system is alerted: Beware! Danger! Even if we ignore the pain and continue doing what we 're doing, the brain continues to search for a solution. Without our knowing it, the brain -

that part of us that possesses inner wisdom - will still be looking for a

way to change what is causing pain. Pain is an expression of the wisdom we all have in us. This wisdom will continue in its attempt to protect us from our own silliness. But if we continue to engage in the hurtful activity, if we do not lend our awareness to the process, the attempts of our inner wisdom to correct the mistakes will probably fail. So we keep exercising and some parts of us twist or bend, or we unknowingly avoid moving certain painful areas. Over time, these unconscious changes, these compensations will become problems in their own right and exacerbate the existing damage. The continued attempt of the our systems to take care of the danger drains enormous amounts of energy, energy that could have gone into productive activity. Anyone who has had chronic pain for any length of time knows how draining the experience is. Even minor or occasional pain can drain your energy because of the continuous attention given to it and because of compensatory changes that are being made without your knowledge. Pain is there to protect us from inevitable mistakes. It can also provide us with the opportunity to enhance our skills and our movements.

*

What Do I Do If I Feel Pain? When an adult feels pain, the first thing that needs to be done is to

acknowledge that pain. Recognize it and remind yourself that it is a sign that you are doing something in a way that is hurtful to you. You need to change

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the way you move so that the pain will disappear. When you resume your activity, proceed very slowly and very gently. Continue the range of motion only so far as to not feel pain. If you do feel pain, go back to the starting position and begin again. This time, look to create a small variation in the movement until you discover a way of finishing the movement without pain. Once you discover this safer easier movement, repeat it slowly, until the movement becomes familiar to you. Sometimes, no matter what you do, you will feel pain. In situations like this I often recommend that the student stop moving all together and, instead, imagine doing the movement. Imagine the movement with as much detail as possible and also imagine the feeling of the movement: it is easy and comfortable. This method, combined with the exercises offered in this program should be sufficient in taking care of the problem.

In the long run, waiting to feel the pain is not a good idea. Pain is on a continuum that runs all the way from pleasurable to unbearably painful: Pleasurable and Easy to Do

--+

Comfortable

--+

Hard to Do

--+

Uncomfortable

--+

Mildly Painful

--+

Very Painful

--+

Unbearable

Long before you reach the very, or even mildly painful, you should slow down and search for an alternative movement that is easy and comfortable to do. Any movement that the human body can do can be done comfortably and pleasurably. The better you learn to organize the movement, the easier and more pleasurable it is to do. This is true for everyone .

It is not a weakness to feel these different levels of comfort and then use them to help guide you toward a more efficient and powerful way of moving. Some people worry that if they move gently, only within their range of comfort, then they will be weak. They worry that their muscles will be flabby, never becoming powerful, skillful, or flexible. But these are false worries. The truth is that the more skillful the movement is the more

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powerful and swiftly it may be done. Once you master the how to of a movement, you can then train with greater power or greater speed. If your movements are done poorly, rigorous repetition will inevitably cause pain and injury, may even force you to stop doing the movement altogether.

It is of utter importance that you understand how false the "no pain, no gain" creed is. Comfort and pleasure should be your guide when learning to move better. With this as our guide, pain occurs less frequently. As well, the movements we do enhance our health and vitality. We stop being violent towards ourselves, and we stop the process of self-destruction . Pain limits us. Leaming to find new ways of movement to insure comfort keeps us safe and allows us to grow into new possibili ties. This program will help you learn the skills you need to be able to listen to your inner wisdom. You will recognize force and hurt and avoid them , replacing them with learning, exploration, comfort and skill.

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Chapter Ten:

Whatis Possible? *

Limitations

*

"Our only limitation is our belief that it is so." -Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais Human history is filled with examples of people taking the impossible and making it possible. A whole series of inventions revolutioniz ed the world : the wheel, the railroad, the telephone , the car, the computer , the space shuttle -

the list is endless. There are also the personal

impossibilities that were made possible : Helen Keller learned to communicate with the world ; Charle s Lindberg flew a small plane across the Atlantic ; Neil Armstrong walked on the moon -

this list can also go on

forever. Then there are our private limitations , limitations that we wish to surpass , possibilities that have nothing to do with these grandiose, historical moments. We may simply wish to do something that most people find to be rather easy. For some, bending over to pick something up from the floor may be difficult. For others , getting in and out of a car may be terribly difficult. Other people might find it difficult to walk on uneven surfaces. Other limitation s may prevent a person from working due to chronic lower back pain . Another person may just wish to be able to finish an entire exercise class. Another person may have reached a plateau in her skiing abilities, while yet another finds that she comes just short of qualifying for the

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Olympics. Though these limitations seem insignificant in the large view, they are tremendously important in the lives of the people who experience them. Any one of us who experiences the same or similar limitations knows that these situations can affect our quality of life, making it less than it could be. This diminishment may manifest itself as a loss of income or it may profoundly affect a person's life and life-style. In all cases , the scope of a person 's life is reduced. As a result many activities are avoided or eliminated, a situation that further reduces the quality of a person 's life. Man y have come to believe that nothing can be done about such limitation s. Movement for Life, however, gives each and every person the tools required to systematically grow out of and beyond their personal limitations . Movement For Life turns the impossible into the possible. Annette was young, healthy, and fairly athletic. When her yoga teacher had the members of the class learn to stand on their heads , Annette found that the movement was impossible to do. Every time she put her head down on a soft pillow, the small pressure resulted in strong, sharp pains in her head and neck. When Annette came to me, she mentioned her experience and wondered if there was anything that could be done to help her. I asked her to show me the movement. It was immediately clear that, while in the upside down position, Annette had no control over her back muscles, and she couldn't feel her pelvis so she didn't have control over it either . I asked Annette to do a series of movements that provided her brain with the missing information. After doing this she could stand on her head comfortably. Sergio was 57 when he first came to see me. He was a successful business man with a vibrant, friendly demeanor. A pain in his heels bothered him. The doctors had not been able to find anything wrong with Sergio. I immediately noticed that Sergio had a habit of standing that shifted the weight of his upper back, chest, and head further back than most people do.

