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Early this week, I had a session with a Feldenkrais practitioner.
Jeff Bickford, who was also a professional dancer for 30 years and a Pilates teacher, had an eagle eye. He noticed more about my body than I have, and I feel like I’m fairly in tune.
This is what to expect from a Feldenkrais worker, a movement therapist. He’ll observe your body, watch how you move and apply what he sees to any physical problem you’re dealing with, emotional issue you want to work through or sport you’re active in.
The Feldenkrais Method is named after Moshe Feldenkrais, a physicist and engineer who died in the mid-1980s. He developed the work in the 1950s after injuring his knee in a soccer accident. Doctors told him he had a 50/50 chance at walking normally again, and those were not good enough odds for him. He went home and applied science to teach himself to walk again.
Unfortunately, he re-injured the knee stepping off a curb, and realized the missing ingredient to his method. He hadn’t looked at the whole system. How he moved his body affected how he was injured in the first place, and how he re-injured himself. From then on, he dedicated himself to the study of movement.
“People think they know movement already, because we do it,” said Bickford, who completed the four-year Feldenkrais training in 2003. “Feldenkrais uses movement to help the nervous system organize movement.”
He noted that explaining the method in a way people can easily understand is challenging. I
admittedly wrapped about a quarter of my brain around the information, and hoped moving through an actual session would fill in some blank spots.
Before we began, he asked if there was anything going on. I described a sporadic pain above my right hip toward the low back. As it turned out, he’d already been eyeballing my posture and tendency to sit with my right leg crossed over my left, as though that were most comfortable, which it is.
Bickford said, much as you might hear in a yoga class, that it wasn’t necessarily good or bad, it just was what my body tended to do. Just like we all have habitual patterns of thought that can be hard to get away from, our bodies have patterns of movement that we’ve learned through the years.
“We just learn one way to move,” he said. “If our environment changes, we’re out of luck.”
We talked about how I stand, and I mentioned my own mission to become accustomed to standing on both feet, versus cocking my right hip out to the side, which always feels great. Cocking my hip to the left just doesn’t feel as natural. He had me stand up, facing away from him, and cock my hips slowly to each side several times. He placed his hands first on my waist and then up higher, underneath my armpits, to notice how the different parts of my spine moved as I bent left to right. I tell him the pain seems to stem from practicing triangle pose to the left. Taking the posture to the right is fine.
Bickford used an example from yoga, how we’re given the guidelines to find a posture. Those guidelines might lead to strain in the body. The method of Feldenkrais believes one size does not fit all, and wonders if there is a better way to get there without the strain, even if that means disregarding the guidelines.
“If there’s strain, then your nervous system doesn’t know how to do it,” Bickford said.
Feldenkrais believed in not saying one thing was true for all bodies, and that any strain is wrong and should be questioned. He believed in being curious, and noticing what the body does when moved in different patterns than it’s used to.
Through the rest of the hour, as I moved from my side to my back and then back to seated, he moved my shoulders and hips, legs, even my thumbs, which he noticed were active when I thought they were relaxed.
The final prescription for my mysterious low-back pain? Focus on softening my sternum and learning to make it more fluid both in yoga practice and daily life.
The objective of Feldenkrais, he said, is “to introduce the possibility of change.”
Remember this the next time you move and feel something not so good happen in your body. If there is strain, it means you don’t know how to do it correctly. If you keep doing it that way, you’re hardwiring your body to keep doing it incorrectly.
“Learn to move smart.”
Jeff Bickford can be reached at http://peakperformancept.org or 635-6800.
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Mulson teaches yoga at CorePower Yoga in Colorado Springs.
Contact Jennifer Mulson
at 636-0277,
Twitter @jennifermulson,
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