Learning must be pleasurable, and it must be easy...

"Learning must be pleasurable, and it must be easy... What is learnt otherwise rarely becomes habitually spontaneous."  —Moshe Feldenkrais

What does this mean? And what are the far-reaching possibilities of learning through pleasure?

We are so accustomed to learning because of some outside motivation: pain, punishment, social and societal expectations, money, external praise (I’m sure there are other motivations for why we set out to learn something, and I hope you’ll add to the list) that often we don’t truly realize what our own motivations are. Am I still trying to please a parent, a teacher, God, a friend, a boyfriend or girlfriend, or society’s idea of who I should be? Or maybe it’s the only an idea of what I think one or all of these things should be or could be.

Regardless of who or what it is influencing us, most of us are sometimes still moving through our lives with a low- or high-level of disconnection from what makes me feel good. This does translate into physical action because I often have a motivation for what makes me do an action and how I do it. You asked me to do something, and so I do it even if I’m not sure how to do it (writing a paper for an academic class in school or responding to a teacher’s comment or request in a dance or yoga class...). Moving in this way, and learning in this way, is rarely true learning because the reason for doing it can cloud the outcome. I have pleased or satisfied the external demand for learning and that’s what I’ve accomplished. And then there’s my own sense of ambition, which can be clouded by external motivations: I need to do this so that _______ (I get my money’s worth; so that I can learn; so that you will love me, like me, pay me, praise me, give me an ‘A’, not criticize me, know how hard I work, not think I’m an idiot...)

During an Awareness Through Movement® lesson I may discover some of these external motivations. When is it that I do too much? When do I move just or mostly to please the teacher? When do I think I know what is being asked of me only to discover I have no idea what is being asked of me? When do I barrel through just because I don’t know what I’m doing and I’d rather complete the request than remain in this place of unknowing? Maybe I will do it wrong. Maybe I won’t finish. Maybe I won’t get my money’s worth of what I think I should be getting. But if I force myself to try to make a choice within all these confusing motivations—which are underneath, around, and in my learning—I am rarely able to learn something new and unexpected. Though often I do! It’s just much harder and more confusing and the thing I learn will likely have inauthentic aspects to it. I have to sift through all these external motivations—which are often at odds and which often don’t have real learning as the goal—to get to my authentic way of moving, thinking, and learning.

We’ve probably all experienced someone telling us to stand up straight. Fix your posture! Some of us don’t do what we’re told or asked to do, just because we’re so tired of being told what to do. I’m going to do whatever the hell I want and certainly not what you asked me to do! Some of us are so tired of this that we can’t stop rebelling and notice when something we’re asked to do might actually be useful to us. But if I want to do this—change my posture because someone asked me to—even if I really want to and really try to, am I trying to change it to please someone or to respond their request or demand? It’s not because I know how to actually change my posture so I can stand “better.” If someone asked me to stand more comfortably, would I know how to do that?

So we begin to notice what we do: How do I stand here? What do I feel here? What feels bad here? What feels good here? What are all the grey places in between here? What confuses me here? What don’t I know about how I stand here? And what if I ask all these same questions when I’m sitting, standing, eating, swimming, biking, etc. here, just in this particular moment? Because from moment to moment what is asked of me and from my “posture” is different. Sometimes I won’t pay attention, because I just need to get to work or to class or to my home or just because I can’t or don’t want to. But sometimes I will. Sometimes is all it takes.

And this is what we do in Awareness Through Movement® lessons. We begin to notice how and what we do. What do I do? What feels good and what doesn’t feel good? I stop or change when something doesn’t feel good. Or if I get confused. Or if I can’t pay attention anymore. I don’t just do to do. And I don’t mindlessly or unconsciously repeat movements. My attention counts more than my movements. I begin to learn through what I notice about myself and how things feel to me. And I start with noticing what I do, where I start from, and then go on to what I’d like to try. I go slowly and make short explorations into what’s new and unknown, and then I return to where I started from to see what that’s like now. I begin to learn because I want to and it’s interesting and it feels good or right to me. (Though sometimes it doesn’t feel good because it can be different, frustrating, confusing, but let’s save that important tangent for another time…)

I begin to learn through pleasure. And when I learn through pleasure, I can really learn something. I am not doing it to avoid or gain consequences. And if learning is pleasurable, I don’t have to force myself to remember. I remember. My nervous system remembers. My somatic self remembers. You tell me what remembers. It’s a bigger, better, more interesting, more-of-myself self that remembers because it’s learning that feels good and is interesting and useful to me, and so it’s easier and sweeter to remember.

The First Approximaton

In the Feldenkrais Method® we often call the first attempt at something “the first approximation.” This phrase roughly means that it's the first time of many that I’m doing something and so of course it won’t be perfect. There’s no pressure or ambition to do the movement or activity perfectly because it’s just the first one, the first approximation.  I do it as I can do it right now.

This idea of the first approximation often helps me to get started on something that’s new or that’s difficult or that means a lot to me.  Often my first reaction is: if I can’t do it perfectly, I won’t do it at all thank-you-very-much. I don’t consciously think this, but it’s there in the background. When I consciously remember there is a first approximation, the pressure decreases. I don’t have to do it perfectly. And in fact I can’t. Perfection is an impossible and defeating standard I’ve set for myself. How can I know how to do something before I know how to do something? How can I know how to do something before I know what it is I'm doing?

When I see my nine-year-old son struggling with his homework—no, struggling to begin to take a look at the homework that he has not begun to work on yet—I recognize his struggle and his need for the concept of “the first approximation.” Recently I caught myself saying to him, “just do your best.” What? Actually no, don’t do your best. That’s a lot of pressure. We laughed about that and he was relieved. We decided that he should not try at all. Do your worst I told him, and we laughed. Because no one of us would actually set out to do our worst! 

But essentially I do set out to do my worst when I avoid an activity or project that I love or that I want to do or that I simply need to do. I’m avoiding it because I want to do it well and I’m afraid I won’t. If I make a start, there’s a chance that somewhere along the way I’m going to do a fine job, or a fine job for me, or a fine job in that moment. My desire to do it well gets in the way of my desire to do the activity or project.

This new blog is an experiment for me. It’s about the Feldenkrais Method®, and this first entry is my first approximation. I’m beginning because I love the method and I enjoy writing. And it strikes me as a satisfying—as well as a somewhat daunting—endeavor to think and write about some of the ideas underlying the method. One of the things Dr. Feldenkrais used to say was that you’ll have really learned something if you can explain it to a friend. This blog is—and therefore you are—the friend I’m writing to. So thank you for reading.