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This became more exaggerated whenever Sergio exerted effort, especially when he played tennis . His way of standing placed excessive pressure on his heels . For Sergio , this was normal standing. If I had told him to change the way he was standing, he would have no idea how to do this . Over the course of four lessons , Sergio was able to feel how he was standing and acquired new ways of standing and moving. That was 10 years ago. Today, Sergio still plays tennis regularly and the pain has never come back. Generally, as we grow and acquire our movement skills and habits, we usually don't think much about them. As we grow, those around us learn to categorize us in certain ways: Terry is not flexible . Yolanda can do anything. Mitchell is totally uncoordinated . Elizabeth is mechanically inept. Thus, limitations can also be learn ed. Outside opinions often help establish, then reinforce , our own perceptions of limitation. By the time we are in our teens, our idea of what we can or can not do is prett y much established. As a result, there are often areas of movement or specific activities that we will no longer venture into, that we will no longer attempt. We feel our limitations and we avoid the painful experience of failure. By the time we are in our 30s and 40s, we recognize our limitations and tend to arrange our lives around them. In our 50s, 60s, and 70s we feel silly even thinking or hoping that we might be able to do that which we gave up many years earlier. Our limitations become impossibilities. What many of us don't realize is that limitations are usually the result of insufficient or faulty learning . If we lack the necessary ingredients of a movement, if these ingredients are not put together well, any movement becomes impossible to do. Most exercise programs ask us to overcome

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limitations by keeping an eye on the final outcome. You already know that this is impossible: without the necessary information the movement can never be done correctly, hence, the limitation can never be overcome. Lacking this understanding, most people fail in their attempts to overcome their limitations. Such an experience causes most people to believe even more strongly that their limitations are permanent. After studying with Dr. Feldenkrais , I grew to realize that I could learn things I once thought were impossible for me to learn. I learned to approach my limitations by going through the process of experiencing and learning the missing parts. As long as I did this, my movements were easy and safe. After just a few weeks of studying this method, I had an incredible experience. I was able to perform dance movements that I had never been able to do before, despite the years of rigorous dance instruction. Suddenly the movements came easily; I moved with grace and precision; the reoccurring pains and inflammations I had experienced for years disappeared. When I began teaching the method, I was equally amazed and delighted to find that I was able to help my students achieve similar successes. Infants and older people could suddenly do something that was impossible for them the day before. Athletes, musicians, and other performers surpassed their previous achievements. People with nagging pains and stiffness suddenly found new comfort and freedom. And all that was accomplished gently and in comfort. For a long time I was continuously surprised by the results. I still had the same feelings and beliefs about what is possible that most of us carry inside us. But after observing the impossible become possible for thousands of people, I finally realized that my beliefs created the impossibility. When you learn to do the lessons in this program, you will feel the impossible becoming possible over and over. These lessons tap into your

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brain's remarkable ability to find original solutions, and overcome limitations by using the correct and necessary information. All you need to do is provide your brain with the opportunity to create that information. After awhile, overcoming limitations becomes a way of life.

:t,

What Is Possible! It is possible for every human being to continuously improve the

quality of their movement, any movement. It is possible, at any age, to learn new movement skills in a safe, pleasurable way. It is possible to continuously enrich our movement vocabulary throughout life, thereby allowing us to continuously grow and have more freedom of self-expression . It is possible to resume the organic learning process that we engaged in as infants and children. It is possible to develop an ever-increasing capacity for awareness. It is possible for anyone to feel good and have an ever-growing feeling of

vitality and energy. It is possible to become more flexible without using force and in such a manner that leaves us pain free. It is possible to heal old injuries and prevent new ones. It is possible to feel good and enjoy movement like a child . It is possible to get rid of compulsions and act out of true choice. Once we start tapping more fully into our potential, new possibilities that we didn't even know to hope for will open up for us. What is it that you would like to make possible? Think it through and add it to the list. Paul has cerebral palsy. I first began working with him when he was 11 months old . At that time, Paul was flabby and did not initiate any movement, and his eyes were very crossed. He had a very faint voice but no language. Paul 's life was difficult and the doctors never really expected that it would improve. This diagnosis seemed true, for Paul did not really respond

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the first couple of lessons. He was not much of a learner, or so it seemed. In order to stay content he required constant attention from his mother. After a few lessons, however, Paul began to roll over. The moment he rolled over onto his belly and lifted his head, his eyes became perfectly focused -

the crossing was gone. As Paul learned to do more, his eyes

continued to remain uncrossed for longer periods of time. When Paul's mother relayed this phenomenon to the doctor, the doctor replied, "That is not possible," following with an explanation as to why this was so. This contradiction between the doctor's beliefs and my experiences perplexed me. Over dinner, I shared this experience with a physicist friend of mine. He told me: "In science, what is truly impossible is anything that contradicts an established law of nature, say, the laws of energy. We as living beings spend energy all of the time. Life depends on a continuous expenditure of energy and in order to do that we have to receive energy. For all living beings, food is the source of this energy. The ability of a cross-eyed baby to learn to focus his eye some of the time does not contradict the laws of energy. Any movement in our body is possible as long as it does not contradict the way we are structured mechanically. I was delighted with his answer. I realized that very often we confuse that which we are used to with that which is possible. What happened to Paul is definitely within the range of the possible. Since Paul's doctor had never experienced a situation like this before, he did what so many of us often do: he confused what he knows with what is possible. Today, Paul is a walking, talking, thinking and loving 4 year old who knows what he wants and goes after it. His eyes are almost always focused except when he gets very tired or upset. My students are free to explore any possibility. Together we observe the outcome and proceed from there. Through this program you learn to

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make the impossible possible . You move beyond your limitations again and again in a gentle, consistent manner . Surpassing your own limitations will become the norm : It will become your way of life!

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Chapter Eleven:

Exercise

*

Many medical texts at the turn of the 19th century extolled the virtues of exercising, citing exercise as a necessary part of a healthy lifestyle . By the 1960s this same view was widespread among the population. Large numbers of people joined the exercising ranks, taking up jogging, tennis, and racquetball. Other people joined a gym where weight machines, stationary bikes, rowing machines, and other activities were offered. One of the most dramatic developments in this regime occurred in the early 1980s: the creation of aerobics classes. Overnight, it seemed, everyone was flocking to aerobics classes or buying aerobics videos. Another trend has evolved. Vigorous exercise is no longer considered the exclusive domain of the very young. People of all ages now participate in aerobics classes and join gyms were sophisticated, computerized machines promise to improve their lives. Research supports such claims. Reduced breast cancer, less brittle bones, healthier hearts, and improved circulation are all touted as proven benefits of regular exercise. If you ask the average person off the street if they thought that exercise was a good thing, chances are they would respond with a hearty "yes." However, there is a darker side to exercising, a side that is less often discussed. Statistics show that the majority of people who join a rigorous exercise routine eventually drop out and stop. Often times the routine proves to be too difficult; the discomfort of the experience, as well as the stiffness and pain that follow, proves to be too much for many people. A

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chronic or persistent injury often puts an end to other exercise and sportsrelated activities. Then there are those who simply find themselves bored by the entire process and give it up. Finally, there are many people who are in bad shape, who could really benefit from some kind of exercise, but who never seem to get involved in a program . Those few who do tend to frustrate easily and then quit. Health-related statistics are deceiving and often only half true. Exercising and aerobic exercises were promoted as essential to maintaining a strong and healthy heart. We were told that such intense demands on the heart would condition it, creating a stronger, more durable organ. But recent research shows that excessively rigorous exercising can actually damage our hearts. It has also been proven that high-impact aerobics can have a very detrimental effect upon our muscles and joints . In part, these findings have led to a new exercise regimen that emphasizes a gentler, less rigorous approach. More and more articles in professional and popular publications are now advocating walking instead of running , low-impact aerobics rather than high-intensity classes , an exercise routine that builds gradually. I've even seen a spa guide that recommends we only do what is comfortable for us. How can such a radical change in the belief system occur in just a few years? How can something that was considered so good to our health be found to actually be detrimental to us? How could we, en masse, train ourselves to do something for 20 years only to discover that it does not work? How come we didn 't know or feel it sooner? I believe that dualistic thinking is to blame, the long-standing cultural belief that our minds and bodies are separate entities.

