By Maggy Burrowes

When our world-wide ‘lockdown’ experience was happening, many of us started interacting online much more often. Watching friends and colleagues framed inside their individual Zoom windows, I noticed how some people accompanied their verbal speech with particularly eloquent and expressive hand gestures. I have always found hands very lovely to look at, and in my online conversations I can find myself a little entranced watching a speaker’s hands moving with fluid grace to illustrate some aspect of our conversation with elegance, precision, and clarity.

Our hands are vital to our experience of being human in so many ways it would be absurd to attempt any sort of list here. We Feldenkrais teachers are trained to use touch in order to teach; we learn to communicate directly with the person lying on our table, skeleton to skeleton, nervous system to nervous system, fascia to fascia, intelligence to intelligence. Our ability to teach effectively through touch is dependent on the sensitivity and refinement of the way we use our hands, and of course happy, healthy, well-organised hands are just as vital for working musicians too.

It is not controversial to say that the pain of chronic inflammation in neck, shoulders, hands, and/or wrists is often the natural result of poor self-use, and that the habitual way that we go about many of our daily activities can lead to excessive ‘wear and tear’, and the sort of pain that can make it increasingly difficult to continue performing. The potential severity of this sort of injury ranges from from needing to take a couple of days off to rest, all the way up to career-destroying levels of Repetitive Strain Injury, and stubborn neurological issues such as Focal Dystonia.

What may not be so obvious is that a pain that you are experiencing in a very precise area of your hand, shoulder or wrist is nevertheless going to require a change in your behaviour over a much wider range of activities than the one that is the most apparent trigger for that pain. While it may be useful to have your specific individual movement habits and “parasitic” muscular behaviours diagnosed by a movement expert such as a physiotherapist or a Feldenkrais practitioner, you can easily experience for yourself the kind of muscular interference I am talking about…

Do try out this – somewhat exaggerated – version of a common form of muscular overuse:

Lift your dominant hand and twirl it in the air – perhaps you could imagine you are playing with a conductor’s baton.

Now pause, and hunch that shoulder so that it is higher than the other one (a postural habit that is common to many of us) and thus closer to your ear. Hold it there (notice how unpleasant it is to do this) and twirl your hand again – how does this action feel now?

This hunching action is not contributing to the intended movement of your hand and arm but is instead interfering with your ease of movement throughout your whole shoulder girdle, and thus your whole self. Habitual muscular contractions such as these are really common, and ever-present in our everyday actions, yet rarely present in our self-awareness. This means they are not that easy to get rid of, even when we become more aware of their presence. You might like to continue this experiment by observing the effects on your arm movements of holding your breath, or clenching your buttocks, or your toes, or fixing your jaw.

You will recognise that any unnecessary tension within your physical self will have some effect on how you are using your arm – and I suspect you may also notice how quickly you are able to adapt to any self-imposed limitation and keep on going. 

I am not exaggerating when I say that the majority of us are not experiencing the full ease and range of motion that our shoulder joints are capable of, and that the unrecognised restriction in our movements that is generated by inefficient muscular activity of this sort will eventually trigger problems that will become impossible to ignore. Unfortunately, although we can label this unwanted muscular activity as unintentional or parasitic, the truth is that, as far as our neural pathways are concerned, the intended action and its parasitic element are very difficult to distinguish – neurons that fire together, wire together. With continual but unconscious practice we have learnt to perform these distinct actions as if they were one; they have become so habitual – that is to say we are so used to moving in this particular way – that if we are to change then we must set about the complex task of extricating the intended action from the limiting influence of the unintended actions, a task that is hampered by just how automatic and compulsive these behaviours have become over time. As far as our neuronal networks are concerned there is no real difference between a “skill” and a “habit” – the distinction is a semantic rather than a meaningful one; we practiced the ‘skill’ on purpose, and developed the ‘habit’ unconsciously at the same time.

From the beginning Moshe Feldenkrais designed Awareness Through Movement lessons to help us identify and eliminate these mobility-limiting, energy-wasting, parasitic behaviours. You may not be familiar with the term ‘parasitic’ when used in this way, but you will probably recognise the kind of thing I am talking about – perhaps you used to make unnecessary movements with your neck, tongue, or jaw when you were first learning to write, or to play your instrument, and occasionally find you are still doing the same sort of thing even now. This can be a natural result of struggling with the unfamiliar efforts required to manipulate any sort of tool at a young age before you had the time to develop more effective ways to control the movements of your hands. If you choose to develop a regular Feldenkrais practice you can learn to steadily unravel all of the tensions you have been weaving into yourself from those very early years onwards, and – to paraphrase Moshe – begin to make what seems impossible more possible, to make what you find difficult much easier to achieve, and to discover that what is easy can become more elegant and more pleasurable to perform – just as with music, the Feldenkrais Method is a life-long learning process and you will find that these two disciplines go together very well.

If you would like to understand more about the concept of parasitic movement and how “neurons that fire together, wire together” I can recommend Mind Sculpture by Ian Robertson; a book-length discussion of how the brain and nervous system functions that is both clear, and beautifully written. If you are interested in learning more about the Feldenkrais Method then I would like to recommend Embodied Wisdom – a collection of essays and interviews that provides a very useful introduction to both the basics of the Feldenkrais Method and Dr Moshe Feldenkrais’ wider interests.

©Maggy Burrowes