DIFFERENTIATING AND HEADACHE “CURE”
If you have been following the essays in the WakeUp Feldenkrais sections, you have seen that this work is not about "fixing," but about finding greater unities and connections, by bringing back into awareness and actions parts of us have atrophied or been forgotten or never discovered.
We don’t fix.
And yet, when the headache comes on, we want it to "go away."
And, as
Anat Baniel made clear in the recent training segment I attended: if we have something going "wrong," the problem is almost always in insufficient differentiation.
What does that mean if you haven't been to a Feldenkrais or Anat Baniel Training of late? It means that things are too simplified and tied together, that there is not enough subtly and complexity.
Say Iraq. Bad Hussein. Good USA. Solution: get rid of bad Hussein. And what has been the result?
Or in a marriage, when one partner gets stuck on some idea that the mate should "listen to me more." And that becomes the mantra, the demand, the complaint. None of the subtlety of when do they listen, when do they not listen, how do I make it hard or easy for them to listen, when do I listen, when do I act closed to them in just the way I complain they are closed to me. The
Work of Byron Katie is nothing if not the differentiation of our fixed and enslaving "thinking / feeling" habits.
Anyway, with a headache, differentiation can often evoke amazing changes. This is just something I invented along the way.
The first and amazing idea, is to let the headache be, and get interested in it. This is the first and greatest differentiation: headache as something of which we can be aware, vs. headache as something being imposed on us from Beyond.
So here we go, on an awareness and differentiation parade.
On the in breath sense the headache on the right half of the skull and head, and on the out breath the left side. Then sense the exact contours of the headache while doing that, what is its size and shape. Its exact size and shape and texture.
Then begin to give the left half, now sensed as an exact shape, a certain color during the out breath, and the right half, now sensed as an exact shape, a certain color during the in breath.
And while doing this, sense the larger body and its shape as containing this smaller, two part, two colored, exact shaped headache.
So we have all this differentiation in the headache: right and left. Inside the contours of the headache and outside. The headache itself and the larger body. Our breathing in and our breathing out.
With all these to pay attention to and follow, and become interested in, the pain is often forgotten, and even when it is there, it is just in the headache contours and not in the rest of us, and is half the time in the awareness of one side of the head and in a certain color and shape, and half the time the pain is over on the other side in a certain color and shape.
Under this onslaught of interesting possibilities for attention the "pain" almost always dissolves. Our attention passes from out of our control victimhood, to in charge intentional exploration. We are no longer run by the "headache."
We are free to watch the headache, and to discover the awareness that is much closer to who we really are than this pain. We are the doer and the awarer and the explorer.
This is good.
