Expand Your Ability: Embodiment, Somatics, and Feldenkrais

00:00
I've used the term story many times on this podcast. Stories are what we've learned about ourselves, their beliefs and how we should act. Stories of the way our past continues to shape our actions. Some common stories that people have that live out in their experience are, I'm not good enough. I'm not lovable. It's better for me to not feel.

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I need to push hard to get results. I can't make a mistake. If we become aware of some aspect of our story, we can find that it's woven into our whole being mentally, physically, and emotionally. On this episode, I share a student's experience of discovering a story he had that he wasn't aware of before. We break down the elements of the story.

00:58
Welcome to the Expand Your Ability podcast. My name is Jeffrey Schwinghammer and I'm a Feldenkrais practitioner. This show is about how we can become more aware of the stories we live in, how to put those stories to rest, and then how to author our way forward. This story we will focus on today comes from a student in one of my classes. He shared this story after class and has chosen to be anonymous for this podcast.

01:28
While it's not a particularly dramatic story, which is why I like it so much, this story is a great example as it clearly demonstrates the fundamentals of a story and how that story can live in your body. I believe it would be instructive for us to take a look at this story. And hopefully by the end you have a clearer understanding of what I mean by story. Okay let's get to it.

01:57
So as I said before, this story comes from a student after a Feldman Christ lesson. In that lesson, we explored lying on your back and then using your hand and arm to roll your own head left and right in all these different ways.

02:15
This is what he said after the lesson. I was told you shouldn't touch your face or you'll get acne breakouts from the oil in your hands. I realized I still avoid touching my face even though I haven't really had acne in 15 years. So, when you asked us to roll our foreheads with our hands, I realized I had an aversion to it. Even when I rest my head on my hands, I try to only touch my hair.

02:44
not my skin. And in this last part here, he's referring to a part of the lesson where instead of lying on the backs, we shift to lying on the belly, so the forehead then lies in the hand. Alright, that's his report, let's dive into the story. Let's take the first line. I was told you shouldn't touch your face, or you'll get acne breakouts from the oil in your hands.

03:14
This student took in the rules and conventions of his local culture. I imagine this information came from a parent, some adult or classmates, somehow, maybe from the media or advertisements. Someone he trusted, or perhaps it struck him as logical. Like, of course that makes sense. Or maybe there was this emotional component, right? Oh, I don't want that.

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Ooh, acne, I better not do that.

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I mean, I remember myself growing up and feeling worried and concerned around the dreaded acne. Nobody wants to have acne. For this student, I don't know how stigmatized acne was, but I have to imagine there was some social pressure here to fit in and avoid situations that could lead to some sense of exclusion or being made fun of.

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self-consciousness, self-checking, self-accounting for your own personal security. If you are insecure, it's like you have an internal team of vigilant guards looking out on your behalf to find places where your insecurities may be found out. And if they're revealed in such a way that you might get rejected, that's no good. No young person wants to be rejected.

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or abandoned, none of that. This story is then a potent mix of societal teaching or expectation mixed with this emotion of I don't want to get acne, that's bad. Do what I can to not do that. And as an adult, we might be like, oh, that's not a big deal.

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But to a teenager, to someone who is much more impressionable, where you're in these situations where you want to fit in, that certainly can be more than enough. Okay, back to the story. He says, I realized I still avoid touching my face, even though I haven't really had acne in 15 years.

05:43
So when you asked us to roll our foreheads with our hands, I realized I had an aversion to it. This is great here. He realized he had an aversion. This aversion was a hidden element of his subconscious, his history, that was molding his actions in some subtle way. Think about it this way. If you were unconsciously avoiding touching your face,

06:13
Would that put on your movement? The way you put on a hat, or comb your hair, or wash your face? Or how about when a loved one brings their hand to your face out of kindness? You might move your head away, breaking the intimacy. Or you could play out more subtly. You might make some internal flinch that's nearly invisible to someone outside.

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And with an internal flinch, you might not even know why you have flinched. Right? If this is not in your awareness right now, you might not even know why you've flinched. You might just feel uncomfortable. And then, associate that with being with the other person. And if we go a step further, because you are unaware of the origins of this internal story, of avoiding having your face touched.

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It might become evidence to you that another story you have is true. A story, something like I'm not worthy of love or connection. Now this might seem absurd, but when you're on the path of detangling your stories, you may find that that this is true to some degree, that your stories are tangled together, that they're interrelated somehow.

