STUDY WITH ALFONS

The shoulders and the spine are allies. Partners in crime. Masters of disasters. When the shoulder blades can move, the spine can, too. I guess. And if they can’t, it can’t. I suppose.

How to explore some of the movements of the shoulder blades, and in turn of course, improve those movements, reach a better understanding, awareness, and well-feeling for the whole self? Show pictures from an anatomy book? Say, “it should be like this, it should be like that?”

My next lesson will have two distinct movements to explore:

1. lift the elbow with the hand relaxed, the hand hanging from the relaxed wrist, the index finger is leaving the floor last
2. lift the arm with the elbow straight, with a fist, the base of the thumb towards the ceiling

Both movements lift the arm, but the way the arm is lifted results in very different actions for the shoulder blade. “One hand loves the other.” – Björk, lyrics from the song Unison, from the album Vespertine. One movement loves the other.

Somebody came up with the idea of doing a select movement as a first movement in a Feldenkrais-inspired movement class. And then do it again in between the class, or at least at the end of the class. See how it has changed, improved. Nowadays this is called a reference movement.

Now, in my latest Youtube video [link], titled: Looser, bigger, more relaxed – anatomy with mindful attention *New Neck Series Ep. 2*, I state that there are (at least) two ways to feel, to sense, the structures of the shoulders with the hands:

1. Either move the fingers over the skin and palpate, sense, feel what you find.
2. Or place the fingers on the skin, gently, listen, but don’t move the fingers, move the shoulder instead. The bones are moving under the skin and under the hand, and feel, sense, what you find.

This led me to notice something else: we can feel in movement, like for example in a reference movement, or we can feel in resting, for example in lying quietly, in supine position, on the back. How are we resting (as a whole, not just the hand)? What is moving inside? And maybe both are reference movements. Or to invent a new word combo, the latter being a reference rest. Something like that.

“See if there is another improvement thanks to the additional movement. Pay attention to how much the movement increased from the beginning to now. If it is possible to create this huge difference in such a short time, it shows to what extent the chest and shoulders were in a bad condition, a repressed condition. If the quality is very bad to begin with, then the first hour makes a huge difference. However, it only shows how bad it was, but it does not yet show how much can be achieved in quality, in the positive direction. It is possible to do much better.” – Moshé Feldenkrais

If you had eyes like an eagle (the bird) you could (for example) stand at ground level and see an ant crawling alongside the top window of a 10-story building. According to the website Livescience, birds of prey can see up to five times farther than the average human can, meaning they have 20/4 vision under ideal viewing conditions.

They also have superior colour vision. They see colours more vivid than we do and can discriminate between more shades. For example, they can see ultraviolet light — and thus can see the UV-reflecting urine trails of small prey… ugh, yikes, but who wants to see that? The ability to see all the urine spills in your favourite park or on a stroll through the city would totally ruin the experience. There’s pee all over the place.

Lolz, how did this piece of writing happen? Actually I sat down to write a short poem, it should have gone something like this:

“In movement,
eagles can see better,
humans can feel & sense better.”

But then I was like, “is that even true?”, and started to look things up and thus found out about birds of prey being able to literally see old pee.

So, luckily, we’re far from that. But how many people in our myopia-inducing world maintain really good eyesight? I found this comment on Quora:

“About 1/1000. I would say, from practical experience, I would see about 6,000 patients/ year when I first began basically as a refractionist in a very large ophthalmology group (15 full exam lanes). And I would see about 6–8 per year. I mean they could read it, binocular, and get everything correct. Typically they were pilots, extreme athletes. I treated many teams on the olympics. I’ve had archers with 20/10 and gold medals as well!” – Emery Hall, former Optometric Physician

Now, how did the rest of us arrive at less-than-ideal eyesight? I myself I wasn’t born with perfect hardware to begin with, but I did pretty well in adjusting to what I have, and several hundred hours of Feldenkrais-inspired exercises did me very good, too. One time, at an eye exam, I left the technician stunned and scratching his head about how such great alignment is even possible given my anatomical eye position. But then, certainly, I did my eyes no good service with too much screen time, reading under challenging lighting conditions, going to bed too late, not spending enough time in nature, and such and such and such.

