Moving Toward Wholeness

Lavinia Plonka

rom my first ballet class at age seven, through my career as a mime and a clown, and later as a Feldenkrais practitioner, movement has been my passion, as well as my main object of study, whether through yoga, martial arts, traditional Indian dance, or the Gurdjieff Movements. I found links and correspondences among these many disciplines. But what has been most interesting for me is investigating how the suppression and expression of emotion is manifested through posture and movement, and how that influences a person’s well-being.

When I was around nine, I wanted to do a play, even though I wasn’t quite sure what a play was. It was to be a fantastic adventure about a handsome, enchanted prince. But the only princely boy in my neighborhood, Chucky, was deaf. It was my first creative use of the concept of constraint, performing a play without words. There was a moment, as I prepared to enter and die as the wicked witch, where I could see and feel everything: the amused neighborhood audience, my heart beating, Chucky pulling out his “sword,” the light filtering through the pine tree; a moment of supreme aliveness that I have continued chasing my whole life. Perhaps that event also planted the seed of passion for nonverbal expression.

My first mime partner pressed a copy of In Search of the Miraculous[1] into my hands, which I shelved and forgot about, because he kept telling me I was asleep, which I could not understand. Then one day in the clutches of existential angst, I prayed for an answer, and like in a Harry Potter movie, the book fell off my shelf. As I read Ouspensky’s description of his own sleep, I felt the shock of recognition, another moment of inexplicable vitality.

Then, during Movements, or during a Work weekend, and once in the presence of Madame de Salzmann, it happened again: that same, powerful sensation. It was sometimes piercing, occasionally beautiful, always ephemeral. Sensation became my Holy Grail. I began to unpack the ways my habits, conditioning and fear kept me in a self-sabotaging, repetitive loop of misery, sometimes like Ouspensky’s Ivan Osokin,[2] but more often like the film Groundhog Day.

However, I still had pain. Despite being a successful physical performer and teacher, my back, which had hurt since my 20s, continued to torture me. The only time it didn’t hurt was when I was performing—the carriage performed ably when the horse was thus engaged.

I first encountered the Feldenkrais Method at my chiropractor’s office. A magazine called Quest[3] featured an interview where Feldenkrais spoke of how our unconscious habits, he called them “parasitic,” interfered with our ability to live joyful, pain-free lives. Having lived in pain for decades, and having tried everything besides drugs, I dove into his book Awareness Through Movement[4] and found myself not only pain free, but eager to learn how and why something so apparently simple could be so powerful.

Feldenkrais defined the four components of action as thinking, sensing, moving, and feeling. All of these are taking place at once, yet we are unable to include everything with our ordinary attention. One way to begin to unpack the complexities of our thoughts and emotions is to begin with sensation (that Holy Grail again). But anyone who has tried to sense their feet while walking, or their hand as it reaches for the doorknob, knows the difficulty in both remembering to try and actually sensing what takes place.

Awareness Through Movement lessons, which occur in a group and are verbally guided by an instructor, are the first avenue of learning in the Feldenkrais Method. They remove the ordinary demands of daily living in order to allow us to pay attention to the subtle sensations that create our hidden tensions and holding patterns. Lying down reduces the battle with gravity. Moving slowly without a need for attainment creates space to notice breath, thoughts, gripping in the body. Being guided by verbal cues from the instructor eliminates the need for intellectual processing. Slowly, a person becomes aware of somatic patterns that interfere with healthy functioning. Rests are like moments of silence where one can attend to the flow of thoughts and observe emotional reactions to challenge, confusion, and constraint.

As my understanding of movement evolved, so did a clarity about my compulsions. In many Work conditions, I had begun to see that my need to be right was connected to my fear of being wrong. It had influenced many aspects of my behavior: wanting to be the best in the class, the smartest person in the room, and avoiding blame at all costs. These impressions were often the result of “being seen” by someone in a situation. The beauty of a Feldenkrais class is that you are the witness of your experience. Once we were doing a rather beautiful movement sequence on the floor. I found myself thinking, “I’m probably doing this better than anyone in the class. After all, I’m a trained dancer, a professional mime, I understand movement better than most.” I arched and rolled and gave it my all. Then I opened my eyes. No one was watching. No one cared. The notion that I didn’t have to impress anyone was a shock, I was paralyzed for several minutes, facing the abyss of the unknown. And the spaciousness of the environment allowed me to experience my ego, my contradictions, and a kind of relief at seeing myself so clearly.

After that, simply moving a leg, or allowing my fingers to slowly bend, folding, and unfolding my palm, became a doorway to a deeper understanding of what it really means to have “sensation.” Gurdjieff spoke about learning to reduce the tension in our “small muscles.”[5] But most of the time, I was either unaware of the existence of those muscles in my daily life demands or unable to access a path toward relaxation. Awareness Through Movement lessons offered the leisure to investigate the source of my gripping without judgment, to feel my jaw unlock without force, and to recognize that I was doing it for myself, not for approval or performance. This was the liberation my nervous system needed in order to become a properly functioning “three-story factory.”

Each lesson has a somatic theme: lengthening the spine, improving shoulder mobility, increasing head and neck rotation, etc. But within the physical instructions is a world of possibility for insight. It is the instructor’s responsibility to attend to students’ perceived obstacles, offer variations that can provide other insights and support the learning without correcting or forcing an outcome. Instead of telling students “Do it this way,” I offer them a path toward their own relationship to movement. Allowing people to do something “wrong” or encouraging them not to strive to “accomplish” initially felt like playing hooky from a lifetime of rigorous discipline. However, I saw that I was not the only one programmed to try to “do a good job.” This performance anxiety was just one of the many “parasites”[6] I began to observe in my students. And as I often would say to them, “I teach what I need to learn.” I continued to see my own tensions mirrored in how I presented the material.

