On self-love and the trials of putting on socks

A post about the time and effort it takes to look after yourself

After posting last week’s lesson about finding the edges of your comfort zone it struck me that I didn't spend much time engaging with the question of how to recognise ease and comfort. I wrote and talked about noticing when you experience discomfort, pain or excess effort, but not about what ease feels like. This reminded me of a section in Ruthy Alon’s lovely book, Mindful Spontaneity, where she notes that human beings are more likely to notice the small black smudge on a wall than the expanse of pristine white background.

Given our evolutionary inheritance, it makes sense that we prioritise noticing the little things that are concerning over the mostly benign background of our experience. However, there’s a cost to this. If we don’t notice or pay attention to the details of what feels comfortable, it becomes difficult to attend to what feels uncomfortable. One of my most treasured teachers, Myriam Pfeffer, said, ‘People are estranged from themselves, insensitive and cut off. I don't think anybody in that state can love himself or somebody else...Or be open to true learning.’

I only spent 2 or 3 weeks learning with Myriam, but her influence on me remains vivid. She went out of her way to encourage me at a time when I wasn’t a very confident inhabitant of my body. I can still remember the quality of touch she used to help reorganise my head and spine in a lesson one afternoon during my Feldenkrais training. She seemed to be someone who spent as much time exploring and valuing the qualities buried in the background as she did thinking about the obvious problems in the foreground, and that has been something that I’ve tried to practise in the years since I met her. (Admittedly, with varying degrees of success.)

So how might we avoid the self-estrangement that Myriam talked about? And how can we better love ourselves?

We can try to practise patience.

We can make sure we give ourselves the time we need.

We can avoid punishing or berating ourselves for not being able to do something the first time we try it (or the second or third or tenth time).

We can recognise that we are not fixed objects with fixed capacities. We are living processes. And like all processes, we are subject to change and variation depending on environmental conditions.

We can try to put ourselves in environmental conditions that allow ourselves to flourish.

If we can practice all these things every so often, the love we become proficient in giving ourselves will become available to others. And maybe the true learning that Myriam talked about will be revealed to us.

It’s easier said that done. In all honesty, I am pretty terrible at being patient. I hate being late and I get infuriated about silly things quite quickly. I think this is because I put myself (and others) under pressure to get things done - often without thinking enough about the impact that pressure is having on me and others around me. Which brings me to the practice of putting on socks.

Like a lot of parents, I spend a substantial amount of my time each morning encouraging (shouting at) my daughter to put on socks. I don’t know if psychological or anthropological studies have been carried out about why kids don’t want to put on socks, but from my own anecdotal research the facts are indisputable. Perhaps one reason for this is that putting on socks is more difficult than a boring, everyday activity should be. When you put on socks, you have to flex your abdomen, bringing your legs and torso together, while simultaneously extending your arms and pointing your toes. You also have to deal with the friction of the sock and the dexterity required to find the hole and get your toes in order. You have to do all of this while worrying about getting out of the door and catching a train and doing all the things you need to do that day.

Putting on your socks is one of those moments where self-estrangement frequently takes precedence over self-love. Because it’s a complex movement operation that we frequently have to do when we’re worrying about something seemingly more important.

So this week’s lesson is about taking the time to acknowledge that putting on socks is difficult and that we should take our time and give ourselves some love. Because if we can give ourselves some love, we can better understand what it takes to give it to others, and maybe everyone can have a better day. It’s also a lesson that I hope Myriam would like. I hope you like it too. You’ll need a space to sit, a space to lie down, and a pair of socks. I’ve packed in quite a lot to 20 minutes, so you might want to be ready with the pause button to take more rests.

The quote from Myriam above is from an interview she gave with Illana Nevill and two other Feldenkrais students. You can read the full piece here. I restricted myself to picking one quote, as I was worried that I would just end up cutting and pasting the whole thing.