FGNA 2006-001
Cortical & Subcortical Motor Control
with Ralph Strauch

with appreciation to Zack Swartz, Onsite Recordings https://onsiterecording.net/

  Below is a Transcript of the First Session including Awareness Through Movement® Lesson (ATM®) Until the first Break.

RALPH STRAUCH
All the slides I am showing today – and a 20 year old article that is sort of related, although I was not using that terminology. I decided to give out the handouts with some trepidation.  I think there are both positives and negatives to giving them to you.  I will tell you about those and hopefully that will change the way you use them.

The negative is that there is a tendency when you get something like that to spend your time thumbing through it to see what is coming, which has you giving your attention to some presentation other than what is going on in the moment. And I think it is better if you stay with what is going on right now. So it is better if you do not read…  So that is the negative of handouts, that they distract you from what is happening.

The positive is that if I did not give handouts at least some of you would feel a compulsion to write down most everything that appears on the screen here. So if you have the handouts you do not have to do that. If you need to take notes, that is fine, but know that you do not have to take down anything you see on the screen because you have it already.

Okay. So, what do I mean by talking about the distinction between cortical and subcortical motor control? There are really two ways to make that distinction.
One way is a neurological distinction, in terms of the part of the nervous system we are talking about that is active.
Another way is an experiential distinction, how you experience movement and what you feel from it and so forth.
We are going to be dealing with both. As far as the neurological distinction I think it is quite likely there are people here who know more about the neurology than I do, so if that is the case please do not hesitate to correct me if I am wrong or to add anything you think is useful.

It is not totally clear to me that the neurological and experiential distinctions really totally track. In other words, not everything experiential I will describe as subcortical happens below the cortex or everything I describe as cortical happens in the cortex.

I still think it is a useful way to make the distinction though, so with that we want to look at the role of each form of control, what each of them does and the balance between them.
Sometimes people talk about cortical or subcortical control as though it were an either/or, one thing is happening or the other. But everything is always going on. The entire nervous system is always at work in everything we do, so the question is how these different parts of the system are balanced in terms of the way we organize our movements and our perceptions and so forth.
Then we want to look at how we as Feldenkrais practitioners can use that balance between cortical and subcortical activity.

ATM BEGINS
First I want to play a little bit with the experiential distinction between the two.
So find a comfortable place on the floor and stretch out. Feel the floor, let it support you. Do whatever kind of body scan you are used to and comfortable with, you do not need as much detail as I might give to a naive audience. You are all very used to exploring yourselves.

Then begin to gently press the back of your head into the floor a little bit and let it go. Just press and release. Press and release. Notice what that feels like and how the sensations of pressure and release spread through your body. Can you press and release without holding your breath or do you hold your breath when you do it? What is it like if you press as hard as you can and how is that different from almost just imagining the press, just getting a very light sensation.  As we know, light pressure is actually better for this sort of thing because if you really work hard at it then you create a lot of tensions in your body that block other things and your sense of what is going on and so forth.
Okay, let go of that and rest for a moment.

Now gently press your heels into the floor and then release. Notice those sensations. Notice what you feel in your pelvis, in your back, in your head as you gently press your heels into the floor and release.  This really works better if your legs are outstretched long, but if you are not comfortable with that it is fine to keep them up. So just press and release, press and release.

Now, begin to do both at the same time. Press your head and heels into the floor, then release. Press both and then release both. Vary the effort you put into this and notice how the information you get changes. You get more information with less effort. Notice your breathing. If you are holding your breath as you press you are working too hard.
Let go of that and rest. As always the rests are not a break from the process but a continuation of it in another form, giving the nervous system a chance to process some of the information you have been generating. They give you a chance to sense change.
Do not talk to yourself about the changes you feel. Just feel them. Once you begin to put it into words, even silent words internally, you have left the experience and are moving to the verbal description. So just stay in the experience.

Now gently begin to alternate, pressing and releasing the head and then the heels. This can be a very hard lesson for people who have no worked with themselves a lot because it requires so little movement. People like to make things happen and you cannot really make much happen here. It is just a question of letting things be very gentle and noticing.
Let go of that and rest.

Note your sacrum now, the triangular bone lying at the base of your spine that connects with the two ilia on either side of it. Press that into the floor a little bit and release. Gently press and release. As you do, see if you can sense movement in the sacroiliac joints. The joints widen slightly as you press or as you release. Sense what happens to your sacroiliac joints as you press your sacrum into the floor. Does the sacroiliac widen a little bit or does it narrow? Are you changing the whole configuration of the sacrum and the two ilia with that pressure.
Again, do not answer that question in words. Just allow yourself to be with whatever is happening in that area. The sacroiliac joints are very important to our mobility, to our strength and our power, yet many people have almost no sense of them because we tend to make our pelvis into one big lump rather than into this flexible fluid structure that it really is.
Let go of that and rest.

Press your head and heels into the floor again, both together, and then let go. Continue doing that for a while. Then as your head and heels release, press your sacrum slightly into the floor so that you are alternating between pressing the sacrum and pressing the head and heels.
If you have a good imagination you can imagine that you are bridging with your head and heels, lifting your body into the air and then letting your body come down and lifting the two ends. So you are alternating the principle point of support, between the head/heel split, and the sacrum.
Just let yourself sense that alternation. Try different speeds. Speed it up a little faster. Slow it down. Do it a little slower. See if you can apply the Goldilocks test – you will find a speed that is too fast and one that is too slow and somewhere in the middle there is one that is just right.  There are a lot of things we do that the Goldilocks test is very useful for.
Let go of that and rest.

How did your breathing change when you stopped? If there was a big change in your breathing when you let go and rest then you are working too hard. Do not work hard. You do not get points for working hard.