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•

Mindless Exercise - Mindful Movement "You will become more flexible, but what I am after is not flexible bodies but flexible minds; what I am after is restoring people to their human dignity."- Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais "Exercise: bodily exertion for the sake of health; a regular series of movements designed to strengthen or develop some part of the body; activity for the purpose of training or developing the body or mind." - Webster's Dictionary In our society we were all taught to employ the dualistic thought

process . Western culture has tended to think in terms of polar oppositions: good/bad , ugly/beautiful, right/wrong, mind/body. Descartes was one of the first to formulate the idea that the mind and body are separate entities. Western medicine still does this. Dualistic thinking makes it impossible for the community to search for a solution that integrates mind and body. In this mode of thinking, the so-called mind is excluded in the attempts to help effect a change upon the body, for each is a separate, mutually exclusive, entity.

If I can look at the heart as an isolated muscle that needs to get stronger, it seems logical that more rigorous exercising will make it stronger and make the whole body healthier. But this logic is faulty. By conceptualizing the body as a separate thing you can influence or change , you separate it from the complexity of the whole. The part that is then missing is the part that is actually you -

your thoughts, your feelings, your

unique personal needs and your whole body. This part also contains your

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larger personal history as well as the biological history that the human species shar es. Exercising employs the same dualistic split between mind and body. Generally, exercises are taught and practiced as a series of limited movements done over and over again. Such exercises very often focus on one part of the body , an arm , a leg, or the stomach. Such singular emphasis separates the part from the rest of the body. But any movement we do involves the whole self . When you move your leg a certain way, every other part of yourself needs to reorganize in order to facilitate that movement. If it doesn 't, you would fall flat on your face. Our body is in continuous flow from one action to the other. It is those parts of ourselves that are rigid and left out of the image of movement that impede this flow of movement and create most of our limitations. Most people quickly develop a habitual way of doing a specific exercise . The quality of the movement habit is dictated by the level of skill the person happened to have at the time she or he started doing the exercise. Employing this method does not require much attention to our feelings, our thought processes, or subtle physical sensations. Look at a person "riding" an exercise bicycle while reading and you will see what I mean. I put "riding" in quotes because the automatic leg movements performed by this person have little to do with real bike riding. On the machine there is no demand for balance. In fact, the eyes, the head, and the whole upper body can be practically motionless while the legs move. The continuous series of complex and delicate adjustments that take place on a real bike ride are eliminated. The stationary bike rider can make mistakes he or she will never know about, mistakes like using one leg more powerfully than the other or subtly moving in a wrong direction. A few weeks down the line, however, this rider may feel a series of pains, yet not

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have any idea why he or she is feeling them. As stated, exercise routines usually focus on a very limited number of movements. Yet our bodies are built to do thousands of different movement configurations and our brains are structured to form the necessary patterns that enable such movements. By reducing our practice to a few movements, we reduce our brain to compulsive action. We tend to use our body unevenly, a process that leaves us susceptible to injuries. Thus, when we begin a new exercise it is important that we pay a little more attention than usual to how we move. We need to feel the movement. And if the routine is done very fast , to the accompaniment of loud, distracting music, these priorities are probably ignored and little or no learning takes place. If you watch a large aerobic class you'll see that most of the people are doing something in an attempt to imitate the movements of the teacher. Yet usually only the teacher and few students actually do the exercises well. Unfortunately, most people 's exercising experiences are similar to those I mentioned above. People exercise as if their minds and bodies are separate, attempting to somehow force the body to do something. When you "exercise" just one part of yourself, you tend to focus on that part only. Your awareness becomes limited, partial, and distorted -

you work with

insufficient information. That is why so many find that repetitive exercising does not provide the results they desire. On the contrary, repetitive exercising often leaves a person feeling stuck, unable to progress further. Repetitive exercising often causes injuries, too ... a fact that causes many people to simply stop exercising. How can this be stopped? How can you get the benefits of exercise without the harm? Simple. You must first understand that you do not need to

exercise, you need to move; you need to move as a whole integrated being. The benefit you receive from exercising can be increased beyond your

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expectations when you understand that it is the movement and its quality that makes the difference. You must actively engage all the aspects of your mind: your feelings, your thinking process, your sensations, your desires, your beliefs, and your awareness. When all of these are brought to bear upon your movement, you become skillful and healthy. You must remember that you cannot separate mind from body, even when you exercise . If you do, you ignore your thinking, feeling, and awareness and the exercising becomes merely a poor, potentially damaging, manipulation of your body. We are built to continue growing throughout life. Movement occupies most of our brain activity during waking hours . Movement is probably the most direct window to our mind -

to our brain activity. We

have a great opportunity to change the way we exercise, now that so many of us are interested in increasing our well-being and health. Exercise can provide us with the opportunity to learn to move better as well as the chance to learn new ways to move. As a result, we are able to grow into better people. Unlike conventional exercise programs, Movement for Life will teach you how to harmoniously and efficiently bring more of yourself into every movement that you do. As a result, limitations and pain disappear. With this program you'll learn to move better by using the amazing qualities that are built into you . You'll learn to pay attention and then you can use the builtin wisdom of your mind/body. You will discover what a remarkable learner you are as well as how well you can move once you learn mindful movement.

*

Fitness Imagine someone who carries a few extra pounds of body weight,

huffs and puffs going up the stairs, and decides to try exercising. Let's say

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the attempt proves to be too difficult, and so the person simply gives up. Though this person needs to get in shape, it proves too hard a task. This is often the case, for fitness programs usuall y work for those who are sufficiently fit to begin with. We humans have an interesting quality: when something is easy and pleasurable , we tend to do it more, but when it's difficult and uncomfortable, we tend to avoid it. When we avoid the activity we often label ourselves as lazy. The actuality, however, is that our avoidance is a sign of our intelligence , our mind preventing us from engaging in activities that may harm us. The truth is that you don 't need to be fit in order to become fit. Your brain is waiting to get new and relevant information so it can organize your movement better, regardless of the shape you are in. Since effective movement learning occurs when you slow down, reduce the force, increase your sensitivity and try different variations, anyone can do it. You must become skillful at doing a movement before you can becom e fit. Once a certain movement becomes easy and pleasurable to do, you will tend to do it more and more. The more you do it, the more the particip ating muscles will be toned and the better you 'll feel. Many years ago, Johnny, a 7-year-old boy, was brought to Dr. Feldenkrais . Due to an accident at birth , Johnny's left arm was paralyzed. The nerve going down the arm was almost completely severed, though some minimal neural connection remained. After a few lessons , Dr. Feldenkrais decided that from a neurological point of view Johnny could move his arm. But the boy had no strength in the muscles of the arm. Dr. Feldenkrais had Johnny lie on his back. Dr. Feldenkrais placed several small rollers under the boy 's arm and shoulder. The rollers served like wheels so that the arm could be moved employing only minimal force. Dr. Feldenkrais gently pushed

