Functioning Compared to Fixing

Functioning Compared to Fixing

Here is the audio link to listen to the newsletter: http://tiny.cc/xo11101

Are you aware that your brain organizes everything you do, whether you are consciously aware or tuned out?  When tuned out, that means that your habits, while not wrong, are activating right away, and sometimes these long-standing, hard-wired musculoskeletal patterns are less than optimal when applied all the time.

Your entire system coordinates how to activate, how your bones are affected by gravity, whether you feel light and upright, or you continually stretch contracted muscles, hoping they let go.  Your organization is informing you about how efficiently you can breathe and how you interact with your environment, all of which are interrelated.

When people reach out to me because they are frustrated that their pain is still lingering despite all the efforts and things that they have done to fix the problem, they’re still searching to find what will eventually help relieve the pain.  Our medical model aims to remedy your problem, whether it’s back pain or any other pain indicating excessive heat, friction, wear, and tear that, over time, develops into a pathology.  Instead of looking for the fix, while we do want our medical field to support and attend to what they do best, your ability to improve and not give up exists through your learning and creating other habits that offer less friction and more benefit.  Notice how most of you have continually optimized your cell phones and laptops with the latest updates… so why not approach any concern with the same mindset: how best to optimize how you organize yourself?

“Never apologize for showing feeling, my friend.” – Benjamin Disraeli

I share with those who reach out, investigating another way to address their long-standing concerns, the process I have experienced personally, which I can attest is valid, beneficial, and has enabled me to re-abilitate myself.  Notice that I shifted from rehabilitation to re-abilitation intentionally.  Most of us have experienced forms of rehab and are still searching for something that is eluding us.  How to restore healing and learning and move forward more efficiently is the missing link.  It was awakening to how to learn instead of hoping someone else could fix my problem.  It was my learning that what I was doing had, over time, become a less-than-useful habit of continually pushing against resistance.  I learned to improve how I function by tuning in instead of tuning out.  It was a problem, and with the help, support, and aid of many, I learned how to restore my life to one that has given me more vitality, potency, and resilience.  I know that you, like me, can have your own experience of finding greater ease and comfort despite not being able to fully fix a problem; it’s still about learning to optimize and improve a little bit each day.

The Feldenkrais Method® is exactly what I needed to help me slow down and turn inward to pay attention to differences. It has also been the same for so many of the people I work with.  It’s not a fix but a process of learning and making better choices, rather than acting fast and falling back into patterns that might not be the best at the moment.  It’s not academic learning but somatically, meaning of the body and mind, how we all learned in the beginning as infants.  Being able to slow things down and pay attention without judgment is crucial to making better choices. These magnificently crafted movement lessons were developed from human developmental processes before any infant could understand directions.  This is a more potent way to learn how to begin the process of comparing, sensing, and feeling not only what you do, but more importantly, how to re-abilitate yourself.

“The lessons are designed to improve ability, that is, to expand the boundaries of the possible, to turn the impossible into the possible, the difficult into the easy, and the easy into the pleasant. For only those activities that are easy and pleasant will become part of a person’s habitual life and will serve them at all times…. The aim is a body that is organized to move with minimum effort & maximum efficiency, not through muscular strength but through increased consciousness of how it works… To learn we need time, attention, and discrimination; to discriminate we must sense. This means that in order to learn we must sharpen our powers of sensing, and if we try and do most things by sheer force of will we shall achieve precisely the opposite of what we need.” – Dr Moshe Feldenkrais

Spring has finally arrived, and with it, I wish you all enlightenment and hope for the future.

I hope I’ve earned the privilege of your time and attention this first week of Spring, and a prayer for all as the holidays begin this April.

Warmest,

Peggi