Expand Your Ability: Embodiment, Somatics, and Feldenkrais

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On this episode we're going to explore this reason about why movement, why are we interested in movement as a way to self-improve. And movement is the basis of awareness, that's what Dr. Feldenkrais says in his book. And we're gonna explore his reasonings. Why movement? Of all the things we could use, why movement? Let's check it out. Welcome to the Expand Your Ability Podcast.

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My name is Jeffrey Schwinghammer. I'm a Feldenkrais practitioner, and this podcast is about learning through movement, learning to understand ourselves more deeply so we can become the people we desire to be, to make the actions we desire to perform. And that requires learning. That requires awareness. So let's develop our awareness. In 1972,

00:55
Moshe Feldenkrais, inventor of the Feldenkrais Method, wrote the book Awareness Through Movement. In this book, he lays out his reasonings of his approach to self-improvement, to learning, to growing, to maturing. And in this book, he includes descriptions of the case of how we are and why we are the way we are. He looks at society, he looks at anatomy, and he also offers some lessons in the book too.

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And what I'm coming to specifically here in this book is he offers nine reasons for why movement. Why movement? Shouldn't I just be able to read a book and that'll be enough? Like I can get some ideas and... Or maybe I can go talk with someone, right? Like that's enough, right? I can use words to learn. But for Felling Christ, it's not just words. We can go beyond thinking or celebrating. We can...

01:52
use movement in a way that words can't reach movement goes deeper than words he offers nine reasons of why movement and we're gonna look at the seventh this is the seventh in a series of episodes you can check out the previous episodes or you can start right here you can take them in any order you like so the previous episodes are 5, 9, 13,

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24 and 30. You'll find the name, Why Movement, at the beginning of each of the titles. Before we get into this particular reason, number seven, Why Awareness? Why are we interested in awareness? Felon Christ named his group classes Awareness Through Movement. The book is Awareness Through Movement. So what is this awareness, and why do we want it?

02:49
Well, awareness is valuable because it's the path out of our habits. It's the path out of our compulsivity. It's a path to doing what we want to do. And we humans have this really interesting capacity to not be fully aware of ourselves. We operate not knowing about how we work that well. You know, you might catch yourself saying, Oh, why did I say that? Oh, why did I do that?

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Oh, I keep ending up in the same relationships time and time again. I keep shortchanging myself. I can't keep good boundaries. I always get frustrated. I keep getting the same outcomes time and time again.

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we create our suffering through actions that we don't really understand. and so awareness is the specifics of what we're doing. so developing awareness is learning about our behavior. what is it that I habitually do? and what does that lead to? and can I play with that? can I change that? what exactly do I do?

04:02
And when you have a bigger picture of what it is that you do, you can be more specific, more precise in how you intervene and make a new choice. We don't just live in our own heads, live in our own bodies. We live in an environment. We have people we relate to. We go places, we do things. Yeah. And our behavior is brought forward in response to the environment.

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in response to a stimulus. A stimulus? That's a technical term, what do I mean? A stimulus is some noteworthy experience, some sensation, something outside of you, something inside of you, something that draws your attention, your boss, the traffic at the crosswalk, your own perceptions of how well you're doing, the audience waiting for you to perform. All of these things, these stimulus that...

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music even, right? This that we hear and what's our response to it?

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Do I twist myself? Make myself tense with fretting that I feel a little bit small when I get in front of people? What is it that I do exactly? How do I do that? What is that moment of, oh, I'm feeling small and restricted, and can I get better and better at understanding that shape, understanding when it starts? What situations exactly bring it about? And

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Can I get more comfortable and more familiar with another option? Another possibility, another framing of myself, how I think of myself.

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So with all this awareness that we develop over time, you can catch these moments of how you respond to stimulus. And then you can inhibit them. You can stop them, make a new choice. And this pattern over time, this cycle of observing, playing, changing, experimenting, testing, this is you molding yourself. This is you crafting who you want to be.

06:21
So awareness is good and necessary. And so let's go to why movement number seven, movement is the basis of awareness. Movement is the basis of awareness. So I'm going to read this section here. It has a couple of paragraphs here, and I'm going to take it bit by bit. We'll talk about each sentence as we go.

