Spare Change?

By Tamela Thomas, Wellness Manager

Why is change such a hard thing for so many of us? Well, it may just be that we have had a series of poor experiences in brand new situations and have come to regard change with much apprehension.

It may also be true that we have a very limited range of responses to deal with the overwhelming and continuous onslaught of daily change in our lives.

It could be different. Imagine you had a broad range of responses to handle each new change or challenge in your life. You'd probably have more success in dealing with change and therefore would not dread it. You would feel better prepared to handle change if you were "better prepared."

Now for the ultimate—imagine you could learn on the spot and create the optimal response to each new change you face in your life. And what if you were able to sense even the earliest and most subtle signs of change to begin to create your positive response? Your sense of confidence and self-assurance would be tremendous.

If this sounds interesting, you won't want to miss this month's article by Janice Vincent. Before becoming a Guild Certified Feldenkrais^® Practitioner, Janice held senior management positions in private and public companies. She is now the owner of MindMoves, a Bellevue-based company with the mission to help individuals and organizations become aware of their potential and act with intention.

Respond to Change with Change

By Janice Vincent, GCFP

Years ago when I was pregnant with my son Justin, I developed a medical condition called poly-hydramniosis—translation, major water retention. Normally 130 pounds, I gained another 70 pounds in the first 7 months. All the water retention was in my womb. I was huge! With 2 months to go and grow, my back gave out and I was hospitalized, unable to walk. This posed many problems, not least of which were running my company and preparing for Justin's arrival.

One day a friend came to visit whose wife had experienced a remarkable recovery from a near-fatal accident. He attributed her regained capacity to the work of Moshe Feldenkrais, the founder of the Feldenkrais Method^® of Somatic Education. Without further discussion, he suggested movement of my body through a gentle touch. I responded by moving. Within minutes, I was able to get out of bed easily. Better yet, I walked without effort and without pain. I was thrilled! But I was puzzled how a problem that had hospitalized me and disrupted my life could be gone within an hour.

Training to be a Feldenkrais practitioner 10 years later, I finally realized what had happened—I had faced a rapid and extensive change in my body's interaction with the world around me. Unaware, I applied my habitual patterns to functions ranging from walking and sitting to working at the computer. I literally applied an old answer to a new question. I behaved as though I was still the svelte 130 pounder. It didn't work and my body let me know. When I found a more appropriate response, it worked. The change was finally answered with change instead of pain. No technique was taught; the method allowed my nervous system to finally get heard. I got out of my own habitual way.

We all move and act according to our self-image. Seldom are we aware of our self-image and our accompanying habitual patterns, yet these patterns can limit our capacity to respond to change within our environment or ourselves. Fortunately, the inability to effectively respond to change eventually causes pain—physical, emotional or mental. I say "fortunately" because without pain we could quickly find ourselves in life threatening situations. Pain is a warning signal; one we can often hear far in advance of damage to ourselves. To do this, we simply need to learn how to learn. Not the way we normally think of learning but the way we learned as infants—an organic way of learning through movement. Learning how you learn is far more important than what you learn.

When we know how to learn we have the sensitivity to more accurately read a situation, recognize our habitual response, know if it is effective or not, and, if not, respond differently. For my students to reach this potential, I use the Feldenkrais Method. Moshe Feldenkrais was a well-respected physicist and judo master, who applied knowledge from engineering, anatomy, neurology, evolution, sociology and psychology to human education. The Feldenkrais Guild of North America summarizes the method as "an education system that uses movement to increase function." The movements, which a practitioner assists a student with, may be repetitive but are not exercises. They are gentle and without strain. They are typically done in a prone position so the effects of gravity are lessened. Indeed they can be so quiet that the student becomes completely relaxed and the movements seem effortless. Why, then, are they effective in helping learning?

Let's go back to change. It entails any stimulus that is different than the one we know. The key is knowing that it is different and responding appropriately. The more we recognize differences and have the capacity to access differentiated responses within ourselves, the easier it is to do anything. Differentiating smaller and smaller differences brings mastery. A novice artist may only recognize a few shades of blue whereas Picasso's Blue Period differentiates countless variations of blue. Paraphrasing Feldenkrais, "It's about the capacity to do the same thing, and anything, in many different ways." Sometimes we call this creativity. So how do we increase our capacity to detect differences?

Among many scientific principles Feldenkrais applied is the Weber-Fechner Law: stimuli and sensation have a logarithmic relationship. Extrapolat-ing, the less the stimulus the greater the ability to detect changes in the sensation. So if you were holding a 100-pound weight when a large feather was placed on it, you would not feel the change. However, if the weight were only 1 ounce, the feather's weight would become obvious. Applying this, the Feldenkrais Method uses those gentle movements, continually reducing effort so that eventually you can sense what you are doing. You can begin to know your habits, your way of doing, so you can open up other options. In other words, you can accomplish what you want to do by reducing your effort. But why is listening to the body effective? Essentially, our body is our teacher. Without it we cannot learn, feel or think. Every action or change in our state occurs in our body. There is no expression of emotion without movement. Watch a bad actor to grasp this point quickly! Movement is how we know we feel an emotion. The same holds true for most of our thoughts. We often mistakenly think our conscious mind is directing us. It is the governor, not the initiator. Feldenkrais knew this well over 50 years ago. There is no difference between initial neurological responses whether we imagine something or actually do it. The difference in imagination is that we put an inhibitor on the action.

Try it. Sit down. Then imagine standing up. If you are quiet enough you will find that you actually begin to contract the muscles in your body in preparation for standing. Imagine looking up and feel how your eyes begin to look up. We cannot separate sense, feeling and thought from action. It is all movement. If we make an action, we move, we feel, we sense, we even think. But unlike the other components, our body is the tangible, the only tangible we have. It always reflects what is happening. It gives us experience; reality.

Our nervous system is constructed to respond in a way that is geared toward ease of use and ultimately self-preservation, but we apply inhibitory and unnecessary movements based on learned habits. Faced with change we do know how to respond but finding the answer takes a different approach than most of us are used to. The next time you sit in an "uncomfortable" chair, consider whether it is the chair that is uncomfortable or you; and which has the capacity to learn and change. Whether acting as an individual or as an organization, the capacity change is present, just not always recognized and accessed. As Feldenkrais believed, survival is not accomplished by learning the right thing to do but avoiding the thing that compromises your vitality, your life.

BIO: Janice Vincent, GCFP, sits on the board of the Feldenkrais Guild of North America and the Feldenkrais Educational Foundation of North America. She is the owner of Mind-Moves and is a facilitator for the WAC's Why Weight? program.