Today I had a lovely chat with a fellow Feldenkrais enthusiast. At some point she was sharing with me her experience of a time where she had some knee (?) pain, and upon rolling about with a Feldenkrais lesson (?) her knee pain resolved, but then she had shoulder pain. I’m sorry I can’t recall the exact details. But we were talking about this in the context of anxiety, body posture and what I clearly remember was that she was talking to her painful shoulder and she asked herself, “Why am I doing this to myself?”

And while we were talking I didn’t think too deeply about it, at first, because I’ve been through so many philosophies, approaches and theories and books and courses already, and thousands and thousands of hours of Feldenkrais in both teaching and self-study and so forth, and been there, worked with that, at first at least that sentence of hers kinda fell into “the long tail.” Or into a Chinese post office kind of situation.

But while I was walking to the coffee shop I’m in right now and writing this, I was shouldering my messenger bag and could feel that old skiing accident in my lower back, which probably wasn’t an accident, and in fact 30 years later why do I still have that pain, there must be something I’m doing to keep that pain or keep recreating this injury, or at least I must do something so that that injury is not getting better, like ever, and clearly it’s neither the bad weather conditions from that painful day 30 years ago, nor my idiotic jump onto an icy patch on the downhill skiing slope, it must be something I’m still doing, and I too asked myself “Why am I doing this to myself?”

And it sounded like a good question. What am I doing to maintain that structural damage, that lower back area that was confirmed to be progressively messed up by X-Ray decades ago, why is it not healing up, what am I doing? How, in a kinestetic-biomechanical sense, but now more importantly in my topic of today type of question: WHY in a metaphysical, philosophical, somato-dings… psychosomatic, kind of sense, What is wrong with me? Why am I doing this to myself? “Really, quoi?”