The Inevitable Growth

It's been almost one year since our Feldenkrais training started. During the training days last weekend, the teacher asked everyone to reflect on how much we had grown over the past year.

What a coincidence! I actually measured my height just a day before, and found out that I had grown 1.5 cm. (I’m becoming 38 soon btw.) I also noticed that my feet had grown half a size.)

I also said that I had difficulty dealing with the word “growth” before. It seems that since I was a child, I always take this word as connoting a certain kind of judgment: how does growth avoid conforming to external constraints and desires (such as the imagination of some authority)?

The teacher asked whether we would think of growth as improvement or evolution.

I thought about how improvement is one-directional, and evolution may involve randomness, constantly creating and constantly overturning the past. “I now think of growth, perhaps, as the ability to redirect experience under a stable subjective experience. The greater the range of this experience spectrum is, the more developed this capacity is.” I said.

The teacher said, “growth is inevitable, even if you don't want it.”

“Wherever you put energy, something will develop.”

“Cancer is also a growth.”

“The possibility of getting better is inevitably accompanied by the possibility of getting worse.”

I thought of young Oscar in Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum, who chooses to stop growing because he does not want to enter the adult world of lies and hypocrisy. He maintained his child form until he was 21, when his father died, he falls into his father’s grave and decided to grow again. The father is dead, the war is over, Nazis have failed? What about the state, the ideologies, the gods who created a world, the higher self…… there is never a shortage of fathers in this world.

During this year’s training, I also found that my relationship with the authority has changed greatly: during the awareness through movement classes, I no longer take what the teacher says so seriously, try to understand and follow every bit of the instruction, or easily get into a confrontative or rebelling mode. It seems that I've learnt to simply take the parts that I resonate with and use them as I like. As a result, I no longer get tired of listening to the instructional language and fall asleep from the exhaustion of awareness easily, or develop tensions and pains in my body trying to fight for something that is not suitable to my situation. In a co-created space, each has its own role to play.

Ultimately, a patricide is most deeply bound and loyal to the patriarchal power. Perhaps it is only after I finally get to understand this, that I am able to start growing again.