Thursday, August 17: Radically Improve or just Get By?

RADICALLY IMPROVE OR JUST GET BY
Do you want to radically improve or just get by? Most people have most of the time, and all of us have at some times, this idea: I’d love to change, as long as I don’t really have to change anything.

Partly, this is healthy, because people are always coming along with programs that they are sure will do us a lot of good. If you’ve been around me, you know I’m more than guilty of this. I love what I’m doing, it has worked wonders for me, and I’d love it to work wonders for you. And yet, as I look around me, I see a lot of junk being offered to people, which they should reject, in my opinion. So, am I saying, take my ideas and forget about others? Sometimes, and that’s when I’ve forgotten to love what is. What’s worked wonders for me may or may not be right for you.

And this is still true: if you don’t change, you can’t change. If you want to be healthier you have to get more fresh air and real movement ( I personally don’t consider “working out” in a gym real movement) and raw foods into your life. And you’ve got to figure out how to transform stress into happiness.

Those are all real changes.

They require changing our habits and that requires changing our thinking.

This gets us to an interesting topic, for me, the topic of WHY FELDENKRAIS WORK IS DIFFERENT. Here are some of the ways.

• It’s not about patching you up so you can “get by.” If you have a sore back or sore neck, the obvious and healthy wish is to have the pain go away. In the Feldenkrais work, though you are not giving a “treatment” to “fix” your sore back or sore neck. You are given a lesson, to improve your over-all functioning.

• Feldenkrais is about learning to use yourself in an improved and more aware way so that not only will your “problem” not be there anymore, but you can more gracefully and easily and intelligently do all sorts of things in life.

•Feldenkrais is no way just about “the body,” though “the body” is what it is, because “the brain” helped us transform ourselves from more or less helpless blobs when we were babies, to at least walking and talking human beings.

• Feldenkrais, is then, a way of improving our brain, and our learning abilities and our approaches to all problems in life.

•Feldenkrais is not only, or even primarily, about “balancing” anything (energies, charkas, whatnot), not is it about reducing stress in the normal ways. Stress is enormously reduced, but part of the pathway to that, is to increase challenges to our brain and our habits and our so-called “body” so we can learn new ways of doing things. Which means: to become free.

•Feldenkrais is about freedom, in thought, feeling, action and living. Some teach this more than others. Central to how I teach Feldenkrais is the goal of coming into the present and having a mind and life that is continually improving and continually exploring.

• Feldenkrais is about expansion of possibilities.

• Feldenkrais is about discovering our potentialities and about discovering more deeply who and what we are and can be as human beings.

It’s more things, and that’s enough for now.