Neither left nor right, both open and closed
One of the joys of practising body awareness and the Feldenkrais Method is building up an ever-more-detailed mental picture of myself. This has been work-in-progress for me for the last 8 years, and it continues to develop.
One of the new abilities that began early during my professional training was accurately sensing and organizing myself in a movement that swept past my centerline from one side to another. Here's an example:
Lie on the floor with your arms extended out to your sides. Have one palm facing the floor, the other facing the ceiling. Slowly rotate both hands so the palm that was facing the floor is now facing the ceiling, and vice versa. Keep your torso, neck and head soft, so they follow the movement if they want to. Can you feel - from subtle changes in shape of your chest, your back, your neck, the position of your head - when you go through the centreline? Not necessarily a geometrically correct centreline, but the centreline you feel inside. Keep the movement slowly going back and forth, gradually making it smaller and smaller. Can you come to rest where everything is in the centre?
What about the boundary between open and closed? An archetypal open posture has hand palms facing forward, back slightly arched, eyes and face facing a little above the horizon, tailbone pointing slightly behind, toes pointing down. A closed posture is the opposite: arms folded across the body, back slightly rounded, eyes and face facing below the horizon, tailbone pointing forwards, feet flexed. Try this:
Lie on the floor and, using the descriptions above as a guide, slowly go from open to closed and back again many times, very slowly, paying attention that everything moves in harmony - all parts get to fully open together before reversing back together until fully closed. Also notice parts of you I haven't mentioned in the descriptions above (what are your sitting bones doing? your breastbone? you shoulder blades? your eyeballs? your tongue? your breathing?). Can you find a place that's as far from open as it is from closed? Or (which is another way to say the same thing), as near to open as it is to closed?
We spend most of our lives in situations that require us either to be open or to be closed - and many of us have a clear preference for one or the other when left to ourselves to choose. Being both open and closed at once is very unusual.
Knowing where the boundary is, and being able to stay close to that boundary (only just on one side or the other of it), is a useful skill. It allows us to cross the boundary quickly and see a situation from both open and closed perspectives. The physical cues mentioned above can help. Imagine you're in a closed frame of mind, doing some concentrated work ('head down', as the expression goes), and you are suddenly called into a meeting. You need to become open. Where do your shoulders go, your head, your eyes, as you enter the meeting?
How do you notice your open or closed posture and frame of mind? Please leave a comment.