HAVE WE FORGOTTEN HOW TO BE HUMAN?

TECHNOLOGY HAS PUSHED US TO OUR PHYSICAL AND COGNITIVE LIMITS. THE CURE? RECONNECTING WITH OUR PRIMAL ROOTS VIA A REVOLUTIONARY NEW PRACTICE

Our modern way of life has left us unable to ever truly switch off. ELLE tries out a revolutionary practice that promises to help us reconnect to ourselves

In a low, cavernous room with stone floors and a single window, through which daylight is peeping in, several bodies lie inert. Some are covered in woollen blankets, others fortressed by pillows. Some just lie there, motionless, feet bare, palms curled skywards – undulating diaphragms the only clue they are in fact alive.

Most of the people in this room are high flyers fallen to earth. There is an exhausted TV reporter who nips around the globe on a weekly basis, and a famous garden designer whose knee twitches with pain. There is a doctor, too, whose days start at 4.3Oam and go on long into the night, as well as a glossy magazine editor, whose phone and mind buzz with stories, leaving her on the verge of panic. Ostensibly, their lives have little in common, but they share one fundamental desire: to reclaim their body and mind. They want to breathe again, move again – in short, they want their mind to move at the same rate as their bodies. They want to salvage the last vestiges of what it means to be human.

The teacher who stands at the front of the class understands this only too well. After all, she has spent her entire life searching for this very answer. Thirteen years of research and constant, painstaking experimentation has finally resulted in Nahid de Belgeonne discovering a solution that may just save us all from a life of chronic pain and burnout. Its name? The Human Method. Its promise? To teach us how to become humans all over again.

To understand why something like The Human Method even exists, let alone why it is quietly practised by everyone from Hollywood stars (Gemma Arterton is, among others, a fan) to some of the country’s most influential leaders, you first have to understand what has happened to humankind over the past several decades – but, more precisely, what’s happened to us over the past 2O years.

It could be argued that the more culture advances, the more degraded the human experience becomes. Technology has affected our long-term memory, while phones have distorted our posture. And social media, with its relentless tide of inflammatory messaging and vanity-puffing commentary, has pulled the plug on our mood-moderating mind chemicals.

‘Human downgrading’ is the term used by Tristan Harris, a prominent Silicon Valley thinker, who believes that technology has, at last, overwhelmed human limits. As a result, we have shorter attention spans, increased levels of narcissism and we live in a perpetual state of stressful moral outrage. (A study by New York University found that every word of moral outrage added to a tweet increased the amount of retweets by 2O%.)*

Facetune apps and filters, meanwhile, threaten to leave us scarily out of touch with the human aesthetic, while sedentary jobs and constant mobile phone use are causing neck strain, shoulder stiffness and tension headaches. Furthermore, mobile phone

use is playing havoc with our elbows – keeping your arm bent for sustained periods of time increases pressure on the ulnar nerve, eventually causing severe pain, numbness, tingling and muscle weakness in the hands and arms (known as cell phone elbow, or cubital tunnel syndrome).** These changes don’t just feel out of sync with our evolutionary template, they are setting us up for a dramatic collapse.

‘The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and god-like technology,’ as eminent Harvard professor and evolutionary biologist Edward Wilson said. The upshot is a world in which being a human no longer works. And, as we attempt to keep up with that world, we are no longer working as human beings.

Nahid de Belgeonne knows this only too well. In the late 199Os she worked as a computer programmer. She was deskbound; shoulders hunched over a computer for hours on end. It was a template for the modern office environment and de Belgeonne experienced side effects that would afflict increasing numbers of us as the years passed. Her body ached, her eyes were fatigued, she was in a constant cycle of fight or flight as cortisol soared through her body. She believed the antidote to the technological world in which she found herself was exercise. She kickboxed and ran to obliterate the stress. At first it worked. Until it didn’t.