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Now I don't know exactly how this student's experience actually played out, but I'm riffing on his story based on my own experiences with my stories. What's key here is the realization. He didn't know he didn't know. He didn't know how the experience of his past continued to live inside him. And how is it that the Feldenkrais awareness through movement process can illuminate this?

08:13
I'll get to that in a moment, but first, one more line.

08:20
So he says, even when I rest my head on my hands, I try to only touch my hair, not my skin. And of course, he's referring to a later part in this lesson where we had shifted to lying on the belly with our foreheads lying in our hands. So later in this lesson, this story is still active, still present, still formidable.

08:49
We had shifted from lying on the back to lying on the front. And then when he's asked to put his forehead in his hands, he does this clever thing. He uses his hair as a barrier between his hand and forehead. It's a clever solution, and it's a way for himself to become more comfortable in this moment. His story had created the context

09:19
there could be a bad outcome, acne, right? So do something, come up with some sort of solution to help me feel safe.

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Even if it's on a very small, subtle level, there is a sort of urgency that this needs to be done, or else.

09:45
As a Feldenkrais teacher, I think this is great. Why is it great? Well, because he was aware of the choice he was making as he did it. He could reflect on it later and say, whoa, I was doing that. Now, he wasn't yet in a position to inhibit the story. That is, to calmly say no to the story, say no to the behavior.

10:15
and make the choice of touching his head or not touching his head peacefully. That may take a while, but I can't know for how long to be sure. But this is the first step. The awareness of the behavior. The act of observing the behavior as it occurs is fundamentally a new behavior.

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is a valuable step to changing that behavior. And of course, observing in as much as possible a non-judgmental way.

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which I will be straightforward with you can be difficult. If you have a bunch of other stories around getting things right, or I should be better than I am right now, um, or a constant direction towards what's wrong. This is where the tangling can happen. All right, let's take a look at awareness through movement.

11:26
So the Feldenkrais group classes are called Awareness Through Movement. The classes aren't just about improving movement. It's not about improving movement for the sake of improving movement. No, instead, the goal is to help people become aware of themselves, especially of the ways they already move, the ways in which they inhabit their stories. That is,

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how they act out the stories in their unconscious movements. In other words, awareness through movement helps us become aware of our stories. And how does it do so? Movement is in everything we do. All of our stories have some movement component. Perhaps it's the way we stiffen ourselves. Or speed ourselves up. Or

12:25
close ourselves off from connection, or desperately reach out for connection. As the story manifests itself in our experience in our body, we can use movement as a way to catch it, to become aware of it. And when we catch hold of that fresh awareness, we can tug on the line, and with it comes the rest.

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the emotional, the thinking, and we can see more and more of the larger pattern of this story. You see, most of the time, as we go through our days, fulfilling our responsibilities, going to work, spending time with others, these stories can pass through us and affect our experience so quickly we have no idea what hit us.

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is key to encouraging us to discover and become more aware of our stories by reducing external stimulation as much as possible. Students explore quietly by themselves with the guidance of the teacher. There is generally no music. The students are asked to turn inward. The movements are done in a slow gentle way, reducing stimulation.

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There is rarely any sort of comparison between students or the teacher. The questions are used to invite curiosity instead of directions used toward pursuing outcomes. The functional movement goal or layout of the lesson is usually not stated at the beginning. This effectively takes the movements out of context, out of story. What story arises for the students?

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during the lesson is what the student brings into the room. Let's connect this back to our student story in this episode. The Feldenkrais lesson offered this quiet space where there's minimal shoulds with a sense of exploration and attentiveness.

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He's lying down quietly on the floor and there's nowhere else to be. Now you can imagine the student going through his life, um, going to the mirror to do whatever in the morning, to, to how he is at work and so forth. That there's always a sense of what's next or there could be that sense, you know?

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that there's in this moment there's something to think about something to think about what what am I supposed to say how do I do this project all of these stories or the events of our days as well all of this is moving through his experience and it's sort of a noise that it would be tough for him to tune into this old story

15:41
around touching his face because there would just be so much else going on. He wouldn't realize that he's acting out that story. In the Quiet Realm of a Felvincrass lesson, in movements that are generally devoid of external story and context, allows him to witness his own internal story.

