Intelligence in Action
The Unlimited Realm of Learning
by Graeme Lynn, GCFP, CSTAT
It is sometimes said that seventy percent of all human communication is non-verbal. That is to say, how we shape ourselves in terms of our coordination and movement communicates more than our mere words. This self-shaping is dependent upon, indeed, accomplished by, coordinated muscular activity throughout the body. Each of us has a characteristic and recognizable way of doing that, which F. M. Alexander called our manner of use and which has inherited and learned components. Each of us, of course, has an individual capability to adopt and experiment with different forms. But because of this self-defining patterning and as a result of many problematic causes through the course of our lives, our freedom to adopt different forms of expression and action tends to be confined within a relatively narrow range. This limitation in range of action and coordination has certain unfortunate physical consequences, both in structural and functional terms.
It is often suggested that there is a debate whether the way each of us turns out is a result of 'nature or nurture'. Although it hardly needed science, this question actually has been resolved in neurophysiological studies in the past hundred years. It is both. We have a vast and complicated neurological inheritance - the 'known' or unconscious - and also an immense capacity for learning - the 'unknown' or conscious. The general direction our physical development takes is mapped out in our DNA. But how we fulfill that direction and how and what we, as human beings, are capable of learning in terms of physical adaptation is almost open-ended because of the virtually infinite network of possibility that is the human nervous system, a large portion of which deals with sensing and moving, the organization and coordination of our physical mechanics, our manner of use.
Moshe Feldenkrais believed that the most accessible component of character or personality - the sensing, moving, feeling, thinking being - was movement because it was most amenable to touch and manipulation, and because it cannot be readily disguised. ('Manipulation', in terms of the Feldenkrais Method and other forms of somatic education, indicates the strategies of touch and handling and in no way implies brusqueness, force, or psychological coercion.) And because movement and sensing are inextricably interrelated via a cybernetic-like feedback circuit in the central nervous system, changes made in the quality of movement enhance the quality of sensing, which in turn enhances the quality of movement, and so on. Moreover, he concurred with Alexander that the causes of virtually all physical limitation and pain lie in our manner of use, or the way we move, or coordinate ourselves in general. Thus, in this view, improving the way we move and coordinate ourselves not only benefits our general function, health, well-being, and sensitivity in the body but also positively impacts our emotional and thinking life.
The development of our physical structure - though directed by our genes - is, in large part, a matter of learning. We also learn much through imitation. Our physical expression of emotion, character, and core beliefs is also learned. How we adapt to our work and lifestyle is learned. Even how we reflexively respond to stress, injury, traumas of all kinds, disease, poor nutrition, and surgery, and then habituate those responses, is in the form of learning. In fact, any experience or factor that instigates a physical response, which response is repeated, is learning - specifically, sensory-motor learning. That is, it results in patterns of sensing and moving. And unfortunately, there are many ways for that process to go wrong.
The physical structure, in terms of the skeleton and soft tissue, has a very wide range of adaptability to learned patterns of movement and coordination. However, the chronic or recurrent aches and pains or, worse, the rheumatic, fibrocystic, neuralgic, and arthritic conditions that many begin to suffer, even in early adulthood, result from patterns of movement and coordination, which the structure can no longer tolerate. When stiffness or holding, chronic tension or muscle contraction, chronic over-use or under-use, misalignment and sheering stresses, ischemia, hyper-mobility and so on go on too long, pain begins and degenerative conditions inevitably result.
Such habitual patterns of misuse and the consequent degeneration can be revised through renewed sensory-motor learning. The Alexander Technique, the Feldenkrais Method, and other methods of somatic education truly represent the best in such ways of learning. Through these sophisticated sensory-motor learning methods a person becomes more sensitive to the quality of his or her movement and more integrated in movement and coordination. The sources of pain and decline are thereby undone. The body is freed in action and regenerates.
Through refined techniques of gentle manipulation, these methods facilitate learning of greater sensitivity to the physical self and of improved quality of movement, no matter what the problematic causes. In time, a person can more readily feel when an action is not harmonious with the physical structure and more easily find a coordination that is right and feels good. In this way, one can resolve problems before or if they've set in and so enjoy greater ease and agility in the body in everyday life. With such positive changes in the organization of movement and greater freedom in action, greater range and freedom of expression of personality are naturally available.
Let me relate several case histories to illustrate how these considerations are developed in real life terms.
Joan is an older lady who had worked in an office, is now retired, and has otherwise lived a fairly normal but not very active life. When she came to my practice for the first time she was limping heavily. An injury to her left leg several months earlier was causing her constant pain in walking. As a result she rarely went out and often felt stiff. In addition, she complained about pain in her neck and shoulders. An assessment of her movements indicated that Joan had started to shift her weight onto her healthy right leg to avoid the pain in the left one. At the same time, to counterbalance, she was stiffening her left arm and shoulder. It was evident that this stiffening was the immediate cause of her neck and shoulder pain.
