"Sex, falling asleep, evacuation of the bowels"

[Mark Foote]

In "Awareness Through Movement", Moshe Feldenkrais wrote:

 

In most cases where an action is linked to a strong desire, the efficiency of the action may be improved by separating the aim from the means of achieving it. A motorist in a desperate hurry to reach his destination, for instance, will fare better if he entrusts the wheel to a man who is a good driver but not desperate to reach the destination in time.

Serious obstacles to performance may occur when both the action and the achievement of the aim depend on the old section of the nervous system--old in the evolutionary sense--over which our control is involuntary. These actions might include sex, falling asleep, or evacuation of the bowels. The action may be performed as if the aim were the means, and sometimes as though the means were the aim.

(HarperSanFrancisco paperback, 1990, pp 82-83)
 

 

Feldenkrais used getting up out of a chair to illustrate his method of separating action from achievement of the aim. A recap, from a post I'm composing now for my own site:

 

 

Moshe Feldenkrais wrote of how people can be unaware that they actually hold their breath in getting up from a chair. He explained why that is so:
 

The tendency to hold one’s breath is instinctive, part of an attempt to prevent the establishment of shearing stresses or forces likely to shift the vertebrae horizontally, out of the vertical alignment of the spinal column that they constitute.

(ibid, p 83)

Feldenkrais described how the tendency to hold one’s breath in standing can be overcome:

 

…When the center of gravity has really moved forward over the feet a reflex movement will originate in the old nervous system and straighten the legs; this automatic movement will not be felt as an effort at all.

(ibid, p 78)

 

Feldenkrais stipulated, there must be “no muscular effort deriving from voluntary control”:

 

… there must be no muscular effort deriving from voluntary control, regardless of whether this effort is known and deliberate or concealed from the consciousness by habit.

(ibid, p 76)

 

My friends, how do you contact "reflex movement in the old nervous system", so as to keep your action separate from the achievement of the aim?
 

Edited Thursday at 09:57 PM by Mark Foote