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down on the shoulder so that the arm moved down the rollers. He then returned the arm and shoulder to the original position . Johnny was then told not to move the arm, rather, just imagine that he was moving the arm. Within 2 or 3 minutes, Johnny was moving the arm himself . In two weeks, Johnny could use his hand and arm to grasp objects, use scissors, and even lift things. This is the same process that all of us go through. Not only can we become skillful at a movement before we become fit, we actually have to do it that way. How can we develop strength and stamina in something we don't know how to do yet? Simple, by reversing the order. Once you have the skill, increasing the power, the speed, and the stamina is a natural, easy process. Acquiring movement skills is an integral activity that we need to have. For too long the separation of mind and body has prevented this learning and limited our abilities.

'l'f Posture Do you feel that you have good posture? Are you happy with your posture? If your answer is yes to these questions, you are in the minority. Most people feel that their posture isn't right or is not as good as they would like. Most people would like to correct their postures yet most have little or no idea how to go about doing this. Certainly there is no shortage of ideas about what a good posture is. Throughout recorded human history we find models of what people considered to be attractive and correct postures. Greek sculptures, ancient Egyptian paintings, African artifacts all try to capture this ideal. Top athletes and models serve as examples for many of us today. In addition, there are also many different methods of movement, each of which has a very specific idea about what good, correct posture is. Students of such methods spend

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hours molding themselves to their teacher's idea of good posture. Each one of these methods has, I am certain, some valuable suggestions and the students of these methods usually benefit from these suggestions. With the Movement for Life program, however, you will not be told how to stand or what type of posture you should have. The reason for this is simple: we don't have "a posture." Here, again, we have fallen into the trap of thinking about ourselves statically: posture is a thing and we try to change this thing in order to look and feel better. But there isn't a posture anywhere to be found. If we try to correct it we are on the wrong track. Posture comes from the word position. Posture assumes a static and a constant position of the body but the body is never posted in one, static position. The living body is in constant motion. We breathe in and out and that alone demands constant motion and readjustment. The way that our bodies are built makes it extremely easy for us to initiate movement. When we stand up, our base (the feet) is narrow and our center of gravity is very high. That creates a body that is easy to move and very difficult to keep stationary. We lose balance all the time and so are built to continuously regain balance. We are built to initiate movement very readily and we are built to act. We have a dynamic body that is built to move in all directions and in many different ways. Every movement we do, be it bending, twisting, serving a tennis ball , kissing, or running -

each has its

own path and all these paths intersect. The point where all these paths intersect is the point at where the movement begins. This point may be referred to as our posture. But since we are a dynamic system , not a static one, we must replace this word "posture " with the word "acture ," acture stemming from the word "action." Acture means the position of sitting or standing from which we initiate an action. The better our acture is, the easier it is for us to initiate

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movement. Think, for example, of an elderly person who has lost his or her ability to arise from a chair. The way the person sits makes it very difficult to initiate movement in the forward and up position required to stand. When he or she can again feel how to move easily in these directions , the acture will improve . In other words, the movement s we learn and can do and the quality of those movements together determine our acture. Once we think in terms of acture, posture becomes irrelevant. Athletes whose "posture" we admire didn't get it by deciding which posture they wanted. They got it as a result of what they do. Thi s is why gymnasts have different "postures" than football players , why ballerinas have distinct "postures" that you can readily recognize.

If we want to improve our "posture" or acture, what we need to focus on is our movement. Telling someone to stand straight is meaningles s: there is not a straight line in our whole body . A straight spine is a symptom of a very serious disease and those who have it are in severe pain, finding all their movements severely limited. Another common error in attempts to improve posture is the continual insistence that a person straighten their shoulders and push them back. Any movement we do involves the whole body/brain. An arbitrary decision to hold the shoulder s back is meaningless to the brain. It can ' t do it well. This is why the instruction never improved anyone 's posture. Learning to move in new ways and learning to improve the qua lity of the movement will spontaneously imp rove your acture. The interest shifts from how you should look to what you can do, how you can learn to do more, and how you can learn to do it easier and more to your satisfaction .

If you want to improve the way you stand and carry yourself you want to improve your acture -

if

you need to focus on learnin g new

movement skills. As babies and childr en, we developed our actur e thro ugh the continuous evolution of our abilities to move and act. As adults , we tend

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to keep doing the same movements we already know in the same way, hence, our acture can't change. But the moment we restart the childhood process of learning new skills and movement configurations, the way we stand and carry ourselves will improve. Once we do this, we never again have to be told how to stand. All we need to do is focus on improving the quality of our movement and increasing our repertoire of movements. This process of organic learning is available to us at any time in our lives. Ruby came to me when she was 83 years old. Her back was very rounded. She bent forward from the hips so that she was always looking down at the floor. At each lesson, Ruby learned simple movement skills, skills that helped her feel, then learn, how to involve her back and pelvis in everything she was doing. After three lessons, Ruby was able to sit straight. She was able to look straight ahead and even gained back a few inches of height. She said to me, "I feel better than I have for many, many years. I feel lighter, like I can do things that I haven't been able to do for a long time. This program taught me to walk straight; it greatly improved my well-being." Her eyes were gleaming. Her daughter, who brought her, was crying and said, "I never thought I would see mother this free again." Improved acture is easy to attain. We are built to continuously learn new movement skills and to refine the existing ones. This process is what brings changes in our posture. The more easy and safe movements we can do, the better our acture becomes.

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Getting Comfortable With Your Body

"A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval."- Mark Twain At this time in our history, a great amount of attention is focused

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upon our bodies and upon our health. Books, videos, and magazine articles discuss nutrition. They tell us what to eat and how to eat it, their goal being to teach us how to be truly healthy. We are also encouraged to exercise and be physically active in order to enhance our health and our appearance. As a result, more and more people have come to take an active role in the maintenance of their own health. Though a wonderful evolution, an essential component is missing in this process -

the idea that we must become

comfortable with our bodies, with ourselves. This is an idea of great importance. Most adults live their lives feeling that something is wrong with their bodies. When we move to the feeling level, we open up a gigantic Pandora's box. Some people are overly concerned with their visual image -

their

"looks." Many people are concerned about their overall weight, certain they need to lose a few pounds. Many focus on weight in specific areas only, the stomach or the thighs, and worry about the weight distribution in these areas. Some people are concerned with the actual structure of their bodies; they think that they are too tall or that their legs are too short or that their head is too large. Others worry about their skin. Many people go through their lives feeling uncomfortable with their bodies but not really knowing why. They have no remembered experience, no tangible explanation that would explain this feeling. So many of us are oblivious to how wonderful we truly are . Few experience spontaneous feelings of appreciation for ourselves or for our bodies. How do we get this way? What brings so many of us to this point? Most importantly, what can we do to change these perceptions? I believe that we are critical of our bodies and uncomfortable with them because of the way we approach ourselves . How we approach ourselves, in turn, affects how others approach and treat us. If we dislike