Working with the Feldenkrais Method with Joan, I helped her to coordinate her movements better as she lay on a low table. At first she was skeptical how she would improve walking while lying down. I explained to her that it is generally easier for us to feel new sensations and thereby learn new movements if our nervous system is not busy maintaining our balance. With gentle movements I explored the way her legs connect in their function to the use of her back and to the rest of her body. As she began to sense the movements through her pelvis and into her back Joan's breathing became deeper. Since the muscles we use for breathing are closely connected with those that support us in being upright and bearing weight, I knew that improved breathing would help her in standing and walking.
After the first lesson, which lasted about an hour, standing on the injured leg felt nearly as good as on the other and Joan visibly walked with more lightness. She returned the following week saying that she might be able to learn much more than she had expected. In the next few lessons we explored her ability to bend forward and turn. Joan couldn't reach her feet in sitting and had started to use a long shoehorn to put on her shoes. This difficulty was resolved as she discovered increased rotation, flexion, and extension through her back and hips.
During our last session she told me that her walks had gotten much longer and that walking felt even better than before the injury. Climbing up stairs was now easy and she felt more fluid through her hips and trunk as she moved about her daily tasks.
David is an acting student and came to me because his instructors told him that his posture needed improvement. When I first spoke to David on the phone, he seemed anxious about himself. A few days later, he came into my office, a tall young man, rounded forward as if protecting himself, looking seriously up from under deep eyebrows. People often said that he took himself 'too seriously'. He had occasional back pain in the sacral area. He often felt awkward and clumsy.
As a teacher of the Alexander Technique, my expertise is in my ability to best coordinate, with the refined and gentle use of my hands, a person's movement and response to gravity via an ongoing address to what Alexander called 'the primary control', the core organizing dynamic upon which all human action in the context of gravity depends. I worked with David in sitting, standing, lying down, bending, reaching, and walking, all the time gently guiding and facilitating the improved use of himself in those very simple activities. I gently worked to resolve his unique way of contracting upon himself, which made the expression of himself as he appeared, and its consequences, possible and necessary. And I helped him to learn to un-do that manner of use and 'locate' in himself greater freedom and more buoyancy in his actions. Because of our natural intelligence, this improved use in simple movements generalizes to all activities.
It is impossible in a few words to describe the details of the teacher's craft, but suffice it to say that David was at the top of his class this past term, remarkably got high marks in contact improvisational dance, which requires great agility and sensitivity, and has received praise from his teachers (and envious remarks from some of his classmates) for his greater physical presence. As a sideline to this, last week, he went out bar crawling with an old friend and told me that he realized part way through the evening that his feelings of social awkwardness had significantly diminished.
The Alexander Technique is an holistic address to how we sense ourselves and how we move and coordinate ourselves. Because our movement and coordination are the means through which we express ourselves as characters - as people - by freeing ourselves from the patterns that confine our self-expression to how we habitually appear and think ourselves to be, we indirectly and positively impact the whole. One of the defining aspects of the Alexander Technique, and other somatic methods, is that it is true to the fact that each of us is presently responsible for ourselves and can only truly grow if we embrace that self-responsibility. This is very different from the doctor-patient and therapist-therapee paradigm where one goes to someone to get some 'thing' 'fixed'. Moreover, it makes improvement and growth ongoing and potentially and practically infinite.
Nicole is a realtor and came to me after she re-injured her back while brushing her teeth. Fifteen years ago she had 'put her back out' while lifting a heavy suitcase from the back of a closet. From time to time over the years she had hurt it in similar ways so that now it was a problem back that she always favoured. She is forty-five, does yoga regularly, and is in very good shape.
When she came into my office, the back was a little better than after the most recent incident, but palpation revealed that the left side of the large group of muscles that run on either side of the spine was still in spasm, and that, underlying the spasm, was a chronic pattern. These muscles were working hard and out of Nicole's conscious control. She could feel pain, but she could not feel that she was doing the contracting that was causing the pain, because the contracting itself was habitual: that is, she had reflexively contracted these muscles as a response to an injury in order to 'splint' the area muscularly (that is, to immobilize it so that it could heal), had 'forgotten' that she was doing that splinting, and had then 'forgotten' that she had forgotten.
Furthermore, the large groin muscle through the front of the pelvis on the left was overworking to balance the chronic contraction of the left side back musculature. This chronic shortening of these big muscles on her left side was shifting her weight noticeably to the left, which is a very common problem, implicated in back, sacroiliac, and sciatic pain, hip, knee and foot pain, and even, when the problem is left untreated and the weight of the body is constantly borne by one side for years, eventual hip or knee replacement surgery. In addition, her head was tilted to the right to balance the left-side holding in the front and back of the trunk and pelvis. This was causing strain in the left side of her neck, compression in the right, and some difficulty in turning the neck in either direction with ease.
