I spent almost all day yesterday flat on my back, staring at the ceiling, making tiny movements with my eyes.

I actually did some movements with my chest, occasionally with my arms and head, too.  And towards the end, my legs got involved a little, but I was still flat on my back.

And yet, I was wiped out at the end of it. 

This was day one in a week-long Feldenkrais intensive that I'm doing down here in San Diego, and the instructor is essentially teaching us how to notice everything about the way we move.  So we breathed for an hour and noticed how breath affected our movement.  How the abdomen moved, how the chest, shoulders, neck and pelvis moved as a result of different types of breathing.  

It's incredibly precise work--I imagine, rather like building tiny model ships inside souvenir bottles.  You're completely dazed, and oddly exhausted by the end of it.  The conversations I had at day's end with other students were laughably incoherent. 

The point of this work--or one of them--it would seem--is to get you to notice how naturally inefficient many of your movements typically are:  how much extra effort you put into lifting your head from the floor, for instance, or turning over from your back to your side.  As I repeated the movements yesterday, I started culling out the muscle actions that were actually necessary to accomplish each goal, streamlining them until I was only doing what was necessary. 

Doing this for five hours or so over the course of a day has had some interesting side effects:  I was brushing my teeth this morning and noticed how I hunch my shoulders, jut my jaw excessively, and wing my arms out to the side unnecessarily.  Once I reduced the movement to its essentials, I found I was exerting far less effort to accomplish the same thing.  Moshe Feldenkrais, the founder of this system, had both a scientific and aesthetic appreciation for streamlined movement. 

There are a lot of implications to this:  if most movement is inefficient, how much could sport and fitness performance improve if we learned to do virtually all our movements more simply?  Short of that how much could pain and restriction be reduced by upping movement efficiency?

Don't know the answers yet, but it's opening up some new doors.  It takes about four years of on-and-off training to get fully certified as a Feldenkrais instructor, and I might just be up for the whole ride.