Expand Your Ability: Embodiment, Somatics, and Feldenkrais

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Moshe Feldenkrais says that we have more experience of movement and more capacity for it compared to feeling and thought. Hmm. Well, right? My North American cultural upbringing has pointed me to reading, self-help books, textbooks, etc. which is good and great. And then also pointed me towards therapy.

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as a way to mature and grow, which also is good and great. And I wonder if either of these are true for you. Now, Felton Christ says that our experience of movement is more rich than feeling and thought. It can serve as a greater basis for personal improvement than those two. I think that's a big statement.

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Let's explore what he means. Welcome to the Expand Your Ability podcast. I am your host, Jeffrey Schwinghammer. This show explores the ideas of the Feldenkrais method to help us not only move better, but to relate to ourselves and others better. This episode returns to the nine whys for movement that Moshe Feldenkrais offers in his book Awareness Through Movement.

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is the book that Moshe Feldenkrais published back in 1972. It's also the name of the group classes in his method, the Feldenkrais method. So why movement? Why would this be an interesting entry point to help a whole person grow and mature? It's an important question since I think our North American culture, or my North American culture, really puts an emphasis

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on book learning and learning through words and facts. Now this is the third of nine whys. I'm going through all nine. And this is a perfectly great place to get started. You can start with this episode. You can check out the previous two whys, why movements. There are episodes five and nine. Let's get started. I'll read the paragraph through once.

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And then I'll go back through it line by line and unpack it. Here's the quote. We have a richer experience of movement. We all have more experience of movement and more capacity for it than of feeling and thought. Many people do not differentiate between overexcitability and sensitivity and consider highly developed sensitivity

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as a weakness. They suppress any troubling feeling and avoid situations that might arouse such feelings. In a similar way, thought is also restrained or broken off by many people. Freedom of thought is considered defiance of the accepted laws of behavior, not only in religion, but also in matters affecting ethnic affiliation, economics, morality, sex, art, politics,

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and even science. Okay, that's the whole quote, the whole paragraph from the book. Let's take it line by line. So the first line is, we all have more experience of movement and more capacity for it than of feeling and thought. Yeah, I think that's right. Movement has primacy in our experience. During the early months of life, that is

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our first apprenticeship. That is our learning environment that is. As children, you know, one relating to our parents, our caregivers, and learning how to move in gravity, how to move on the surfaces we're on, how to move in relation to others. And we humans in particular spend a long time

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learning our motor patterns, you know, as we go from wiggling to rolling to crawling to shimmying around objects and eventually to walking and standing. And then of course speaking and conversation comes later. Thinking in words is a skill learned over a long period of time. Our capacity for complex thought and reasoning develop as we age.

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And generally we are mobile and playful with our bodies before we can really describe or think or reflect about what we are doing. So how about feelings? Have you had this experience where it's hard to put a name to what you are feeling? The mixture of what you're feeling defies the words you've inherited from your mother tongue? Like, like, I don't even know what to call this.

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feeling, right? Sometimes it's not so clear.

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I remember when I first attended a men's retreat, one of the most basic exercises was to put words to our feelings. And a lot of men had challenges with this. And so the facilitators made it simple. You know, are you mad, glad, or sad? Which is really as simple as it gets.

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And I'm sure all these guys wouldn't have as much of an issue going outside and playing a game of baseball or frisbee and moving and being in their bodies. Right? So, I think this richness, this experience for movement is particularly of interest for me because I was a bit of a nerdy kid. You know, I like to study, read books, I played a lot of video games, and...

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To a large degree, I disregarded my body for the most part until I really couldn't anymore because my body got so loud and uncomfortable that I had to do something.

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Having been in the Feldenkrais method for quite some time now, there is a lot more capacity to movement than I had imagined before, and it's awesome. Alright, let's get back to the book. So the next sentence.

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and they consider highly developed sensitivity as a weakness. They suppress any troubling feelings and avoid situations that might arouse such feelings.

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If you listened to last week's episode, you'll recognize this topic. This is the line that inspired that episode. So real briefly in that episode, I talk about the practical importance of being sensitive. Sensitivity is like precision. How well can you hit the target? And it's how well do you perceive differences from moment to moment?

