Transform how you move, feel and live

Like many people, I was often told as a child that I was too emotional. Too volatile, my older brother used to say! But our emotions keep us alive and safe.

Emotions move us towards action.

Think about it. Anger and fear, in different ways push us towards action – running towards or away from danger. Love, whether passionate or platonic and joy, open us for connection. We’re pack animals, we need others to survive and thrive. (And procreate, from a biological point of view.) We need to feel safe to be vulnerable, for the emotions that we have to be able to move in and out as needed, as appropriate.

Like everything else that we do, and learn, we have habits of emotional connection. Or disconnection. Some which serve us well, or for some time at least, and others that are less useful.

We could think about therapy, it can be a very useful avenue to change our thinking. But for me, it was thinking about emotions from a physical standpoint which moved the needle. The first time I realised how powerful this could be was in a Feldenkrais class. It’s what made me decide to do the professional Feldenkrais training.

Thinking about emotions from the body

We were doing a lesson where we had to move our legs in a certain way, and I got a flashback to my childhood. Suddenly, I was back in Great Ormond Street Hospital in the orthopaedic department. I was lying down with a surgeon observing 7-year-old me, like a man buying a horse. Prior to some leg operation or other. He was moving parts of my legs to analyse what was going on. As if they belonged to him, rather than me. (A common experience many of us have had from surgeons from that era.) Not a terrible flashback as they go, but nevertheless extraordinary.

One moment I was on the floor in a class in London. The next, reliving an experience 30 years prior on a hospital bed. And then a few moments later returned to the present. Shocking at the time, and I took a little moment to come back to myself. N.B. it is unusual to experience flashbacks in a class, a little less so in the one-to-one work. But for me it was the first of many, some more dramatic than others. They have all been moments to experience difficult things I had to deal with as a child as an adult.

There’s a power of moving in this way with attention. By adulthood our physical movements are neurologically tied to emotions, and memories. I made a movement out of my habitual realm, in a way that someone else had done to me prior, and it triggered a memory.

Body-mind symbiosis

This clear mind-body symbiosis is more common in a hands-on session. People remember historical injuries that they’ve forgotten when I’ve asked at the beginning. When I’ve been moving them for a while, or moved that part of the body in a certain way, then the event comes back to them.

My favourite example of this is from one of my colleagues. He was studying hands-on work, around the abdomen. His learning partner asked if he’d had any injuries in the area, before she started. He said no. After she’d been moving his fascia around on the inside of the pelvis, he remembered a childhood incident. His father was a butcher, and he’d run straight into the shop, straight into his Dad’s butcher’s knife. And got stabbed in the guts. Luckily the knife went missed the intestines, and went into the bone rather than the guts. So whilst messy, he just needed stitching up. But he had completely forgotten. Forgotten something so extraordinary! Movement had brought it up from his memory banks!

The physical and mental are one thing. There’s no separation between our bodies and brains. We are an embodied brain.

Physical sensation is how we experience the world outside of us. It’s also how we build patterns of thought into what we know as emotions.

An emotion is not only a thought.

It’s made up of three things: a facial expression, breathing and body-holding patterns. It’s what influences changes of vocal flavour when we’re upset or happy. The physical tension or release is what moves us into action. Think of anger. When people are angry beyond thought, there’s a build up of tension which needs a release. It’s why people cry when they’re angry when violence is socially unacceptable. It’s a release of the physical tension of anger. Sadness directs that tension more inward. Fear can be both inwards and outwards tension.

The happier emotions of joy and platonic love have less tension attached. There’s a opening up which allows us to connect with more ease to the world and people around us. It’s not only mental, but physical. Perhaps you’ve noticed that on some days strangers are more likely to chat to you than others. That physical tonus level is something felt on an unconscious level.

It’s part of how we learn to move towards things that bring us joy, and away from things that cause us discomfort. How we decide which people to bring into our lives, or keep more distant from. Those physical sensations are inbuilt into the emotions.

If we can sense them, we can change them.

When we’re anxious, or upset, can learn to have more ability to shift our emotions. From anxiety towards action. From fear into joy. From weakness towards power.