Collectively, we have reached the end of a cycle.  Economically, ecologically, socially and politically, the limitations of the old order are revealing themselves in a most dramatic fashion.  While some still believe—or at least appear to believe—that things can go on as they have been, albeit with some minor reforms, most of us sense that a more fundamental ending—something more akin to a death than to a minor injury—is upon us.  Like all deaths, this one is carrying a great storm of emotions on its winds: rage, grief, fear, despair, and yes, relief and exhilaration.  These emotions, in turn, are inspiring an array of actions at the personal and the collective level.  Some of these actions are absurd, some inspired—and in many cases, it is difficult to discern which is which, for while it is clear that something is ending, we cannot yet see what will follow.  

This end has been approaching for a long time—many of us have felt it coming, and indeed wondered why others were so slow to recognize what was so obvious.  Yet even those who have long anticipated this moment find ourselves surprised that it has actually arrived—at this moment, in this fashion.  No matter how diligently we have sought to prepare ourselves, we feel unprepared.  

The economic situation in particular—perhaps because it is so immediate and concrete—is causing a great deal of fear in our collective body.   I feel it in the individual bodies of virtually everyone I touch these days.  Many of us are facing hard choices immediately; many others of us are not personally affected yet, but know that we will be eventually, and all of us are touched, consciously or unconsciously, by the suffering of the millions, near and far, for whom this crisis is an urgent, life-threatening disaster.  
Since I meet the crisis anew in each of the people who comes to me, I ask myself many times every day, “What can the Feldenkrais Method bring to this situation?  How does the work we do together in the office apply to our broader circumstances?”  

When we do Feldenkrais lessons, particularly the Awareness Through Movement lessons in which we engage in self-directed movement, we inevitably encounter the limitations of our habitual ways of moving, perceiving and thinking.  For example, at the beginning of a lesson, the teacher asks us to carry out a movement—say, sitting on the floor with the soles of the feet facing each other, holding the outside of the right foot with the fingers and palm of the right hand, and raising the foot and leg away from the floor.  We attempt to carry out this instruction, only to find that the movement in question is either impossible—we cannot raise the foot from the floor at all—or incredibly difficult.  As the lesson continues, we may find that our habitual way of understanding the instruction is making things more difficult than they need to be—for instance, we may discover that we interpreted the instruction to mean that we were supposed to move only the foot and leg while keeping the pelvis and spine relatively rigid, when in fact the movement is much easier if we allow the pelvis and spine to curve into a deeper “C” shape and to rock backward as we raise the foot and leg.  The teacher, of course, never told us to keep the pelvis and spine rigid—we simply assumed that was required.  We may wonder how we arrived at such a dysfunctional, self-defeating interpretation, and how we learned to give our allegiance to it rather than to our own comfort and ease—even in a context where we are urged to find the comfortable and easy way.

But the difficulties we encounter in a Feldenkrais lesson do not end there.  We may well find that even once we understand that we are free to involve our whole selves in the movement in order to make it more efficient and pleasurable, there are barriers.  The years we have spent shortening the muscles of our back reflect themselves in a limited ability to lengthen and softly curve them to assist the free motion of the hip and leg even though we now understand what is required.  How do we respond to such a limitation?  Some of us become striving, competitive and angry.  We notice that the woman next to us is raising her foot over her head when we are only lifting ours six inches off the floor, so we try harder, and when that fails to bring the desired results or even causes pain, we decide that the teacher, the lesson, or the Feldenkrais Method are stupid and worthless.  Others become angry but turn the anger on ourselves—we decide we are stupid and worthless.  Or we feel guilty because we cannot find a better way, and think we deserve the pain we experience as a result.  Others tune out, failing or refusing to notice that we are doing the same thing we always do, and reaping the same results.  Or we notice that we are doing the same old thing, but we hope that somehow, this time, doing the same old thing—while thinking positively about it!—will miraculously produce a different result.  Most of us combine a number of these responses.

The world is leading us in a challenging Awareness Through Movement lesson.  We have run up against the limits of our habits—for instance, the habit of creating economies based on endless growth and exploitation of resources on a finite planet.  It is clear that we need new ways of understanding our planet’s “instructions,” but even when we gain a broader perspective, we are constrained by our entrenched ways of doing.  The fact that we have built an economy dependent on metastatic growth, a society utterly dependent upon fossil fuels, is like scar tissue in our collective ligaments.  These limitations won’t go away or reorganize overnight, no matter how clearly we now see that such change would be beneficial.  The harm we have already done to our planet’s homeostatic mechanisms is like damage to the cartilage covering our bones—even if we could completely transform our ways of living today, we would still have to cope for decades with the damage we did when we were ignorant or heedless.

