Month: February 2009

Orientation, manipulation, and timing are three facets of organization that have to come together for an action to be successful (doing the right thing in the right place at the right time).

You can create a new “manipulation” (the movement, considered as a configuration of the body in relation to itself) by altering the configuration of the starting place of the movement.

For instance, in the first rolling to sit lesson we altered the use of the arms at the beginning, feeling the difference it made to the ease of the movement and the participation of the core to let the elbows come towards the ceiling. There are lessons with similar folding/flexing the core movements where the arms are in the configuration of a donut-shaped circle around the head. How would that change things?

You could also vary the configuration of your head. What if your head were turned to the left or right, and in that turned position you lift, now your ear towards your knee?

What are some of the different configurations you could imagine for your legs, and how would that variation change the movement?

In order to catch a ball coming at you in the outfield, you have to be on the field, in the right place, facing in the right direction (the right orientation in space), holding out your hand with your palm in the right direction (making the right manipulation of your body), and at the right moment (timing it to be there when the ball reaches you). It could be Aristotle’s practical wisdom we're studying here: to do the right thing is a confluence of the appropriate action in the appropriate situation at the appropriate time.

So one way to think of creating variations of a lesson you've done is to vary it in one (or more) of these three ways.

That is, you can vary your orientation in your environment (space, gravity); you can vary the action you do considered in a a specific manipulation of your body; or you can change the timing of the movement(s) you are doing. In that way, you can invent a variation, changing the orientation, manipulation, or timing of the lesson and teach it to yourself.

(If the distinction or nature of those three abstract ideas is not so clear yet, don’t sweat it. You can start the other way around: be creative in any way you like, and then analyze that creativity into these categories later if you find it useful to do that.)

Please share your variation with your fellow learners by posting as a comment on the lesson you were modifying. Then we can all try one another's lessons.

Our human capacity for learning is extraordinary. We go from tiny creatures who can barely manage our own digestion–and can’t manage our own elimination–to being able to play intricate musical compositions, perform acrobatics, paint pictures, form and express elaborate abstract thoughts. We spend months just figuring out how to stand up.

Our ability to learn makes us able to adapt to, survive and flourish in a wide range of environments. It goes on for life.

It also makes us able to learn to do things more stupidly than any animal acting on what we call “instinct.” If I go (like my cat) to jump up on a ledge, I’m sure to muff it up. In fact, what my cat does seems impossible to me.

This Method is fundamentally about learning. It isn’t so much about treating or fixing things, but about learning new capacities and options. And instead of learning by imitating, it’s about learning by teaching yourself. The instructions of the lessons are like a puzzle: the real instruction always is something like “notice what you do, how you organize yourself, in order to do the action described.” And what you have to do is something you have to create.

So in designing variations and creating new options for lessons, the ultimate challenge becomes to create something more like a riddle, a puzzle, and less like a roadmap.

Moshe’s early work in Judo (the legend is that he was one of the first European black belts and helped found the French Judo association) showed him a quality of human action that one might call the somatic reality behind maturity:

The essential aim of Judo is to teach, help and forward adult maturity, which is an ideal state rarely reached, where a person is capable of dealing with the immediate present task before him without being hindered by earlier formed habits of thought or attitude. (Higher Judo, p. xiii)

The posture (or as Feldenkrais named it, “acture”) from which a person could respond with movement in any direction, based on the current situation as it is, and the needs and intentions of the agent, is the mature stance.

This is not posture as your Aunt Mabel defined it. Not about “standing up straight” or “pulling your shoulders back.” In fact, can you catch yourself adjusting how you sit at the very appearance of the word “posture”?

“Acture” is about having freedom to act unhindered by the past or by fixed ideas about how you are supposed to be. It is a dynamic, not a static, state.

Philosophical debates about the nature and possibility of freedom tend to leave out of the equation the kind of creatures we are. Whether we’re free becomes a question about whether anything in the universe can happen outside of the deterministic causal chain that we imagine science tells us exists. But what if we think of being more or less free in relation to our capacity as creatures who may be ignorant and who can learn?

Feldenkrais had one simple and concrete “principle” of freedom. If you know how to do something in three ways, then you’re free. Just one way–you’re stuck. Two–you’ve got an option now, but you’re still caught in dichotomies. Three and you’ve got choice.

Moshe was fond of saying that the first principle of his work is that there are no principles.

Principles may organize our thinking and direct our attention and action, but they also tend to put us to sleep. We discount or ignore aspects of our experience that don’t fit the principles.

When someone asks what we feel, we answer instead with what we know.

Sometimes in Feldenkrais our acute awareness of how knowledge can bypass feelings creates an anti-intellectual bias. Sometimes when someone asks what we know, we answer instead with what we feel. But what would like really be like if we were confined always to the realm of feeling and had no epistemological capacities apart from appreciating sensation?

The claim that the first principle is that there are no principles is a paradox. It is designed to wake us up rather than put us to sleep. Neither the sleep of clinging to principles nor the sleep of floating in the endless sea of experience.

Principles are not to be banished but to be handled intelligently.