Volume 5, Number 9-10, October / November 2006

Quote From Moshe: “Consider the woman who could dance, and how she made a pupil or client dance also, without teaching musical rhythms, dancing steps, and all the rest of it. Her friendly attitude and her experience made him learn without any formal teaching. A certain kind of knowledge can pass from one person to another without a healing touch. However, the man must have learned to use his legs, hands, and the rest of him before a friendly touch could help him to use his experience and learn to dance so easily. He learned nonwithstanding his ignorance of his latent ability.” (The Elusive Obvious, p. 8)

Connecting the Thoughts

I have a strange dilemma. I think too fast.

You’d think that would be a good thing? Well, sometimes it is. But more often it causes problems in my awareness.

Want to imagine you’re me? Go out to the park. Close your eyes. Move your head rapidly to different places and open your eyes for a split second at a time. How’s the scenery? Not so great, right? That’s the kind of fragmented awareness I struggle with in my environment and my self.

What if I shared this wonderful quote with you: “Four…seven…ago…brought…nation.” Is that as stirring as the actual beginning of the Gettysburg Address? I didn’t think so. But that’s what you get when you live with a fragmented awareness of your reality.

Actually, I think fragmentation is a common problem, but it happens differently for different people. It may be a fragmentation of your sensation (head here, neck there), or your relationships (wife here, friends there), or of your time (work here, home there). In every case it can be problematical.

How about imbalance? What causes us to have better or worse balance as we walk a balance-beam? Of course it helps to have highly sensitive feet. But really what we’re after is something greater than that: It’s a sense of connectivity, not only of all the body parts working together as a unit, but also of your shape in the space around you, and even in the connection of time from the moment you leave the safety of the ground to the moment you return to it.

It’s called continuity. It’s the opposite of fragmentation, and it can be cultivated.

My favorite way of doing that is through the eyes. As I’ve written before, I can use them as a means to change, and also as a meter for recognizing whether change has occurred. The more information I can connect up in my visual sphere, the more I find I’m able to keep my balance, not only because I have such an improved sense of where everything is that I’m walking on, but also because my whole system is responding to movement.

Here’s a nice game to play with your eyes: Close them. (No, that’s not the trick.) Hold your finger in front of your closed eyes. Do you have an image of your finger in your mind? Can you “see” the finger even though your eyes are closed?

Now move the finger left and right. Where does the image vanish? Where does it appear? The places where it winks out are gaps in your awareness, places where your eyes might jump or where your neck doesn’t like to go. After you’ve had a particularly nice lesson you could check it again and see if the image is more continuous.

This trick, if you want to call it that, really underlines the profound connection between our bodily sensation and our mental state. Balance is a nice combination of the two, I think. It’s not exactly voluntary, but we can intentionally invoke it under certain circumstances, like when we’re walking on a large ball.

Nearly any Feldenkrais lesson is going to provide you with more continuity in your awareness. Will it always translate into better balance? Well, if not a physical balance then perhaps an emotional one, or a social one. Pay attention. You never know what you’re working with when you start connecting.

What Isn’t Feldenkrais?

I’ve spent years now writing articles on what Feldenkrais is and what it does. This time I want to write about what it isn’t.

You might not think that would be very useful information. After all, I could tell you that Feldenkrais isn’t a hot dog. No big surprise. Or I could tell you it isn’t a musical instrument. Okay. We could go on forever. Why would I want to broach this non-subject?

Because many people come to Feldenkrais looking for something that the Method may not offer, and it behooves me to warn such people that they might be better served elsewhere. And here’s an even more important point: Sometimes Feldenkrais creates a result that leads people to misunderstand it.

The most important example is relaxation. People usually find that Feldenkrais is relaxing. Because of this, they may describe the Method to other people as “something that helps you relax.” Yes, this is true, but that’s like describing a car as “someplace you sit.”

I want people to understand what the Method really is, and what it’s designed to do. To that end, I’m going to tell you what it isn’t so that the correct pathway appears more clearly in front of you.

One: Feldenkrais isn’t therapy. This isn’t a mistake that many newcomers to the Method make. Feldenkrais works with your body, right? How could that be mistaken for therapy?

