Feldenkrais Method | thesofiamagazine

Physics of Love

by Lavinia Plonka | Jan 31, 2020 | Asheville, Body Language, Feldenkrais Method

By Lavinia Plonka

This morning, my husband Ron, obviously possessed, decided to make a stab at some of yesterday’s dirty dishes. He got as far as a wooden bowl. He picked up the obviously Asian, delicately painted bowl gingerly. His expression was reminiscent of someone who, on a casual walk through woods, stumbles upon an alien’s ray gun. Now this bowl was given to us almost five years ago, one of two with matching chopsticks, by a houseguest. Ron looks at me, holding the bowl, “Where does this go?”

I stare at him. “What?” is my incredulous reply. I heard him. Of course I heard him. And I could simply say, “It goes on the display shelf next to its mate.” But I don’t. Sadist? Masochist? You be the judge.

He’s now intently contemplating the chopsticks. He now knows, just from the timbre and nuance of my, “What?” that he’s supposed to remember this bowl. He’s supposed to know its history, its place in the house. He knows that his question has triggered Irate Condescending Female Syndrome. His mind is feverishly trying to decide whether to surrender, or attempt to rescue himself. He digs himself deeper. “These chopsticks. They match the bowl, don’t they?” I can barely contain myself. “Yes, dear, they are a set.” He ponders the little notch and hole, cleverly placed there by some underpaid laborer so that the chopsticks rest neatly on the bowl. After a couple of minutes of fiddling, he has them together. He glances, slightly desperately, around the kitchen. He does not want to ask me again, so he opens the cabinet where we keep bowls and starts to quietly put the bowl with the chopsticks in.

“Not there!” I sputter, appalled at the resemblance of my voice to Daffy Duck’s. He jumps back.

“I know!” he protests. “I was uh, I was just rearranging the shelf in there, see?” He pulls out an ancient salad bowl, given to us as part of a set for our wedding forty one years ago. “I would never put this lovely, delicate, painted bowl in with these cracked, old things.”

Now I have to prioritize my ire – how dare he call those lovingly oiled cherished walnut bowls cracked old things? But that would distract me from the more immediate game – the “you never remember anything game.” So I let go of the righteous indignation and zero in for the kill. “Well now, I think that bowl goes with the other bowl. Remember, we got two?”

His eyes panic. “Two bowls? Of course, we have two bowls.” He is now whirling around the kitchen, bowl in hand, opening cabinets.

I stop him and lead him to the display shelves, placing the bowl next to its brother. “That’s where they’ve been. Remember? We decided they were too beautiful to hide away?”

He stares at them. “Display. They’re display items. Why would I think of getting food bowls from a display shelf?” Somehow we have staggered and flailed together for years of riotous adventures, several teetering brinks and countless arguments over how to make the perfect cup of coffee. Our atomic dance of positive, negative, yes and no, right and wrong, I did, you did not, has kept us spinning in complex patterns that would make John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Live dizzy. Friends often ask me how, in this age of broken marriages, Ron and I have managed to stay happily together. I sort of vaguely remember principles from physics that had to do with attraction, covalent bonds (or was that chemistry). My guess is that Ron’s and my cha cha through time, if shrunk to subatomic size would resemble exactly the atomic behavior of a bedroom slipper. Something cozy and familiar. An object that finds its way into unexpected places. (“Have you seen my bedroom slipper?” “Hey, how did this slipper get in the stove?”) But of course I have no way of proving that our relationship is a macrocosm of a slipper, so I concentrate on continuing to perfect my dance, and keep our relationship as cozy and unpredictable as I can.

Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned in trying to share my life with a human of the male persuasion. This is a very unscientific report, based on research with one subject. For a more exhaustive study on the vast gulf between male and female, don’t stop at books like Men are From Mars. There’s a vast literature written by professionals who are eager to help confuse us further with titles like: Why Men Don’t Have A Clue and Women Always Need More Shoes (Barbara and Allan Pease) or 9 Secrets to Bedroom Bliss: Exploring Sexual Archetypes to Reveal Your Lover’s Passions, and Discover What Turns You On (by not one, but two PHDs – James Herriot and Oona Mourier) Books are wonderful, but experience is a marvelous teacher if you just recognize the lesson.

The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, I saw a movie a while ago about a family that was so ordinary they were extraordinary. The husband so loved his wife’s cooking that no matter what she served he said, “My god! This is delicious! What is it?”

