Expand Your Ability: Embodiment, Somatics, and Feldenkrais

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Tell me, have you ever been so taken by emotions like anger or rage, you acted in a way that you didn't like? Perhaps you get struck by this same sort of big emotion time and time again. And maybe they feel too big for your body that you just have to get it out of you somehow. I guess I could also ask you if you are human, because that's something that can happen to everyone.

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So how can we handle these big emotions so that we are more effective, more graceful at it? Or at least we don't destroy what we care about? This episode features the story of one of my students, the challenges he has with his big emotions, the ineffective ways he has dealt with them and the consequences, as well as what he discovered from our Feldman Christ lessons together.

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His story surprised me and I think it's worth hearing, especially if you have quote pent up aggression. Welcome to the expand your ability podcast. I'm your host, Jeffrey Schwinghammer. I'm a Feldenkrais practitioner and this show explores what it means to be human and how to improve our in internal quality of our movement, our thinking, our feeling, our sensing.

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so that we can meet the world on burden from our past. And if you haven't subscribed to this podcast, please do. And I also have a newsletter you can find in the show notes if you want to get more information, more ideas that we talk about here. And you can also reach me through there, through email. Thank you. All right, so my initial inspiration for this episode was around the misuse of force.

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and how that can be destructive for us. How excessive force or efforting constrains our thinking, reinforces our old habits, and is uncomfortable, ineffective, and creates wear and tear on our bodies. So I definitely wanna talk about that topic, but as I explored that topic, this story came forward. I was teaching a lesson recently that explored twisting the spine, where the pelvis and legs tilt in one direction,

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and the arms and head go in the opposite, plus lots of variations to explore all the related movements. One of my students, Sharijar, shared at the end of the class the following comment. He said, the knot in my back in the upper right side that was really limiting him in both his movement and breathing.

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now feels so much different. It's open. I can take a fuller, deeper breath." The gradual turning slowly melted it away. He also expanded on that saying, he had tried to work the knot out for the past two days. And then he said, the rolling we did in the lesson helped me more than anything else we tried. Wow. How cool is that?

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A knot in his shoulder that he tried everything he knew in the past couple days to address was greatly reduced in one hour. And doesn't that seem unlikely? No part of this lesson in my intention was to help him with that specific issue. We didn't use our hands or any other tool to grind at that knot at that specific place.

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Sharyar also didn't mention at the beginning of the class that he had that knot. And so he still found relief there. So how could we explain this? Well, one way we can say this is that one of the goals in a Feldenkrais lesson is to help people distribute the tone of their musculature across their whole body.

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Tone refers to how active a muscle is, how engaged that muscle is. And so at the end of a Feldenkrais lesson, the tone of our whole musculature changes, becomes more even, not so lumpy, not so knotted in any one place. So a perk of this lesson was that it helped him address his knot.

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You didn't have to work hard to achieve this either. So I thought this was a great story, a great anecdote around how we can improve our experience without the use of direct force with a fix-it quality. Now, of course we're moving, we are using forces. So it's not that we're not using any sort of force. Of course we're using force.

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I just mean that we weren't using force in a way that we apply pressure to a place with the intention to help that place. This use of direct force was Sharijar's default strategy before. He said, quote, I would try to treat them, the knots, with rolling, asking someone to dig an elbow into or.

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really aggressive stretching. Is this true for you? Is this the way of dealing with knots to use massage or something else? And then Sharyar said this to me. How ironic that I tried to apply the same remedy as what brought me to the injury to begin with. Wait, what? This is what surprised me. This is what caught my ear.

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He tried to apply the same remedy that got him into the trouble to begin with.

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What did he mean by that? First, let's describe Sharyar a little bit. I know him from an online support community that focuses on improving relationships. Sharyar is articulate. He's thoughtful and he's so quick to offer helpful input for others. He's an artist who does classical drawing, painting and sculpture.