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ourselves , others respond to this attitude and treat us in a like manner . In order for a child to feel good about him- or herself, to think that he or she is truly wonderful and that his or her body is also wonderful , the child needs to be treated in a loving way. The child must be approached gently, must be treated kindly and with patience. The caretaker or the teacher needs to be curious about the child's feelings and bring those feelings into account. The child's feelings of safety, sense of comfort and security as well as actual safety are of primary importance. Hence , the caretaker must be flexible , constantly changing in order to insure optimum levels of safety and security. Can you imagine being treated that way for an extended period of time? What would it feel like? Would you enjoy it? You can be treated this way, any time, all the time: you can treat yourself this way! Unfortunately , most of us do not do this. Look at the way most of us exercise . We turn to instructors that insist we use force to achieve the goals they establish. We move to fast music that blares at us. There is no concern for our safety, no patience for our unique needs and feelings, which are dismi ssed or ignored. We are being asked to move like someone else so that we might eventually look like someone else. If we look at this process carefully , we find the very same process that is supposed to enhance our health and well-being is subversive. The underlying assumption is that we are not good the way we are ; self-hatred and criticism subtly evolve from these ideas and practices. In exercise, as in all aspects of our life, this process operates . But we can stop it. Gentleness can replace force and violence. Patience can replace speed. Curiosity can replace rigidity. Fun and new movements can replace repetitive, limited movement. Awareness can replace compulsion . Like a child, when we learn to move in this way the movement feels

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good. We can then get pleasurable sensations and feelings from our bodies. We then get more control over our movement. The pleasure, as well as the sense of fun we feel while moving, brings spontaneity back into our bodies and our lives. With this program you will learn how to approach yourself in a loving way. This , in turn, will increase your ability to feel truly comfortable with your body.

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ChapterTwelve:

HealthandWellness

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"Preserving the health by too severe a rule is a wearisome malady." - LaRoche Foucault When we go to the doctor, get ourselves checked over thoroughly, and are told that all is well, are we healthy? When we eat well, exercise, and minimize the stress in our lives, are we healthy? The dictionar y defines health as "freedom from defect, pain, and disease." Are we healthy when we are free from defect, pain, and disease? Is health merely the absence of these things? Despite the lack of medical symptoms many people don't feel healthy. Most of us think of our health as if it were a thing, a static object, when in fact it is just a manifestation of a complex , dynamic process. As discussed in the previous chapter, every time that we think of ourselves as static, we form misconceptions as to how we function. As a result , the solutions we look for to fix a problem usually don't serve us well. We say "I want my health back" like "I want my shoes back." But health is not a thing. In order for the term "health" to have meaning to us, we need to think of it as a process . Health can increase and decrease. Instead of looking at health as a static thing or configuration, let's think of it as a part of a dynamic process. Looking at health as a process allows us to ask questions like these: What is a healthy person like? In what ways is a healthy person different

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from someone less healthy? We all know the feeling of being healthier without comparing it to illness. When we are ill our ability to carry out our daily activities is disrupted; we feel weaker; we are less interested in the world around us. Our desire and ability to move also decreases. Look at a healthy child, however, and you'll see just the opposite. The child is vibrant and full of energy. She or he is curious, continuously moving and learning new things. The world around the child is fascinating, inspiring the child to come up with more and more new ideas. This process of continuous organic growth is available to all of us throughout our lives. As adults, however, we need to engage in this process intentionally. If we don't engage in this process, we find ourselves confined by a small, limited set of habits that make our thinking and behavior compulsive. Research shows that when adults continue to learn, the number of connections in the brain will continue to grow. Conversely, when adults stop learning the number of connections in their brains gradually starts to decrease. In other words, when we stop learning new ways of thinking , feeling, sensing, and moving we become progressively more limited. A healthy adult is someone who continues the process of growth , keeps learning new ways, new options. If we look at health as a part of a dynamic process we can determine the degree of health by observing the level of stress, or disruption, that a person can sustain and then easily recover from. For example, Art and Dan are walking down the street when both slip on banana peels. Since Dan has many different movement options in his back, chest, pelvis, and head available to him, he is able to reorganize his movement quickly and regain his balance. He may then continue walking. Art, however, does not possess these many movement options. When he starts sliding, he does not possess

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the ability to respond to the unexpected demands of the situation and he falls. Even worse, Art obviously cannot fall well since he is not accustomed to abrupt changes in his body organization. As a result, it is likely that Art will fall rigidly and injury himself. The more movement options we have, the more freedom we have and the more prepared we are to deal with stress. In an attempt to be healthy, many people try to reduce the stress in their lives, as much as possible. Though it is important to eliminate unnecessary stress, some stress is inevitable and certain stresses are essential to our life and health. Recent research shows that people who are more active (and hence have more stress in their lives) are actually healthier and happier than those who are less active. Creating new options and increasing our freedom of action can become a way of life. Instead of shying away from stress we can embrace and absorb it. We can engage in life more fully. Another way to think of health is as our ability to make our dreams come true. I am reminded of a workshop once conducted by Dr. Feldenkrais. Attending was Janice, a 48-year-old woman who had been born with cerebral palsy. Janice walked laboriously, aided by a four-pronged cane. During the workshop, Dr. Feldenkrais demonstrated a series of movements using Janice as his subject. At the end of the lesson Janice was able to stand unassisted. She could walk freely and safely without the use of her cane. Janice was so moved, she began to cry: "You made my dream come true," she said." Now you have to give me a new one." Having dreams and realizing them takes great strength, the strength to feel, think, and continuously learn. Our health and strength lie primarily in this unique human ability to continuously evolve. This process allows us to make the changes we desire. The changes can be very subtle or very obvious. It is when we stop growing and developing that we gradually become dull,

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loosing our vitality, our vibrancy and our curiosity. As a result, we are increasingly less able to cope with life's inevitable stresses. We gradually lose touch with what it is we truly want and we experience few, if any, options for change.

It is never too late to reverse this trend. We are built to be healthy. Our brains are waiting to be used more fully. Even genetic diseases or chronic diseases do not quench this tendency in us. Ben also has a genetic disease which causes his muscles to atrophy. When I first met him, he had already undergone several surgeries. Ben 's muscles had significantly atrophied; he was in considerable pain a lot of the time and had a hard time walking. Ben believed, as his doctors did, that this was inevitable. Since he suffered from a progressive, genetic disease, it was only logical to expect it to get worse. Ben figured that within three years or less , he would be confined to a wheelchair. When I looked at Ben , however, I saw a wonderful, intelligent man that possessed the ability to learn and refine his movements as long as he was given the relevant information to do so. Before his first lesson , walking a single block was an excruciatingly painful experience for Ben. After his first lesson, however, Ben was able to easily accompany me on a 20-block walk. That was 12 years ago. Today, Ben is still walking and functioning more fully and successfully than when I met him. Being healthy is an active process. It is not just what we put in and around us, but what we do with ourselves and how we do it. By doing this program people will find themselves getting healthier and stronger. This program does not address disease. You get healthier by gaining choices and freedom in your thinking and in your action.

