20 BREATHS, AGAIN
This is hard. To simple follow my breathing for twenty breaths. To do this when I’m grinding my morning juice (wheat grass and apples, a gobs of fallen apples from all the trees I’ve planted years ago in the Garden Park). To do this when I’m awake in bed in the morning and not quite ready to get up.
To do this and type words into a computer, that is beyond me just now.
Merely, to follow my breathing as I type these words, that’s big one, that creates a huge shift. But to get up from the computer, walk to the front door and back and count and follow my breathing, let’s see if I can do that.
Yes. I can. Five breaths.
Walking is one of the best activities for following and counting the breathing, my breathing, my life, this is my life, am I worth paying awareness to, am I worth that price?
Or am I going to remain shackled and enslaved by the “normal” life of words and worries and preoccupations?
Free or slave.
That’s all that’s at stake.
Hmm. One, two, three.
Let’s see if I can count up to three breaths while writing away just now on this computer here. Even that is “hard,” and “hard,” is part of what the Feldenkrais work is all about: making the impossible, possible.
And what’s the first step in that?
Break things down.
Get interested in the process, not the accomplishment.
Slow down. I have to type a lot slower to count my breathes while typing. And even then it is “hard.”
But when I reign my attention back to breath and count and these words all at one, the project is “hard:” in that very exciting way of how we are when we are on the cusp of learning something we have never been able to do before.
The impossible.
This is impossible, counting my breathing and typing at the same time.
Is that true?
No.
One. I start a sentence and it moves along. I breathe out and then, two, I breathe in. Three, surely that’s cheating to type out the numbers as I go.
One. The “cheating” is what , two, we learn when we get smart to the, three, Feldenkrais Method. One. To do things, two, in the non habitual way, three, so often seems like cheating.
One, no wonder we never change. Two. We have a whole logic set up. Three: do it the way it’s always, one, been done, two, or that’s cheating. Three.
This is fun for me.
Hard. But a little less than impossible.
God only knows, three, how it is for you.
Now I just type when I get to three, three. And again, what do “you” the reader, real or imaginary, three, think about that?
And that too, is at the core of much if not all of , three, our slavery: is the outside approval coming my way.
Lost my count.
Being smart, three, what a lure. To say the smart thing and get lost in the lure of : someone somewhere will approve.
And then, after trying to count the breathing, to simple follow the breath and type is a cinch.
Another Feldenkrais “trick,” to learn something, do this: make it more difficult, do it in a way that is clearly less functional, and then come back to the “natural” way, which will all of a sudden, feel really natural.
One, two three. What a good world.
Ciao.
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