In the beginning using the techniques of handling developed by Thomas Hanna, I worked very firmly to 'oblige' Nicole to consciously contract the large central muscles of her back and front even more strongly than she was already doing unconsciously, in order to override the unconscious pattern of contraction with conscious effort. This served to break the habitual and overbearing 'grip' of these large muscles in all of her activities and quickly resolved the most immediate painful effects of her most recent injury.
Then we began to work with her chronic pattern of use that tended to compress her structurally and potentiate her injury pattern. Through refined work, using the handling strategies and techniques of the Feldenkrais Method and the Alexander Technique, we gradually developed greater ease in her overall movement and also a qualitative enhancement in her yoga practice - and her golf game!
Mr. Leszczynski is an elderly gentleman who shuffled into my office complaining of a chronically painful shoulder and neck. His doctor had prescribed various kinds of analgesics and anti-inflammatories, then cortisone, then referred him to physiotherapy where he had been treated with ultrasound and electric muscle stimulation, and been shown stretching exercises. Massage and acupuncture had been tried. His granddaughter had given him magnets. He was tired a lot and the pain was worse when he was tired. He finally came to me because he had realized that being a patient was an ineffective strategy.
In an experiment done in an American teaching hospital, in one case they took a muscle-bound athlete, and, in a second, a stiff old man; and, under general anaesthetic, with great care, moved them into various yoga-type poses with extraordinary ease. The conclusion drawn was that inflexibility comes from the nervous system not the body. The nervous system is a learning function. Habits are unconsciously learned.
Pain often develops from habitual patterns of limited movement, which limitation can be unnoticeable because its development is so gradual - over five, ten, twenty, or fifty years - or from trauma-related patterns. Such movement patterns, which are inefficient and not harmonious with the physical structure, typically take some time to unlearn.
The source of Mr. Leszczynski's neck pain lay, in some sense, in the way he used his feet and his back and his pelvis, and in his manner of walking or moving in general, and even in his attention. There were, and I believed that I would need, many means of access to help him notice, unlearn, and remake what he was habitually doing and had unconsciously learned to do over many years. So, with my help, this gentleman systematically, gently, and patiently turned his attention to his body and to his physical mechanics again and again. Two or three times a week for some sixteen weeks he came to explore his sensory-motor world: how he organizes the movement of his head relative to his trunk, pelvis, and limbs; how he stands, sits, walks, bends, and turns; what he does with his arms, legs, and spine in relationship to his centre; where breathing takes place and how it can be restricted; what and where is his pelvis and how does it connect with his arms, legs, rib-cage, breathing, and head; what are the differences between the use of his right arm and his left arm, his right leg and left leg; where is movement initiated and how does it travel through the body; where are the dead spots in his body image; what is good movement.
The neck pain gradually diminished, vanished at times, and then disappeared for good. Occasionally, it would recur and he discovered ways to control and undo it. He discovered how and when he did what he did to bring it on acutely, and how not to do that anymore. Against my advice, he learned to touch his toes and skip rope with his granddaughter. He returned to an avocational pursuit he had set aside as a young man with a family. His wife and her friend each came for a couple of dozen lessons to improve their posture. In August, the couple went on a trip to Australia. After their daughter marries in December, they will begin spending their winters in Perth.
These case histories illustrate that anyone - fit or unfit, able or disabled, young or old - can discover improved ways of moving and functioning and that this improvement is potentially limitless. Neither age nor experience is a necessary obstacle to such renewal. Generally, we presume that our sensory-motor capabilities are determined by nature or that change is too difficult for us; that each of us, as we are, has reached our natural limits or that certain difficulties are insurmountable; that deterioration is inevitable, as we grow older. Fortunately, none of this is so. There are no known limits to learning and few of us have approximated our full potential. Indeed, stress tension, stiffness, back or neck pain, inflexibility, mal-coordination, arthritis or joint disorders, voice or breathing difficulties, postural or spinal problems, post-traumatic or post-surgical limitations, myofascial or musculoskeletal pain, most so-called signs of ageing even, are not necessary or predetermined processes, but faults in or regression of learning. And these limitations can be undone through renewed sensory-motor learning. Thus, through somatic methods, our native intelligence can soon renew its sensitive control of our physical functioning. We generally use only a small portion of our learning potential. The 'signs of ageing' - pain, affliction, and limitation - are actually the results of complex learned patterns that can be undone and remade through the means used in these methods. Our abilities may feel different between twenty and seventy, but at any age, instead of increasingly avoiding certain activities or compensating for or suffering our limitations, we can explore new ways of moving and responding. Somatic methods are perhaps the most powerful ways to do that and to return the body to renewed ease, buoyancy, and agility in action and to better general health.
Somatic methods concentrate sensory-motor experience through individually designed 'lessons' creatively adapted to the person's present or presenting conditions, which experience he or she therefore naturally enjoys. This design and this enjoyment make such learning attractive, interesting, usable, and potent. This is how and why these methods can resolve functional limitations effectively and can resolve other functional problems that may arise in the course of our lives and further enhance the quality of life.
To schedule lessons, please contact Graeme in Toronto, Ontario, at 416-964-7026, or click to email.