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And for the company he works at, he does human resource management, processing, and customer service. Like, he's a stand-up guy. And you wouldn't expect from having casual conversations with Sharyar that he deals with a lot of rage and anger. And he's been in more than his fair share of street fights. Sharyar told me, quote,

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So I would either take things the wrong way and then respond with excess or unnecessary force and aggression. It would have me on edge, making me paranoid and reactive, hyper-vigilant to minor slights and ready to respond at a moment's notice.

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often acting out reflexively instead of thinking, reflecting, and processing. It would lead to bad fights and a reputation for being angry, aggressive, and rageful person. It would exhaust me and drive me away from others and make me unable to be nuanced in my reception and response, as well as often hurting loved ones. I wasn't very happy. I felt emotionally obstructed.

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I felt I could only ever have peace with solitude and sought to distance myself from others at every opportunity. Made me a loner with a strong dark side, like the quiet kid. And when someone tested me, I would shock others at how far I would go. I noticed a few times some kids would convince another kid to try me, then stand back and laugh as I beat the brakes off that kid.

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Sharyar shocked himself by his own behavior. He said quote, the guilt and shame that came after was suffocating. Wow, I believe him and I also can't believe it. Sharyar has only shown me such kindness and support. One terrible aspect of this is the lack of control. Difficult emotions have a

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blinding effect. We lose our ability to think about other choices. And these difficulty emotions are also self-asserting and self-propagating. They feel right in the moment and then they have this internal inertia that keeps them going forward. Sharyar confirmed this too. He said the experience was like being this animal that can't think, feel, or process.

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He continues, it's just a pure struggle, like how a dog will bite down on something and throttle it until it stops moving.

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I don't think for one second that is how Sharya wants to be in the world. If he had better choices, I'm sure he would prefer them. To handle the experience of rage and anger, he turned to lifting weights. This intensive use of force to push metal to move things to get it out of you was actually the conditions for him that developed the knots.

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A lot of the tension in the area, he says, comes from pent-up anger and rage, which I try to channel into vigorous training, applying force to weights. Then when I feel tightness, I try to smash and mash it out of me." He described going to massage therapists and chiropractors for addressing his tightness. He thought he would be the perfect client because he would come in time and time and time again, needing help again.

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and his massage therapist often remarks how tight, intense, and stiff his neck is. Sharyar said of these professionals that they were treating the symptom and not the cause. When my chiropractor treats my neck, there's often relief but it doesn't last long. As well she may attempt a movement a few times, but if there's too much tension she moves on.

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Same with the massage therapist, with the upper back. The muscles seem to impede their work, so I can tell they are frustrated at times trying to treat me. I used to think, hey, this person will love me, I'm a gold mine to them. Not the case. Sometimes they look like, oh, not this stress ball. And when I leave they look exhausted.

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he said, feldling christ is the first thing i've done that treats the physical manifestations but also addresses the emotion underneath. in some of the earlier sessions, i could feel emotion just coming up non-stop the whole time. at times it made it hard to focus on following the instructions even. and by the way, quick comment here, that's totally okay. in the feldling christ world,

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The number one operative for the student is to take care of themselves. Not every direction will be agreeable to the student. They might have to do less or go slower or work in their imagination or to be present with any emotions that come up. Of course, be with the lesson as much as you can. Find the spirit of the lesson.

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and work with that. But if you got emotions coming up, that's okay. The Felton Christ space attempts to be non-judgmental to the student's experience. It's actually the case that that has been a big part of my own journey, has been working with my emotions.

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If we have a strong aversion to feeling our difficult emotions, they can get masked by the tightness in our bodies. It's as if the holding of the musculature is a way of helping us not feel our experience. And as we work in movement and become more sensitive and tuned and explore non-habitual movements,

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then these emotions can rise to the surface, be observed, be welcomed perhaps, and then they can move on.

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Now in this story, Sharyar learned a number of things. The most important thing I think is that Sharyar developed a new resource. And what do I mean by resource? A resource is an internal skill and capacity to provide for one's own needs. Sharyar reported that feeling it and not resisting it and not acting on it

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does more in a short bout than days and days of force applied. I thought, man, I must be crazy or something, like that analogy when you only have one tool, like a hammer, and just try to pound and smash everything. I used to think I had to pound it out of me, release it in controlled bursts, or be destroyed by it. That seems like the slow way now. Like bailing out a boat with a thimble.