“Ice cream.”

“How’d you make it?”

“I bought it at the grocery store.”

“Brilliant!”

Ron does that. I can make a tuna melt and he dives in with such joy, you’d think it was chateaubriand.

Separate vacations. Nothing makes a man appreciate his wife more than sleeping on sheets he keeps forgetting to change for more than a week. Not to mention the fact that he’s lived on peanut butter and pizza all week.

Which brings me to: Let them eat pizza. I used to try to provide for Ron’s meals when I traveled. Once I tried to be the perfect housewife by making and labeling meals. When I returned, the refrigerator was full of science projects and there was a pile of pizza boxes in the recycling. “Why didn’t you eat the food in the refrigerator?” I asked.

“I couldn’t find anything,” was his reply. A friend of ours calls this MLD: Male Looking Disorder. “If it’s not a beer bottle, we can’t recognize it,” he explained. I’ve decided that Ron just needs to go back to his roots periodically: pizza, peanut butter, turkey sandwiches. Then when I return, he is ready for risotto.

Perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned is: nagging gets you nowhere. We’re talking chromosomes here. There is undoubtedly a genetic predisposition to deafness when the line, “When are you going to….” is repeated. Here is my secret weapon: start doing whatever it is you wanted your husband to do. Loudly. Need a picture on the wall? Start with “Honey, I need your hammer and the picture hanger hooky things.” Want a table refinished? “So . . . I bought this highly toxic furniture stripper stuff and I’m going to re-do the table on the living room carpet.” Need new track lighting? “Hey, honey, I’ve got this light panel open and I’m wondering about these loose wires hanging out of the wall?” They can’t stand it. You will get instant results, guaranteed.

Like any partner dance, there is one important rule: pay attention. Try not to step on each other’s toes. Remember that his moves mirror your own. Somewhere in the dance between negative and positive, electron and proton, yes and no, there is a nucleus, a center, and that is called love.

Body language expert, Lavinia Plonka has taught The Feldenkrais Method for over 25 years.

For more information, visit her at laviniaplonka.com

Embracing Change

by Lavinia Plonka | Dec 31, 2019 | Asheville, Body Language, Feldenkrais Method, Psychic

By Lavinia Plonka

One of my oddest, odd jobs was a mini-career in reading Tarot cards at parties as Madame Lavinia. It had begun by accident: a theatrical agent who knew that I dabbled, called me in hysterics: their psychic was sick (couldn’t she have predicted that?). Could I, would I throw together a gypsy costume and read cards? “I can’t do that! I’m not psychic!” But no excuse would deter her from her conviction that a phony seeress was better than none. I sat at this party feeling like a cross between a con artist and a blithering idiot.

“You’re going through some big changes at the moment,”

“Things have been tough, but it’s all going to change,”

“You need a change.”

Whenever I was at a loss as to how to interpret the cards, I just had to couch my oracular pronouncements from the perspective of change and I was on a par with the Delphic Pythoness. Somehow, word got around and next thing I knew, (although I should have seen it in the cards), Madame Lavinia was booked for events ranging from corporate picnics to graduation parties.

In the past, during particularly dreary days, I’d pull out the cards and say to myself, “Yes, things are pretty bleak right now, but they are about to change.” Then I’d lay out the cards. When the spread dared to intimate more of the same misery, I would quickly gather them up, saying, “Clearly I haven’t shuffled enough. Give me something better than that . . . now!”

I’ve been told more than once that “all is good.” That it’s all about attitude. Looked at from another perspective, we could reframe things: bad is the new good! For example, there’s a Tarot card called the Tower. It shows screaming people leaping out of a burning castle or skyscraper. Instead of saying, “Uh oh, there’s a catastrophic change ahead,” look at the good: “You are about to experience a magnificent opportunity to liberate yourself from old attachments.” One of my favorite doom and gloom cards is the Ten of Swords. A person lies face down, stabbed in the back by ten swords. The Tarot historically defines this as ruin, betrayal, utter despair. What a wonderful time to treat yourself to a massage! Better yet, let’s look at the therapeutic quality of being punctured. Maybe a few sessions of acupuncture are in your future.

All the great philosophies tell us that change is inevitable. The I Ching is actually called The Book of Changes. Just when you think things couldn’t get worse, they do. When you’ve been knocked up side the head by the Ten of Swords, be comforted that even this can be interpreted positively: there’s no place to go but up!

