The Beliefs That Shape Your Movement #162

What do you believe about your body, and is it true?

So many of us carry beliefs about our movement that we've never questioned, such as “I'm just not coordinated. I've always been stiff. My family all has bad backs. Of course things hurt more as I get older.”

These beliefs can feel like settled fact, but often they're simply stories we've absorbed from family, teachers, doctors, or our own past experiences, and they can be changed.

In this episode, I share how a belief I held about aging, back when I was in my late twenties, kept me stuck until I found the Feldenkrais MethodⓇ. I also share a story about a client whose fall and a chiropractor's honest but heavy-handed reading of her X-rays led her to believe she could no longer move freely, even though the fall itself had caused no real harm.

We'll talk about why your brain doesn't respond to affirmations alone. It needs evidence. And how the small, easeful experiences created through FeldenkraisⓇ Awareness Through MovementⓇ lessons, even movements done in the imagination, can give your nervous system exactly the kind of proof it needs to update old beliefs.

Key takeaways:

• Many of the things we believe about our bodies (stiffness, lack of coordination, inevitable decline) are beliefs, not facts, and beliefs can be revised
• Beliefs about our movement can come from family, coaches, teachers, healthcare providers, or a single striking moment, like seeing a radiograph of our spine
• Aging brings real changes, but that doesn't mean learning and improvement stop
• The brain needs felt evidence, not just repeated affirmations, to shift a belief
• FeldenkraisⓇ lessons can create experiences of ease that give the nervous system new information that can change your beliefs about yourself 
• Imagining a movement clearly, as if you're doing it rather than watching it, activates many of the same brain regions as physically moving
• Slower, smaller movements often create more learning than effort or striving
• This same capacity for learning and change applies to our horses and dogs too, not just to us

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello. What do you believe about yourself? What do you believe about your movement, about your body? You know, I often hear people say, I'm just not coordinated. I never was coordinated. I'm never going to be coordinated. Or I'm just not athletic or, you know, I've always been stiff. It's just the way, just the way I've always been. And they don't expect anything different. Or this is one again, I hear a lot.

Oh, my family, we all have bad knees or we all have bad backs or bad shoulders, whatever it happens to be. Or again, this is a super, super common one. Well, I'm getting older. Of course my movement is going to be limited. Of course things are going to hurt. Of course things are going to fall apart. And as a matter of fact, I have personal experience with that belief because I started saying to myself, you know, I.

I was having severe carpal tunnel syndrome in both arms. My back was tight and stiff, my neck was stiff. You know, I started having. Well, I had had by that point years of pain in my hip and limitation. And I remember saying, I have to expect this. I'm getting older. And I was in my late 20s when I said that. And I believed it. That's the sad part.

But fortunately for me, I learned about the Feldenkrais method, which is something that. Now I've been teaching it for over 30 years. And that turned me right around. It gave me hope, it gave me what we call biological optimism, that I could look at these beliefs and change them. I could have different experiences that would just totally change my mindset about aging or about coordination or about athleticism, about flexibility, all those things.

So because we really need to, to, to question these things that we think are facts about us, are they really facts or are they simply beliefs that we've convinced ourselves are true? Right? That's what, that's what beliefs are. And, you know, our brains naturally create beliefs, right? They help us make sense of the world. And they can come from personal experience, they can come from your family. They can come from teachers or coaches or doctors or other healthcare people.

You know, if you think about it, if you had someone that was important in your life say to you, oh, you know what? Stick to reading books. You're. You're not athletic. You know, you hear people, they make pronouncements like this that they'll just tell someone, oh, you'll never be coordinated. You're. You're not elegant or you can't dance or you can't sing or anything like that. I mean, that can have a profound effect on how a person develops what beliefs they carry about themselves.

Right. It becomes, you know, you, you get limited to this box. Or you could just, you know, have these beliefs. Like there was this client I used to work with, her German shepherds, and she had these wonderful German shepherds. And she could see the value in the work because one dog had hip dysplasia. And now that dog could do things it couldn't do before. So that was all well and good, but she wasn't interested in having sessions herself.

Okay. But she had a fall one day. Her German shepherds actually pulled her. They saw a squirrel or a cat or something, they pulled her and she fell on the sidewalk. And so she went to a chiropractor to get checked out, and the chiropractor took X rays of her back and said, oh, yeah, you didn't break anything. You're fine from the fall. But look at this, look at these X rays.

You have all, you have arthritis here and there and this and that is going on. And, you know, he put this fear in her. And ever since that experience, ever since she saw those X rays and had things pointed out to her of what was wrong with her, she lived life like in bubble wrap. She didn't want to do anything. She was so worried about hurting herself. I thought it was really sad, really sad situation because it wasn't the fall that caused anything.

