How You Do One Thing is ...
How you do one thing is how you do everything, but how do you do that one thing? And what if you don't like how you do that thing? We will be exploring that today. Welcome to the Expand Your Ability Podcast. Your Explorers guide to you, your experience, your movement, your world. Okay, so how you do one thing is how you do everything. Nested within that statement is the proposition that you don't know what you're doing and so you have to be told that how you do one thing is how you do everything. So how is it that we do that thing and everything?
This is a question that the awareness through movement classes of the Feldenkrais method try to answer.
You see the problem is we are creatures with habits and habits are good, right? You might want to change your habits but the fact that you have habits are really helpful. You have habits of walking, of speaking, of moving and that basically allows you to not have to think through everything, everything. That would be way too much work. So we get good at things, they recede into the background, we don't have to think so much about our habits, and they afford us new possibilities. Then there's the challenge if our old habits have become invisible to us or we become unable to change them, then we've lost control of them. They begin to run our lives in some way. And so this happens across the board for anybody and everybody.
This is the issue with our childhood wounds. Our strategies we learned as kids to find some sort of sense of safety around our parents, our caregivers, our friends, our relationships, all of that. We've learned a way to fit in somehow and those habits can stay longer than we need them. Those habits then become limitation. And when they become limitations, we notice them and we want to do something about them. So what can we do about them?
Well, what we need is awareness. Awareness of what we're doing in the specifics. When do we do it? Where do we do it? What are we doing? How does it feel as we do it? What is the timing of it? what is the direction of it, what is the intention of it. If we can find all these pieces, we take that habit that is invisible and we make it more and more visible. We put it more in front of us. And we have to do that with non-judgment. We have to do that with compassion.
But by doing so, we have that in front of us and then we can tinker with it. We can modify it. We can come up with slightly adjacent ideas, slightly adjacent habits, and then something new can emerge. And so that can take that old sticky habit and dismantle it. So in order to have this awareness to find these details, we need to work with our powers of observation.
Think Sherlock Holmes. Ah, here's the culpits' tracks, and he went this way. So what can improve our powers of observation? Well, we can create an environment that helps us. So what kind of environment helps us? Well, think about this. If you were trying to find a habit, and the habit was like a camouflaged sniper in a forest, covered in the gilly greens, the patterns, and they disappear into the woods, would you be able to find them? Well, it'd be tough. It'd just be more tough. Okay, what if you took that sniper and put them into an urban setting still wearing the green or into a desert setting still wearing the green that contrast would make them pop. They would actually show up in that environment more clearly if they are not camouflage for that environment.
And so in the awareness through movement process the ways in which we use the environment to help us is to reduce distractions, to increase contrast. And how do we do that for the human experience? Well, we go quietly. We reduce efforts. We make before and after reference movements. And by slowing down, we can see more. Just like slowing down in a car, we can see more of the environment. When we go in real time in our daily experience, It's a blur in terms of noticing our habits. So slowing down, reducing effort opens up the space to catch these habits. We figure out what we're doing, and then we find out what's possible. We do variations. We mix up these parameters of the movements of the habit. We're exploring, and we go, well, what if my pelvis goes this way? What if my eyes go this way? What if they go together? What if they go separately? What if these elements that I just choose as a part of this, I can play with them in different ways. And it's like giving your nervous system a buffet of new options. Hey, I've been doing this. Cool. I can do this and I can do that and I can do that. and it's in this quiet, nonchalant way that you're not fighting the habit. You're augmenting the habit, saying, "Hey, there's more here."
And this overall is the Feldenkrais method. It's that in the awareness through movement process. That's the group lesson. And that's in the functional integration process, the one-on-one work. So the job of a Feldenkrais practitioner is to offer people a guided experience to make very profitable new experiences for themselves that they can take into their daily lives. What's really great about this framing is that you don't have to fight your habits. You don't have to work harder to beat your habits. It's more about being quiet to see the moment the habit arises in your experience. Can you catch all the related attributes of it? The descriptors, the what, the where, the when, the how? And yeah, it's going to be uncomfortable. That's for sure. It's going to be stimulating for sure. But it's not a compulsive way to fix it. Oh, I got to be better. I got to do that. Because when we approach things like that, we'll we're back into how we do One thing is how we do everything.
How we go about changing our habits, how we go about improving ourselves, gets folded back into reinforcing ourselves. How we've been improving ourselves through our lives is another how we do it. So we have to get around that too, because that might be limiting us as well. So there's layers. There's layers of this onion, and we get to peel it off one layer at a time. and it's an adventure. Please go ahead and subscribe to this podcast. I will be continuing to talk about habits and awareness and how we can get around our old sticky habits and to find a new, deeper sense of quality, of composure, of internal satisfaction for ourselves. I'm also on Instagram and Facebook.
Please look for expand your ability there too. The question I would like to leave with you today is, "Did a sticky habit come to mind as you were listening to this podcast today?" And can you begin to ask some questions about it? What are the specifics of this habit? When does it happen? Where does it happen? What environment does it happen in? I wish you the best of luck and see you next time.
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