What don’t you miss until it is gone?

Photo by Mega Caesaria on Unsplash

What is something you don’t miss, until it is gone?   One of my favorite lines from an old movie, The Paper, has Marissa Tomei sneezing as the very pregnant wife of the newspaper editor in the movie and say, “You don’t appreciate bladder control until it is gone”. 

Balance is like that – we know it most when we lose it.  Physical, emotional, life balance – we feel the lack of it as we lose it or when we end up on the literal or metaphorical floor.  

Balance is immediate – we know when we have it and we know when we don’t. 

Balance is intangible – what it actually is, how it is affected, what supports it is a little more elusive.   

What feels like balance within you?  In your life?  What do you do when unbalanced?

What restores your sense of balance?

How we experience balance and the loss of balance can show up in different forms.  I could feel more unsure, move in more tentative ways.  I can lose trust in myself and may shrink from some activities.  I can feel diminished, feeling the old in my aging process.  I can feel afraid, bracing against what might come.

I lost my balance once buying corn at a road side stand.  I stepped back from the counter, connecting my calf with the wooden brace extending out of the front of the stand.  In one moment, I was buying corn and in the next moment, I was falling backward.  I felt a sense of control, then felt out of control.  I was falling before I could think I was falling.

How we look at balance yields a view into what it is and how we can inhabit ourselves with a sense of balance.

Intention

Alan Questel says, “When we lose or regain our balance it is mostly recognized through how we move.  We move as a result of our intentions.  When we are unable to fulfill our intentions, it may show up as a loss of balance.”    We have an intimate, often unconscious relationship between our intentions and our actions. 

Have you had the experience of fumbling with your keys, to orient your key into the lock?   This small struggle moment is when intention and action are not relating well.  When I want to get through the door and I fumble with my keys, my intention does not include the process of lining up my key, of inserting it in the lock and turning the lock to release the door.

I am focused on the goal of getting into my house, getting on with it so I skip over my intention in the act of unlocking.  And depending on how many re-usable shopping bags or weapons bags I am holding, I swear a little!

So how do we find the way to fulfill our intention when we move? 

We use two personal resources, perception and manipulation, to fit intention to action.  We tend to focus on manipulation as the skill that needs improving. I find how we use our perception is more often the initiator of the problem.

How well, how accurately, how precisely am I perceiving what is in front of me?  Am I using an existing mental model of the lock in the door to guide my movement?  Or am I having a full, unfettered experience to perceive what is there – my key, the lock so I am set up to do the manipulation needed. 

What perceptual hygiene might be called for to clear away what is getting in the way? Am I absorbed with a rumination about a conversation?  Am I drunk?  Am I absorbed in thinking about what I will do next?   Am I sucked into the sensations of an exhausted body budget?

Try this out – put your key into your lock but see how it would be possible to slide the tip of the key precisely into the slot of the lock without tapping, without bumping the key tip on the outer rim of the lock?  What kind of attention would you need to bring to make a clean insertion? How slow or how quickly would you need to move?

So part of inhabiting a sense of balance can be expressed as a harmonious relationship between intention and action. 

To return to my unbalanced corn buying story, I intended to back away from the stall and encountered an obstacle.  My balance was broken.  I didn’t intend to back into the wooden brace so there is another piece to looking at balance – how we interact with our environment.

Environment

Why is unlocking the door important?  Our environment determines how we act in the world.  What about choice?  Free will?   I could leave my door unlocked, removing this need to unlock it.  But I don’t, because I live in a neighborhood with a steady stream of people in my back alley looking for bottles and sometimes the opportunity for something more.  So I engage in this ritual to lock my door that feeds my sense of feeling secure. Growing up on a farm, we never locked our door, because a neighbor might need something when we were not at home.  Different environments, different actions.

What creates balance walking up and down stairs?   Do you look down at each stair as you step?  Do you look straight ahead?  Going down stairs, we often look down, literally rounding down to cope with the felt sense of risk while descending.    Stepping down stairs feels less risky than walking down a muddy or icy slope. 

A friend shared her experience of slipping down a muddy slope in a haunted house, losing her balance on the dark and unpredictable surface.  How can we find balance when our environment gives us conditions that are not stable?  What does it mean to have balance when we don’t know what is going to happen next?  What if balance isn’t a state but a process, a response to each moment?

