The power of expectations

When I received my first functional integration session, I had no idea what to expect. I had done yoga for several years, and been to the physiotherapist, occasionally to the osteopath, and I couldn't imagine what another practice could look like. But I was in pain, I was worried, so I went to this mysterious treatment. I didn't know what to expect of it, so I was not expecting anything - I was certainly not expecting her to fix me. I was actually very skeptical. I came out of the session not feeling much, but the day after I felt almost healed. Did I expect it? Not at all. How could something I had never heard, that I was skeptical of, do me any good?

Years later, I went back to the same Feldenkrais practitioner when I had pain in my hips, or in my back. I went to get my issues fixed, treating her like a special physiotherapist, as if she were a witch. I was expecting to be fine after those sessions, and none of my problems got fixed those times.

In the third year of my Feldenkrais training, I gave a 1:1 session to a first-year student who had just started her training. This person had many health issues, and we didn't know each other, so I have her a simple session. No crazy stuff, everything very slow. Towards the end, she suddenly started crying and I was surprised that my little actions had had such an impact. I wondered if she would have reacted the same if the same session had been given by a Feldenkrais trainer with 20+ years of experience, to whom we often show up with the expectation of having a moment of revelation. And because we expect it, we never get it. It struck me to realize that the same experience, delivered by two different people, might put the receiver in a different mindset and thus create in them a different experience.

After some Awareness Through Movement classes, I found myself without back pain, or without wrist pain, or without whichever of the pains that was actual that day. What was crazy is that sometimes the class was for shoulder blades, and I'd find the pain in a body part that felt totally unrelated had diminished. So then what did I do? The next time I had pain there, I'd do the same ATM class, expecting the pain to go away. But it didn't work.

Dating is another realm where expectations can shape the experience we have. When we go meet somebody wondering if we're finally gonna meet the one, we load our encounter with so much expectation that nobody will possibly be able to fullfil them. Nobody will be as funny, as handsome, and as caring as we expect our new lover to be. But maybe they are kind, and cultured, and amazing gardeners, and because we are focused on how they fall short with respect to our expectations, we fail to see what they bring. Our expectations prevent us from meeting the other person, as they are, where they are. We close ourselves out of the opportunity.

When we come into an experience with expectations, our finger is so rigidly pointed at one thing that we can't appreciate anything else. We can't be surprised. There's a trap though. For a while, I thought I could pretend not to have any expectations, while still having them. I was going to dates thinking "yeah yeah I'm just going for a coffee [but how annoying would it be if we didn't turn out to be a match]". Or I was practicing Awareness Through Movement classes thinking "yeah yeah I'm here for the exploration [but I really hope this heals my back pain]". And we can trick our minds into believing many things, except the ones we don't believe.

The mindset that brings us places is one where we are curious, open-minded, and light-hearted. One where we don't know what we'll find, and we are happy to find out. What's best is that, with this mindset, there's always something to take home. It might not be what we had hoped for, but it will still be something. And at some point, we stop even having hopes. We just show up to experiences and have a good time.