Unusual Sensations?

I only found your work the other day and have not seen the DVD o book yet. But from you have revealed about the arch and the grasping action have made significant improvements in speed as well as other little things. I just seen you article ALWAYS MAINTAIN A SENSE OF THE FINGER MANIPULATING THE KEY and so I decided to have a go a this sensing and have found that I can 'hear' my finger/s move, what does this mean? Also, when moving my finger up and down and side to side from the knuckle as slow as I can hear it groan like a heavy unoiled door closing. Is it because my muscles are weak and are not used to such motion? Are these muscles the Interossei that I am sensing? Should I carry this on? Any thoughts on this are much appreciated Thanks DLJ

What an intriguing post! Great question! Of course it is difficult to say, but what your experience sounds like is this: Those groans indicate what Moshe Feldenkrais called 'parasitic contractions,' muscular effort that has no purpose. Certain muscles are holding your fingers in place instead of moving them. Your fingers' bones haven't found an alignment that would allow them to simply stand there without help from muscles that feel they need to prop the bones up. Most of us suffer from this and don't know it. If we slowed down as you did, we might not feel the fingers 'groaning,' but we might well feel a 'hitch' in the smooth movement, an interruption, a block of some sort. So it's NOT that your muscles are weak, actually it's that some of them are working too hard. I don't know if it's the interossei or some other muscles.. You are on EXACTLY the right track to solving this and transforming your technique. When you feel or hear your fingers 'groan,' simply go back and do the same movement even slower, even gentler, even smaller. And when you reach the point where they are going to 'groan,' stop before you get there and reverse direction. Then approach the point again, and back off. Keep nudging up against that point but not plowing through it. And eventually a strange thing will happen, you will be able to go farther than before without the groaning starting. Your brain has learned to let go of the contraction that was causing the groan. It simply dissolved. This is the prerequisite to new learning, or actually the first stage of new learning. Once the interfering contractions have been decoupled, you can then begin to learn to move your fingers in a new way, sensing the possibilities of skeletal alignments that empower, that make movement easy, stress-free, AND powerful... Again, thanks for this really fascinating description. AFF