Move into Life

Chapter 1
One  

Movement with Attention-Wake Up to Life  

Nothing happens until something moves.  
—Albert Einstein  

Think of your life as constant movement-millions of small and large movements. Think even beyond the familiar movements associated with your bones and muscles. My teacher, Moshe Feldenkrais-a physicist and judo master who developed a revolutionary mind-body method to help people transcend their limitations-often told his students, "Movement is life; without movement life is unthinkable." Through movement, you make sounds, organized in your brain as language, that communicate to others ideas and emotions you are experiencing. Through movement, sometimes when you are alone, sometimes with others, you carry out all the activities associated with your job, profession, family, recreation, and creative expressions.  

Through advanced brain research, we know that our simplest thoughts and feelings involve movement within and among billions of brain cells. Whether it's remembering that you need to pick up your dry cleaning on the way home, or feeling a surge of excitement because it's Friday, or being inspired by music you're hearing on the radio-all these involve movement. Even your daydreams and your dreams at night involve movement. The cumulative result of all this movement is who you are and what distinguishes you from me. What we begin to see as we delve into what movement means in our lives is that the quality of our movements is a manifestation of the quality of the workings of our brains and will ultimately determine the quality and vitality of our lives.  

Where Movement Is Organized  
What gives the continuous movement of our lives the particular form it takes? What organizes the ways you throw back the covers from your bed and swing your legs out to the floor as you begin each new day? What is it that organizes how you put the bread in the toaster as you are getting your breakfast? What organizes how you mutter a foggy "good morning" to your family members? What organizes your patience or impatience as you thread your way through stop-and-go commuter traffic, or how you enunciate your words or use certain facial expressions as you greet people at work? What is it that gives you the power to invent, form attitudes, and develop ideas? And what is it that orchestrates the emotional experiences you are having throughout the day?  

The answer, of course, is your brain, those two to three pounds of gray matter embodied within your skull. Within your brain are billions of brain cells. Each and every one of those cells has the potential for making between five thousand and twenty thousand connections with other cells, all poised to receive and send information to and from all the various parts of your entire system. This is as close to an infinite number of possible brain connections as one can imagine. It is here in your brain that information gathered from your movements is organized, somehow making sense of the myriad messages received-and in a continuous feedback loop that also tells you how to conduct every movement you make.  

Movement is the language of your brain, and your brain is the great organizer of that movement, managing trillions of connections associated with every single action, large or small. The manner in which all of this takes place will determine how you experience your life, whether you feel numbed and deadened or excited and energetic at the end of the day.  

Imagine for a moment the wasted energy you'd expend if your brain organized your every step in a way that required twice the energy that would be required if your movements were better organized. Or imagine that in the process of doing its organizational tasks your brain surrounded your every thought and feeling with a million contradictions that required you to ponder, and perhaps worry over, every little thing. Life would indeed become exhausting. You'd feel drained all the time.  

What we'll discover in this chapter is that the quality of organization that our brains provide us is directly related to the quality of the information we provide it. And one of the most important ways to improve the quality of the information we provide it is through bringing attention to our movements.  

Most, if not all, experts in the health-related fields agree that movement, or what more often is referred to as exercise, is central to our health and continued well-being. We are encouraged to exercise both our bodies and our minds. Yet it is important to note that movement alone, done automatically, without attention, does not provide the brain with any new information. On the contrary, such movement will tend to groove already existing brain patterns more deeply. Over time, that leads to loss of strength and flexibility in both body and mind. We then think that we are losing our vitality due to age, life circumstances, or simply back luck. But not so. The moment we bring attention to our movement, any movement, research shows that the brain resumes growing new connections and creating new pathways and possibilities for us. And that is when we feel most vital.  

Much of what I've learned about vitality and the brain's organizational capacities has come from working with young children born with neurological anomalies, and from adults who have suffered injuries or diseases that continue to cause them pain or a loss of normal function and vitality. Through the work I have done over the past thirty years, I've seen how profoundly important the quality of the organization of movement is-for our bodies, our thoughts, our emotions, and our feelings. Through movement with attention, we gain the ability to assist our brains in seeking the most successful way to manage all movement in our lives.  

Exercise 1     
The Transformational Power of Movement with Attention  

With this simple, short exercise, you can experience firsthand the power of combining attention with movement to transform your performance and your whole sense of yourself. You can then do it in your yoga practice, sports, and everyday movements.      