‘High-intensity exercise was my response to working in a very stressful environment,’ she says. ‘I just didn’t know what to do with these feelings of being overwhelmed. In the end, the work I was doing and the exercise I was pushing my body through meant that I burned out.’ Nahid left the world of tech and for the next 2O years practised as a successful yoga teacher. She ran her own fitness studios in London, where she became known for her inventive form of restorative yoga. It was slow yoga: small, undramatic movements, deep breaths by candlelight and bolster cushions to support wonky skeletal frames. It wasn’t yoga as most people would recognise it. This was, after all, the Noughties. People wanted to push their bodies as much as they pushed their minds. It was a time of extremes. Exercise became another method by which to test the limits of human potential. CrossFit, a high-intensity form of exercise that purported to use exercises that mimicked ‘real’ movement (bending, squatting, carrying a 15kg kettlebell on your shoulders) boasted of pushing its disciples to the edge. Its mascot was Pukie the Clown – a nod to the exercise-induced vomiting many experienced. Spin-class instructors talked gleefully about overwhelmed clients crying (a form of ‘release’, they said), while yoga studios were offering new forms of the ancient practice – hot yoga, ashtanga – that promised to push clients’ bodies into advanced poses in record time. Exercise, the thing that was supposed to alleviate the stress of modern life, was in fact aping the very culture people were trying to escape.

‘I realised that everyone had forgotten how to be human,’ says de Belgeonne. ‘We had become human doings, not human beings. Yoga, once about pausing, had become about movement. I had clients who had been doing it for years, but were still stressed.’

Many of her clients were on the edge of burnout, suffering from digestive issues, skin disorders, anxiety and extreme fatigue. De Belgeonne realised that she needed to get them out of their heads and into their bodies. She wanted to create a sense-based movement that would allow clients to reconnect with themselves. ‘Your body tells you everything you need, but if you’re disconnected from it, how can you know what it is that you need?’

The Feldenkrais Method is a mid-2Oth century technique devised by Israeli physicist and mechanical engineer Moshé Feldenkrais that has been adopted by many who experience chronic pain. It is, in a way, an ‘end of the line’ solution, meaning most arrive at Feldenkrais when nothing else has worked. Its methodology is relatively simple: teach the body how to move in less stressful and more natural ways through repetitive movement. This creates new neural pathways, leading to long-term changes.

De Belgeonne thought Feldenkrais could be the answer for many of her clients. She started to incorporate it into her restorative yoga practice. Clients living with long-term pain and anxiety began to report dramatic changes, not only in their wellbeing but in how they moved and breathed, too. They became more mindful, and this allowed them to move their bodies in the correct way.

‘I realised I was holding my breath every time I wrote and sent an email,’ says Catherine, a client who has worked with de Belgeonne on and off for six years and now practises The Human Method every week. ‘My sessions don’t stop me from holding my breath, but they make me realise I do it. I wasn’t behaving in a human way: I didn’t breathe correctly and never used my distance vision, as I was sat in front of a computer all day. I didn’t sit normally, either. I clenched my teeth when I was doing a task that required my full attention. I was putting my body under all sorts of unnatural stress because I wasn’t connected to it. It was just something that needed to keep pace with the mental stress I was working under. Now I feel back in sync with my body, the benefits of which have been incredible: deeper sleep, a body that doesn’t ache 24/7 and a freer mind.

The Human Method, which de Belgeonne teaches in west London and at retreats around the country, isn’t whizzy or glamorous. A lot of time is spent curled over cushions and covered in weighted blankets as breathing work is conducted.

She encourages clients to walk barefoot as much as possible, in order to stretch and work the often-forgotten muscles in the feet. She makes clients explore the movements of their hands, toes, elbows… all the overlooked muscles and ligaments that our ancestors used every day. She helps clients to stretch their skeletal systems and press pause on minds that fizz with information. It doesn’t burn calories or leave you drenched in sweat. But what it will do is transform your mind and body for the long-term, and reconnect you to that most fundamental part of who you are: your ancient self. Your body that was built over tens of thousands of years. thehumanmethod.co.uk

”YOUR BODY TELLS YOU EVERYTHING YOU NEED – BUT IF YOU’RE

disconnected from it, HOW CAN YOU KNOW

what that is?”