A life of carrying tension accumulated in my lower back completely unnoticed. In middle age, roughhousing with children triggered what appeared to be a sudden back injury. Resulting chronic pain led to a search for relief. Awareness Through Movement classes in the Feldenkrais Method provided not only relief, but a gateway to deep understanding of self, and perhaps more surprisingly, understanding of the world. Although perhaps not self-evident, this story is also about complex systems.
It was written as a letter to a good friend of a good friend.
An acquaintance I met at Boulder Aikikai's Summer Camp in the Rockies has recently become a Feldenkrais practitioner and posts articles about pain management and research. I was partly motivated by those articles and partly by the persistent failure to find any relief from many other interventions.
What changed between the many failures and finding relief was as much a change in mindset as it was physical. I had been looking at myself as injured or broken or fragile. I was looking for someone to fix it. I had to be careful and guarded. Here on the other side of that journey I look at myself as resilient and capable. I think ATM helped me change my mind and my thinking by what seemed at first like unrelated experiments in movement.
That kinda gets to the heart of the matter. Mind and body are not separate things. These experiments in movement were not at all unrelated to my mind and thinking. The prevailing explanations of pain assume biomechanical causes and solutions. But some research into chronic pain indicate neurological causes are equally involved as biomechanics.
ATM classes take a different approach. Instead of looking at the point of pain as a point of dysfunction ATM seems to ask, "well, what else is working for you? What and how can you move without pain?" That change in attention shifts the whole project from fear of the injury to an inquiry into our capacity; and an inquiry into how to expand that capacity and create movement that has a quality of ease.
At the same time, it shifts the focus from "who can fix this problem that I have become?" to a focus on "how can I learn and grow with who I am?"
I hasten to add that I don't think any practitioner ever asked any of those questions specifically. Those questions showed up on their own as I have reflected on what I've learned about my own ability to move and how I've learned it. But that is also right at the heart of the matter.
I now tell a different story about my pain. I've spent a lifetime carrying my emotional stress and trauma as tension in different parts of my body. The past year-and-a-half has been an intense study in learning how to at least not pile on more tension into those places; even better, learning how to release some of the accumulated tension. The awareness part of the classes is noticing places where seemingly simple movements are chopped and stunted for me; where I have some combination of muscular development and neurological habits or even beliefs and assumptions that restrict what I can do with my own body. A specific movement raised my own awareness. Then, experimenting with that movement with emotional curiosity, and acceptance, and even forgiveness leads me to some small, new skill and capacity where only moments before there had been a direct experience of limitation.
Each lesson has lead to small ways of moving differently and discovering something like assumptions I have made about my own movement. The exercises challenge those assumptions and offer a self-directed discovery of my own capacity.
Through ongoing practice in ATM I have begun to accumulate new capacity and ease. With that break in mental-emotional-physiological behavior, I've broken the habits that collaborate in creating and maintaining my experience of pain.
I wasn't expecting to write such a testimonial for Feldenkrais Method, but it has played a very important role in my recovery.
I hope you can find some relief from the pain and find some hope in general. That felt like forever when I was in the worst of my pain. I was also quite fearful that I might never return to aikido and skiing and roughhousing with my kids.
Best of luck to you in your recovery.
.
Some years after recovering from back injury, I separated my shoulder while trying to show a high fall. A couple years have passed. There's more to say about the gift of practicing Awareness Through Movement.
The separation in my shoulder has left permanent damage – ligaments were torn and the complex joint will never return to its original arrangement. What I learned in recovering from back injury, I was able to also apply to recovering from shoulder injury.
In this case, I am still re-learning how to roll over my new shoulder. The experience of this recovery is completely different than my back injury. In part, the shoulder pain was less debilitating than back pain. Far more important, though, is knowing that I know how to recover from chronic pain.
My shoulder will never be the same. I am now on a journey of inquiry, learning how to use the shoulder I have. Occasionally I wish I could have avoided the shoulder injury. So much of my aikido skill was built with a different shoulder. Yet I don't dwell in the regret for very long. Having recovered from the back injury, I know how to pay attention to the feedback from the shoulder I have now. I am capable of adapting what I learned before against the feedback to find new ways to roll with similar ease.
My growth continues. I still roughhouse with my kids, and ski, and attack and fall and throw my friends at the dojo.