Well, people who experience the Method often find themselves coming to face emotional issues that prevent them from making the changes they desire. Often pain is caused by habit, and the habit is reinforced by an emotional reaction. For example, you may grit your teeth. You can bring your awareness to your jaw with the Method and learn to relax it, but you will be unable to make lasting change without at least recognizing the emotional component of the habit.

That being said, the Method may not be the best way to deal with the emotional issues that cause you to grit your teeth. The reason the Method is so effective is that it bypasses the mental and emotional by working in the realm of movement, so you can make a change without having to think in linguistic or even conscious terms. On the other hand, the emotions still come up as you make a change and you have to be ready to deal with them. Often when you no longer “have” to grit your teeth, you find yourself facing the thing that gritting your teeth always distracted you from.

Interestingly, talk-therapy can sometimes lead to profound physical changes. When you resolve certain emotional issues, you may find the physical counterparts vanish. But talk-therapy can be a rather blunt way of addressing physical issues, and similarly Feldenkrais may not provide you with ways to talk about your pain.

Two: Feldenkrais isn’t massage. This is a biggie. Feldenkrais practitioners have actually had to work with legislators to clarify the laws so that the Method is not lumped in as another type of “body work.” If it were, we’d have to get massage-licenses to do our work.

So what’s the difference? Well, I don’t want to speak for massage, either in its capacity to provide relaxation or health benefits. You can research that yourself. What I can say is that Feldenkrais has a very different approach to the body. Our goal is neither relaxation nor physical therapy, but learning.

The learning is done through movement, so it’s easy to mistake it for something else, especially since it often relaxes people and gives them a sense of well-being. But if you think about it, any kind of successful learning creates a sense of joy. Think back to the moment you “got” something you’d been struggling to learn, like that math problem in 9^th grade that you couldn’t get until the day you had the “ah-ha!” moment.

Learning is pleasant; it comes about through transcending consciousness and traveling to a higher level of understanding, and it leaves you with a sense of greater clarity that usually brings a sense of security, joy and even curiosity about further ideas.

If you’re looking to relax or even to feel better, you’ll probably get that from the Method. But understand that these results come about from your active participation in a process of growth. Relaxation and well-being are not given to you in a lesson or put on you by a practitioner. They are merely the result of the learning process that the practitioner facilitates.

Three: Feldenkrais is not a martial art. This one’s kind of subtle. Moshe Feldenkrais was the first Westerner to achieve a black-belt in judo. Martial arts and science are two of the sources behind the development of the Method. Yet the Method itself is not a martial art.

You could argue that, while Tai Chi or Judo have their roots in fighting, they are as much “art” as “martial.” They elevate the movement of combat to a higher plane. They emphasize the relationship of one person with another and, as such, serve as vehicles for the learning of certain relationships like “combatants” and “opponents.” They can also be turned around to show people how to relate in less antagonistic ways. Like any art, they facilitate the relationship of the martial artist to the world.

With Feldenkrais the relationship between two people enables the work to occur. A practitioner cannot assist a client without having a profound relationship with that client, a relationship of two nervous systems, interacting much in the way that two judo opponents attempt to throw one another. But the relationship is not the goal. The relationship is the means. The goal is awareness.

People use Tai Chi to generate awareness and it works very well for that purpose. Yet the process is slow and one is not able to direct one’s learning towards a specific path very easily. Tai chi ends up becoming more of a way of living than a tool for learning.

Feldenkrais is very useful in that it can be specifically focused on a person’s dilemma. The scientific component of the Method provides it with a focus that makes it profoundly useful for dealing with specific issues like a bad back or sleeplessness. At the end of a good lesson, one has more than a repertoire of moves that “should help.” One has an understanding of some of the causes of one’s prior state.

This may be the most controversial of my essays thus far. There will be people, both clients and practitioners, who claim for the Method roles that I believe will deflect from a true understanding of it. Some of my claims for the Method may be overly exact. Others will be too vague. In the end, though, I maintain that the Method is a method for learning and that when one sees it as such, one is able to access its power to the fullest extent the way its creator hoped we would.