Why is Awareness Through Movement taught the way it is?
Awareness Through Movement is a unique way of teaching movement, grounded in neuroscience and movement science. What's the theory behind it? Here, as a taster, is my brief summary:
Movement is not a purely physical activity. The mental side of movement - how your brain understands where the different parts of you are in space, and how it knows to move them relative to each other to reach a different, desired, configuration - is fundamental in increasing our range, freedom, and control in movement.
Happily, our brain and central nervous system are neuroplastic: they can continue to develop and adapt throughout our life. What we can do and how we behave is not set once we reach adulthood. We can continue to change our self - our repertoire of skills and behaviors - from day to day.
Our normal movements are governed by habit. Most of the time, we don't give a thought to how we walk or sit in a chair. But if we are to learn new patterns, we need to be able to break habits and form new ones.
Anyone wanting to overcome a limitation - whether it's the ability to sit for long periods at a desk without discomfort, or a wish to perform better at a chosen sport - needs to go through the process of noticing what their existing habitual patterns are, learning new patterns, and creating new habits which offer more freedom and ease than the old ones.
This process works best when we are in a particular frame of mind. We are comfortable. Anxiety and stress are removed. We are curious and open to play and experiment, without any expectation of a result. There is nothing to achieve. To maintain this state of mind, we keep movements small and easy. We take plenty of rest. Nothing is a strain.
Because we are dealing with habits which lie deep (old habits of movement become fully subconscious), we cannot address them through conscious learning - at best, that would yield only temporary improvement. To bring about lasting change, we need to experience through our senses, rather than understand through reasoning. The whole method of Awareness Through Movement is designed so we can sense how it feels to move in ways we would never normally consider possible.
This is why lessons are given by verbal instruction. Our brain is required to interpret the instruction, and the interpretation it comes up with is whatever comes most easily to us in that moment. We get to feel our pattern of movement from the inside and work from there. Subsequent instructions call our attention to different aspects of the movement and engage us in using more of our self.
One way to help us notice our established habits is to put ourselves in an unfamiliar position with respect to the force of gravity. This is why a lot of Feldenkrais lessons are done lying on the floor. The muscle systems that normally work keeping us upright are free to act differently. The floor also provides a plane of reference.
We must first explore and understand our range of comfortable movement. Once we know it in detail, we can investigate its edges, find ways to extend them. Progress happens in small steps. In practice this kind of exploration means repeating movements many times with small variations.
Because we are looking for new possibilities in movement, we seek patterns of connection throughout the body. We may isolate a small element of movement to get to know it, but we will then put it in the context of a complete, whole-body movement.
The purpose of movement is to allow us to act in the world - to perform a function. We connect movement patterns to function explicitly.
How we move, behave, and perform in life are intimately related. The method has benefits beyond improving our physical ability to move with ease.
The above barely scratches the surface of this powerful and fascinating method, which has benefits beyond helping people move better. If you want to learn more about the theory, there are excellent books on the subject. I can recommend Awareness Through Movement by Dr Moshe Feldenkrais, and The Brain's Way of Healing by Dr Norman Doidge.
What do you do to notice old-established habits? How do you learn new patterns of behaviour? Please leave a comment.