Is your movement infected with parasites? Is the skill of movement related to the skill of self discipline? Is there a reason the word “motion” sounds a lot like the word “emotion”? Other than it makes for lots of good disco song lyrics? Read on and find out.
Movement skill is movement inhibition
One of the primary ways that we can improve the efficiency of our movement is to inhibit unnecessary muscular contractions. I have discussed this idea here and here. The basic idea is that skilled movement depends just as much on the inhibition of muscle activity as it does on activation.
In fact, inhibition of neural activity is a higher order skill then activation, which tends to spread or irradiate from place to place without any help. Imagine the movements of an infant. Any intention to accomplish a movement goal tends to activate all the muscles in the body. Reaching for an object gets the legs kicking.
Or consider the uncoordinated movements of someone learning to do a complex activity for the first time, such as salsa dancing or hitting a golf ball. Every muscle gets involved in every movement, even the tongue and the facial muscles. Is this the cause of white man’s overbite? Unfortunately, I think the overbite is a feature not a bug.
So developing movement skill is largely a matter of inhibiting the spread of neural excitement rather than extending it. In this sense, learning better movement is more like sculpture than painting. You improve your art by taking things way, not adding them.
Movement Parasites
Moshe Feldenkrais had a very nice phrase to describe the undesirable physical movements that we need to chip away from our movement sculptures. He called such movements “parasitic”, because they are undesirable little bastards that become so attached to the “host movement” that they can’t be separated. So the intended movement will always activate the parasitic movement, until it becomes like a reflex, a movement over which we have no control at all.
For example, some people will raise one shoulder a little bit, every time they inhale. The shoulder lifting is now parasitic on inhalation. There is no ability to inhibit the movement, no freedom to avoid it, and perhaps no awareness it is even occurring. This may remain true even though the constant lifting is creating fatigue, discomfort and pain. This is just one little example, and all our movements are similarly infected. Any movement that is less than world class in its efficiency is probably infected with thousands of parasitic movements, in the hands, the face, the abdomen, everywhere. Ooh gross, parasites!
Of course this is not the end of the world, and we do not need infection free movement any more than we need bodies completely free of bacteria. (Quick factoid – did you know that nine out of ten cells in your body does not belong to you?) But just as we can benefit from good body hygiene, we can also benefit from getting rid of some of our more troublesome movement parasites.
The Feldenkrais Method tries to eliminate parasitic movements in several ways. Movements are done very slowly and mindfully to create awareness of unnecessary or superfluous movements or tension. Students are encouraged to pay attention to exactly what parts of the body participate in particular movements, how the movement is initiated and how much effort is involved. Many of the movements are done with constraints to prevent unwanted movement in certain areas.
The hopeful result is greater awareness of movement, and more ability to inhibit unnecessary movements. The goal is essentially freedom to choose the movements in your body. As the man said, if you know what you are doing, you can do what you want.
Mental Parasites
Here’s a very interesting question that is the subject of the next post.
Is there a relationship between inhibiting unwanted movements and inhibiting unwanted thoughts or emotions? Are there emotional parasites? And can working on movement get rid of them? Feldenkrais thought so, and in the next post I will discuss some interesting research which seems to bear on this question.
Yes, always there are emotional parasites. All our intention to make a movement is our intention of hurry, anxiety or perfectionism for instance.
So cleaning up our movement parasites can also clean our emotions. But not always cleaning up our emotions alone will clean our movement parasites.
Intention is the key, because it is related with our belief systems, emotions, feelings and personal / familiar histories.
“Learning better movement is more like sculpture than painting” – What a great way to put it!
As a musician I am highly aware of parasitic movements. Most people thinkt they can’t sing and when they try, they squeeze their throat and contract their swallowing muscles. But that actually blocks the free vibration of the vocal chords and thus produces a weak, strained and instable sound. Once you begin to relax the sound gets so much better. At the end, you might want to add some more muscles for stylistic reasons but first you need no stop your parasitic movements. Once you start to relax while singing the rest is just experimentation and mindful listening. Little by little your brain will learn how to coordinate the vocal chords for specific pitches.
Maybe there should be Feldenkrais courses for singers and musicians.
I have been thinking about the relationship between my thoughts and movement with the armoured combat I practice. I look forward to your next article.
I have been discussing movement therapy with a group of musicians who have been diagnoised with Focal Dystonia. I don’t know why I haven’t invited them to Todd’s blog before, but this one nails what they have been dealing with. They seem to have had some great results from Feldenkrais Therapy.
As always, great, clear writing on the Feldenkrais Method.
I have been focusing on becoming aware of holding the breath as a parasite, especially in new or complex activities. I have been surprised at how often I do this.
This has made me wonder why we hold of breaths in response to the new and the complex.
Is the breath holding learned or does it come from somewhere deeper within – an inherited reaction to a threat or the need to eliminate an activity in order to focus? The breath is the vital function that we can control. Not sure if there is a definitive answer but it has been interesting to think about.
This is a really interesting way to conceptualize bad movement habits. It really highlights the central role that the nervous system plays in athletics. A lot of people I trained didn’t understand that ability to do a movement correctly had to be learned and got discouraged thinking they just didn’t have control over their body when in fact, they just needed time to map the right motor patterns.
In my own life, as I get better at handstands I find myself more relaxed when inverted but still in control.
My personal experience has been that the more freedom of movement I had (more mature body patterns), the more emotional and mental freedom I’ve had. OCD personality traits are almost non existant, my relationships with others have radically changed, I have a lot of control over my capacity to focus on any given task, and I can live my emotions without them taking over me.
This has been said since Wilhelm Reich. It doesn’t matter which map you use: Feldenkrais, the trauma model (“The trauma Spectrum” by Dr. Scaer explains this in MD-level science on this), Alexander Lowen’s or Pierrakos, Ida Rolf, Alexander Technique, yoga and qi gong… Neurotic traits are structured within the body.
Hi Angela,
Thanks for relating your experience. I’m glad you have had some success!
However, I think it does matter which map you use. Some of the map makers you mention, such as Reich, have built some pretty questionable maps. I disagree that neurotic traits are “structured in the body.” It is more accurate to say that they live in the brain, but can be accessed and changed by moving the body. Many people believe that trauma or neuroses are coded in the body or fascia or meridians, which is very different from saying that the body is a good handle to change the parts of the brain where the problems really live.