Falling and Failing

This last week, I had the very, very great gift of being able to explore with Pamela Underwood—six full days of Body Writing. 

What you see here is the canvas that I'm walking away with. Now, this is not a complete piece. It's the beginning of a relationship with these prints of my body.

I learned so much about myself, about art, and relating to art. And what you see here is one of several iterations. 

Each day of the retreat was a new iteration — an unfolding of these body prints. One day, one iteration felt like failing & falling. It looked like one body was falling, and the other failing to catch her. But, it wasn't just bearing witness to a print. But, a feeling deep in my bones. A soulful, painful sense of falling and failing occupied every aspect of my being. And I struggled with that just a little bit, just a little bit. 

The following day, I decided to hang the print vertically versus horizontally. So, a different orientation to the canvas. A different orientation to myself. A different orientation to falling and failing.

So, I slept with it hanging. 

When I woke this morning, I heard this inner calling, this whisper, to just let it fall. 

Let it fall. 

There's resilience. 

This painting is resilient. 

I'm resilient. 

Life is resilient. 

So I let it fall. 

In that falling and failing, I was reminded of some of the wonderful ways that we explore in the Feldenkrais Method.

The power in learning to fall well. To fall well means learning to fall without harming ourselves. So, developing the skills for falling well so that we no longer fear falling.

And failing. Oh, the magic in failing and making mistakes. From a biological standpoint, mistakes are golden — especially when it comes to movement. Because it gives us the chemistry — failing, erroring, making mistakes, and then trying again to correct our mistakes. There's magic in correcting our mistakes and exploring a variety of ways to refine and improve what it is we set out to do.

All that refinement and correcting leads to the biological state for neuroplasticity — the neuroplastic state. From there, we can use those physiological juices to decouple emotions, create something new, and learn something new. We often discover incredible potency in all that exploration of failing well and making mistakes.

We discover something about ourselves. New things are revealed. The relationships of our thoughts and our emotions with our movements. The release of our past, our history, those aspects trapped in our bodies. And sometimes, we're blessed with discovering that all those different mistakes are just avenues for other possibilities. They're a living potential.