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The express route is to surrender to the feeling and stop damning it up, not to unleash it on others, no, but to allow it to be heard. It comes out as anger and quickly turns into sadness. And I want to just highlight that point there. I have found that so true in so many instances myself, that that anger that I experience has some sadness behind it.

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Sharyar continues, To let myself cry and feel the pain? It gets more intense and then it subsides. Another quick note, I find this so true for myself as well. This next part is great. He says, I had a spot of tension in my neck yesterday and thought, hey, let's try this again. Instead of trying to pound it out with a theragun.

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I just breathed and moved very gently and slowly and deliberately for some time. It has massively improved. Wow! This is so wonderful! Shairar has developed a new tool. Instead of having a hammer and seeing everything as a nail, including his own body, to mash and smash it out of him, he has this new internal resource to work with.

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In our Feldenkrais lesson, he was given a different environment. Here in this environment we explored through listening, through attentive movement, using the large muscles of the body to move, and to be curious in the process. Shaira said that the classes put him more in touch with how full and overflowing he felt. That he was buried in all these feelings.

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but he no longer feels like, quote, a pressurized tank ready to burst. And he also admits that there's still plenty of work to do. He's not denying that. I think that's a huge learning there. His own curiosity and gentleness with himself is what helped him make the change here. And that's exactly what Sharyar is known for in our online community.

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that he is gentle and he is curious. And from my perspective, I think he managed to take that existing skill he has that he offers to others and found a way to offer it to himself. And I think that's a big challenge for all of us, including myself, that we can be better able to treat others than we can treat ourselves. And that can be a real tough thing to sort out.

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And I think that's fundamental to how we work in Feldenkrais. We act out the questions, how am I now? And what do I need? Even if we don't specifically say those questions, those questions are in the background of our experience. To conclude, here are some important takeaways from Sharia story. We don't know what people deal with.

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We don't know the stories they live by, what haunts them, and what they struggle with. Shairar made a discovery about himself. He wasn't told a better way. I didn't tell him he had to do anything. But through direct experience and having a contrasting experience between how he treated himself before and trying this new way to take care of himself.

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He found something that worked better for him, and he continued to choose that better way. We lose our agency to difficult emotions. Shairar acted out his emotions in ways that were destructive to his relationships with family, friends, and himself. Having a different approach to how we relate to our difficult emotions helps us reclaim our own agency, our own ability to make choices.

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There is also this relationship between feeling, thinking, moving, and sensing. In this story, he deals with large difficult feelings with a corresponding rigid musculature. So this story brings up the question, what are the metaphors we use to describe our emotional experience like anger? Is it bottled up? Is it pent up?

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I totally get how the sensation feels that way, but when we have that metaphor, does it lead us to choices like smash it out or mash it out? That doesn't actually serve us. That doesn't actually help us that we might need a different metaphor or a different solution than what our current metaphor offers. And as I've described in earlier podcast episodes,

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There's an element of how we do one thing is how we do everything. The use of force that created the problem, that use of mashing and smashing and using muscular force to get out that difficult feeling, was how we tried to treat his knots that came from working out in that way.

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So how we do one thing is how we do everything. But it doesn't have to be. We can have new choices. Well, that's the story. I hope it was helpful for you. I'd be really curious to hear your thoughts on it. So please send me an email. My email is jeffery at expandyourability.com. I also have a free guide. It's called the nine surprising benefits of the Feldenkrais method.

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You can download it, it's in the show notes, it's easy to find. And it's also an invitation to join my newsletter. I send out the newsletter weekly. I share about the new episode that comes up and I talk about related ideas and share opportunities of how you can work with me. Because talking about and sharing what we learn is so helpful for helping us learn.

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I invite you to talk about the ideas in this podcast with family or friends. Find out, do they have the same experience as you? The question I would like to leave you with today is, what's your relationship to your big emotions? Thank you for your attention.