1.   Sit at the edge of a chair with your feet comfortably flat on the floor and with about a foot of space between them.      
2.   Lift your right arm out in front of you, with your elbow straight but not stiff. Lift it to shoulder level and put it down two times. As you move, pay attention to how it feels. Put your arm down and stop.      
3.   Now do the same movement twice with your left arm, lifting it to shoulder level, with elbow straight, paying attention to how it feels. Then lower your arm and stop.      
4.     Select the arm of your dominant hand and do the rest of this exercise with that arm. If you are right-handed, do the exercise with that arm; if left-handed, use that arm.      
5.   Lift your dominant arm in front of you to shoulder level, with your elbow straight but not stiff. Keep the arm up and begin moving forward with this arm as if you were reaching for something a foot or so away. Make sure to also move forward with your upper body as you do this. Then come back to your upright sitting position. Do these reaching-out and coming-back movements two or three times.      
6. Stop, and come back to your neutral sitting position. Put your arm down and rest for a moment. Feel how you are sitting and how you are breathing.      
7.     Again, lift your dominant arm in front of you to shoulder level and reach out as you did above. Do this two or three times. But this time do something a little differently. As you reach forward and come back to your neutral sitting position, pay close attention to your lower back. Can you feel any movement there? If yes, is your lower back arching and rounding as you reach forward with your arm and come back?  
8.   Stop, come back to neutral, put your arm down, and pay attention to how your shoulders feel. Does the right one feel the same as the left? If not, how do they feel different?  
9. Lift your dominant arm again and continue doing the same movement as you've been doing, two or three times. But this time pay attention to your belly. For example, are you pulling in your belly when you reach forward or are you relaxing it, or perhaps pushing it out? Then pay attention to your pelvis. Do you feel movement in your pelvis as you reach with your arm and come back? If the answer is yes, are you rolling it forward when you reach out and rolling back when you come back to neutral? Stop, put your arm down, and feel how you are sitting. Do you have the impression that one arm is longer than the other? Lighter than the other? More energetic and vital?  
10.  One more time, lift your dominant arm and do the same reaching-forward and coming back as before. This time pay attention to your ribs in your back, on the side of the arm you are lifting. Do you feel any movement in your ribs? Simply note in your mind any movement you are feeling.          
11. Now, with your arm still raised and extended, reaching forward and coming back two or three times, do the following: Let your attention move, sort   of like a flashlight searching in   the darkness, starting with your pelvis, moving to your lower back, then to your belly, then to your chest, then to your shoulder, then to your wrist, and finally the tips of your fingers.      
12. Stop, put your arm down, come back to neutral, and take a few seconds to notice the sensations in your body. How does your dominant arm, the arm you moved, feel? Compare it to the other arm. Do you feel any differences between the two? Feel the whole side of your body on the side you just moved-including everything from your face down to your feet. Compare these sensations to the ones on the side you didn't move and see if the two feel any different.  
13.  Now simply lift your dominant arm in front of you and put it down a few times. Does it feel any different than it did at the beginning of this exercise? It may feel lighter, longer, maybe larger, and perhaps you can lift it higher, with greater ease. You might feel a sense of having more energy in that arm. Now lift your other arm just one time and note whether it feels any different than your dominant arm. Does it feel heavier or clumsier? Does it seem to have less vitality?  

You lift your arms many times a day, even as you are walking around and doing your usual activities. However, these arm movements do not bring about any noticeable change. In this exercise, however, which you took five minutes or so to do, you most likely are already feeling some clear changes. This is a demonstration of how the power of movement with attention can transform us instantly.  

The Dance Between Movement, Organization, and Vitality  
Have you ever noticed that young children move nonstop when they are awake? What is all that movement about? Movement coupled with attention to the sensations, feelings, and outcomes that result serves as a rich source of new information to the brain. With every movement the child makes, new connections are taking place within their brains, forming the seemingly infinite patterns that they will use to express their lives-how they will speak, stand, run, and write, what they will think and believe and feel. Through their brains' capacities for taking in new information and organizing complex patterns, children develop their own unique capacities and ways of perceiving the world.  

The relationship between movement, growth, and vitality is never so purely demonstrated as in our childhood years, when so much movement, brain activity, and formation of patterns within the brain takes place. In those first years of our lives, when we are developing so many skills and abilities, we not only move a lot, but also feel our movements vividly. This time of our lives epitomizes everything we associate with vitality-full of energy, highly flexible in body and mind, experiencing each moment as new. We are curious, optimistic, joyful, creative, inventive, and unstoppable.  

At the heart of it all is movement with attention-not just movement of our muscles and bones, but also the movement that is our thinking, feeling, and emotions. By moving with attention, you will be able to resume that process of intense growth, invention, and change that we observe in children.  

Every day, through the people I work with, I see the connection between movement and vitality. By paying attention to their movements-arms, legs, torsos, eyes, how they breathe and think and feel-weariness turns to vibrancy, curiosity, and interest; rigid shoulders are suddenly freed; and locked-up emotions are liberated.  

Some years ago, I worked with a woman by the name of Miriam. She was in her midfifties and had gone through an extremely difficult divorce a couple years before. The divorce rekindled profound pain and trauma from an extremely difficult childhood, compounding the grief and pain she was experiencing. A single mother, she found a job as an office manager and was able to create a stable financial base for her child and herself. However, she was profoundly unhappy. Hurt and disillusioned by all that life had dished out to her, she gave up on ever having another relationship, and, being depressed and shut down, she confined her life to a very limited and predictable social life, belief system, and routine.  

As shut down as she appeared to be, she nevertheless attended one of my classes. She seemed to be doing okay with the movement exercises of the class and was very attentive throughout. After the class, she came to me with a big smile on her face. She explained that she wanted to thank me because she was feeling an important change in her life already.  

Miriam explained that she did not understand exactly what had occurred, but as the class was progressing, she began feeling more flexible and comfortable in her body. But that was not all. "Something shifted inside me," she said. She felt as if a big weight had been lifted from her shoulders. For the first time in years, she actually felt hopeful and that her life could be different. After attending a few more classes, Miriam continued to experience changes. She moved more easily, took up swimming, and began socializing more. She was so enthusiastic about what she'd experienced that she asked me to teach in her town, which was about an hour and a half from where I lived. She was eager to have her friends experience what she was experiencing. She assured me that she knew people who would attend and would benefit greatly from taking classes with me. Because of time limitations, I had to decline, but Miriam kept asking, and one day I had an idea. I suggested that she take a training program so that she would be able to teach classes to her friends. She took me up on my offer and signed up for my next training seminar.