Volume 2, No. 9 – October, 2003

Quote from Moshe: “I have never met anybody, man or animal, who cannot tell a friendly touch from an evil one...Through touch, two persons, the toucher and the touched, can become a new ensemble...The touched person becomes aware of what the touching person feels and, without understanding, alters his configuration...” The Elusive Obvious, p. 4

What I Like About You

In a typical doctor’s office, you go to the expert, tell them what’s wrong, and let them check you out. They look you over, maybe run some tests, tell you what’s wrong and what to do about it. At no point does the relationship change. Everyone’s roles remain the same. If your problem goes away, it is a direct result of the doctor’s advice.

In a chiropractic office, you come to the expert, tell them your problem, and they address it by working on your body. They make changes by manipulating your bones or accessing pressure-points. A massage therapist will make changes to your musculature or your connective tissue. You participate in those changes only passively. In each case, the practitioner stops when you appear to feel better, or when a muscle-test indicates you have improved.

You go to a Physical Therapist and tell them you have trouble walking, or getting up. They refer to their expertise and advise you in the way to do exercises which are designed to strengthen your weaknesses. They instruct, and you do as they say. If you are changed, it is by the nature of your learning some of their expertise to use on yourself.

All of these approaches are good for many situations, but they are different from Feldenkrais in the nature of the relationship between client and practitioner. What is that relationship, and why is it more important than expertise?

How do I work with someone? How do I know where to put my hands, what to move, and most importantly, when to stop for the day? The stuff that happens in a lesson often seems arbitrary to a client who has come in for a specific problem. I may move the ribs to deal with a hand-injury, or I may play with the feet to address a bad back.

Feldenkrais is a relationship-building tool. First, it helps you to create a better relationship with yourself, connecting the parts of you that have so long been separated. Second, it creates a relationship between you and me, the practitioner and client. The second relationship is what makes the really powerful change possible.

When you come to my office, I am less interested in your symptoms and more interested in who you are as a person. It’s not because I need a friend and it’s not because your symptom is irrelevant. If I am going to make your life better, I have to make you aware of choices that will eliminate the symptoms or keep you from colliding with them. To do that, I have to understand how you experience and interact with the world.

Thus the relationship begins: I must get to know you. My first means of doing this as a Feldenkrais practitioner is by observing the way you move, sit still, or lie on my table. As you lie down, for instance, I may take note of the extent to which you keep your back arched or the different directions you point your feet.

Instead of correcting you, my next task is simply to call attention to what I notice so that you notice it, too. I use movement to communicate with you, to find out from you what you can sense and what you cannot, and to progress in this dialogue until our awareness of your situation is more evenly matched. I may do this either by placing my hands on the area that is engaged, or on an area that is not engaged so that you become aware of the contrast. As I move you in a way that is easy, I become aware, and I make you aware, of what choices you have. How far can you rotate your arm? What is the relation between your arm and your ribcage, and how can you change that relation to move the arm farther?

As I move you, I am also moving myself. Your ability to sense will be aided or impeded by my own. If I want you to let go of your expectations for how far you can move your arm, I have to let go of my expectations too. We both must grow in the moment to dispense with criticism and engage in paying better and better attention to the situation at hand. As we increase our awareness together, we both begin to move as a larger system. We both learn something in the interaction, and we both feel changes to ourselves.

I stop when I sense that you have learned something fundamental about yourself, and that as a result you have somehow changed since you first came in, perhaps in a big way, and perhaps in a subtle way. What is most lovely is that I will have changed too, so that as you stand up and feel different, I feel different as well. I am not the expert; rather, I am a participant in a shared learning experience. I may be the guide, the catalyst, for change, but I am not immune to its effects, and I cannot be if I am to accomplish the work with you. If I take you somewhere, I have to end up there too.

If I have done my job well, you will have a sense of how you got from where you were to where you are, although generally we will have to go through such a process a number of times before this occurs. Whether or not you can keep the experience, nonetheless something has happened that has changed you, and it has also changed me, and lastly, it has changed our relationship.

When I am working with someone, one of my cues to stop is when I look down and do not recognize the person. Often the changes that occur are so profound that a client looks physically different because they carry their head differently, relax their habitual expressions, and breathe. The lesson ends when I relate to the person not as they presented themselves when they walked in the door, but as they are now, closer to human, closer to loving themselves.

QUESTION FROM ASK ADAM:

Are there Feldenkrais Lessons you can do in a car while driving?

Linaka

Dear Linaka,

You can do any of them in the car, to a certain extent. Feldenkrais knew that some people would be incapable of doing his lessons because they were bedridden or severely disabled. He advised those people to do what they could and imagine the rest. Many people gained significant improvement by doing this because a clearly imagined movement actually creates more change than a real movement done without attention.

So if you buy a Feldenkrais tape or CD at, say, www.feldenkrais.com, you can drive, listen to the tape, and imagine you are doing the movements, or do the ones you can do and imagine the rest. But be careful! Some lessons may make you drowsy!