If I don’t drink my opened bottle of wine, it will turn into vinegar. On the other hand, if I forget about the apple cider in the fridge, it becomes hard cider. See? Change is good. When do you let change happen and when do you initiate change? Is my decision – whether it’s a fashion fit before a party or quitting my job – really mine?

Everything is always changing, even when we don’t notice it. I imagine a conversation between two rocks sitting on the bank of a river.

“Hey.” “Hey what.”

“I’m eroding.”

“I’ve noticed you’re looking thinner. You look great!”

“I dunno. I could probably still lose a bit on the bottom.”

“Well, you better be careful. Try to change too much and you’ll do something radical. Did you see
what Al did?

“How could you miss it? He went right over the edge of the bank.”

“Well, he’s been on the edge for a long time. I warned him.”

“Yeah, but to just go like that.”

“Crazy, huh.”

“Hey, he’ll survive, he likes to take chances. Anyways, let’s face it, you never know when change is going to hit you. Look at Ilsa, man.”

“I know, she totally cracked!”

“Who would have expected Ilsa to fall apart like that. She was such a rock!”

“It’s always the quiet ones.”

“And now she’s in pieces. I don’t think she’s going to be able to get herself back together.”

“Well, she was no spring chicken.”

“Yeah. We got time.”

When we decided to leave NJ for Asheville, I felt reborn. I ran up and down stairs, packing boxes, organizing yard sales, giving things away. I couldn’t wait to start over. No one in Asheville would know I’d ever been a fortune teller. I would have no past, except what I was willing to divulge.

While I packed, my husband Ron would slip out of the house in the morning and return in the evening without so much as touching a box. I assumed he was busy packing up his studio. But he wasn’t. He was sitting there, paralyzed. A week before the move, I asked him how it was going and Ron assured me he was almost done. When the movers arrived at his studio, they not only had to finish packing his stuff, but they had to order another truck because Ron’s “few boxes” amounted to another whole move.

After everything was gone; the house was empty, the studio was empty, the new family was waiting outside, Ron stood rooted in the house. I asked him if he was scared.

“No, why?”

“Because you’re standing stock still in the middle of our former house.”

“Huh?”

“It’s time to go now. We’re moving to Asheville.”

“Right, right.”

To this day we, or rather I, joke that Ron’s heels left skid marks on the floor in our old home as I dragged him to his new life. He doesn’t think it’s funny

Life is good. I decide, why not read my Tarot cards? They come up – two of disks: change, five of cups: disappointment, The Moon: fear of the unknown. I quickly gather them up and say, “Clearly I haven’t shuffled enough!”

Body language expert, Lavinia Plonka has taught The Feldekrais Method for over 25 years.

For more information, visit her at laviniaplonka.com

Heeding The Call

by Lavinia Plonka | Dec 3, 2019 | Asheville, Body Language, Feldenkrais Method

By Lavinia Plonka

A few days ago, a word popped into my head. Dithyramb. From nowhere. No NPR story. No romance novel. No scholarly treatise in recent memory had included that word. In fact, I had no idea what it meant, although at my age, that could simply mean I don’t remember. I shrugged and went on with my day. And then, every day, there it was, dithyramb. Like an earworm, you know, a song that goes on and on in your head and you can’t get rid of it. I recently battled Frank Sinatra’s anthem, “That’s Life” for a few days, thought I had conquered it, only to have my husband Ron sing it to me after the overloaded food processor spewed pureed beets all over my white linen shirt.

“Dithyramb,” said my brain as I dug up my bumper crop of Jerusalem artichoke. (Did you know Jerusalem artichokes are good for your gut bacteria? What to do with ten pounds of inulin rich tubers?) “Dithyramb,” it whispered as I attempted parallel parking on Haywood Rd. during rush hour. The multiple folds of my gray matter vibrated and echoed. Of course, lots of other words and ideas pop into our heads on a regular basis, like old songs, names of people I went to high school with, lists of various types of heirloom string beans. But they are polite, perhaps arriving unbidden, but leaving gracefully.

I could have just looked it up. But you know how it is. Like the friend you keep remembering you were supposed to call, except it’s 11PM, or you’re in the shower, or you misplaced your cell phone. And then you forget. So I would muse as I drove, or piloted my shopping cart through Trader Joe’s. Was it some kind of ancient Greek musical instrument? Maybe a tool for divination? A mathematical term? Forget the why, at this point it was all about the what.