Ok, now, what I actually wanted to do is to write about the ability to feel and sense ourselves, and if that works better with or without movement. I’ll see to that on another day, though, because for now I ran out of time, I need to work on my next movement lesson for Youtube (which is about sensing ourselves in movement). I’ll see you around!

A few years ago I put together a couple of pictures to illustrate the sequence of a lesson. This one started with lying supine, on the back, and lifting the head to look at the feet. That’s a so called “reference movement”, a movement we can try again in the end of the lesson and see how it has changed.

However, the problems with reference movements are plenty. For example, it might be difficult to feel, sense, get just anything from it. What am I supposed to feel? It’s like being asked to look at the stars in the sky… on a sunny afternoon with blindingly bright blue skies in California.

Yet, from an outside perspective, we might be able to see something. Please have a look at the first picture in the first picture. You might see that my trunk and legs are immobile like the trunk of a tree, and my poor neck acts like a little hinge joint trying to lift my head off the floor. So, what would be a first sensible step to improve that? What else could (or should, or might) move to support the little neck?

Yes, the ribs. The ribs! The ribs on the front side could come closer together, while the ribs on the backside could distance from each other.

And what about the pelvis? What about it? How could the pelvis move to support the poor little neck? How about a little roll, forwards? Backwards? Maybe we need to exaggerate the movements of the pelvis in order to feel, to register, to accept: so let’s do a roll and a lift!

So, there’s a story. Bit by bit more and more of the whole self is invited to participate. But that’s not the only strategy. Participation is fine, but there’s other strategies, aspects, as well. Timing, for example. Direction, angle, trajectory. Acceleration. Spring loading and tension. Experimentation, creativity, unsupervised time. Then there’s breath, a work of volume. Oxygen in the blood, blood saturation. There’s inflammation levels, too. Arthritis? Polyarthritis? Or as its opposite, maybe, genetic hyper-mobility? Are we still talking about movement learning?

So, returning to the most simple narrative, a story of participation, a simple comparison of Before and After. A simple story of bringing all parts to move together in harmony. In harmony there is ease, and new possibilities.

In the end, the reference movement again. The head is lifted in a very different way, and it feels so much better. Yet, nobody said how it should be done. How is it even possible to see the sun and the stars at the same time? If only they knew.

I’m invited to present at the La Pelvis Project Presents: “Live with LULU”, a project made possible with the support of the Gluck Fellows Program of the Arts, Interior Beauty Salon, and the University of California Riverside Dance Department. Date: Thursday, March 31, 2022. All sessions are free and open to the public upon RSVPing. More info here: interiorbeautysalon.com/in-motion

Priscilla, the organiser, asked me to write 2-3 sentences on what I will be presenting. I typed down the following, as I find this could be quite interesting. I just sent it out right now, therefore I don’t know what she will make of four paragraphs, it’s certainly more than 2-3 sentences. Just for the archive, here’s my original proposal:

Why don’t you just say what you want to say? How can we ever find the right words within the infinite possible combinations of words and sounds of spoken language?

And furthermore: Can we compare spoken language to physical movement? For example, in spoken language, would the repeated shouting of a single word be the equivalent to the repeated execution of a single motion? And consequently, would telling a longer story be the equivalent to a longer movement sequence? In movement, what would constitute a congruent story? What makes or breaks the grammar of movement?

In this context I will present a selection of movement sequences from Somatic Education, inspired by Moshé Feldenkrais, to experience the pelvis like we might experience the subject, object or verb in a sentence, or the agonist, or antagonist, or a side character, or maybe even the setting in a story. Does any of this make any sense?

What do we need to make sense of movement? In popular media we see famous clinical psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists produce a lot of very elaborate and complex spoken language, but why don’t we see them teach equally sophisticated movement classes? Let’s find out!