The Creative Body

I couldn’t say it better myself.  This article by Edward Yu, a Feldenkrais practitioner and tai chi teacher reminds us that it’s not how hard you work, but how smart. Check it out as well as his newbook, The Art of Slowing Down. 

Welcome to the Creative Body, a resource and forum for exploring the intersection between body and mind, movement and possibility, expression and introspection.  Take a tour, post a comment.  If you’d like to submit an article, please send material to lavinia@laviniaplonka.com.

The morning of my birthday, I dreamt I worked in a Parisian parfumerie as a clerk. All the women were delicate, formerly lovely creatures who still dolled up every morning as if to meet a beau. There was a distinctive Umbrellas of Cherbourg vibe to their cheery, twittery chatter as they compared new kinds of make up and exclaimed over hairdos. I felt a deep sadness that so many lives of great promise had ended up in a loop of empty optimism and unfulfilled dreams.

I woke up and screwed my eyes shut to try to sleep longer, “It’s your birthday, dammit, you can sleep in.” But the dream’s heavy atmosphere billowed around my fragile self image as gremlin voices nagged, “Well, how are you any better than those ladies? Do you have an Academy Award? Have you published your novel? Are you a millionaire?”

I looked at the pile of bills, the unpainted floor, the to do list (go to Sam’s Club for brie, pick up cat food, kill the blister beetles, mow the lawn) and fought the urge to just fall to the floor and whine. What had I done to deserve this? This mediocre, ordinary life of petty responsibilities, inconsequential worries (Come on! There’s a war in Afghanistan for goodness’ sake!) and lack of celebrity, or acclaim, or at least wealth.

At my computer were dozens of Happy Birthdays from my Facebook friends. Most were people I never speak to, some I don’t even know. Instead of being moved, my bitter attitude scoffed, “Yeah, it’s so easy to just click on my Wall with Happy Birthday, like they really care.” Then came the E Cards, and my wall began to crumble. Funny cards, sentimental cards, goofy Jacquie Lawson cards. Tears began to well up. And then I saw an email from my mother. She lives in Hospice, dying of ALS. She can’t walk, talk, eat, hold her own head up. She struggles to write every word, using her left hand to push her right hand. Yet somehow, she had communicated with one of the aides there to open her computer and type me a Happy Birthday email. I melted in incoherent sobs. My poor husband Ron, who has witnessed countless breakdowns, just stood there patting me saying, “There, there.”

“Why am I crying?” I cried. He shrugged. “It’s your birthday, you can do what you want.”

“I just don’t understand, what did I do wrong in my life? How is it that Robert Downey Jr. can be arrested for drugs and drinking and still be a multimillion dollar movie star and I try to do the right thing and it gets me nowhere?” Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy Robert Downey Jr. I just suddenly saw that the equation my parents tried to drill into me, “Work hard, be impeccable and you will be rich,” doesn’t always hold true.

“You don’t know,” replied Ron. “Maybe Robert Downey Jr. is still searching for meaning as well. Maybe all that money doesn’t mean much, so he drinks to feel something or to fulfill a lack.” Right.

“So it’s your birthday. What do you want to do?” he asked. I honestly didn’t know. Part of me felt like I should keep working. The list would never be done. Instead, I said, “Let’s go for a hike.” Silently I prayed, “Dear God, or Goddess, please send me a sign. Just any sign that lets me know life is worth living.” As we left, I grabbed a plastic bag. I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be nice to find some chicken mushrooms on my birthday?”

We’ve been experiencing what the newspaper has called “a mild drought.” So hoping for mushrooms of any kind seemed quixotic. But within ten minutes of our hike, spread out on a log as if they were a presentation, was a spectacular row of chicken mushrooms. I stared. I had gotten exactly what I asked for. For the whole rest of the hike, there was not a single mushroom.

It couldn’t have been a clearer message.. Ask for chicken mushrooms. Get chicken mushrooms. It’s like God was sitting up there with folded arms saying, “I’d really like to give you what you want. But you keep sending mixed messages. So I send you a little prosperity, a little adversity. The good and the bad. As soon as you figure out what you REALLY want, I’ll send it Fed Ex, no wait, I’m God, I can just instantaneously make it manifest. Happy Birthday, kiddo.” Needless to say, I’m having chicken mushrooms for my birthday dinner. And I’ve decided I didn’t have an emotional breakdown. It was an emotional breakthrough. What a birthday gift.

I was working with someone recently who had a great deal of back pain. She was lying on her side on the table and I was gently exploring the area where her spine connected to her ribs. “What are you doing” she asked.
“I’m exploring how your ribs move,” I answered.
She shot up and stared at me in disbelief. “My ribs are supposed to move?” She was incredulous. After she calmed down, I assured her that she moved her ribs all the time: bending, reaching, twisting. They do all these marvelous movements without us ever noticing. But when back pain, shoulder pain, even neck pain strikes, we rarely think that it might have something to do with the ribs.