Finally I looked it up, slightly apprehensive that it might not even be a word. Or that it might be some inappropriate type of sex toy. Perhaps it was a word from another reality, another dimension,
and had no meaning here at all. But there it was. Dithyramb.

• A wild choral hymn of ancient Greece, especially one dedicated to Dionysus.

• A passionate or inflated speech, poem, or other writing.

While I’ve done some wild dancing in my time, often influenced by the gifts of Dionysus, I have definitely never sung a wild choral hymn. Passionate or inflated speech however is another story. I have spent a good deal of my life either being told to shut up, or telling myself to button it. I even spent 25 years as a mime, perhaps because while expressing my passion usually ended up with my foot firmly in my mouth, the crafting of a mime piece actually required reasoned thought, choreography, and practice.

I worried that heeding the call of Dithyramb was the first symptom of “voices in my head.” What was my brain going to tell me next? And would it be Dithyrambic? “Go, Lavinia, stand in Pack Place and declaim your passion for the construction of a monorail above Merrimon Avenue!” “You must now invent a new recipe combining lichen and wild persimmon!” “This is the time to pull out those fishnet stockings from your 80’s punk period! Seize the moment!” Can you shut off your brain? Do Zen practitioners have dithyrambic interventions?

Every day, scientists are finding more stuff out about how our brains work. There is the brain’s glymphatic system flushing our brains every night. Glial cells, originally thought to be just “stuff” in our heads turn out to be key players in our neuronal health. They’ve even found the part of the brain responsible for earworms and that earworms can boost our mood, if they don’t drive us crazy.

What if the call to Dithyramb was some higher force trying to communicate with me, that I need to tune into some yet unidentified passion? How can I lean in, listen more deeply for what the ether is trying to tell me? Or perhaps it’s simply that in my past life I was one of the mythical Eleusinian mimes (OK, a mime for all time!) who apparently were instrumental in these dithyrambic revels. For sure it’s a word that needs to re-enter our lexicon.
We need more wild choral hymns, more passionate speeches. Dionysus is calling.

Body language expert, Lavinia Plonka has taught The Feldenkrais Method for over 25 years.

For more information, visit her at laviniaplonka.com

Board Games

by Lavinia Plonka | Oct 31, 2019 | Asheville, Body Language, Feldenkrais Method

By Lavinia Plonka

“I think we should….”

“Forget it, we don’t have the money.”

“What about….”

“There’s no budget for that.”

“We need….”

“Yeah, but our financials are so bad, the members will never go for it.”

“I’d like to propose…”

“Go ahead. The complainers will eat you alive.”

Didn’t we, why haven’t we, money, naysayers, money, no volunteers, money, money, money. No wonder we call it a non-profit!

I sit at the board meeting, squirming, checking my Facebook page, pacing the room, staring out the window, even at one point lying down on the floor, feeling like Steve McQueen as a prisoner in Papillon. Nothing helps me endure the chains of minutiae that hang on our organization. If we really wanted to torture political prisoners we could simply put them on a non-profit’s board of directors.

Many years ago, before it was a status event, I went to Burning Man. It is located on a desert playa, a specific terrain that transforms radically in the event of a rare and sudden rain. As the rain came pouring down, the soil was transformed from a hard packed gray surface to a bizarre kind of clay that attached itself to the bottom of our shoes. With every step another layer of clay attached itself, so that even if you ran, within seconds you were wearing cement platform shoes. You could no longer lift your feet and you had to stop in spite of the pouring rain to knock the clay platforms off your shoes and run again, repeating the process until you were soaked, covered in gray muck, and exhausted. The difference between this and being on the board of a non-profit is that eventually the rain did stop.

I had taken to calling the board meetings “bored” meetings. The endless questions about the lost revenue, the harried executive director constantly explaining why something ended up costing more, and the eternal discussions about policy filled me with futility. How could we possibly innovate, change, improve anything if we were trapped in an endless loop of protocol? The final straw was when a typo was found in one of the by-laws.

The By-law is up on the screen as part of a Powerpoint presentation. (When Steve Jobs went to meetings, if someone began a Powerpoint presentation, he walked out.) I’m like the mime in the box, helplessly banging on the invisible wall to escape.

“This has to be changed, the name of our organization is misspelled.”

“Sure,” I say, “Let’s do it.”

“We have to vote on it.”

“What?”

“It’s a change in the by-laws. Therefore it has to be put to a vote.”

“You’re joking.”

