Exploring our deepest habits
Do you sometimes find yourself grinding your teeth at night?
When you look in the mirror, does one side of your face seem longer than the other?
Does your voice feel constrained when you enter a difficult conversation?
Any Feldenkrais Method enthusiast will tell you about the deep sense of relief and relaxation to be gained from lessons which work primarily with breath, eyes, face, jaw, or tongue. These are places which are at the centre of deep-seated reactions to stress, or of old habits our subconscious formed for self-protection. They rarely get to let go. In fact, they may not have fully let go since early childhood. Awareness Through Movement lessons offer an effective way to go deep into our nervous system and find a reset.
We use our face and mouth almost constantly, mostly without ever bringing our awareness to them. Where does our tongue rest in our mouth when we are not speaking? Which eye is dominant? In which side of our mouth do we prefer to chew our food? When we meet people, do we address them with a frontal attitude or do we tend a little to the left or right? For most people, awareness of the self doesn't include such fine detail about patterns of self-use.
Our face is the aspect we show to the world. As social animals, we human beings are especially good at maintaining our face in stressful situations, even though this may be at the cost of a lot of internal tension. If we regularly or constantly find ourself in such stressful situations, tensions can remain and become habits in how we hold our self.
Making the situation even more complex, the jaw muscles are connected to the body's anti-gravity system - the muscles we need to stand up. Any less-than-perfect alignment in how we maintain balance in standing and walking - caused for example, by stiffness in the muscles around the hip joints, or acquired following and injury or trauma - could lead to unnecessary tension in the jaw muscles. Again, like all such tensions, it can become a habitual and unnoticed element in how we hold our self.
All this makes learning to let go tensions in eyes, face, jaw, tongue, or breathing apparatus fundamental if we are to effectively recover from stress and become resilient to stress. The approach I take when I teach is to guide people to discover for themselves details about their patterns of self-use. Here's a sample: use the tip of your tongue to explore the inside of your mouth. Not quickly but slowly and deliberately. Can your tongue distinguish each separate tooth? Take the time you need to check each tooth out. What shape is it compared to its neighbors? What places can the tongue reach, and what places can't it reach? Is it as easy for your tongue to go left as to go right? What can your tongue tell you about how high the roof of your mouth is, or how wide your mouth is? Now, separate your top and bottom teeth a bit, and bring your tongue in between to explore the inside surface of your cheek. What consistency does your cheek have - how elastic is it, how thick does it feel? Is that consistency the same in different places in your cheek? Is the same in the left and right of your face?
These questions have a purpose. When we direct our attention and our curiosity in a gentle way to face, mouth, jaw, tongue, eyes, those places start to let go of tension. This letting go is a process, it doesn't happen all at once. Regular practice helps. Over time, we get better at recovering from stress. And we get more resilient, so that stress doesn't translate so immediately into as much tension.
How do you notice tensions in the face, eyes, mouth, jaw, and tongue? Please leave a comment.