Functional Integration, the second avenue of learning, is what Feldenkrais called a one-on-one lesson. Unlike the scripted lessons, which allow for exploration within a form, a Functional Integration session is like a slow-motion contact improvisation. A person comes with a problem, a wish, a curiosity. The practitioner then guides the student’s movement and attention, with a minimum of conversation. Instead of students doing the movement themselves, the practitioner moves the arms, legs, rotates the head, supports the ribs, etc., in an exploration of how their physical organization is affecting their ability to solve the problem, whether it’s a rotator cuff injury or a locked childhood trauma. At first, working intimately with one person at a time was terrifying to me. I was not well versed in anatomy. Most of my fellow graduates were massage and physical therapists. How could I possibly know what to do?

I stand before someone, usually someone who is suffering. I quiet my mind, sense my breath, and try to put myself in their shoes. The way they stand, their weight distribution, the curve of the shoulders, the position of the feet. I feel the stress of holding oneself together in the face of a protruding neck, a lifted hip, an overly rotated right leg. Each of these small unconscious choices creates a pattern of disorganization in the entire system. Feldenkrais often said that “Pain is the body’s response to disorganization.” The suffering is holistic: not just physical pain, but difficult emotions and ruminating thoughts that interfere with living joyfully.

I ask questions, assessing their perceived self-image or what the brain map is telling them. Often their description is the opposite of what I see. Or they feel nothing, but tell me, “My wife says that I limp.” Or they have an exaggerated idea of the distortion. I don’t correct them but let the questions reverberate as we go to the table. Sometimes there is a story—about an injury or trauma, although more often those that have experienced emotional trauma don’t reveal much in the beginning. They’ve been through so much therapy, perhaps it’s a relief not to have to talk. Yet.

What does it mean to “be touched”? How do I touch someone with a quality that gives permission to trust, to allow, to let go? The student can feel the difference between a touch that includes attention and compassion versus a formulaic approach, or a touch with an agenda. The touch of a Feldenkrais practitioner is an inquiry, creating a dialogue, “Does this move? Do you feel this? What’s in the way? What happened to the breath?” The nervous system responds, either yes or no, by relaxing or resisting.

Sometimes I’m lost and I just sit, waiting for a path, a strategy that will open for us. Those moments of feeling responsible, in the true sense of the word; being able to respond, require that I go slowly. Otherwise, my anxiety becomes their anxiety. Those moments are like a gift, reminding me that I can have a different quality of attention for myself.

At those times, I am able to witness how an inner effort can lead to a different connection with others. Sometimes quiet tears come streaming, unbidden as the student lies there. Sometimes ridiculous things are said, “I feel like I’m a cake baking in a 1950s oven.” “I think the tightness in my ribs is the result of the corset I was forced to wear in my past life.” Sometimes a revelation. “I forgot! I fell off a horse when I was 12. Never went to the doctor. Never connected it to this ankle pain.” “I think I’ve been cowering from the blows my entire life.” In both group classes and private sessions, the emphasis is not on trying to fix or change anything, but on becoming more aware.

When I began to unpack my own pain patterns, I began to see how my postural habits were the result of suppressed emotions: rage, sorrow, fear from a challenging childhood. I presented as a strong, almost aggressive, daring, and feisty bundle of energy. But the energy was laced with anxiety that kept me in a perpetual fight or flight pattern that had defined my outer persona and had created my chronic pain issues. This connection to emotions, posture, and pain has been my concentrated area of study. I wanted to know why I carried so much tension, why each person had their own unique walk, why some people were placid, and others were forceful and what that had to do with physical and emotional choices.

Perhaps this curiosity was why I became a mime in the first place, wanting to perfect the ability to express emotional states through the body. Or maybe my career as a mime caused me to want to go deeper. Like our physical and emotional states, it’s a chicken or egg kind of story.

As I began to understand the physiology of emotions—the chemical compounds, the neurological processes, the relation to the organs and sensation—I began to get a glimmer of understanding of the difference between emotions and feeling. My efforts to be impartial, to simply stand and listen to both outside and inside, impacts my students’ experience. They become quiet and interested in sensing themselves. It’s perhaps not the same as the global sensation of presence that comes from inner effort, but it is a movement toward wholeness.

Working with people who are deeply identified with a particular emotional state, I am sometimes able to provide a path toward a different kind of organization that leads to freedom. When a person begins to understand that, as Feldenkrais put it, “The mind is the body and the body is the mind,” a veil is lifted off what seemed to be a permanent slavery. Feldenkrais defined this slavery as compulsion, an inability to see options for how to respond. It reminded me of Mr. Gurdjieff’s analogy of the wax cylinders that form from habit. Freeing oneself from compulsion feels like a first step toward response-ability.

At this point in my career, I have taught thousands of classes, lifted thousands of heads. And yet I still feel like each lesson is a journey into the unknown. With each session, I have an opportunity to find something more in myself, a greater possibility, an invitation to discover new paths to freedom alongside my students. I get to begin again. □

Lavinia Plonka was a member of the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York for twenty years, and since 2002 has continued with the group in Asheville, North Carolina, where she is also a Movements instructor. She has taught the Feldenkrais Method internationally for over thirty years and maintains a private practice.