Now alternate between your head and your pelvis. Press your head into the floor and release and then your sacrum.
Then alternate just between your feet and your sacrum. Press your heels into the floor and release and then your sacrum.
Now add the head so you are going in sequence. Pressing the heels, sacrum, head, sacrum, heels. Just go back and forth, kind of up and down your body that way.  See what that feels like.
Then let go of that and rest.

Notice somewhere in the middle of your back, maybe down around T8 and T9. There is a variant that kind of feels like the middle of your back. Press that area gently into the floor and release. Notice as you do, how the rest of your spine responds, what happens to the pressure between your pelvis and the floor.
Then let go of that and rest.

Notice now the spaces behind your knees. Sense how large those spaces are, whether both are the same or if there is a bigger space behind one knee than the other.
Very gently make that space a little smaller.  The backs of your knees will not touch the floor so you cannot press them against it very well, but you can flatten your legs a little more to just slightly reduce the space and then allow it to come back to its natural size. So very gently pressing and releasing the backs of the knees.
What happens in your torso when you do this? What happens in the contact between your spine and rib cage and the floor as you flatten your knees a little bit?
Then begin to explore doing both of those things at the same time, pressing with the middle of your back and flattening your knees. Do both both things and let go, both and let go.
The begin to alternate between the two. Press your back into the floor. Then let go of that and press the back of your knees into the floor. Back, then knees. Then let go of that and rest.

Notice your breathing. Notice your sense of yourself. Go through the scan you went through when you first lay down. See what changes there may be in your image of yourself through the lesson.

Sense the space under your neck. Notice the curve of your neck, the space between it and the floor, and make that space a little smaller. Flatten your neck gently against the floor, then let it come back to its natural curve.
Let that go and rest.
Now notice the spaces under your ankles. Make that space a little smaller – flatten your ankles slightly against the floor then let them come up.
And gently begin to combine those two movements at the same time, flattening your neck and your ankles. How does that stretch you out? How much longer do you get when you do that? You might feel a slight sense of elongation as you flatten and a slight compression as you let go.
Now alternate, first flatten your neck and as it comes up then flatten your ankles. Neck, ankles, neck, ankles.  Okay, let go of that and rest.

Now sense the curve under the small of your back, the lumbar curve. The spine may come completely off the floor, may have a space there that some little insect or small animal could crawl through, or if it is against the floor that place has less pressure.  Then slowly gently flattening and releasing the small of your back against the floor.  Then let go and rest.
Press your head against the floor and release a few times. Then press your heels as your head releases, going back and forth between them. Then add the sacrum, so you are alternating between the head and the sacrum and the heels and the sacrum and the head. Up and down.

Next time you go up and down, add the spaces under the middle of your back and your knees. So now you press with your heels, then decreasing the space behind your knees, then the sacrum, then behind the middle of your back and then pressing the back of your head.
As you do this gradually begin to add the other places we have looked at. From your head you flatten your spine a little bit before you go to the middle of your back. Then you flatten your lumbar curve a little bit before you go to your sacrum.
Then maybe something we have not done is to flatten your upper thighs a little bit before you go to the knees.

Eventually you are just going up and down your body, pressing slightly into the floor and releasing and each time you release one you move to the next spot. Any other spots you find as you are doing this that may feel like they ought to be included, then include them. Just move up and down your body at whatever pace feels like a good pace to you.

At some point, as you are doing that, you may find that the movement almost takes over and is almost happening by itself. When that happens allow it. Then you do not have to keep intentionally pressing, but let yourself go into a sense of feeling a wave going up and down your body, from your feet to your head and back down. And just allow that wave to flow, just observing it go.

See if you can imagine that somewhere in the recesses of your skull there is a volume knob. Without doing anything in particular if you turn the volume up the wave will get a little bigger and if you turn it down a bit the wave will get a little bit smaller.
If you just imagine a knob in your head that controls the volume of the wave, you are not going to be doing something. You are just going to think about it getting bigger or smaller and see how that might change your experience.
Now gradually turn the volume knob down so that the actual movement in your body becomes less and less, down to almost imperceptible but where you can still sense a movement, a sense of a wave moving up and down your body even with nothing actually moving.
Now turn the volume knob up slow and see if you can amplify that sense of movement to the point where you feel the wave, from your head down through your body, getting larger.
Notice there are different ways you can watch the wave. You can kind of from some outside perspective you can just watch the whole thing.  You can see it going up and down the way you might stand at the beach and watch the waves.
Or you can ride it. You can get on it. So you are always feeling the point of pressure and riding it as it goes up and down your body. As you are doing that you can step off at some point.
So you are riding it for a while and then you can step off the next time it goes past your pelvis and just sit there and just sit there and watch the pelvis rise and fall by itself in the wave.

So it is all the same activity with a lot of different ways of taking it in. Just do whatever feels interesting to you. Just spend a few minutes exploring what you find interesting about this wave movement – either changing its amplitude, letting it go up and down, watching it from different perspectives..
Or, if you feel like you’ve had enough, just letting it go altogether and just being with who you are and how you feel right now.

Gradually turn the volume down and let the wave subside. If you are imagining watching the surface of a wave moving back and forth on water then imagine it gets less and less until the surface becomes flat.
Sense who you are in that flatness. Are you the same person now who laid down on the floor at the beginning of the lesson or are you somebody different? Just register that.

When you are ready, just think about coming back up to sitting and standing, to coming back into the world and moving around. Stay in this place as you do that as much as it seems feasible.

We will take a short break for about ten minutes.

During the break stay with this way of being as much as you want to. You may find you would just as soon not talk to people. You may if you want to, but if you feel like being quiet you can be.