The Pattern Makes the Problem

In order to sense how someone moves, I must first understand how we can move. I know that we share a common blueprint for movement based on the design of our skeleton. Just as each joint both allows for and limits motion, the skeleton as a whole both permits and constrains movement, defining which movements are possible and which are not. This potential for motion both specifies the domain of possible human movements, the potential possibilities or variety, and demarcates the absolute limits on movement, the constraints.

When I evaluate the way Casey moves, I ask, “Out of all movements she can, ideally, carry out – which ones has she eliminated?” My hand senses the impulse of the muscles in the area of her lower mid-back to contract each time she starts to move. Her lower back moves only in the direction of rounding, of flexing, and never in the direction of arching. I get the impression of someone with part of her spine – the mid-back – arching; and the other part – the very bottom of her lumbar spine – stationary. Out of the many and varied possibilities inherent in human movement, some configurations are, in Casey’s current state, not possible. Keeping her pelvis rolled back and her back relatively flat, Casey maintains an unchanging relationship between her pelvis and lower back. The perseverance of this relationship restricts her motion more than her anatomy requires and limits the ways she can move. A new constraint has been laid over the limits defined by her skeletal structure, introducing a relative constraint that we call an invariant. This invariant, this ingrained pattern, is like a constellation. In a constellation the stars move through the sky in fixed relationships to each other, maintaining a shape because the relative angles and distances between them stay the same. In Casey’s body, a relationship that could change, indeed, that was made to change, has become a limit and this limitation has become a problem.

This is the kind of problem I was referring to in The three C’s when I wrote: “Seeing how we move and understanding how we can move, Feldenkrais understood how dysfunction arises from our limitations and how our difficulties are embedded in the very way we move.” Even though Casey can perform the complex activity of skiing, even though she works out and stretches, even though she is in good health, she is limited. Rather than understanding tension and pain as the consequence of how she moves, she mistakenly identifies them as the source of her difficulties. But what she identifies as a problem comes from how she moves, from the steadfast relationships between the parts of her body and the inflexible pattern that they form, not from any one part alone. The microscopic focus of the conventional diagnostic procedures excludes the systemic nature of the pattern. This invariant is not local—it is not simply due to the tightness of her muscles—it is global. The pattern is intrinsic to the way in which her nervous system engages in every activity.