10 years ago by
A Pianist
Here are some excerpts from recent email conversations I've had with Alan. The topics arose from some functional difficulties that I explored during two lessons with him. I've added some background so they make sense. The excerpts are in quotes.
From Feldenkrais, we know that the self image is an internal representation of ourselves that governs our every action. Any changes top the image change the organism. A lot of the time with Feldenkrais we are working on refining existing parts of this image, but what happens if part of the organism is not represented at all? Seemingly easy tasks become very cumbersome to perform, with other parts of the body compensating for the missing activity, perpetuating the problem further.
Until recently, I had a major blank spot in my image - the area round my shoulders. There was no differentiation between ribcage and shoulder blades and thus very limited movement. Of course, this fed further down into my arms and caused pain in several different places. It also meant that I could have no functional connection to the keyboard.
I had actually done various ATMs based around the arms and shoulders, but there had been little effect - you can't refine an image that does not exist.
In my lesson, Alan had me make various movements while pushing the piano (as if to push it through the wall behind). These movements involved leaning my whole torso backwards and forwards while arching and rounding my spine, moving one shoulder backwards and the other forwards (with some variations involving the direction that the head or eyes would turn), and a composite of the two. With all these movements I had to allow my shoulder blades to slide over my ribcage. So, while all of this was very muscular, I now had a new, albeit primitive part of my self image. Then several days later I had an FI lesson, which illustrated the significance of having that initial image to work with:
I thought I'd let you know about a very interesting FI lesson I had a couple of days a go. I told my teacher about the piano lesson I'd had with you, and we agreed to work on the movement of my shoulders. It seems my lesson with you had created a new part of my self image as intended and my shoulder blades were sliding freely at the top, but they were still being held in place at the bottom. By the end of the FI lesson they were moving as they should.
So now I have some really tired muscles at the bottom of my shoulder blades that have been holding on for years, some really tired muscles at the top of the centre of my back which have had to fight against that holding, and some really tired muscles around my rib cage which must have been contributing to the conflict too. But this tiredness makes me happy, as previously I could not perceive it.
In the more recent lesson, Alan spotted that I was still not engaging with the keyboard very well. I explained to him that I was still having twinges in my forearms when playing and he made a very interesting comparison to the tendonitis that can develop from using a computer mouse. Although it takes very little effort to press the button on a mouse (similarly, the piano I had at the time had very light keys), even people that use themselves efficiently can experience twinges along the tendons of the forearm. Alan explained this as a functional vacuum.
A functional vacuum (or my understanding of it) is a situation in which the conditions which the nervous system is expecting (e.g. the resistance of the key) are so different or non existent that the nervous system and muscles freak out, causing the twinges and pain which people experience.
Recently I bought a new piano with heavier keys, which led to this observation:
I bought a new piano recently which has heavier keys than my previous one. Initially I thought that this might be a problem, but then I remembered what you said during my last lesson, about my left hand looking better, perhaps due to the heavier keys at the bass end. That seems to be true in this case, things are feeling somewhat better, though I have made other observations about what has been contributing to my pain issues.
This final part involves an observation I made regarding functionality of sitting. Perhaps this is obvious, but although I knew this intellectually, putting it into practice is something else entirely.
Over the past week I've been looking into sitting and how I use my lower back muscles. In Bonn you pulled me up on my sitting, and although I had changed the shape of my posture somewhat, functionally it was still very similar. I've had a couple of FIs recently that have helped greatly in increasing my awareness and have allowed me to actually let the muscles of my back relax for the first time in ages.
This leads onto another recent discovery. During the last lesson I could feel the effects of what you were getting me to do very strongly, and have done so a couple of times since then. However, most of the times I practised what you showed me there appeared to be little effect (because I was, perhaps, practising something subtly different). One of the big things I've noticed is that my hands will warm up when I do it well, and get cold very quickly when I do it badly. The work I've done with my sitting seems to have clarified this - it seems to me that how I sit has such a significant effect on how well I can learn that if I don't sit well there is very little point trying to change how I play. So now I have a focus.
I'd be interested to know if other people have made similar observations.
