Volume 6, Number 1, February 2007

Quote From Moshe: “…normal is the potentially possible, deformed and limited to ‘normality.’” The Elusive Obvious, p. 105

Our Fifth Anniversary…wowie!

What else can I say? Not only have we been managing to talk about Feldenkrais for five years straight, but every day new articles appear in scientific journals claiming “startling new discoveries” about the human brain which Feldenkrais Practitioners have been taking advantage of for a generation or more.

We hope you’ll stay with the newsletter, and if you haven’t tried Feldenkrais, isn’t it about time?

No One Way About It

I had a conversation with an old friend the other day, and I left with my brain supercharged. He told me to consider a checkerboard. He said, “You can think of that checkerboard as 8 rows of alternating red and black squares. You can also think of that checkerboard as 8 columns of alternating red and black squares. There’s two ways to look at that checkerboard, two ways to describe where any square is on it.”

My friend was describing a concept called “duality” and he’s teaching a class on it. At first I was unimpressed with the idea. It seems sort of obvious, doesn’t it? How useful can that be? Okay, so you have two choices. Pick one.

But as I began talking with him and thinking about it some more, I realized that this idea of duality is something I’ve long been interested in…I just never had a name for it. You may be wondering what the big deal is yourself. Allow me to give you a more complete tour.

The duality itself is not the issue. Recognizing the duality is. Why is it so important to recognize that there are two ways to find a checker? Let’s look at duality in another realm: Music.

In a choir you usually have four different types of voices: Sopranos (high-singing women), Altos (low-singing women), Tenors (high-singing men) and Basses (low-singing men). Choral music is often made up of four singing parts that are sung together to make beautiful harmonies. If you sing hymns at church you know exactly what I’m talking about, because the four singing-parts in hymns have the exact same words sung at the same time, pretty much in the same rhythm, but with everyone singing slightly different notes.

If you’re a choir singer there are two ways you can think about your job: One, you can think of yourself as responsible for singing your part as prettily as you can; You don’t think about anyone else’s part. Any note you sing is understandable as a piece of your melody. Two, you can think of yourself as one part of a four-part instrument, like a finger on a four-finger hand. Every note you sing is understandable as an element in a four-note chord. You don’t think about your line as having any importance by itself.

If you’re a singer and you limit yourself to either one of these ways of thinking, you’re doing yourself and the music a disservice. When choir singers (or string players or horns) only pay attention to their line, the result is a piece of music that flows nicely, but has no cohesion. It sounds like four different parts that happen to be sung at the same time. On the other hand, when singers pay attention to how their part fits in with the other three, but never give any weight to the beauty of their singing-line, the result is a piece of music that has cohesion but doesn’t flow. It’s mechanically perfect, but not beautiful or human.

A choir singer can only really make music by recognizing that both ways of looking at a note are happening at the same time. Each singer must be thinking about his or her singable line, but must also be able to hear how that line fits into the other parts. Being able to recognize the dual function of each note is vital to making good music.

Now, to be perfectly honest, musicians often perform without this recognition of duality and nobody calls them on it. There are plenty of performances where the singing was pretty enough, or the music was good enough, or the hall was comfortable enough, that the result was a performance that, while not perfectly musical, nevertheless satisfied the audience or the ensemble. In other words, lack of duality doesn’t prevent the performance of a piece of music.

On the other hand, The Feldenkrais Method requires a recognition of duality, at least from the practitioner, or it doesn’t work. Before I get into that, let’s go back to our checkerboard, because three people have come to talk about it and what they say is very important.

The first person looks at the checkerboard and tells us, “You can look at these squares as rows or as columns, but you can’t look at them as both. You have to choose.” This is a dogmatic opinion that few people would agree with. It doesn’t take much to dismiss this person, and our next visitor does so.

The second person looks at the checkerboard and says, “I disagree. You can look at these squares and see them as either rows or columns. All you have to do is switch your perspective and you can go back and forth. Both ways of looking are correct. You just have to choose which one you want at any given time.” This person is harder to refute because what they’re saying is so sensible. This is generally the way we perceive things in life. We know there’s more than one way to see something and we make a choice based on our preferences or our needs.

But our third person is not so easily convinced. “If you choose, you lose something. The squares can be perceived as either rows or columns, but to limit your perception to one or the other is to deny that the checkerboard is a grid. Each square has a role as a member of a row and a column and, if possible, one should look at it that way.”

Why do we care what these three people have to say about checkerboards? As I said, in Feldenkrais it’s essential. When a person comes to see a practitioner, the interaction between them is a duality. If you think the practitioner is doing something to the client, you’re only partially right. If you think the client is creating the lesson internally based on feedback from the practitioner, again you’re missing something.

Once a practitioner begins interacting with a client, either through touch or movement, the two nervous systems become one. A situation emerges which is much more like a dance than a massage. If the practitioner begins following the movement of a client’s ribcage with their hands, it becomes very difficult to decide if the client or the practitioner is guiding the motion. In fact, to try and decide cheapens one’s perception.

The two are deciding together, based on the combined information the two of them are taking in. It may be that the practitioner is more aware of the duality than the client, but if the practitioner is unaware, then the lesson will be severely limited. The practitioner will either direct the client or follow the client, and they may even switch back and forth, but the true power of the work will not occur unless both are happening at once.

I left the conversation with my friend thinking that the ramifications of his class, teaching people to recognize duality, is profound and necessary, and sorely lacking in today’s world. It may have been that, in the past, it was enough to describe two ways of perception, but as we interact more frequently with people whose views seem radically different from our own it behooves us to recognize that what appear to be opposite opinions are, in fact, facets of a larger truth that remains to be discovered.