A few days ago, someone said to me, “Let me know when you’re going to teach a lesson on knees.” This innocent request made me think how our culture trains us to apply a simple reductionist model to understand how our bodies work. Is it valid? After all, if we have a problem with our foot, heart, or thyroid gland, we expect to be referred to a podiatrist, cardiologist, or endocrinologist. Do our bodies function like mechanical devices that have replaceable moving parts? I propose humans who have a healthy nervous system are far more complex than our sophisticated 21st century smartphones or self-driving cars.
Humans are not Machines
As infants and toddlers, we create personalized, simple and complex movement patterns in response to our environment through self-learning. Simultaneously, our senses, emotions, nervous systems and bodies develop and grow. We learn to select what is useful and filter out vast amounts of information that isn’t. Gradually, we learn language to communicate, write original stories, create art, music, and build machines from abstract ideas that interweave our physical world with our imaginations. As energetic beings who think, speak, and act with intention, we are inundated with information from within and without whilst calmly scrolling through emails and sipping a cup of tea. We exercise our free will to consciously help or harm others unlike animals who act instinctively.
Feldenkrais Lessons Rebalance the Entire Body
As for the knee lesson request, my first thought was, “The lessons are all about the knees and not about the knees.” This sounds facetious and paradoxical but it’s not. If you feel discomfort or pain in a knee, the last thing you want to do is isolate your knee from the rest of your body and force it to work harder. By paying attention to coordinate the movements of your toes, feet, ankles and hip joints, and use your leg to work in harmony with your pelvis, spine, ribcage, shoulders and head, your problematic knee becomes functionally supported by the healthy joints above and below it. Moreover, the joints in your good leg are spared from overuse.
Your problematic knee has a chance to heal without doing more than it can or need to when the work of the leg is distributed throughout your joints. When your nervous system senses the knee is safe, the resting muscle tone of the leg decreases, and the bones and muscles can return to their proper alignment and length. Years ago, I worked with a client who thought she may have dislocated or fractured a rib earlier in the day. I reduced the muscular tension along her spine, upper back and chest and, reconnected the movements of her ribcage with her shoulders and pelvis. She stood up and exclaimed, “Well, my rib still hurts but the rest of me feels great!”
Why Is Rebalancing the Body So Important?
Feldenkrais lessons rebalance the body to prevent premature overuse or damage of joints by understanding our functional movements require participation of the entire body. Waiting a decade or two for overuse symptoms to surface following physical or emotional trauma indicates Feldenkrais lessons should begin sooner than later. Why? Because trauma immediately alters how our bodies move, yet after the trauma resolves, the unbalanced, adaptive movement and/or postural patterns persist.
Similar to meditation, lessons calm the nervous system from the frenetic pace our culture demands by focusing and connecting the mind and body. They give us a glimpse of our original beginner’s mind to safely explore our movement potential and restore balanced, sustainable movement without our usual backdrop of self-judgement, criticism, expectations or goals.