I was working with a client not long ago, a military officer who wanted to avoid surgery on his painful lower back. Over several months, his back was gradually becoming more comfortable, and he was becoming aware of things that he was doing during his daily work at the Pentagon that made the back worse and of what he could do to make it better. Much of the time in our weekly sessions consisted of my showing him small, gentle, inwardly focused, rolling movements that eased the kinks out of his stressed psyche and tightly muscled body. In this particular session, he told me that in a few weeks he would be leaving the Washington area and flying overseas to a command position in a war zone. "Oh no! I said, "How will you continue your Feldenkrais work—in a place where you will have no privacy and have to be tough all the time? What if someone sees you? What will you tell them you are doing?" He sat quietly, and thought a moment, and then responded, "I will tell them I am working on my Puma Power."

    I loved his response, and I have been using it ever since.

    Cultivating Puma Power is an excellent way to describe the Feldenkrais work. The Feldenkrais Method^®, in brief, is a way to study and improve movement. Linking it with the big cats is good because of the images that are evoked of power combined with fluidity, ease, dignity, and resilience.

    This cat-like way of being is an aspect of physicality that we humans often admire, but have not emphasized in our traditional education of the body. Most physical education emphasizes aerobic conditioning, muscular development, and achievement of external goals. Many, many good things come out of this training, but also sometimes bad things, such as a body that is stiff and a psyche that accepts damage to the self as the price of achievement.

    But if you examine a cat’s body, it is resilient and not hard; and she runs and jumps more than we do without suffering pain. So maybe there are some things that the cats, and also other animals, can teach us about movement:

Alternate periods of activity and rest/return to neutral. When a cat, or a dog, rests, she truly rests. Her muscles become deeply relaxed. She gives up the previous pattern of muscular activity and allows her muscles to return to neutral. From this uncommitted, central place, she is ready to take the next movement pattern, whenever it is needed.

We people, by contrast, often hold on to the tension of action even when the time for that action has passed. So even when doing nothing, we are spending energy maintaining a previously needed pattern of contraction. Then when it is time to act, our energy is less than it might be, and the new movement pattern competes with the old.

Use the skeleton instead of the muscles. The body is designed such that the weight of the structure is carried by the bones--and not by the muscles. The muscles are supposed to be free for movement. When all the parts of the body are well aligned through the skeleton, every action feels light and comfortable. Even big actions feel as easy and unremarkable as scratching the top of the head. But whenever the effort is not distributed through the skeleton, the person, sensing the lack of stability, unconsciously recruits the muscles to help. Through this workaround, the task is accomplished, but the quality of movement declines, becoming heavier and stiffer. It was from this chain of observations that Moshe Feldenkrais distilled one of the guiding insights of our method: "In poor posture the muscles are doing part of the work of the bones."

Remain present throughout. Whether delicately playing with a toy or pouncing on prey, a cat is fully present to itself.

We people, by contrast, tend to narrow our focus and externalize our definition of self to "I am this small thing that I am doing." By training oneself instead to keep attention broadly distributed over the whole self and to foster an inner awareness even while acting externally, the quality of being and of action improves.

    In closing, I am thinking of another lesson to be learned from the cat. No one can ever make life safe. There will always be the unknown, the unexpected, and risks to be taken so boundaries expand. Inevitably there follow bumps, bruises, and even major injuries. So if you can’t protect yourself from all harm, then model yourself on the cat, who, as the saying goes, has nine lives. She doesn’t always play it safe, but she carries herself in such a way that she keeps bouncing back.