By Rachel Hamstra, Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner
We all have habits in everything we do. They’re an essential part of being human. They allow our brains to not think through every single thing we do all day long. They’re a survival mechanism. However, it’s important to question them now and then to make sure they’re serving us well, and get curious about how we might change them if they aren’t.
Yesterday I was working with a client, who I’ll call C. She has a long history of lower back and hip injuries that have compounded on each other over the years. C’s habit, her survival mechanism to keep moving, has been to dissociate from her left side where most of her injuries have happened. After a recent surgery that’s finally allowing her injuries to heal, she is learning to live in her left side again and it’s a very complicated process.
Yesterday we dug into the question “Can I shift my weight to the left?” and it quickly got philosophical. I asked C to think “I need to shift my weight to the left” and immediately, her body froze and her protection habits kicked in hard. I asked her to think “I’m trying to shift my weight to the left” and the same thing happened. I then asked her to think “Can I shift my weight to the left?” and she unfroze, her protection habits got out of the way, and her movement became more fluid.
Noticing this made C laugh because of a conversation that had happened with her partner as she was leaving the house to come see me. “Have a good day!” C said, and her partner’s response was “I’ll try.” She asked him, “Try..? Do you want to have a good day?” Her partner answered “Yes, of course” and they had a brief conversation about how your attitude affects your day. She realized her body and mind were having that same conversation about her left side. How she thinks about her left side affects how she uses it.
As C was getting ready to leave my office, I suggested that she could use this same kind of questioning with her physical therapy exercises, to not push and do as many repetitions as she can or go as hard as she can, but to find out what feels safe and possible for her body on any given day. C replied, “Exercises? Oh, this will change my relationship [with her partner], not just my exercises!”
Feldenkrais can be very hard to describe and explain because of experiences like this one. It’s not just a movement practice or a hands-on bodywork technique - it’s a life philosophy that gets us curious about ourselves and others. “Can I?” or “Can you?” is a very powerful question because it leaves room for an honest answer and kindness. For any version of this question at any moment, the answer might be an enthusiastic “Yes!”, it might be a strict “No.”, or it might be a “Maybe, but I don’t know yet.” Leaving enough room and kindness for “No.” or “Maybe…” to be valid answers, rather than pushing because we need to or should do something, is something we all need more practice at.
I’ll leave you with a quote that this part of my work makes me think of:
“I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”