They ignore me. “Anyone willing to put forth a motion that we correct the spelling in By-Law 48, section 2, sub-section A?”

A hand raises from a zombified board member. “We have a motion on the floor from Cara to change the spelling in the name of our organization to reflect the actual spelling in By Law 48, Section 2, Sub-section A. Do we have a second.”

I think of Kafka. The motion passes. After all that hard work, we have lunch.

Cosmologists have posited that the universe is a living, breathing being and that all life is a microcosmic reflection of the macrocosm of the universe. Each of us contains a sun, the rhythm of the moon. On a smaller scale, our blood is like the earth’s rivers, the trees our lungs. Our relationships reflect the galactic dance. I contemplate the notion that a board of directors meeting is like a black hole – you get sucked in, and nothing escapes.

“So that went really well,” smiles the President. “We passed a motion. Let’s check in with each other shall we? How are things going for you all?”

To my shock, as we go around the table, each board member offers a self congratulatory platitude. “Well, it was a tough year, but I think we’re now on the right track.”

“I’m feeling very positive about the direction we are going in.”

There is a rumbling inside of me. My face is getting hot. If I am a reflection of the planet I’m a volcano, if I’m a microcosm of the universe, I’m about to go supernova.

I take a breath and explode. “I’m sick of us operating from fear. I can’t understand why everyone is operating from an attitude of lack. If we are all about functionality, why are we so dysfunctional? Why can’t we just try to change? So what if we make a mistake? Einstein once said, ‘Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.’”

My voice is quivering. They’re going to hate me. They’re going to tell me I’m over-reacting. A little voice whispers that they are going to kick me off the board. Which actually sounds good at the moment. But no one moves. They sit, mouths open; egos singed, smoke trailing out of their ears.

Like a comet striking the earth, I have disrupted the status quo. Emotional debris is everywhere, smoldering ruins of a meeting. A collective breath and the President speaks. “I’m really glad you said that. Let’s take a risk.”

Another board member speaks up. “Thank you. I feel the same way, I was just afraid to say it.” The sun begins to shine on our group.

I’m a volcano. A comet. A storm. My husband calls me Kali, the Hindu Goddess associated with both destruction and empowerment (although he seems to forget the goddess part.) It’s not an easy job, but somebody’s got to do it. I think this is why I wasn’t elected prom queen.

Body language expert, Lavinia Plonka has taught The Feldenkrais Method for over 25 years.

For more information, visit her at laviniaplonka.com

Playing God

by Lavinia Plonka | Sep 30, 2019 | Asheville, Feldenkrais Method, Psychology

By Lavinia Plonka

California Style Magazine stares up at me from the coffee table in my hotel room. It features a parade of impossibly tall, thin women with sculpted faces and futuristic Barbie hairdos. Like the almost human androids in the movie Blade Runner, these women seem perfectly crafted facsimiles of various iterations of Venus. Which brings me to musing about creation, evolution and mythology.

Darwinism tells us that humans evolved over time. Mythology tells us that humans were crafted: from dirt, mud, clay, ashes, blood, spit and more. This reminds me of a childhood attempt to craft a city out of mud in my backyard. I was about four years old. No matter how I mounded the lumps, they kept looking like blobs instead of some fabled kingdom. In a moment of artistic inspiration, I went inside and took a few glasses from the kitchen, filled them with mud and began tapping out towers, condos, turrets, even a fortress. My architectural masterpiece would have been brilliant had I not tapped too hard with one of the glasses. It shattered in my hand, cutting me in several places. When I ran crying to the house, my Mother freaked out and started screaming. My city remained unfinished, and my architectural career was over, a memory forever etched in mud and blood.

The Mayan gods actually had to keep recreating humans because of poor choice of materials. First, the people they made out of mud dissolved in a flood. I can hear the gods now. “OK, who proposed the mud idea?” All the gods look down at their feet, which at the moment feel like clay.

“Harry thought it was a good idea.”

“Really Harry, what were you thinking?”

“Well, I knew the budget was tight, I was trying to get it done quickly.

It worked over in Mesopotamia.”

They then tried wood, but the humans burned up in a fire. They finally got it right by creating humans out of corn. This triggers a disturbing thought. What if we are indeed “Children of the Corn” (with apologies to Stephen King)? Perhaps that’s the reason that corn is currently taking over the world. Michael Pollan has proposed in his book, Botany of Desire that plants have been manipulating us all along, seducing us with beauty and nourishment to help them spread. Could Monsanto’s efforts to “craft” a new, powerful, invulnerable corn that will irrevocably alter our DNA (if we survive) be part of corn’s master plan? Just kidding. Sort of.