The fall was actually no big deal. It was now she had, she saw, you know, radiographs where the, the chiropractor was pointing out all these problems with her. And so she, she took on a belief that she could no longer move easily. So that's a, that's a, you know, an example of a situation where that person, I don't think he meant it, you know, in, in that kind of a harmful way, but she created a belief around what he said.

I won't even fault him. He said what he noticed on the, on the radiographs. And then she created a belief based on that. And probably there was other reasons because other people may, might have said, ah, I was fine before the, I saw these before you X rayed me, and I'm going to be fine after. But she was, for whatever reason, really ripe in creating that belief about herself.

Okay, so that's one example of how that type of belief can be, you know, kind of provoked, if you will, by an outside person. So. But now let's talk a little bit about aging, right? I mentioned earlier about. Lots of us have this idea that there's this Horrible, inevitable downhill decline as we get older and that we're not capable of improving. It's like we're past our prime. I don't believe that.

I have evidence in my own life that that's not true. I have evidence with many of my clients and students. But I will say this. I think it's important that we acknowledge that things do change as we age. They change for us, they change for our horses, they change for our dogs. I mean, there are changes, right? You know, maybe those chronic injuries, you know, maybe you start to develop arthritis from different ways of using yourself over the years.

You might be losing strength if you're not using strength, you know, recovery might take longer. I mean, things do change. So acknowledge that. We don't want to act like, you know, those things are untrue to some degree. However, here's the question. Do those changes mean that we can't continue learning? Of course they don't. Learning and improving can happen at any age and any level of fitness. I have seen this over and over with humans.

Yes. And also with horses and dogs. Some degree of improvement is possible at any age and any level of condition. But let's talk about the difference between limitations, these kind of self imposed limitations we put on and how we feel about new possibilities. Because sometimes we confuse, you know, an experience we're having now with tomorrow's potential. We sort of discount this idea that we can get better. You know, maybe you have a stiff neck, so turning your head feels difficult today.

Or maybe the way you stand up out of a chair is not very comfortable for you. Maybe it puts a strain on your knees or something like that. Those are experiences, those are valid experiences, but they don't necessarily define your future. The brain is always learning. And with the right information, the right learning, which I teach through the Feldenkrais method, you know, you can, you can choose new experiences that help your nervous system learn something different, right?

And that this then can be used to change your beliefs about yourself. Okay, so this is, this is what's so important. The brain needs evidence, right? You might want to change belief about yourself and you might recite affirmations, you might write things down, you might post memes or quotes or something like that. And those are, those can be helpful. You know, motivational quotes can be super helpful, right?

You might tell yourself, I'm going to think differently. But here's the thing. Our brains want evidence that this new information is really true, right? It's not just about I'm going to tell myself I'm Graceful and coordinated. You give me evidence of that. Your brain says, okay, so without that evidence, your old beliefs remain convincing to your brain. So this is why I love the Feldenkrais method so much.

Right? And this is where your own work comes in. Because when we do a Feldenkrais Awareness through movement lesson, it's not about correcting you. It's not about telling you the quote, unquote right way to move or making you stretch further or pushing through discomfort. It's about creating a particular kind of experience, a learning experience, an experience where you feel ease and new possibilities arise. So, you know, maybe as you're doing a Feldenkrais lesson, your breathing gets freer.

That's a really important experience for your brain that can start creating new neural connections, right? Maybe your shoulders feel lighter and freer. That's real evidence for your brain that movement can feel easier and more coordinated, more elegant, right? So then maybe after the Feldenkrais lesson, you get up and walk and you notice, wow, my hips are really free. My back feels nice and loose and comfortable. That's, again, real evidence of improvement, about helping you feel that movement can be easy and light and athletic feeling, right?

Because you start to coordinate your parts differently. So that evidence can be used for your brain to update its beliefs. Right? And. And here's the thing. You might think, well, how do I go from feeling tight and stiff and old to feeling this way? Here's the thing. When you do a Feldenkrais lesson, you modify it to suit yourself. So in other words, I work with people all the time that have had either through, you know, wear and tear, maybe through arthritis or through maybe some serious injuries, they've, you know, really damaged their hips or their knees or their shoulders or their backs, what.

What have you, right? It happens. Or their neck. And we can always modify a Feldenkrais lesson so that even with those limitations, even with those restrictions, the movement can feel easy. It might be really, really small, slow movement at first. That's totally fine. What we're looking for is a sensation and experience of ease, right? Of breathing freely as you move, of linking ease and comfort with movement. That's when your brain will say, oh, movement doesn't have to be something I restrict.

