Pleasure/Pain, Learning/Fixing and Chiropractic...

Chiropractors are good and their fixing is sometimes exactly the right thing—there is nothing wrong with fixing! And I know that chiropractic as a discipline has gotten a lot more subtle and nuanced than the old rack-n-crack. But I'm going to use chiropractic as an example of fixing, because the idea of fixing is to find what's stuck and give it a whack. (Albeit a very skilled and strategic whack.) Feldenkrais is the opposite. When we draw people's attention to their movement and how it feels from the inside, we're emphasizing what feels good, easier, or more satisfying. We invite them to expand on the good feeling—and suddenly their range of motion increases. This is one reason we don't demonstrate—the student should find their own 'easy,' partly because they are better equipped to do so and partly because the process of recognizing what's good is itself good for them. The student's organism responds well to following the line of ease, and then they can notice more, and as they notice they feel better: a classic reinforcing cycle inviting your complex adaptive system to hang onto that pattern of notice and appreciation. This is our way out of the chronic pain loop. But it isn't fixing. It might be obsessing, teasing, flirting, playing, exploring but most of all it is accepting.