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A martial artist is sensitive to the subtle shifts in his opponent's body weight. If he can find the right moment where his opponent is off balanced, he can use that as leverage to take him down. A musician is sensitive to the notes, the timing, the performance of fellow musicians. I mean, what do you want to pay to hear an insensitive drummer? When I do video editing, I'm sensitive to all sorts of things.

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the moments when a character moves? Is that a moment to cut on? Does the camera have any motion to it? What feelings are generated? How long should a clip be? All these things are something I'm sensitive to. They're part of the craft. So being what people call too sensitive might actually be something more like overexcitability.

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Now I don't mean excitement in a straight positive sense. Like I'm excited to go to the party this weekend. I mean excitement in a general sense. Like when you walk into a room with people running all over the place and you ask, what's all the excitement about? Right? Excitement here is being activated. It's nervous system arousal. It's vigilance. It's alertness.

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There's something we are reacting to with some sense of urgency. We don't differentiate these words so much, right? Sensitivity and overexcitability. And we can lump it all into sensitivity. You're being too sensitive. Now that gives sensitivity a bad rap. Growing up, I had some sense that it wasn't good to be sensitive.

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And I think that's what Feldenkrais is getting at when he says that many people suppress any troubling feelings and avoid situations that might arouse those feelings. So they get excited by the information they receive via their sensitivity. And instead of being present with difficult feelings, they avoid them.

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I think this makes sense. If you have a history of thinking that a sensitivity to your feelings is not good, you're just not going to go there. You're not going to explore that. And over time that might narrow your path, right? You may avoid actions, people, experiences, anything in your life that arouse those feelings, and it's not uncommon. I mean, who, really, who hasn't done this?

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to some degree. I'm a veteran of this and recovering as well.

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Alright, back to the book. In a similar way, thought is also restrained or broken off by many people. Here, Moshe is pointing to how some thoughts are off limits to people. I'm sure you've had this experience where you're talking with someone and it's almost like you're walking around the borders of an invisible landscape. There are thought paths that are comfortable and free.

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topics that you can easily go into and then some that are restricted and you have to take a roundabout path like oh that's the topic we just don't go to right now and this might be something you find in yourself there's just some topics i'm just not willing to go to right now the thing about moshe feldenkrais was that he abhorred when people stopped thinking

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To come to a final conclusion was to give up. He wanted people to continue to keep thinking from many different angles. A part of his trickster, teacher nature would be to challenge his students. And I've heard that from many people that worked with him. And this reminds me of the phrase thought terminating cliche. Have you heard of this? This is when a thought is uttered

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in a way that attempts to effectively stop an argument or prevent further thinking on the matter. I came across this term thought terminating cliché a few years ago during the pandemic days when people on all sides had taken strong positions and to have conversations were fraught at times and there were a lot of dead ends. And I would hear different sorts of thought terminating clichés.

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Oh, I guess we're done here. What's the feeling? Here's some examples. Trust the plan.

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someone out there has it worse than you. It's all about balance. Now, I'm not saying any of these examples are wrong in every instance. No, sometimes those are perfectly fine sentences to say. But what I'm saying is, when those thoughts are said, do they represent the end of line for thinking? Is it a full stop?

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Is it like you wash your hands of that thought? You do a shoulder wipe gesture? Moving on.

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I find that in myself. I see that in conversations. Sometimes you go as far as you can in that conversation. But it's really helpful for me as I navigate my ideas and navigate my thinking. Where is it that I stop being curious? Where is it that I fall back into a type of

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and close myself off to learning.

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Okay, back to the book. Freedom of thought is considered defiance of the accepted laws of behavior not only in religion, but also in matters affecting ethnic affiliation, economics, morality, sex, art, politics, and science.

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This is a continuation of the previous idea, right? Having this internal landscape of thought where some paths are well-trodden and some aren't. So some of the things we think about, we are open to reasoned debates to have conversations about. And some things we are so tied to that they're deep beliefs.

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In the language we use in the Feldenkrais world is we speak in terms of people's stories. And these stories can run deep. Stories are the ways in which our past continues to live out in this moment. Stories are a way of describing the relationships of our lives. Are we the main character? Are we the side character? Who are the people that are the villains or allies?