I can now expand on this. And a lot of times this starts simply in your imagination. Because when you think, for example, if there's a movement and it's difficult to do for whatever reason, arthritis, some other injury, what have you, right? Tightness, you can imagine doing the movement. But here's what's important, you have to imagine it as if you're actually doing it, not that you're watching someone do it on a movie screen.

Right? You need to imagine yourself doing the movement. And this is what I find fascinating. A lot of my students, when they first imagine a movement, they might have difficulty imagining it because in their brain, that movement is difficult for them to do. So then it becomes, let's break it down even more. Let's do it smaller and slow. Even in your imagination, do it smaller and slower. And then here's what's really fun.

When you clearly imagine doing a movement, you're waking up a lot of parts of the brain that are involved in actually moving. So you start to lay the groundwork, the foundations for easy, healthy movement. And this can start rewiring your brain. You can start creating new neural connections. You can start changing those beliefs. And then people will often start moving, like in a tiny way without even realizing it.

So when they imagine very clearly, right, they actually start doing the movement, but they're doing it from a place of ease and comfort and safety. So again, the brain wants to expand on that. So it's a really cool. It's a really cool tool to use, you know, your imagination. It's something that Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais, the man who created the Feldenkrais method, was a big proponent of. And since his work, you know, functional MRI studies have shown how different parts of the brain get activated when we imagine doing a movement.

So it's very cool. So we can use experience to reshape mindset. I mean, think about that. People are always talking about changing your mindset, right? Changing your beliefs. Well, we can use experience, kind of, you know, mindful experience to reshape those beliefs, to reshape your mindset. So this is an important part, too, is to. To remember that learning doesn't mean something has to be difficult. Like, you don't need to be striving and straining to create a positive learning experience.

In fact, the opposite is usually true. So again, like I mentioned earlier, you can slow down, you can do much smaller movements, maybe just do imaginary movements or what we. Some of us refer to as just past a thought. It's like you're thinking of it, and then you do a little bit more. A lot of times that just happens naturally, as I mentioned earlier. So those conditions, right, make it easier for the brain to notice new possibilities.

Right? It's not protecting itself. Right. It's not worrying now. It's like, oh, this is easy. So that's why it's, you know, in the Feldenkrais method, when I'm teaching a Feldenkrais class, I am often encouraging my students to go slower and to do less because I know their brains will notice more and give them more opportunities to improve how they move and how they feel and what they believe about themselves.

So I would say instead of asking yourself, well, how do I change beliefs, ask what experience can I give my brain today? And remember that evidence will drive your brain to. To update its beliefs, right? And make them more in. Align with how you want your life to go, how you want to live your life. So probably pretty empowering belief would be, you know, you. You don't want to act like you'll never experience pain or stiffness.

You know, that's not really realistic, right? But what about if you had this belief? My nervous system can continue to learn and improve. You can embrace what we call biological optimism, right? Understanding that your, you, your whole self has an intelligence that strives for health and wholeness. And you can tap into that, and tap into that so you can experience greater comfort in your movement, greater ease, greater athleticism, right?

Better coordination. And so you. You add them in as bits of evidence. So again, I encourage you, and I do have some free resources. Whether you're a horse person or a dog person, it doesn't matter. You can do the rider masterclass. You're just sitting in a chair. You're not riding a horse. But it can give you experience of improvement, of noticing what it's like to have movement feel easy, elegant, and fun.

Right? Because there's always new possibilities to discover. So just to wrap up, Will, I say, I recognize I'm not the same person as I was when I was 25. However, in so many ways, I actually feel younger. Because I know now after doing this work for more than three decades, that this work allows so many new possibilities of body and mind to open up to us. So, you know, so aging might be real to some extent, but so is learning and improvement.

So I hope you all recognize that power that's inside you, that you can look at your beliefs, you can change things. You can start to experience ease and comfort and flexibility in your body and in your mind. This is what's really important. Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais used to say, when what I'm not after is flexible bodies, but flexible minds. In other words, we can change our beliefs so they can help us live the lives that we want to live that really fulfill us and that we could have the most fun with our horses and dogs at the same time and we can keep up with them, right?

Give them the best lives possible. And I'll be talking more about this idea in future episodes about how we develop habits of movement and also how our horses and dogs develop those habits of movements and what we can do to help change them for the better as well. So thank you so much for listening. I love sharing this work with you and I look forward to talking to you again soon.

Bye for now.

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