I admit I love watching parkour.  For anyone who hasn’t seen parkour, here is a short glimpse. 

https://youtu.be/1KnpCHYpSuQ

This example includes high levels of athleticism but in its most basic form parkour is the practice of moving in your environment.   

Playground environments are a familiar form of parkour – monkey bars, balance beams, climbing walls.  Watching a child navigate a climbing structure, I see the same close attention, the regard for precisely what is possible for the next handhold or foothold, all within the comfortable range of his own reach, his body’s dimensions within the space.

In navigating uncertain surfaces, we fare better staying open, responsive to our environment.  To brace, to become more rigid in reaction to fear of falling separates us from the information we could be receiving, the sense of the small ridge under your right foot, the slight slope down to the left.  What if balance was the process of an unspoken, felt conversation between the person who moves and the environment she moves through?   How well do we listen to our environment when we move? 

An odd thing happened a couple of weeks ago.  I spent a couple days checking my feet – it felt like something was stuck to the bottom of my feet – I could feel something there.  Then I realized, I was simply feeling more with my feet.  When I opened my awareness, I could feel the grain on the hardwood floor, feel the ridges on the linoleum, feel the texture of the welcome mat to a degree I was not conscious of before.   I don’t have a well-defined “why” for how this increase in sensitivity has come to be; I do know that I have come into a better sense of balance by feeling more.   

Structure

This leads me to focus on a third lens on balance – the question of our structure.

Back to the corn stand.  I am falling backward, tripped over the wooden brace at the corn stand. This story is memorable for me because of how I fell.  Somehow, maybe in some kind of early whisper of my aikido practice to come, I found a way to fold and roll gently onto my back. I was surprised.  The woman selling corn was surprised.  It just happened.  No time to think.   What happened?  Why didn’t I just fall backward, flat on the pavement?

The question for structure and balance is – can we regain our balance once we have lost it, once it is compromised?  And can we do something about our balance before it is a problem?

Clearly, we need to go beyond an understanding of structure as the form or the shape our feet, legs, hips that lets us be stable, to stand without toppling.   All of that is important, but in order to live, to function fully, we need a structure that can move and be balanced. 

Falling is different from movement in its reversibility.  When I step forward, I can choose to pause and step backward at any time during the movement.  When I fall, I can’t reverse it.  At the corn stand, I was going down.  I have an opportunity though, to alter the process and direction of my movement as I fall.  A stumble became a roll.  I was able to move in the direction I was already going and change my action.  Dynamic balance involves a responsiveness to the combination of intention, environment and manipulation of our structure, a kind of flow power to create moment by moment anew our intentions, our actions.  We shut this flow down when we contract, when we brace against what the moment brings.  When we inhabit ourselves with a sense of balance, we call out our capacity to adapt, adjust and find postures of support. 

Time for Integration

I live where it feels like, at this time of year, pretty far north.  This week I have watched leaves start to turn colors, weather forecasts start to hint at near frost temperatures, I daily contemplate the likelihood that my squashes will grow big enough to be harvested before a hard frost.  Do I need to cover them tonight, prolonging my hope for a harvest? 

Summer, typically, has been a time for integration for me.  A time to step away from the pace of doing I commit to the rest of the year.  A time to sit in utter stillness in my kayak in the middle of a lake with pelicans and gulls as my only companions.  A time to look into a fire in the cooling evening, letting everything be.  A time to pause, watch the sky under the guise of reading on the back deck.  A time to allow. To let come.

I had a different kind of integration experience this summer, a positive disruptive one.  As part of my May training with the Feldenkrais Training Academy, I had a one-on-one Functional Integration lesson with Jeff Haller, our educational director.   Functional Integration is a hands-on lesson, where the practitioner creates learning through touch.  The situation I presented him – I am feeling coordinated, well organized with good alignment – experiencing pleasurable movement….on my left side only.  My right side was fighting like hell to not be that.  My right knee, hip, shoulder ached regularly.  My right foot too.  In my aikido training, I regularly have a kind of Jekyll and Hyde experience – an aikido-like feeling on the left and an awkward, shoving strength experience on the right.   Jeff asked me to do a basic move from aikido (shio-nage for my aikido audience) to highlight for me how I was organizing myself differently on each side.  Then he asked me to lie on the table and explored through touch my body’s organization.  Ten minutes into the lesson I felt in some palpable way more like a whole person.  The how of this part of the lesson is still to be learned; the what of this part of the lesson is with me still.   Soon he easily had my right leg swinging as if I were a skeleton, with no history of sciatica, no muscular knots in my hip and buttock, no learned patterns to cope with pain, stiffness and numbness.  By the end of the hour, I felt connected, balanced, and structurally whole – we repeated the aikido move from the beginning of the lesson and Jeff told me, “When you are organized like this, there will never be any openings”.   Structural strength and ease.  Super cool.