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The thing with our stories and our habits too is that they generally are, at the start, invisible to us. Our beliefs, our habits, appear as fact, appear as common sense. Like duh, this is unquestionable. You know? Like, this is the way it is. This is the way it is. Now that sounds like a thought-terminating cliche, doesn't it?

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There are many stories that we live in that are beyond our ability to recognize them in this moment. But I also believe that until our passing day, we can write new chapters for our lives. We can still author our life forward towards something more beautiful. For Moshe Follinkreis, he wanted people to become free thinkers, to really be liberated from ideology, and to see for ourselves what works.

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And that can be tough to do in a social context. There's a phrase I've heard in the sciences. It's something like, the scientific field moves forward one funeral at a time. That the ideas of particular scientists kind of hold back the field until they pass and the new ideas come forward. In some ways,

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It's not so obvious to realize how we think until we travel somewhere or spend time with other people and then we can sense the contrast of, oh, this is how I think and maybe I don't have to think this way. I can have new ideas about myself. So how does free thinking relate to movement? Now there's a popular phrase out there in the Feldenkrais world.

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which is move better, feel better. And who doesn't want to feel better, right? But let's flip the phrase. Move poorly, feel poorly. Limitations in moving are not only reflected in limitations in feeling, they're also reflected in limitations in thinking and in how we sense ourselves too.

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These limitations are a rigidity, they are habitual loops. In a way into helping people question the unquestionable in their lives for Feldenkrais was through movement. You develop the awareness of what you are already doing, what are the loops that you have playing out, and here, here are some more options. Which of these do you like more?

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The individual becomes more and more aware of their own rigidity and then offers themselves a way to leave that rigidity, become more aware of the decisions they continually make and then make new decisions. So rarely is the world black and white. We actually need to negotiate and work together so we can build bonds of trust. Our capacity for trusting or not trusting

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is acted out in our bodies. So Felton Kress is saying here, if we want to improve ourselves, let's tap into the great richness that is our body, that we have to offer, right? Through the richness of our embodied experience, we can tinker with our thinking, tinker with our feeling, and leave behind the stories. Mobility of the body

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can become mobility of the mind and of the heart. Okay, let's go back and revisit the paragraph as a whole.

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We have a richer experience of movement. We all have more experience of movement and more capacity for it than of feeling and thought. Many people do not differentiate between over-excitability and sensitivity and consider highly developed sensitivity a weakness. They suppress any troubling feelings and avoid situations that might arouse such feelings. In a similar way, thought is also restrained.

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or broken off by many people. Freedom of thought is considered defiance of the accepted laws of behavior, not only in religion, but also in matters affecting ethnic affiliation, economics, morality, sex, art, politics, and even science. Felton Christ is putting forward that movement can be a way to expand and to explore without

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necessarily going into difficult places that people might be resistant to. Whether I can't think that thought, that's not a thought that's open to me. Or, oh I can't go into that kind of feeling for whatever reason, maybe they just prefer not to have that sort of sensitivity or relate to themselves in that way. Our culture can... I don't like the word, but it's common.

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program us in particular ways. Another way to phrase it is we can learn how to be based on our cultural environment. And our culture can guide us to closing avenues and opening other avenues. And let's not forget about the avenue of our bodies. And the best part of our bodies is that they're free.

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It came with the whole package. Our bodies are free to explore with, to move with. We don't need a lot of props or tools or anything like that. We can work with ourselves. Because talking about what you are learning is so helpful in learning, I invite you to share these ideas with a loved one, a friend, or family member. And talk about your experience of movement.

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Is it true that we have more capacity for movement than feeling or thought? That movement is more rich? Is it true for you? Is it true for them? Please join my newsletter to get a weekly email for each new episode, plus latest news and announcements for upcoming opportunities to work with me. And speaking of which, I'm going to be building an online course based around these ideas in this podcast.

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And to build this course, I need input. I'm doing research interviews with many people to figure out what are their questions, what are their needs, what are their challenges. And I would like to hear from you. Please start a conversation with me by sending an email to jeffrey at expandyourability.com. The question I'd like to leave with you today is, what is something that you think is so?

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that you might be willing to reconsider. Thank you for your attention.