06:49
Alright, to the book. Most of what goes on within us remains dulled and hidden from us until it reaches the muscles. Okay. He's saying that we don't really experience ourselves until something happens in our musculature that cues us into our internal experience. We continue. We know what is happening within us as soon as the muscles of our face, heart, or breathing apparatus

07:18
organize themselves into patterns known to us as fear, anxiety, laughter, or any other feeling. Okay, he's using a key word here, organize themselves, our face, our heart, our breathing. They change in their rhythm, or in their tension, and all this, and that change will become an overall pattern that we can recognize, that we can put a word to.

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It goes on, even though only a very short time is required to organize the muscular expression to the internal response or feeling, we all know that it is possible to check one's own laughter before it becomes noticeable to others. Ah, yes, that's the moment of inhibiting. We're in a social circumstance. We need to be polite or something. Something happens that's kind of funny, but we know we can't laugh, so we kind of hold back.

08:14
we hold back the smile, we hold back the chuckle or maybe it slips out a little bit maybe we're not great at holding it back and that's the moment of inhibiting we're making a new choice now that might actually be a compulsive choice maybe I have to hide my expression time and time again I can't show people cause that's too vulnerable that could be something we want to investigate hmm, why do I do that?

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but we have the possibility to intervene in our experience as a new choice or as a habitual choice.

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He goes on to say, similarly, we can prevent ourselves from giving visible expression to fear and other feelings. The image that comes to mind is a poker player, right? The poker face. They don't want to let the outside world know what's going on internally. Gives them a strategic advantage.

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Okay, back to the book. We do not become aware of what is happening in our central nervous system until we become aware of changes that have taken place in our stance, stability and attitude. For these changes are more easily felt than those that have occurred in the muscles themselves. Okay. So what he's saying here is we don't like, we don't really have a dashboard with a number readout of our central nervous system.

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okay, what's the heart rate at? what's what's what's going on here? the blood pressure? you know, we don't have some sort of scale, internal reading like that. But we have our musculature. We can become aware of the changes in our stance, stability and attitude, because those reflect kind of a whole body musculature change. And we might not be so specific about any one particular muscle.

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It might not be the most helpful scale to think about, but we can sense, Oh, am I rounding myself, becoming a little bit more, you know, curled in a little bit more protective? Am I feeling broad and open and ready to hug someone, right? Those would be two sort of ends of a spectrum.

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Which muscles are working in those particular moments? With some time, you could probably get clearer and clearer on that, but, you know, we can sense the overall picture. He goes on to say, we are able to prevent full muscular expression because the processes in that part of the brain that deals with functions peculiar to man alone are far slower than the processes.

11:10
in those parts of the brain dealing with what is common to both man and animals. Okay, so our brains are different than animals, and because of the speed in which these processes occur, we actually have a window of space to make a new choice. The response comes in, and then we can change our action. I mean, sometimes we act really quickly. If you've been in an emergency situation,

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You hear and you do. You have to act quickly, right? And that can be the way that a dog hears the twisting of the can opener, or the bag of treats. Oh, I hear and I do. I go there right away.

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But in man, we have this extra opening, because of the speed of the processes that we can leverage that to make some new choices, that we don't have to be so reactive.

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He says, it is the very slowness of these processes that makes it possible for us to judge and decide whether or not to act.

12:31
whether or not to act. Right. And that there is the place where you can say no to your history. No to whatever you've learned. Right. Because we all grow up in different situations. We all learn different ways of relating to others, uh, of acting. And then some of these ways we might like, some of them we might not like. Right. If we get particularly

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short tempered or aggressive or, you know, what, what is it that we want? How do we want to be? Right. And our learning, our history might not put us in a position to be how we want to be, but we have the possibility to say no to what we already know and to try something different.

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He says, the whole system ranges itself so that the muscles are ordered and ready either to carry out the action or prevent it from being carried out. Yeah, it's that idea again here. Decide whether or not to act. He says, as soon as we become aware of the means used to organize an expression, we may occasionally discern the stimulus that set it all off.

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Perhaps this is true for you. I can think of some moments, of some thoughts that are difficult for me to think about, or maybe it's like some memories of some challenging times in my life, and I can think of it. And even that stimulus, my own thought, can create a sort of a flinch or a bristle, like, oh, that situation. Maybe it's when you hear that tone of voice from someone that's near to you.

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They say that thing in that particular way and it just catches your ear and like reaches deep into you and it pulls out some sort of response from your past of like, wha, you know, whatever the, whatever the response is. Right? That stimulus stirred up something from the past.

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When they said that thing, it reminded me of long ago when my parents did this or that. And yeah, I didn't like it.