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~

The Flat Stomach Myth The Royal Canadian Army was one of the first organizations to

promote the idea that stomach exercises and a flattening of the belly were beneficial, an idea that quickly became widely accepted. To achieve this, a series of exercises were developed. As early as the 18th century, paintings and prints of military scenes depict men with drawn in, flat stomachs, artificially squared shoulders , and inflated chests. It is interesting that this approach developed in the military, a realm where obedience and lack of individuality are the requisites. "Stand straight, tuck in your stomach!" This is something we have all heard . Popular magazines, video tapes, television programs continually present us with ways to flatten our stomachs . Why are so many people ashamed of their stomachs? In my years of teaching I have found the single, most disruptive idea to obtaining skillful movem ent is this flat stomach myth. Our muscles have a peculiar relationship called antagonism . What that means is that when one muscle group contracts, the opposing muscle group stops contracting and becomes longer. For example, the muscles that bend the elbow are antagonistic to those that straighten the elbow. If this were not the case, and the muscles in the back of the arm contracted at the same time as the muscles in the front of the arm, the elbow would not bend. Similarl y, the muscles that bend the leg at the knee are antagonistic to the ones that straighten the leg. This relationship exists throughout all of the muscles groups in the body and it is the brain that manages these different relationships. We are told that a flat stomach means that we have strong abdome n muscles. But in order to have a flat stomach we must learn to keep our abdomen muscles chronically contracted. Our back muscles , which are also

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called antigravity muscles, are central in the process of keeping us upright. Our abdomen muscles are antagonistic to our back muscles. When the abdomen muscles are contracted, the back muscles cannot function fully, a situation that severely interferes with our ability to move well and powerfully. What is a powerful muscle? It is one that can become shorter through contraction. We get power out of a muscle to the extent that it can shorten . That is how our muscles create movement in our bodies. A muscle that is contracted all the time - is shortened all the time -

is useless to us because

it cannot shorten any further.

Let's take a closer look at what happens when we succeed in keeping the stomach muscles short all the time. When the abdomen muscles contract, the chest becomes stiff and immobile . The back muscles can't work fully and the movement of the pelvis becomes very restricted. By keeping a flat stomach we seriously constrict movement in the strongest parts of our bodies, our pelvises and our lower backs.

If we do any kind of sport or activity that requires power and mobility in the arms or the legs, we will find that the pelvis and the back cannot provide the necessary power that is required and that it is built to generate. As a result, the arms or legs do too much of the work and become disproportionately powerful. When this happens there is a loss in agility and/ or accuracy. Performance levels drop. This overuse and misuse is the cause for many of our injuries. Carol, a national running champion , came to me unable to improve her time. I noticed immediately that she had a very tight, flat stomach. As a result, her chest was rigid and she had very limited mobility of the pelvis. As well, her leg muscles were very overdeveloped. With each lesson , Carol learned to free her belly and use the center of her body more. Her leg

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muscles actually became smaller as the middle of her body became stronger and free. Having achieved this, Carol was then able to break her previous records without even trying. Her times improved enormousl y. Perhaps the most unfortunat e side-effect of successfully flattening the stomach is the effect that this has upon breathing. For centuries, people have known that easy and well coordinated breathing is essential for maintaining personal well-being and health. Diaphragm movement is essential for proper breathing to occur, but our stomachs, ribs , sternum and clavicles need to move in order for the diaphragm to move fully. When you actively hold your stomach in, you actively limit and disrupt your breathi ng. It is ironic that in an effort to look and feel better we spend many hours and days training ourselves to do something that weakens us, ultimately making us less healthy and feeling worse. In truth , the only thing a flat stomach provides us with is gratification, the feeling that we have achieved a standard that makes us more attractive and lovable . But it is a false standard. So is a flabby sagging stomach the answer? Of course not. Like any other muscle in the body, the abdomen muscles need to be toned. It is the chronic contraction that must be avoided. If you watch animals in the wild you see that their stomachs are free. Can you imagine a lion or cheetah tucking its stomac h in all the time? An infant with a flat , chronically contracted abdomen is an ill child with severe disorders. By freeing your stomach you free it to return to its natural job. Free, it reconnects with the brain in such a way so that the abdomen and back muscles can be used naturally and powerfully as needed. The abdomen muscles retain their full length so when you need to move in specific directions, you will be able to use them to safely aid you. When many of my students first come to me, they are afraid or even

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unable to free their abdomens. They are that brainwashed by the flat-stomach myth. Once the abdomen is free, the movement of the pelvis and the chest frees also; then the tension in the neck disappears. The students feel well, powerful , and free . With Movement for Life you will also experience this process. You will learn to have powerful abdomen muscles. You will learn to use these muscles in conjunction with the rest of your musculature in such a way as to provide you with the power, the freedom, and the comfort you are built to have.

*

Beauty and Brains "Many complain of their looks but none of their brains."- Yiddish Proverb Students feel so much better when they learn to free and use their

abdomen muscles that they don 't worry anymore about a flat stomach . But how do they look? Do they have those unattractive bellies sticking out in front of them? The answer is no. A stomach with well-toned muscles looks just fine . It becomes a harmonious part of the whole body. Since the pelvis is freed and the chest becomes soft, the head is carried taller and the person looks more vibrant. When the movement is easy, powerful, and harmonious it becomes an aesthetic pleasure to watch. I recently saw a dance performance. I

In the group of dancers, two were significantly older than the rest. Their way of moving, however, was so superb, so refined, that they received far more applause than the younger dancers who were also very good. Our ideas of what is beautiful are shaped, in great part , by our culture and by our training. Our culture places a huge emphasis upon how we look. Movies, television, exercise programs, models all establish standards of

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height , weight, facial structure, hair color, and dress. Often times our input as to how we should look is mostly static. We need to remember, however, that culturally determined standards of beauty are arbitrary standards. What qualifies as a beautiful woman in our culture might offend another culture, might even seem abhorrent to another culture. Yet there is one thing that we seem to react to universally, beyond culture, and that is movement. What we neglect to appreciate is the extent to which harmonious, dynamically skilled, and elegant movement makes us look beautiful. Movement expresses our thoughts, our feelings, and our intelligence. Further, we see and experience each other in movement and action not statically, as pictures in a magazine. The quality of movement is very important to our perceptions of beauty, often more than any purely physical detail. If someone, possessing what we agree are beautiful features, moves in a clumsy , uncoordinated way, we would probably not see the beauty. The beauty industry and the mass media are little concerned with the internal , subjective experiences of the individual: they are only interested in a visual image. Beauty is not purely visual, however: it can also be a fee ling. We can look in the mirror and see a beautiful person. We can close out eyes, focus internally, and feel beautiful. We also have built into us the ability to know, appreciate, and effect an aesthetic quality in any move we make. A movement can feel difficult or clumsy. It can also feel easy, aesthetically pleasing , and even elegant. As we learn to move in more and more ways that feel beautiful and elegant to us, we start feeling beautiful. Whenever we feel beautiful those around us will experience us as beautiful. Thousands of times I have watched as my students became more vibrant and beautiful. They did not try to look like someone else: they simply became more of who they were and, as a result, becam e beautiful individuals. This causes the person to become more alive at the cellular level. The skin

