Slowing down, from the outside-in

Erin Ferguson can do something that you probably can’t: She can go through an entire day without getting stressed. Not even a little shoulder squeeze or a stomach somersault.

And her trick is something that you probably haven’t heard about before.
Not meditation. Not yoga or Buddhism or breathing techniques or a permanent IV of chamomile tea. (Although Ferguson has a background in those, too. Well, not the tea drip.)

Ferguson has re-trained her brain — through movement. Through examining her muscle tone, skeletal alignment, the processes of her movements and, plain and simply, gravity. Consciously exploring her skeleton’s connection to the Earth has grounded her, from the outside-in. Not that there is any distinction between your body, mind and spirit, says the 39-year-old Boulder woman.

The method she uses and teaches is called Feldenkrais, and at its core: learning new ways to replace your old habits.

If this were a class, say it’s called “Life 101,” Ferguson would ask you to get out your highlighters and pay close attention to the following key words: Responsiveness. Adaptability. Uninhibition. Curiosity. Strength.
These terms will be on the test; that would be your ability to transcend limits that you place on your own potential. Oh, that brings up another word you’ll want to highlight: Freedom.

Before your brain checks out or overheats, let’s stop. No, really, stop.

Slow down.

Slow down. That doesn’t mean become lazy or inefficient. Slowing down, according to Ferguson, means allowing yourself to be completely responsive. (Did you underline that?)

About 80 percent of American woman say they are stressed out or anxious, according to the National Sleep Foundation. When you’re constantly stressed, you lose the ability to truly respond, because you are “always on.” Yet, in that, you are never really on.

Let’s back up to the good ol’ days. Children start out highly adaptable; research after Hurricane Katrina showed children bounced back quicker than their parents did. As people get older, they trade that adaptation for adoption — of certain ways of moving and reacting, Ferguson says.

They get stuck.

The older we get, the deeper the ruts we’re stuck in, from stereotypes (about ourselves, too) to the way we sit in our office chair (hello, repetitive stress injury). Trapped in a groove, we run frantically, getting nowhere, so we run harder.

Stop the imaginary race, Ferguson says. And consider your options for getting out of the hole. You’re not really trapped. With some curiousity, you can climb out.

The hole, or habit, is not right or wrong, Ferguson says. She’s not talking about overriding existing habits. She just wants women to explore their habits, and realize there are more options to how they live.

Do you know where you are?
Life is full of trauma, big and small.

For example, let’s say as a kid, you’re playing in the street (bad girl!) and you have to jump out of the way of an oncoming car. Your body responds naturally, and that response helps you survive. Your breathing gets faster and shallower, muscles tense, blood rushes to the brain. And then, you move on with life.

Except not.

Many people hold on to those responses to things that happened in our past. (Your computer crashes, and you revert back to the hyped-up fight-or-flight response of the oncoming car. But this is so not life-or-death!)

“You’re constantly responding to things that aren’t happening,” Ferguson says.

And if you’re living a life of chronic stress, you never truly adapt. You only pretend to. You walk around, contorting your breath and facial expressions trying to push past the fear or the emotions instead of allowing them, Ferguson says.

“We contort ourselves to deal, and by ‘dealing,’ we limit our full range of responses,” Ferguson says. “It takes a lot of energy and tension to limit our responses.”

Women especially like playing martyr. They associate goodness with the amount of work they do, especially for others, to the point of pain.

“We’re so ready to associate stress with a good thing,” Ferguson says. “But stress is so unimportant.”

Hang that on your bathroom mirror.

And while you’re there, look at your skeleton and muscles. Do you even realize that you have ribs? That’s not a joke; many people never stop to sense their rib cage. If you aren’t paying attention to where your physical body is in space — something as simple as how your ribs move — how can you claim to know yourself on intangible levels?

As Ferguson puts it, “How we move internally is how we move through life.”

The Feldenkrais movements embody how less can be more. Because the movements are so focused and intentional, you connect with the deepest muscles — even your bones. During a class, your brain feels worked out, too.

Many of Ferguson’s clients are runners. She helps them discover new movement patterns and body awareness. Imagine seeing a video of yourself running. You can see, with “cognitive” awareness, what your body is doing, and how it might not be moving the most efficiently. Feldenkrais teaches “kinesthetic” awareness, or the ability to notice your body’s internal positions when they happen.

Never fail, the clients say it changes their races. Many report quicker times.

“If you know where all your bones are in space, you can carry out your intention more clearly in the world,” Ferguson says.

Curiosity: The stress-alternative
Now here’s the fun part: the key to reprogramming your patterns.

Curiosity.

Curiosity is the friendly, gorgeous cousin of stinky stress. Both can drive you to accomplish tasks. Except using your curiosity to introduce novelties and variables into your life (and muscular patterns) is pleasant. And won’t give you zits.

“There is a different between trying our hardest and doing our best,” Ferguson says. “In our culture, we have the pervasive habit of meeting challenge with effort, instead of meeting difficulty with productive curiosity.”

Let your curiosity erode your inhibitions, she says.

“A lot of us run around unconsciously inhibiting most of the potential in our skeleton,” Ferguson says. “But why do we hold ourselves back? That is the $64 million question.”

With no good answer.

In fact, inhibitions are what led Ferguson to Feldenkrais in 1996. She had been struggling with chronic back, feet and muscular pain from “trying to hold myself together,” literally and figuratively.

Her physical pain was an extension of her dissatisfaction at her high-profile job in New York. Ferguson’s movements were rigid and forced.

Then, in a Feldenkrais workshop, she says suddenly she realized she could move her body in all kinds of new ways that her misguided self-image had been blocking.

“It made all of these things possible for me that I couldn’t believe were possible,” Ferguson says. “We all have a sort of tape recorder in our heads that tells us who we are. What happened was my tape recorder got smashed. My identity shifted.”

That’s when she quit her job, moved to live in a Buddhist community in England and ran a natural health center. She moved to Boulder in 2007 and opened a Feldenkrais studio to help others.

Ferguson says she hopes that everyone realizes that they are malleable.

“You can change,” she says. “There is hope in that.”

Which brings Ferguson to how she defines strength. As she sees it, strength is not tensing up and pushing through life. Strength is not being the fastest runner on the hamster wheel.

“Strength means being free to move in and out of different situations, emotionally and physiologically,” she says. “Strength is freedom.”

- By Aimee Heckel

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