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Felton Christ goes on to say, in other words, we recognize the stimulus for an action or the cause for a response when we become sufficiently aware of the organization of the muscles of the body for the action concerned. Right, so we can sense internally the whole picture. It's possible the response and the breathing in the musculature, the expression on the face.

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your balance over your feet or over your pelvis. We can sense that there is some sort of summoning from that stimulus in our behavior. And when we understand the musculature, I think it really gives us a huge leg up. We can really understand ourselves when we have a clarity of our sense of movement. That's a part of it. And that's where the awareness through movement practice comes in.

15:59
By exploring these movements in all these different ways, we get the sense of our whole body and what's possible, and we understand this is kind of my baseline area, or this is kind of how I normally experience myself. You get clear about that. And any deviation from that becomes more and more clear. The contrast becomes more and more clear. And then we can sense what is outside of us? What is that stimulus?

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What is my response? Oh, this is not so usually me. Something's emerging. Do I want to continue this way? That's where all these choices begin to emerge from.

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He goes on to say, Sometimes we may be aware that something is happening within us without being able to define exactly what it is. In this case, a new pattern of organization is taking place and we do not know yet how to interpret it. And that's part of the mystery of being ourselves. If we really befriend ourselves and get along with ourselves and we're open to this curious

17:12
presence with ourselves. Oh, I'm doing this thing. Oh, look at this. I'm, I'm acting out in this way. Look. Oh, this is new. Where did, where did I, where did this come from? Hmm. I don't know exactly what this is, but I'm doing it.

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And like that, we don't really understand ourselves, but we could understand ourselves far more than we do with a bit of attention, a bit of openness, a bit of curiosity. Felton Christ goes on to say, when it has occurred, that stimulus, that organization, several times, it will become familiar. We will recognize its cause and...

18:02
sense the very first signs of the process. In some cases, the experience will have to be repeated many times before it's recognized. And that's the nature of habits, right? As we pay more attention, we can become more and more familiar, more and more familiar of how these patterns express themselves in our bodies and our musculature, expression, our breath. We can begin to see the relationships.

18:33
the connections, the patterns, they become more and more familiar because initially they can be invisible and they're especially invisible until the point they cause us pain or create error or mistakes or trouble for us it's usually when we experience pain we're like we gotta do something about this, right? we gotta do something about this now?

19:03
I don't want pain, but if we're curious and we're open and we're interested in ourselves, we can be in this process of understanding ourselves and becoming more and more adept at aligning our preferences, our choices, our goals together. That we don't have to wait until we feel so much pain, that we can be more proactive in our learning.

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And it takes time. It takes time to recognize our patterns. I mean, some of these things, I tell you, over weeks, months, years. So this is, this is the long, long kind of work. It's like years for some of these parents to watch it come and go and come and go. Cause they're so invisible otherwise.

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But if we're attentive to movement, it's concrete, it's real, it's right here, I can sense my body, I can cultivate a greater sense of my body, then I become more adept at understanding myself.

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The fellow in Christ goes on to say, ultimately we become aware of most of what is going on within us, mainly through the muscles. We become aware of most of what is going on within us, mainly through the muscles. A smaller part of this information reaches us through the envelope, that is the skin that encompasses the whole body.

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the membranes that line the digestive tract, and the membranes that enclose and line the breathing organs, and those of the inner surfaces of the mouth, nose, and the anus. So our human being, our body, our embodied experience is a sensing organism living and breathing and experiencing.

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And all of this is rich information about who we are and how we act and how we do what we do. It's coming to us through our body. And in this way, movement is the basis of awareness.

21:39
That's why movement number seven. Movement is the basis of awareness. Hopefully there was something interesting in that for you. Maybe it brought in some new insights. Let me know what you think. You can always send me an email at jeffrey at expandyourability.com. Love to hear from you. You can also sign up for my newsletter. Just go to the show notes. You can find all the information there. There's a sign up for the newsletter.

22:09
I have a free guide in there, also a free lesson if you want to check this out and get some direct experience. And please, talk about these ideas with a friend. By doing so, we can better elaborate, better expand upon, better associate these ideas with our own experience, and find out if it's true for other people. We can triangulate.

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And from there we can get better understanding. Let's not be alone in our learning adventures.

22:47
Okay, I have one final question for you, as I always do. The final question is, if it is the case that movement is the basis of awareness, and let's take any sort of challenge you have or curiosity that you have, how is it that movement can give you a greater awareness to help you with that challenge?

23:16
And thank you for your attention. I appreciate it.