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becomes smoother and softer; the metabolic processes become better regulated . When we learn new ways to move , when we involve our feelings, our thinking and our awareness , our beauty is enhanced. Through this program you 'll learn the feeling of beauty. You will experience the freedom of feeling the individual beauty of your own body. You will experience beauty as dynamic , as something that is created from the way you use yourself as well as the way you think, feel, move, and act.

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Chapter Thirteen:

It'sEasierThanYouThink ~ "Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge." - Winston Churchill It is very difficult to do something that you do not know how to do.

Rock climbing is very hard for a novice; speaking French is very difficult for a beginner. But if you watch a skilled rock climber in action, the climber's free and graceful movements suggest that the experience is easy. Similarly, if you go to Paris, everyone from little children to the elderly are conversing freely and fluently in the language you found so difficult. Speaking another language and rock climbing are not intrinsically difficult. However, it is very common for us to assume that a specific skill is difficult. When we do not know how to do something we often express this in terms that convey the difficulties we perceive: "Oh, playing the violin is very hard," or " It is terribly difficult to speak Japanese." In truth , no action

alone is inherently difficult or inherently easy. Once a person possesses the skills to do something the action is easy and the person no longer thinks about it in terms of its difficulty. Let me give you another example of this concept. Most people can lift a glass filled with water, can bring it to their lips and drink; the action is done smoothly so that no water is spilled. Most people will not think that this action is difficult. In fact, most people will not even think about the action at all, they just do it. But if a person's ability to perform this movement is

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hampered by a stroke, if a person has cerebral palsy or Parkinson's disease or a similar physical limitation, or is a 1-year-old child, this simple movement of drinking water from a glass is a complex and difficult process . Difficult and easy are relative terms. Any movement can be easy once we know how to do it. Once we go through the process of acquiring the necessary skills to perform a movement the movement comes easy and we really don 't think about it any more . People who have acquired a certain movement skill at an early age often do not really know what the process is that they went through to gain the skill ; -

they learn ed the movement when

they were young, when their brains actively sought out and disco vered new patterns on a daily basis. Often, these people make poor teachers precisely because they lack a true understanding of their own processes. On the other hand, peopl e who learned a skill as adults or who simply had a more difficult time acquiring a skill often make better teachers; they understand the process and know how to convey the skills to others . One of the principle tenets of Movement for Life is the belief that each movem ent skill has underlying skills that are necessary to learn in order to perform the primary movement. And anyone can learn these underlying movement patterns and then be able to perform the desired movem ent. If someone wants to learn to sit on the floor and cross their legs in a lotus position comfortably, they must first learn the underlying movem ents that enable this final configuration . There are certain ways that the pelvis and lower back need to move so that the hip joints can become free; certain movements in the head and shoulders are essential so that the spine can become taller. Similarly, if you were told to perform a Judo roll after merely observing someone else do it, it might seem impossible for you. But if you were led through the process and you learned to round your spine and twist it

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at the same time, then learned to tuck your chin in close to your armpit and use your toes to rock your pelvis, and then learned an additional 10 essential configurations to this movement, you would then perform the roll easily. A movement becomes difficult when we lack some of the underlying movements patterns. If we insist upon doing a movement and lack some of this essential information then we feel that the movement is difficult. From there we will probably assume that we lack talent, that the movement is beyond our abilities, that we are not good enoug h. But you no longer need to feel this way. With this program you will learn that any movement is a lot easier than you expect once you have been presented with the necessary information. With this information the brain can create the requisite patterns that enable you to make the movement safely and easily. This is the process of making the impossible possible as well as easy. If you always learn the underlying movements before trying to perform the

final movement then no movement is ever difficult. If a movement is complex it simply has more underlying patterns of movement that you need to learn first. But learning them is a matter of time not of difficulty. When Dr. Feldenkrais decid ed to teach David Ben-Gurion , the first Prime Minister of Israel, to stand on his head, Ben-Gurion was well into his 60s and notoriously nonathletic. Dr. Feldenkrais believed that this movement would provide Ben-Gurion with valuable health benefits as well as help enhance Ben-Gurion's self-esteem. The two worked together consistently, meeting once or twice each week. After two years, Ben-Gurion was able to stand in his head for the first time. Questioned by reporters , he told them that it was true that he had learned to stand on his head, but more importantly, he told them," I learn ed to stand on my own two feet." It can take a few minute s to acquire the missing information or it can

take a few weeks or even a few months . It depends on what you are trying to

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learn to do, as well as what you already know how to do. It is important to remember that however long the proce ss takes, the movement patterns that you learn along the way to your final goal are, by themselves, valuab le and useful for facilitating many other movements that you do. This process of gradually acquiring information is also easy and pleasurable; it increases the harmony between our feelings, movements, and thoughts. Finally, your vitality and general sense of well being improve dramatically, thus making all aspects of your life better.

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Aging With Movement

"Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy man has no time for."- Andre Maurois For most of us, aging means a deterioration in our functioning abilities. One of the changes that aging people most often notice is a reduction of their own mobility, this is accompanied by a reduction in the quality of the movements that are still done. These people experience a loss of agility, swiftness, and coordination. Is this truly an inevitable part of aging, though? The answer is a definitive no! The "typical" symptoms of aging are not a result of passing time. Rather, they are the outcome of several things: the way the brain was used over the years and the types of movements generated as well as the individual 's self perception. The old paradigm has been used to create compulsive patterns of movement. Organic learning has been abandoned, the number of patterns in the brain keeps shrinking, and fewer and fewer patterns of movem ent are available. In my practice I have seen this process reversed time and time again. I have had people as old as 92 learn to improve their mobility drastically in a

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matter of minutes. Having come from the old paradigm as well, I was continually amazed to discover that elderly people can learn and change as fast as babies do. Given our brain 's potential , as well as its inclination, to form new patterns of movement, the passage of time becomes simply a continuous opportunity to learn to move better. The more movements we learn, the more we are prepared to learn even more. Our brains can do this for us no matter how old we are. Efficient movement can be done easily and learned swiftly; it does not require much force but it can generate a tremendous amount of power. Easy, pleasurable, and efficient movement are meant to be our permanent companions throughout all our lives.

