Quiet body, quiet mind: Not just for meditation
By Richard Adelman April 18, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Lecture-demonstration
Feldenkrais embodiment therapy
Richard Adelman
Mon, Apr 28,m 7pm
LifePath Center
Recreo 80
50 pesos 

Historically, there have been meditation practices in which people have deliberately subjected themselves to pain.

Their search for transcendence may have led them to immerse themselves in the pain ecstatically or to cultivate the power of mind to separate themselves from it. I cannot comment philosophically or religiously on these practices, but I can say that they are very problematic from the point of view of somatic psychology and “the life of the body.”

Our deepest truths (ethical, religious, and spiritual) come from our bodily protoplasmic process The life pulsing and flowing within us speaks to us directly about the nature of Being and about our connection with the greater life which transcends us. Even the psychoanalyst Jung, who was not noted for having a bodily approach, wrote that “the soul is the experience of the inside of the body.” Joseph Campbell, who revealed the profoundly imaginative mytho-poetic energies resounding through history and our daily lives, said “myth comes from the body.”

Let’s consider the idea of reducing effort and maximizing comfort in the sitting posture, especially with respect to meditation. Neuromuscular pain—in the legs, pelvis, hips, or spine—can be an annoying distraction not just while meditating but anytime we are sitting.

It poses a challenge to the process of concentration and can interfere with the quality and limit the duration of the sitting itself. Beyond that, in the face of continuing pain, most people instinctively begin breathing in a shallow manner and in general try to escape from their body. They may not be conscious of this process of disembodiment, but it occurs nonetheless.

From my point of view, how we are present in our body is of the utmost importance. Too much tension may evoke discomfort or pain while too little may result in a tendency to collapse, and may ultimately result in pain as well. More profoundly, improper tension interferes with the body’s normal rhythmic movements of expansion and contraction: when we are squeezed and hypertense, for instance, we don’t allow room for our life forces to well up, pulsate and flow within us. We are suffering from overly restricted boundaries. On the other hand, when these are too weak and porous, we have difficulty making a proper container for our experiences and they may leak out or drift away. Too much rigidity or density means we don’t receive; too much looseness or flaccidity and we are unable to contain.

At issue here is one’s personal bodily form. Stanley Keleman, a somatic therapist in Berkeley, California, has developed a very powerful approach to dealing with these concerns which he calls “formative psychology.” Formative psychology embraces the connections between the bodily, emotional, imaginative and spiritual aspects of our lives. I have been fortunate to study with him since 1970.

Among many other influences, Keleman was a student and colleague of the great teacher Karlfried Graf Von Durckheim, who achieved an original synthesis of Zen and European Jungian and existential depth psychology and said, “Any incorrect bodily form, any hypertension, any cramped condition—understood existentially—is an expression of an ingrained wrong attitude. The manner in which he is physically present and the degree of his permeability reveal the point at which a man has arrived on his way to maturity—which is to say toward integration with his essential being.”

Keleman has developed a way of working with oneself which he calls the “Bodying Practice.” It entails learning to make a series of micromovements: very subtle, deliberate modifications in the intensity of a posture or gesture in order to “embody” that posture. This is a way to come to know yourself, to develop intimacy with your patterns. It is a way to develop a personal relationship with your reflexive, habitual patterns so that you can learn to influence them and not merely be victimized by them, to learn to make variations and differentiations in how you organize and use yourself in the world. It is part of a natural developmental, maturational, evolutionary process. It has a broad range of applicability from helping people to manage stress in daily life to helping them on their way to become, in Durckheim’s words, “transparent to transcendence.”

With respect to sitting, for instance, a person can be helped to discover how they go about bracing and stiffening, or compacting, or perhaps collapsing themselves. They can then learn to make modifications within this pattern, to find a place of relatively easier physical balance and comfort and to begin to feel more peacefully grounded, contained and at home in themselves.

Two other useful approaches to enhancing ease in sitting are the Feldenkrais and Pilates methods. In conjunction they can be very effective in relieving/preventing distractions from pain and discomfort by increasing flexibility in the hips and the spine, safely strengthening the spine and the deeper abdominal muscles, and developing the body awareness people need to locate and stay easily balanced within their personal comfort zone. Although I believe it is not intrinsic to them, both these disciplines can be used formatively to help people contact the life feeling within their postures, to learn to recognize that as they change their muscle tone, range of movement, or body shape they may in fact be altering how they exist, who they are as a person and where they are on their path to spiritual maturity.

Richard Adelman, M.A. psychology, has a combined total of more than 80 years’ experience with the methodologies of formative psychology, Feldenkrais and Pilates. He can be reached at his San Miguel cell 044 (415) 114-3069 or at richardadelman@gmail.com.