Exploring Your Self-Image Through Feldenkrais

What’s your self-image like? How much of yourself can you feel?

Our brains model ourselves in 3D. So if there are parts that aren’t present in our thinking about ourselves, we can’t organise them well.

How do we know if our self-image is good?

We need to have something to measure. And to start this process, scans are the most useful tool.

Over time, you learn to remember what it was like before, and what it’s like now. In that noticing of changes is the kinaesthetic learning.

It’s not like other learning: where it’s about facts or skills of doing. It’s more like a skill of being, of sensing yourself in three dimensions. Of adding more pixels to the image of yourself, so you can see yourself with greater clarity.

Try scanning your body

You can read through, or I’ve recorded it for you especially. You can download the audio on my website.

1. Take a moment. Sit down somewhere. Make yourself comfortable. Close your eyes (it’s easier for most of us to feel internally with the eyes closed). And imagine you’re creating a 3D version of yourself from the top down.
2. What can you feel from the top of your head downwards? Is it easier to feel the front or the back? The right or the left?
3. Is one side of the face clearer to sense than the other? Can you feel both ears? If so, with the same clarity?
4. Can you feel how the cheek morphs into the jaw? The shape at the back of the head? The way it curves into the neck underneath the head? How many planes can you feel in your neck?
5. Can you feel the neck sliding into the top of your shoulders? And then fill in the arms, the hands? Are you sensing certain surfaces, or the whole three dimensional container? Notice, without judgement if you can.
6. Note what’s clear, what’s hazy, what’s missing. If we want to improve we have to know what’s there.
7. How much of the back, the armpits, the front of the torso can you feel? Do you sense your breast? Can you feel the back of it? Can you sense the ribs underneath the breast, the ribs, and the low back? Is one side shorter than the other? Where is it easy to be continuous? Where is it more a collection of parts?
8. How much of your pelvis do you sense - the belly button at the font, the undulations around to the back of the buttocks. How the pelvis folds into the legs? Underneath- can you sense the sit bones? Your anus, urethra, genitalia? Moving down the legs, how continuous are they? Can you sense the knees all around, the lower legs, the ankles? The feet – the soles of your feet?

If you weren’t able to feel so much, don’t worry, you’re not alone. The majority of people have trouble with this.

Are there differences in the level of clarity?

Repeat the scan without my words a few times.

Is the left side clearer than the right? Is that true all the way down? Or does it change? Don’t theorise. or conceptualise what may or may not be true, or what someone else has told you about yourself. What do you sense? Right now, in the present moment.

Are you feeling the surface, or also the content? What would it include to feel inside and outside? If we think of the head, that would include the eyeballs, the mouth, the teeth, tongue, nose, and other fleshy areas?

Where are the gaps for you?

Most of us have areas that are hazier. Some have gaps, parts that are completely missing. Often in different places, for different reasons.

The first times I did this, I had big gaps in various places too.

I could feel my feet, ankles, knee caps, and then my thighs. In my self image, I didn’t have backs of knees. I had endless surgeries as a child, and learnt to disassociate to get through.

Clients share with me their own missing areas too. I’ve had people who couldn’t feel their neck, or shoulders, or who had cut their ankles out of their self image. Some who had gone through operations too. They’d cut the operated area out of their picture of themselves.

One woman, post breast surgery, had dismissed the whole corner of her torso. She came to me in bad pain with her shoulder. She couldn’t feel what she was doing with the shoulder, as she’d cut out the whole area from her thinking of herself. Slowly we brought it back into her picture, so she could include her whole self in her self image.

Why is self-image important?

To act takes four things. We need to think, move, sense and feel (emotions). We can only act in accordance with our current self image. To move ourselves well, in a way that’s coherent with our goals, we need a sense of ourself.

A complete picture. A sense of whole. Even if that whole includes areas that don’t match up to our expectation or desire. Especially, in that case. We need radical acceptance of ourselves, to deal with what we have in front of us in a realistic fashion.

Sometimes we’re not ready to let go of that past self image. Maybe it’s not even a past self image, but an imaginary one, like me with my old imaginary normal legs. It takes time, and courage to face to accept our whole self. Flaws, diamonds, and all.

How can you improve your self image?

If nothing else, practice the scanning. You don’t need anything special for that. Find a few minutes each day, simply to sense yourself.

It’s the meta-learning of every Feldenkrais lesson.