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If It Is So Easy, Why Does It Work So Well? "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them "-Albert Einstein We all want to move well. We all want to have the freedom to move

well and powerfully. The more movement possibilities we have, the better we are able to fully realize these goals. The human body is built to move and the human brain is structured to enable infinite possibilities of highly coordinated movements. This is true for everyone , not merely a few exceptional athletes. It is true for people of all ages and from all walks of life. Yet when we look around us we see that these truths often do not match our realities. The reality for most of us is that we do not move as well as we would like. We often experience pain and injury as a result of our participation in a specific sport or an exercise program. Many people also get injured on the job. Some of us find that exercise is too difficult and many who continue with an activity find that they reach of

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plateau and can no longer improve beyond this level.

It is my belief that all of these different realities stem from how we think and the ideas we have about ourselves. Duali stic thinking causes many of us to think of our bodies and minds as two separate entities and we then approach our bodies as if they were machines governed by the laws of the inanimate objects with which we interact. When we think this way we forget that we are live, dynamic beings whose performance depends on much that is entirely irrelevant for inanimate objects . Dualistic thinking also derails our focus . When we want to move a certain way or perform a task we tend to focus on only a small part of ourselves, like our fingers or our hands , forgetting that they are mer ely parts of a larger process. Similarly, when we try to improve the way we look, we focus on the muscles as lone entities. We believe that will power and force can be used to force our bodies to perform the way we want. We believe that the harder we try, the more we will improve and the better we will appear. We approach movement mindle ssly, repeating a small number of movements over and over like automatons believing that these repetitions will keep us strong, flexible, and healthy. We believe that unless we have pain we cannot have gain. We accept pain and injury as a necessary part of excelling in movement. We believe that we can overcome limi tations by using all these same principles, exacerbating older injuries and creating new problems. We hold fast to the beli ef that through this entire process we will achieve our goals directly despite setbacks and failures. This process must be stopped. We need to change the level of our thinking and shift to a new paradigm in order to solve our problems and move beyond our limitations. Then we can think and understand that mind and body are one. We will know that how we think and feel as well as what we think and feel are integral parts of the movement process and all the

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functions of the body. We are not machines, but live, vibrant, ever-changing beings that respond to and manifest our internal process and external influences. Forcing our bodies and mentally beating ourselves up only leads to more restrictions, to more injuries, a process that destroys us over time. We must bring our feelings and sensations into account: they are the primary source of valuable information. We must stop focusing on the muscles alone for attempting to change their functioning is an inefficient process that causes physical distortion and leads to mistaken patterns of movement. It is our brain that organizes all movement; it is the brain that orchestrates the muscles. When we provide our brains with relevant information , the brain then orchestrates the muscles to crate efficient and harmonious movement; the improvements follow suit. Forceful repetition only makes us less sensitive by providing the brain with less information. We must start any new movement gently and slowly, varying the movement to provide the brain with the information it needs. Then the brain may clearly understand what it needs to execute the movement safely and effortlessly. In this manner we gradually approach a goal , step by step filling in missing pieces of information. We focus on the process instead of obsessing on the outcome, and find that we learn to surpass even our own hopes and goals. We come to realize that our bodies move and function as a whole. We no longer focus on just a small part of ourselves; instead, we realize that successful movement requires a successful interaction between the related parts of the body and brain. We know that pain, any pain, is a signal of danger that we must take seriously , that we must listen to. We realize that a painful movement is a badly organized movement. Instead of continuing it, we immediately stop and use the tools we possess to help find a better way to move , a way that

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does not cause the pain . We realize that forcing a movement, as well as rigid willpower, are merely poor substitutes for true skill. We replace forcefulness with gentle exploration and we replace willpower with the intentionality and attention. We know that a voluntary movement is a mindful movemen t. We know that automatic repetitions do not supply us with the change we desire. We know that a small number of movement s repeated again and again is not enough to make us flexible, strong, healthy, nor to make us feel well. We· realize that our brains thrive on new information. We realize that in order to not lose what we have and to gain more, we must continually explore and learn new movement variations. We need to keep developing our sensibility, our ability to feel and our awareness . We replace automatic functioning with awareness and this then brings about rapid and amazing improvemen ts.

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Conclusion ~ The movement lessons in Movement for Life and the method itself reflect all the components of this paradigm shift. Each lesson focuses on a certain movement skill. Often times the student does not even know the final goal. This is done so as to not distract the student from the process. The student keeps being introduced to new movement variations and new functions in order to keep interested and involved in the process while also providing the brain with the new information it needs. The student is encouraged to be aware of feelings, letting one's own sense of ease and comfort level be the guide. The student is taught to become more aware of the whole body and the nature of the changing relationships that occur whenever the student moves. This way of thinking and moving yields remarkable results, results that are within the reach of every person. This method of approaching and understanding ourselves empowers us to do things that were impossible when we functioned within the realms of the old paradigm . This new method is so easy and effective because this way of thinking better fits the way we are structured, better facilitates the ways we are supposed to function. Each and every person who honestly and wholeheartedly involves themselves in this process will create for themselves a world of possibilities. You will discover a new way of living, a way that will improve every aspect of your lives. I wish you all success.

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"

ny movement that our body is built to do - no matter how big or small, fast or slow - can bepleasurable and easyto do."

So writes Anat Baniel, wo rld renow ned teach er and practitio ner of "Movement for Life." In this book, readers will find the philosophic , scientific and hum anist bases for her meth od , pr esen ted in Baniel's own uniqu e and gentle voice.

"My time in the training has been the most extraordinaryperiod of growth and change in my adult life." Carol McAmi s, Professor of Music , Itha ca College "The training has dramatically expanded my concept of what is humanly possible to achieve." Elyse Lande sberg, Physica l Therap ist "Feldenkrais represents a revolution in human health." Smith sonian Maga zine "Several years ago my health, strength and energy were so poor I f elt very frightened. Now, at age 60, I am looking ahead with confid ence and excitement." Louise McGuire-McNa lly, Teacher "The Feldenkrais exercises are ingenious and simple." Yehudi Menuhin , Concert Violini st

MOVEMENT FOR LIFE, deve loped by int ern ationally renow ned Feldenkrai s®practiti oner Anat Baniel, brin gs the rewar ds of pai n relief, flexibilit y, strength and energy w ithout th e high price of FOR LIFE discomfort usua lly associa ted with exercise. Mo vEMENT represen ts the cu lmination of Baniel's lifelong comm itment to hu ma n health and we ll-bein g. Anat Baniel bega n stu dying the Felde nkra is®Meth od in early childhoo d in her native Tel Aviv, an d later became the stud ent and apprenti ce of Dr. Moshe Felde nkr ais him self. Baniel taught at the Feldenkrai s Institut e in Tel Aviv w here she w as able to deve lop her ow n meth od of m ovement training. Bani el h as worke d extensive ly w ith infant s and children , healthca re professio nals and musician s, and has deve lop ed and dir ected tra ining progra ms for a w ide range of intern ational audi ences.

ISBN 1-886616-00-0