Your body isn't broken, you just don't know how to use it

Why I Do Feldenkrais®

By admin • June 26, 2010 • Filed in: Feldenkrais

A friend of mine recently told me about a TED talk by Simon Sinek called “How great leaders inspire others.” In this talk Mr. Sinek lays out the importance of communicating the “why” of what you do rather than the how or the what. Inspired by this talk I decided to express to my community why I do what I do.

About 10 years ago I was at a point in my life where I was ready to start a new career. I was looking for something that I could be passionate about and serve the greater good. I started looking at the serious problems our planet was facing then and continues to face today. Although things like war, hunger and many others problems seemed vitally important, the environmental issues seemed to continually dwarf them. It was clear to me that if we are not able to protect our planet we will destroy the foundation of life and it will be next to impossible for most of humanity to continue to live here. Thus, saving forests, fighting climate change and protecting our natural world became the thing I decided to commit my time to.

I enrolled at Antioch University in Seattle in their Environment and Community program and set myself a course to become an activist/change agent who would dedicate my life to the struggles of our planet.

At that same time I was encouraged to join a 4 year Feldenkrais training. I am still not sure why I joined but was intrigued by the work. Nothing was pointing in this direction but something inside me convinced me to give it a try. What I began to realize in my time in both learning experiences is that change is difficult for most people. Much of the environmental movement is focused around changing habits. How can we drive less, walk more, eat more vegetables and less meat. Although these are valid concerns, few people were actually changing their habits. What we needed was a way to change our habits at a deeper level.

For my master’s thesis at Antioch I wrote a paper about holistic education centers and what they were trying to teach us. Through this project I saw that our entire educational system, the way people are trained in corporations and most other walks of life, was focused only on our cognitive experience. What was not included was much of the experience in our bodies and emotions. In fact, much of this was considered to be an impediment to actual learning. And yet, at the same time, I was discovering through the Feldenkrais Method a deep sense of my body and an internal resource that allows me to organize around my own internal needs and desires. It was a movement away from determining what I was on the inside based on the outside world. No longer did I need to dictate myself from what my family, friends and culture were telling me.

Moshe Feldenkrais, who created this method, was very disturbed by this compulsion people have to find the answers for how to live their lives from outside sources. The method he created is revolutionary because it is calling each one of us to a deeper and richer form of human experience. The Feldenkrais Method helps us to adapt to the outside world through our own internal determination. It is this shift in the way humans experience the world that would change how we connect to each other and the planet. Many of the neurotic tendencies we have result from the belief that there is something fundamentally wrong with us. Unfortunately the standard for what is right is based on an external master or image that we could never live up to. The Feldenkrais Method helped me to determine my own self-worth from inside myself.

Unfortunately much of our culture is sending us messages to turn off those body based sensations and to use our minds as the primary form of living our lives. One of my teachers, Russell Delman, explains that the mind is not the problem. It is only that our minds are running our lives. What is important is to place the mind in service to our internal self. This shift would allow people to live from a more intuitive, spontaneous place. Humans could function not from a place of knowing but from a place of wisdom. In his book A Gradual Awakening, Stephen Levine, says, “We desire to know in only certain ways, a way which will corroborate our image of a rational, separate, autonomous self. When we open our minds, our hearts, not trying to understand, but simply allowing understanding to occur, we find more than was expected.”

One of my dear friends, Bud Arbanas, explained it this way: “The mind is meant to separate, to create a duality, north/south, left/right, up/down. But the heart creates connection and integration.” When we come from that inner space we are not in that place of judgment but from a place that sees things as they are in the moment. We don’t have to experience a person, place or thing based only on our conception of it but how it really is in that moment. If you could come from a heart place how would you experience a Middle Eastern man sitting next to you on a plane? How would you experience this same man if you came from a mind place?

I believe this way of experiencing the world is the next great step in human evolution. It will allow us to begin to build a different culture one that is not based on hierarchy and control but based on connection and compassion. I see my work as only a tiny part of the greater change that is happening across our planet. These types of changes are not going to be talked about on your local t.v. news. They come in small little steps that slowly become a wave of change. Before we know it the paradigm will shift and people will be living their lives differently. Each one of us, improving on our path, is moving us toward a revolutionary way of living as human beings.

 

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