Relaxation

I am experimenting on the computer keyboard as well as piano. I'm noticing something right now as I type-- I'll have to try it at the piano, too. It has to do with relaxation. My hands are quite tense by habit. That tension is interconnected with habitual tightening all over my body. If I experiment with using my hands in a more relaxed way, literally EVERYTHING changes.. how I carry my torso and head, my toes, everything. So it's nice to have relaxed hands. As I type, I can imagine my hands being like dead weights hanging from my forearms. My fingers can feel like they droop. When I press a key, it can feel like I just "let go" and let the finger collapse in a puddle on the key. Just let the dead weight do it. But after I do that for a while, I notice two things. One: I can bring some finger activity back into the game. This feels like an improvement in some ways. I still have the relaxation, but I can add a touch of activity to it. Two: I can adjust my image of my fingers "collapsing in a puddle." Instead, I can look for that place of stability. I think this is what Alan would call skeletal support. I can find a way of organizing the movement so that my finger doesn't just collapse in a heap, but feels stable all the way down. It is still relaxed. I also add this idea of "integration of choices." I feel that life offers me many options, and the best response is usually some integration of them. There is a lot to learn from letting my fingers collapse into a puddle, but that is not the whole story. There is a lot to learn from conceiving of keypresses as purely finger activities. But that is not the whole story. Somewhere in the middle of all these is some choice that integrates the most useful aspect of each option. To avoid confusion, I should add another point. All these experiments are done SLOWLY. There's a lot to learn from doing it slowly. Doing it fast gets easier. But, the way that a pianist would describe doing it fast might be considerably different. For instance, the idea of stabilization. It's clear to me what this means when I am slowly depressing a key and looking for that skeletal support. However, as I speed it up, I might have a different sense of it. I might start to describe it as providing an equal-and-opposite reaction force, for instance. I haven't sped it up much so I don't really know how I would describe it. I just believe that slow practice is very good for learning something and leads directly to improvements in fast movements. One thing that Feldenkrais pointed out is that much learning is *unlearning*. We are unlearning all the extraneous actions that hinder our goal. If you throw someone into the water using a sink-or-swim approach, they flounder around. They make too many unhelpful movements. Swimming means learning to make just the needed action and drop everything else. Neuroscientists notice that the brain cerebral cortex gets thinner--yes *thinner* -- when a complex activity is learned. Learning is about dropping neural connections that aren't needed.