Pregnancy,
Making Plans, Making
Mistakes,
What Do I Do When I
Don’t Know What To Do?
and The Feldenkrais
Method…
My son is in the 4th grade now and watching him
get older and learn about life and learn how to learn is a fascinating and
sometimes painful process. This isn’t really a surprise to me; it’s a
fascinating and painful process for me too, still, and it’s one of the reasons
I’d thought it probably unwise to have a child. But, as with so many of the
best things in life, pregnancy took me by surprise. I’d been in a solid and
good relationship with the same person for seven years, but we couldn’t decide about
children. “Why mess with a good thing?” That was our strategy, and not a bad
one for us, at least at the time. But then I accidentally got pregnant (I point
to Chinese medicine—which suggested getting off the pill for various health
reasons, and the sponge—which worked for a year-and-a-half but then, voilà, was in the wrong place at the
wrong time). That was one of the best accidents of my life. Even so, I’m still not
keen on accidents and mistakes, though clearly they’re not always terrible. In
fact, they’re often a good way to learn something new.
Considering how apprehensive I’d been, I was surprised at
how eagerly and happily I accepted and even celebrated the news. But then there was a very real birth and a very real baby to wonder about.
What are those things? And how do you do them? To prepare, people go to classes
and make birth plans. I did those things too, with an apprehensive eye toward
chaos and a lack of control. I hoped for a drug-free labor but was unsure. What
is the pain of labor like? We hear about these things, but it’s impossible to
know them until they’re experienced.
Yes, labor happened, and my birth plan was a nice one but
not a map. I had to go with the real path of my child’s birth, not insist on the
one I’d made up or hoped for or enthusiastically imagined. I know now even more
about what I learned then. Things aren’t usually what I expect. Even when I set
out to do something, it usually doesn’t go the way I plan. It’s in that moment
when I realize that things are different from what I’d planned, wanted, hoped
for, that I have a choice about learning. What do I do when things don’t go the
way I expect? I could get angry, complain, cry, laugh, give up, insist,
kill myself, kill you, drink a ton of alcohol or do a lot of drugs or eat a whole
cheesecake. But that’s the question, isn’t it? What do I do when I don’t know
what to do? In the case of birth, I gave up and deferred to the easiest path.
But is that what I usually do?
Strangely and incredibly, this is a moment we deal with in
almost every Feldenkrais lesson. What
do I do when things don’t go the way I expected? What do I do when I don’t know
what to do? And how do I find an easy path?
In a Feldenkrais
lesson we go slowly and pay attention to how we do a movement—presuming we
accept an important principle of the method, which is that how I do a movement
is more important than the movement itself. How
trumps what.
In almost every lesson there is a moment to discover that
how I do something is not the only way to do it. Or perhaps the discovery is that
what I’m doing is not what I thought I was doing. Or maybe it’s that I don’t know how to do what’s being asked
of me except in this particular way, which I just discovered is not so useful (for
instance it causes me pain, or it’s not clear, or I have to hold my breath to
do it that way). But what am I going to do in this moment when I haven’t yet
discovered how to continue differently?
This sounds straightforward, but it’s in this moment that we
often want to abandon the mission, avoid the problem, throw in the towel, distract
from the game…. I personally have many strategies to take me out of that uncomfortable
moment: taking brutal or unclear action, crying, laughing, day dreaming, or shutting
down. It’s rare that I encounter one of these moments and simply and quietly
wait for a path to present itself. Each time is the time that I think a path
will not appear. These aren’t necessarily conscious thoughts that I have. But unchecked
these are the underpinnings of my actions. But instead can I consciously wait
and try small movements and puzzle out a more useful, more efficient, more
elegant way to proceed?
One of the gifts of the Feldenkrais
Method is that we get to practice this moment, this response to the
question of what to do next. I do feel better and move better in and with my
body. But these movement patterns, which I was drawn to for movement’s sake,
unexpectedly and accidentally turned out to be much more than what I’d planned for.