While it’s true that the bones of the ribs can look like a cage, it’s an inaccurate image. Each rib can move in relation to the others, coming together and apart according to the activity. The bars of a cage are immobile. For some people, this “cage” becomes almost like a suit of armor, over protecting parts of the trunk. Emotional trauma often affects breathing and posture, which causes the ribs to seem almost stuck, leading to a vicious cycle of immoblization. My ribs are stiff, my breathing gets shallow. My breathing is shallow, my ribs move less, etc. That’s when the ribs do become prison bars! As student told me a story of a faculty meeting at his school where someone had proposed a program he was uncomfortable with. “I sat there and folded my arms across my chest as I listened to the proposal. I don’t think it’s a habitual posture for me, but as the other teacher talked, I felt myself full of resistance to his idea. All of a sudden I realized that my arms were holding my chest so tightly that I was barely breathing. I put my arms down by my sides and instantly felt more air coming in. As my ability to breathe increased, I was literally better able to take in his idea, let it move around in me.”

A frozen rib cage interferes with freedom of expression. After all, even an exhale is an “expression” of air! In theater there is a saying, “The chest does not lie.” This statement infers that your true emotional state is reflected in the carriage of your chest. Unconsciously, we are both communicating as well as reading others’ emotions in sometimes subtle, but sometimes large shifts in the chest. For the last 200 years, science and medicine insisted that the organs in the torso are merely mechanical devices; pumps and bellows that keep the human machine running. The idea that emotional life is somehow connected to these physiological functions was ridiculed. And yet, we would talk about someone walking around with his chest “puffed up.” Or having a “gut feeling.”

Neurotransmitters have been found in the stomach indicating that a “gut feeling” may be a kind of intelligence that informs the thinking brain. New discoveries in the field of neurocardiology are prompting some to call the heart another brain, the seat of the emotional intelligence. While science may have forgotten, or misunderstood its importance in relation to our body language, our “kinesthetic sense” has always been there for us to see as St. Exupery’s Little Prince once said, “Not just with the eyes, but with the heart.”

Here’s a simple exercise to try. Find a neutral stance. Where do you find your chest right now? Is it forward or back of the plumb line? Is this where your chest is all the time? Walk around a little bit and experiment with the position of your chest. Try expanding it , puffing it out. How does that affect the rest of your walk? How do you feel? Sink your chest in and down, as if you had pushed all the air out of your lungs. Walk around a bit like this and notice what comes up.

When you try an exercise like the above, it is important to give yourself a little time to let the posture sink in. Many people are afraid to experience different postures, especially in the chest, because it interferes with our habitual posture, shaking up our self image. But what a wonderful way to experience not only new options for yourself, but how you might better understand others who carry themselves differently from you.

Moshe Feldenkrais defined health as the ability to recover from shock. Shock can come in many forms: injury, illness, war, physical trauma, losing a job. I recently got a phone call that my fifty year old brother had been found dead of a heart attack. Even now as I sit here writing this, waves of grief flow over me, bringing unbidden tears. For a week, I had to be strong: for my mother, his daughters and my sisters as huge undertakings from caregivers to funeral arrangements took place. I don’t know how I would have been able to stay standing without the gentle support of Awareness Through Movement. When I noticed that my body was so tense it didn’t even feel as if I was touching the chair I was sitting on, I stopped and allowed my attention to soften the gripping. During moments of extreme stress, some inner voice would softly remind me to notice my breathing (which had often stopped.) Sometimes all I wanted to do was lay on the carpet and moan. Which I did. But after moaning, I remained there, quietly rolling my head, inhaling and exhaling, then slowly rolling to my side to stand back up.

As much as we think we are in control of this life, there is no guarantee that things will stay the same or that everything will go according to plan. Just when you least expect it, fate, fortune, the universe, whatever you call it, comes and knocks you up side the head. It doesn’t differentiate between rich or poor, good or bad. So instead of trying to control life, perhaps it’s better to find ways to be flexible. Then when the blow comes, you can literally roll with the punches and easily regain your balance.

One of the greatest gifts of Awareness Through Movement is the opportunity to connect with thoughts, emotions and sensations while moving. It allows the nervous system time to process the countless impressions that are streaming in every moment. After a shock, giving oneself the gift of awareness can speed the healing process.

I’m sure the months and even the years ahead will bring piercing moments of sadness as a picture falls out of a book, or I hear one of his favorite songs, or a random thought crosses my mind. But I’m standing. A little shaky maybe, but gratefully putting on foot in front of the other.

