Composing Experience

When I teach Composing Experience in workshops, I often begin with a direct experience illustrating how strongly your unconscious choices can affect your experience — even in situations that seem clear and straightforward. This is one of those experiences.

The situation is one in which you put one hand on your forehead and hold it there, while a partner grasps your wrist and slowly applies force to pull it away. Your resulting experience will depend on how you organize your perception of that situation, as the following video shows. Don’t just passively watch, but pause between the variations and play with them. If you watch with a friend, try each variation along with the video. If you watch alone, see how much of each experience you can recreate in your imagination as I describe them.

The exploration should not be approached as a contest between you and your partner, where he wins if he pulls your hand away and you win if he doesn’t. Rather, your partner should endeavor to provide the same stimulus each time — the same kind and amount of pull on your arm — so you can see how your perceptual choices affect the resulting experience for both of you.

Most people perceive this situation initially as one in which they must resist and fight against their partner’s pull. The leverage is with your partner, so unless the you are significantly stronger, he will usually prevail. Both of you will have the experience that you initially resist your partner’s pull, but eventually fail and have your hand pulled away from your head.

The variations involve refocusing your perception to one in which resistance is not required, because your partner’s pull is no longer sufficient to remove your hand. Imaginary glue is one such refocusing, and moving the imagined point of disconnection from the hand/head juncture to the wrist or to the neck are two others. The initial conflict between you and your partner no longer exists — so resistance is no longer necessary.

Your initial experience — of conflict and resistance eventually overcome by outside force — is what most people expect and accept as inherent in the situation. It is the experience predicted by our beliefs about ordinary reality, and it’s easy to convince yourself that it is dictated by the laws of physics. The point of this exploration, though, isto show that this is not necessarily the case. You really have more choice than that. Ordinary reality is one way of bringing the world into focus, but there are others — others which can sometimes empower you in situations where ordinary reality does not.

This has profound implications. For me, they were life-changing. I came to understand that external reality was not as fixed and immutable as I had believed it to be. Instead, it was an illusion, created by perceptual limitations which I unconsciously imposed on myself. Whatever reality is actually out there, if there is one, offers a much wider range of possibilites than ordinary reality allows. Understanding and learning how to move beyond those limitations became a driving force in my life.

I discovered these possibilities through my practice of T’ai Chi and Aikido. My personal practice shifted from the martial arts, per se, to seeking a deeper understanding of perception and the mechanisms through which I created my personal reality. I wrote The Reality Illusion to articulate the way I understood these mechanisms in the late 1970s. When I met Moshe Feldenkrais in 1980 I realized his work offered powerful tools for exploring these phenomena, which led me to study with him and become a Feldenkrais Teacher, The way I teach and practice is driven by this underlying philosophy.

Greater self-awareness can allow us to move beyond the limits we impose on ourselves in all dimensions of our lives, leading to easier and more pleasurable movement, greater emotional flexibility and comfort, and enhanced skills of many kinds. In the extreme, it can lead to the seemingly superhuman skills and paranormal abilities exhibited by some martial arts masters and others who have devoted their lives to achieving high levels of mastery. Most of us will not achieve those levels, but better understanding of how they come about can give us useful insight into what is possible in our lives, and how to achieve it.