As in a difficult Feldenkrais lesson, none of our habitual responses are likely to serve us tremendously well.  While there is certainly a place for anger and hard work here, “trying harder” in the ways we have always tried is unlikely to bring about the fundamental reorientation the world requires of us.  We need to take responsibility for the ignorance, selfishness and greed we all carry within us—but guilt is unlikely to bring radical transformation.  Spacing out and doing nothing or simply “thinking positively” are unlikely to help.  

What actually works when we run up against the limits of what we know and can do in a Feldenkrais lesson?  Attention, faithfulness, patience, surrender, and wonder.  Attention means that even when what we encounter is unpleasant in some way, we stay with what we are doing and how it actually feels.  (“Ack!  Every time I try to raise my leg more than two inches off the floor, my hip hurts and my neck feels strained.  When I don’t try to raise my leg more than two inches, I feel inadequate and my stomach feels kind of hollow with that, but at least my hip and neck don’t hurt.”)  Faithfulness mean acting in accordance with what we notice, no matter how strange or uncomfortable that may initially feel.  (“O.k., even though it is kind of humiliating to not be able to raise my leg more than two inches when that woman next to me can raise her foot over her head, I’m going to stick with that, because that is what actually feels o.k. to me.” Or, alternately, “Wow, it feels kind of scary to walk around with my chest so soft and open, but it also feels good—I’m going to let it be.”)  Patience means being o.k. with our natural time frame for learning.  (“I’ve done this lesson three times and it’s only a little easier than it was the first time, but it is easier—and I can live with that.”)  Surrender means trusting that there is an integrating holistic intelligence that makes sense of the process even though our cognitive minds—with which most of us are intensely identified—don’t understand what is going on. (“It doesn’t make sense to ‘me’ that lifting the leg only two inches off the floor and resting whenever I feel like it brings improvement. It doesn’t make sense to ‘me’ that improvement sometimes appears hours, days, or weeks later when I haven’t been thinking about it or practicing at all—but I see that it does.  Hmm…) Wonder—“Wow!  Look how easy it is to raise my leg now!  I would never have thought I could do that!” or “Hey!  I have sprained that ankle over and over again, sometimes just walking down the street, but today when it started to twist, I somehow corrected myself!  I wonder if that has to do with this Feldenkrais stuff…”)

Our current collective crises also call for attention, faithfulness, patience, surrender and wonder.  We can attend to our own fear, despair, grief, rage and even denial, noticing how and when these arise and how we habitually respond to them.  We can observe our habitual ways of living and the ways they now seem inappropriate, as well as our uncertainty about how to change.  We can act in accordance with what we feel even if it initially seems strange, uncomfortable, or too good to bear.  Some examples of faithfulness I’ve encountered in my circle lately include: giving up a long-cherished home to move to a smaller, cheaper, more efficient dwelling; moving friends and relatives in to save money and other resources, despite significant interpersonal challenges, and opting out of buying Christmas presents and instead giving money to groups serving those in need.  

We can be patient (and compassionate) with each other and ourselves as we take the steps that we can toward transformation, while acknowledging that it would be good if we could do more, or if we could've done more sooner.  We can surrender to not knowing what next week, month or year will look like—including the very real possibility that all we do may not be enough to avert personal or collective catastrophe—while simultaneously surrendering to the necessity to act.  We can surrender to the possibility that there is a powerful, holistic, integrative intelligence which makes meaning of all this, although our minds cannot come to terms with what is happening.

Wonder might seem hard to come by when things seem so overwhelmingly grim, but there’s plenty of occasion for it.  I am seeing amazing healing in the lives of many individuals and families.  After all, the world that is dying away has been characterized by tremendous human isolation, cruel and crushing inequality, and profound separation from nature, including our own nature.  Whether we have been aware of it or not, all of us—even those who appear to have benefited the most—have carried the burdens of our habitual forms of social, political, economic and ecological organization in our bodies and minds.   As those forms die away, some of us are finding welcome breathing room--moments, at least, of liberation from old forms of suffering.  Certainly that is cause for wonder.

Like all deaths, the collective death we are experiencing could have (at least) two distinctly different outcomes.  Like an annual plant that fails to set seed or a perennial whose roots are not hardy enough to survive the winter, our “civilization” or our species as a whole might simply rot, composted by Great Nature but not reborn in a way that preserves and integrates the old form into a new.  On the other hand some individuals and groups might even now be forming and spreading tough, resilient seeds or sending down deep strong roots that will endure the long harsh winter we are surely facing.  Though few of us who are alive now will live to see the spring that may follow, our seeds and roots may contribute to that eventual rebirth.  Part of the pathology of the culture that is dying now has been its obsession with spring and summer (youth and growth) and its attempt to ignore, denigrate or defeat autumn and winter (limits and death).  By taking a Feldenkrais approach to our encounters with limitation and death at this time, we can contribute to the possibility of healing.