Back to crafting humans. Another prerequisite in many cultures’ mythology is that the gods create beautiful creatures, in fact like the gods themselves. In a Navajo story, the gods had issues with their handiwork. They had sloppily crafted people with animal teeth, claws instead of feet and to add insult to injury, these proto-humans smelled bad. A paleontologist’s delight!

Current AI technology is getting closer to crafting the androids we saw in Blade Runner, and in the TV shows Humans and Better Than Us. Yet all these celluloid androids really just want to be human, like Pinocchio. Simultaneously, we humans are moving more towards becoming . . . something else. The technology of limb and organ replacement is advancing rapidly. Scientists, theologians and philosophers are busy in their ivory towers discussing how many body parts can be replaced before one is no longer human. And why stop at simple replacement? What stands in the way of becoming superhuman? Why not include a super computer in the brain? How about hands that crush steel instead of merely being able to hit “send?” What about eye replacements that can see infrared, UV, night vision? Lungs that can breathe toxic air, stomachs that can digest myriad variations of corn? The possibilities are endless. Between enhancements and replacements, it is predicted that the human of 2030 will be unrecognizable to us. 2030! Perhaps unwittingly we are creating our own replacements.

Scientists have already created a “bionic man.” They have taken prosthetics and various organ replacements from around the world and constructed a creature, not functional yet, but getting close. Perhaps all he needs is a jolt of some kind, like Frankenstein’s monster, to walk the earth.

In Greek Mythology, Prometheus and Epimetheus were put in charge of creating humans. They used the creation material of choice: mud and clay. Prometheus assigned Epimetheus the task of giving the creatures of the earth their various qualities, such as swiftness, cunning, strength, fur, wings. Unfortunately, by the time he got to man Epimetheus had given all the good stuff out and there was none left for man. So Prometheus decided to make man stand upright as the gods did and then give them fire. Things didn’t go so well for Prometheus after that, but humans have been using fire for craft, both culinary and artistic, ever since.

A popular gangster saying regarding departure from earthly life is, “It’s time to meet your maker.” When that opportunity arrives for me, I’ll have a few design suggestions for the craftsperson responsible for making me that scientists have probably not considered.

My wish list:

Eyes on the back of my head.

Retractable, functional wings.

Removable arms so I can sleep

comfortably on my side.

Invisibility by choice.

A pouch like kangaroos have so I don’t have to always carry a purse.

A Daryl Hannah hairdo that never needs maintenance.

The question remains. If in the future, we have limitless options on not only how to be, but what to be, who will we be? Will the constructions of the future look towards us ordinary humans as their creators? Will un-enhanced humans be viewed with scorn and pity? Millions of years from now, will there be a whole new set of creation myths? From where I sit, it looks to be a brave, new world indeed.

Body language expert, Lavinia Plonka has taught The Feldenkrais Method for over 25 years.

For more information, visit her at laviniaplonka.com

Forget About It

by Lavinia Plonka | Aug 29, 2019 | Asheville, Body Language, Feldenkrais Method

By Lavinia Plonka

Scarecrow “They took my arm and they threw it over there!
And then they took my legs and threw them over there!”

Tin Man “That’s you all over.”

My first vivid memory of forgetting was from age eight. My mother and I were at a discount outlet diving into bins of underwear like pirates into a treasure chest. “Mine, all mine.” I clutched all the new panties my chubby fingers could grab. Never again would I worry about being in a car accident and having the hospital staff cluck over my ragged briefs. I could move on to more weighty subjects like ending the Cold War or how I could con my father into more spare change so I could win the “Mission Money” collection contest and get a glimmer of approval from Sister Giovanni.

As we stood at the check out, my mother gave me a rare smile, clutching her lace trimmed slip with the adjustable straps. Then suddenly, she hissed, “Where is your pocketbook?” In the orgy of new lingerie, I had misplaced my first, my best, my only pocketbook, a red patent leather fantasy with a cool clasp that you turned. The blood drained from my face. I had $3.00 in that purse. My mother tore out of the line, dragging me back through disgruntled women who were busy burying themselves in discounted blouses. We tore the underwear bin apart. Looked through all the socks. Tears streaked my desperate face. This was it. I’d never have a pocketbook again. Let alone cash. A woman approached us, holding my purse. “Did you lose this, little girl?” she asked kindly. My mother thanked her profusely and turned to me. “What are we going to do with you? I swear you’d forget your head if it wasn’t attached!”

