When I first began training in the Feldenkrais Method, I was so bowled over by it that I was sure that once I’d really become aware of my body, I’d never be in pain again. (Ah, the sweet hubris of the newly minted Feldenkrais devotee!) Previously I’d been very prone to ankle sprain, to tweaks in the neck, to shoulder strain and many sundry pains.
What I have discovered in working with the Feldenkrais Method is a)that I’m many many times less likely to injure myself than I have ever been in my life and b) if I do find myself with a pain (Hey, life happens. Sometimes it hurts.) I have a different relationship to it than I did before.
In my pre-Feldenkrais life, a small tweak to the neck would mean pain for days, days that might expand into weeks, growing into a problem that would then require expensive bodywork – massage, acupuncture, Physical Therapy, whatever. I realized recently what the difference was: I woke up with a pain in my back one Saturday morning. It was not a particularly serious pain but it was the sort of pain that inhibited my walking and standing. I could see that if I wasn’t careful, it could grow and become a terribly debilitating injury.
However, because of my experience with the Feldenkrais Method, I knew how to move around the pain instead of into it. In a pre-Feldenkrais life, I would have leaned into the pain, pressed on it, investigated it by pulling on it. Now that Feldenkrais is a big part of my life, I know how to do what’s easy. I learned how to find another pathway when the way before me is painful. I learned how to respect the pain and how to move easily around it, as if the pain were a stone in the river. That is, not ignoring it or pretending it isn’t there, just letting the flow go around the obstacle. And the curious thing about this strategy was that – by the end of the weekend, the pain was gone. I was able to move freely by Monday evening.
I know that in my pre-Feldenkrais life, I would have lived with that pain for much much longer. It’s not that in working with the Method one will never hurt one’s self again – but the more aware we become of how we move, the more easily we can manage pain, flow past it like a stone, and watch it eventually dislodge and roll away entirely.