This past December after one of the many North Carolina snowstorms, we had no power for four days. No phone, no water, no light. No computer, no TV. It was hard to read by candlelight. So I decided to do something I’d been avoiding since the New Age Movement began. I was going to make a vision board.

A vision board is a collage of sorts. You gather images and glue them to paper – like a visual statement of goals or a non-verbal affirmation. Mind you, I had nothing against vision boards. In fact, I thought the idea was kind of cool. It was the cutting out and gluing part I was avoiding. The joke, “I flunked art in kindergarten,” was no joke for me. Give me a bottle of Elmer’s glue and within minutes it’s all over my clothes, the desk and of course, rippling up the images that are glued to the paper. Scissors, look out! I can cut myself on children’s scissors. And it never fails that my hand slips and slices off a part of the picture I was so carefully trimming.

I pored through every magazine. I snipped images, words, icons. I layered them, re-arranged them and finally, after two days, had my vision board. My husband Ron, who is an amazing fine artist, came over and stared. “Wow,” he said. “It’s so….neat.”

It was. Pieces fit together. No jagged edges. Cool ideas. I realized in that moment that as I had been working on the vision board, I hadn’t felt any rush. No compulsion to do a “good job.” My inner critic had taken a vacation along with the electricity. I didn’t even realize until then, that some little girl in me always felt a pressure to perform, even in doing art. In that pressure lie the roots of failure.

I’ve met people who are afraid to cook for others for the same reason. Others have even given up yoga because they weren’t “good at it.”. And yet this compulsion to perform comes from my own habitual behavior, it has nothing to do with the people we think we are performing for, or competing against.

One of the things I love about the Feldenkrais Method is that it interrupts this habit. Instead of asking students to perform, it asks students to investigate, to explore, to experience. There is no one watching how well you raise your head, or lift your leg. There is no one judging if you have “succeeded” at rolling up the “right” way. A teacher of mine once challenged the class to free itself from “the stench of striving.” And Moshe Feldenkrais would often advise his students to “Try not to try!”

It’s a paradox, that when I try less, but with more attention, more ease and presence, I accomplish much more than by straining, pushing and trying to perform. Feldenkrais lessons can help us interrupt not just our movement habits but our behavior, to allow enjoyment of every activity, not just what we are “good” at. And magically, we improve!

Congratulations! If you’re reading this, you still have a computer, you’re not sitting out on the street, and more than likely, you will eat at least one meal today. Somehow, in spite of Bernard Madoff, Goldman Sachs, Washington Mutual, AIG, all the doom and gloom, all the betrayals and disappointments, we’re still standing (and sitting, lying down and rolling around!)

The holiday season always ramps things up: whether you are steeped in tradition and family or anti-holiday, there are always challenges to our equanimity between now and the new year. It continues to be my commitment to the community to keep prices for classes at Asheville Movement Center affordable. I haven’t raised class prices in several years and I plan to keep it that way.

In those moments when it seems there’s no time and everything is overwhelming, I’d like to offer a paradoxical suggestion: take a moment to do nothing. There only seems to be no time when I’m rushing towards the future. When I’m in the present moment, time doesn’t exist. Here’s a short exploration that can help remind you to be grateful for the present moment. Moshe Feldenkrais called this the “prayer lesson.” Or click here for a free audio version excerpted from my book: What Are You Afraid Of?

Sit comfortably in a chair and slowly bring your palms together in front of your chest. Barely touch them and then separate them slowly a few times. Feel how sensitive your fingers become. Now bring them together so that everything has a solid contact. Begin raising your hands, still palm to palm, toward the ceiling and back down in front of your chest. Notice your breath. Where do your eyes go? Your head? Repeat this several times, taking in whatever information comes up. Then rest.

Once again bring your palms together. This time as you raise your hands and arms, raise your head and eyes. As your hands return, bring your head and eyes to neutral. Does this feel any different? Is this what you were doing before? What do you feel in your face? In your belly? Rest.

After resting, try the same thing, but this time, each time you raise your hands up, lower your head and eyes. Feel what happens to your back. Are there any images that come up for you? Rest again.

If you wish, you can repeat this, alternating the direction of your head. Allow yourself to exhale each time you raise your arms. Feel how this movement of the arms is connected to your back and chest.

Any time you feel insecure or lacking, take a moment to pause with your hands in front of your chest. When you are about to go into a meeting, need to make that call, are afraid you will be inadequate, take a moment. Place your hands together and do a few of these movements, sensing your breath. You can do it full out, or use very tiny movements – it’s not the size of the movement, but the attention paid to the movement that counts. As the movement centers you, perhaps gratitude will replace the feeling of lack that inhibits your possibility.

Thanks for being in my life!

Lavinia Plonka