Since then, I have left my purse at parties, in shopping carts, in cabs and in restaurants. I rack my brain to try to retrace my steps, to remember where it may have gone astray. When finally I remember, it is a vivid experience, as if suddenly everything has come together. Like the Scarecrow, my parts were scattered, and now I’ve reconnected the neurons that keep my thoughts together, my head on my shoulders, my purse beside me.

A woman’s purse is like a limb, sometimes even forming a hollow in the shoulder from the years of hauling apparently unnecessary things. Then comes that moment when someone says, “Does anyone have a nail file, band-aid, lozenge, mint, hairbrush, tampon, aspirin, pen, the Yellow Pages, a map of the NYC Subway system, the original eight track of Helen Reddy’s, I Am Woman, the solution to the world energy crisis?” And you casually root around in your purse, muttering something like, “I think I have one in here somewhere,” producing the requested item to the delight and surprise of onlookers. Unfortunately, this magic does not work when you are looking through the same collection of items for your keys as the rain is pouring down, a strange man has followed you into the parking lot, and one of the bags is starting to tear.

When I have the opportunity to travel somewhere without my purse, there is inevitably a moment where I stop dead, trying to figure out what’s missing. What have I forgotten? And sometimes, I have my purse, but I’m so used to carrying it, that I forget it’s there. “Oh my god, I forgot my… oh, heh heh, here it is.” Men are no exception to this phenomenon. I’ve watched my husband Ron ransack the house looking for the glasses perched on his head.

Neuroscientists are always poking around in our heads trying to find our memories. Some speak about the functioning of the amygdala, a tiny little part of the brain that seems to store the unforgettable memories. I’ve hoped that I could delete some of my old memories so that there might be room on that little hard drive for remembering names of people I meet and recent conversations. Surely there is no reason to keep remembering the time I forgot about a concert engagement and got a call from the stage manager asking me where I was.

Muscle memory is bandied about as the reason certain habits don’t quit, like the limp that remains years after a sprained ankle. I once had a client whose ribs were held as tightly as armor. All attempts to introduce movement came to a dead end.

“It’s muscle memory,” she announced.

“Oh, were you injured there?” I asked.

“No, it’s from the corset.”

“Corset?”

“In my last life, I had to wear a corset. It was during the nineteenth century you see.”

I can’t remember where I put my keys, and she can remember her last life. Where is the fairness in this? Then again, I’d hate to imagine the state of her amygdala.

When I was a girl, I had no idea that my Mother, who had survived capture by the Nazis, had PTSD. Neither did she, since we’d never heard of it. I did not understand that certain triggers catapulted her brain’s hard drive into replaying scenes from the war. Whenever my father was even a minute late from work, no matter what the weather, she’d grab her purse and start walking the streets looking in the gutters for his dead body. When my Father came home minutes later, he would launch into violent cursing as he tore out of the house looking for her. One day, we hid her purse. She tore the house apart, then collapsed on the couch. Instantly, my seven-year-old sister, my two-year-old brother–who thought it was a marvelous game, and I jumped on her, pinning her to the couch. “Where is my pocketbook?” she wailed. “What have you done with my pocketbook?” By the time my father got home, five minutes later, we were all sobbing on the couch. To her dying day, she never went anywhere without her purse.

The worst is when I forget myself. It can happen at any moment. I’ll be driving and suddenly I’m at my office, when I was just going to the supermarket. Or I’m walking along a beach, so deeply in conversation with an imagined adversary that suddenly I say out loud, “I really don’t think so,” just as I pass an elderly man who looks at me pityingly. In those brief moments of awakening, I experience clarity, like the moment I remembered where I left my purse. Except in this case, it wasn’t my purse that got forgotten somewhere, it was me. My thoughts are scattered all over, and then whoosh! Everything comes back together, I am re-membered. I grope in my purse for my notebook to jot down this trope of enlightenment. My wallet is not in my purse. I forgot it on the kitchen counter.

Thank goodness that at the bottom of my pocketbook is at least $4.00 in change from the time I forgot to properly close my change purse. . .

Body language expert, Lavinioa Plonka has taught The Feldenkrais Method for over 25 years.
For more information, visit her at laviniaplonka.com

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