What interests me even more than the lesson, is the process of integration that followed.  I left the training session in May with a new relationship with my right hip, with at least two viable options for how to move it while I walk, how to stand, how to shift my weight – my habitual way of moving and the more efficient way Jeff taught me that allowed for lighter weight transfer, for quicker walking with less effort, for greater stamina – walking uphill became almost easy, like I had a new power source within me to just glide up the hill.   But I was returned in a way to being like a toddler – either pattern could show up.  In the process of integration, I found that I was becoming stiff and sore almost every time I moved from sitting to standing.  I played with options, how to apply what I had learned so far to change my experience. (Because I am going to make this better!)   Some days I felt 20 years older each time I stood up.  A senior toddler – stiff, wobbly, a little confused about how to move from here. And frustrated – – why was this happening to me?  How was this better?   This integration process felt much more like disintegration.

I tried several things with limited success – morning exercises to stretch and open up the mobility in my hips – good for an hour or two.  I changed how I sat, focusing on lengthening my legs, letting go of tension I held while sitting – this worked better but it didn’t change the pattern from happening.   I found some ways to move that didn’t hurt; other parts continued to protest.  I felt the pressure from an internalized, societal idea – this is just what happens when you are over 50. 

What I hadn’t tried is a core part of applying awareness to my movement – slowing down to really sense what was happening in the movement from sitting to standing, in the shifting of weight into my feet.  I slowly came to study this moment in my movement. 

This August, my integration process was supported by another one-on-one lesson, this time with Chrish Kresge.  After presenting my current state, she observed me and asked, “What are you over-using?”  I didn’t know the answer until she asked.  “My knees.”  She led me through a lesson that I was familiar with about the movement from sitting to standing and brought together the ways I was not quite yet integrated.  And it did come together, I came together.   Wonderful.

What can I glean from this integration process to take into my life more broadly?   A key harvest is the role of attention in being with my movement.  I am fully conditioned to use my attention to determine my state of being – how does this feel? It hurts.  If it hurts, how do I make this movement better?  This kind of attention may be an expression of self-care, self-love, but expressed through a corrective kind of care.  There is a subtle kind of limit I place on myself here by pursuing attention anchored to the agenda: how do I make my movement better?   It’s the attachment I put on my curiosity – curiosity to know what is happening to “fix” myself compared to a free, unencumbered curiosity to know.  This attachment changes my attention, changes my relationship with myself. A small difference but the impact on how I treat myself is powerful.

Let’s compare the two.

Closed form of curiosity:  Why do my knees hurt?  What do I need to do differently to make it better?  I could work on strengthening my thigh muscles, on opening the flexibility of my ankle joints.  I could wear knee braces to keep my knees moving in good alignment.  

Open form: What is happening when I stand such that my knees hurt?  What do I notice?  I could notice the placement of my feet, the direction my knees move coming to standing.  I could notice where my head is in relationship to my feet and knees, what arc it makes.  I could notice where my eyes move, where the weight of my head is placed and the work needed to keep it upright.  I could keep going in this form of curiosity, in exploring possibilities.  I could also keep going in the closed form of curiosity but I can see an end to what seems worth exploring.  If my knee hurts – will I look further than the next set of joints for the cause?  What about how I am using my spine, how I organize the weight of my torso over my knees?  

A closed curiosity, an attention attached to a “fixer-upper” agenda is just more limited. I am formed by decades of corrective care – from myself and others. The pause to allow for open attention is to notice what I notice. To allow for repetitions of unproductive patterns.  To learn.  This is the habit of attention that is more important than exactly how I make my movement.  How can I relinquish the driver’s seat on the quality of my movement?  Because the body likes and embraces what works better.  I am my body. My attention determines the nature of our relationship together.

Real learning, doing something that is actually new and different than what I have done,  is situated in this kind of love – this attention in the form of open curiosity to my state from a stance of acceptance, an embrace rather than a bracing against what is present.   What kind of love is this, that attends to how I am?