Hey Everyone!
In the last post, we touched on two main functions of nervous system: keeping us alive, and learning and growing. And how lately we’re getting stuck in the former — all survival mode. (This probably isn’t news to any of us…)
This Skilled Beginner Series (the link to the first sequence is below) will explore how to find our way out of getting stuck in survival mode. The key is to provide the conditions that our nervous system needs to remember about its learning and growing ability. Not just to feel calm and secure, but also to be engaged.
In other words: both safety and surprise.
I want to tell you about how I discovered this essential combination for myself — what felt like the missing link.
I’ve written before about how I felt a need to go back to the body.
I was working as a playwright and teaching in the theater community, and couldn’t help noticing how widespread the underlying anxiety and blocks were in my peers and students.
For years, I’d also been exploring somatic practices and integrating them into my theater work— but the two worlds I was immersed in, somatics and dance, and writing and theater, felt only barely connected.
I wanted something dramatically different to address the fundamental problem of disconnection that seemed to persist.
The writing solutions out there were all heady and either traditional, going all the way back to Aristotle, or experimental, which at first might excite novelty but eventually seemed like a bag of tricks. And while many somatic movement practices could imbue a relaxed, creative state, it felt like they would stall there, with no clear next direction.
That made Feldenkrais stand out as unique for me.
I remember coming out of my first Feldenkrais class in Brooklyn in 1996. Even though I wasn’t ready to step fully into the portal yet, I still remember the pleasure and curiosity, combined with rigor, that felt truly different, not just like more of the same.
Ten years later, when I started to intensely train in Feldenkrais, it felt connected to the deepest part of my creativity.
It reminded me of the “beginner’s mind” concept from my meditation practice, but it felt infinitely more yielding — like it lit up old and new pathways of inquiry that I’d been immersed, and sometimes tangled, in for years in my creative work.
It felt like a bridge between the body and language — like the creative process itself, without having to leave any part of myself out.
Later, I would learn that this experience was called neuroplastic learning, and it could only happen in an essential balance of safety and genuine surprise. It’s engaged parasympathetic learning, which can sometimes be hard to conceptualize before experiencing it.
But we have all experienced it before, as toddlers.
Feldenkrais understood that the way we learned as infants and toddlers was the most potent and intuitive way to develop new skills. The key is that it’s not just learning on high alert, laced with performance pressure, and it’s not just relaxation
“Relaxed engagement,” as Feldenkrais writes, is essential for deep learning. This is a three-part series, where we'll be slowly building from this "relaxed engagement" to more complex sequences that integrate language and story.
In this sequence, we use the consciousness of our hands, which take up quite a lot of neural territory, to bring articulated consciousness to other parts of ourselves. Building awareness around the hands can also help us connect with a time when our brains expanded and differentiated the most. Grab and hold and touch and taste.
Working with our hands is not just an efficient way of regulating ourselves, but also of making the invisible more visible, or the unknown a little more known.
In an annoying bit of irony, this kind of “beginner” learning is a lifelong process.
And thank goodness it is.