16:12
Alright, so he has witnessed his own internal story. He has become more aware. So what is the goal? What is the goal now? Is there a right way to act? For this student, I'd recommend if he wanted to contend with his story and change it, would be to catch how often it plays out for him throughout his day. Can he catch more moments of awareness?

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not to judge it, but to just catch these moments. Because now he has this initial awareness, he can use it to find more moments of awareness. As the pattern becomes more observable, his ability to make a choice will eventually emerge. Now to be clear, the goal is not for him to touch his face.

17:12
or for him to not not touch his face. In this work the emphasis isn't on doing the right thing, but to reduce the compulsivity of the choices we habitually act out. Those choices that come through our internalized stories. What do we aim for if it's not about doing it right? It's a funny question.

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If we're not doing the right thing, what else could be, could we be doing? Instead of the right thing, we want to find what we like, what is satisfying to us. So we explore expanding choice. Can you imagine touching your head, touch with your fingers or touch with the back of your hand, or maybe through the sleeve of your arm, deliberately

18:10
use the hair as a barrier? Or you can even ask questions like, where does the face start? Can you find the line where you can touch and then not touch? What are the countless ways you can make this movement? How do you go about it? And then what feels right to you in the end? How do you want to be? Your own authority can step forward.

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not the authority of the stories from the past. Eventually, we can be so confidently removed from the story that the story transforms. The story becomes a story of how we overcame this old story, that it can become rich and valuable information for others on their path. I wouldn't be surprised if afterwards,

19:10
chose to be anonymous for this episode, at some point finds a way to resolve this story confidently and then begin to share this story directly with other people, perhaps with the framing of, hey, this happened to me, I overcame it, my life is now better for it, and if you deal with something similar, it's okay. You can get past it too.

19:40
Alright, let's expand this out to some other stories connected into other ways people experience themselves. If you listened to last week's episode with Sarah Baumert, she framed her Feldenkrais experience as a way for her to grow out of her learned, internalized oppression from her dance training. There was a way that those teachers, coaches, directors...

20:09
had impressed upon her a certain way to dance, to think about dance, to feel about dance. Those you could frame as stories. Perhaps you have a flittering of a memory sometimes, something like, you remember that time when you did a dang good job on that school assignment, but you were then disappointed later by the teacher who docked you a couple points.

20:39
because of a small spelling error. That felt unfair. And that frustration and hurt still sticks with you somehow.

20:50
Or, perhaps you were bullied at school. Those mean girls made fun of the way you walked. Their hurtful comments stung so deep that they were deep enough that you changed your walk for years and years. And now you feel removed from your body. Clumsy and awkward. That too is a story. I was teaching to a class of seniors recently.

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And the lesson was centered around moving your power center, your pelvis. The students shared some of their stories around the pelvis. One of the students appreciated how much nonjudgmental attention we were giving the pelvis. And then she shared what her culture taught her. And as she put it, the pelvis is suspect. Whoa, right? The pelvis is suspect.

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A whole massively important part of you is to be distrusted. Now if that's a story you have, how will that play out over decades? Does it go in the direction of something like comfortable wholeness? Or something else?

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Alright, to recap, we explored the story of a student with an aversion to touching his face. We observed important aspects of the story that are common to all stories, including the really gnarly emotional ones.

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There are aspects such as societal learning, an emotional component, some sort of learned aversion, a constraint in movement, the loss of choice, a self-consciousness, and then a new awareness in the discovery of this story. And we talked about how the Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement process can be of help.

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and we related this story to other stories.

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If this episode or this podcast has been helpful to you and you want to help the podcast, there are a few ways that you can help. The first is send me an email. Let me know. I like to know what you found interesting or found helpful. So please be in contact. My email is jeffrey at expandyourability.com. The second is give this show a five star review.

23:32
That sounds like a cliche these days, but it does help. The third path is I have a free guide called The 9 Surprising Benefits of the Feldenkrais Method. And by downloading that, you also get signed up for my newsletter where you can hear about new episodes and upcoming opportunities to work with me. Because having conversations with loved ones about what you are learning is so helpful to learning.

24:02
I encourage you to take some part of this episode and talk with them about it. What felt true to you, or not true, and see what they think too.

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Alright, my final question for you today is, what story limits you? And how does it play out in your movement? Thank you for your attention.