Lynette Reid's blog

Another orphaned page on my site, that I thought I'd integrate, so to speak, into the blog.

A fellow practitioner suggested to me reading Chapter 7 of Body and Mature Behavior alongside the lesson AY217 On the side, the sternum becoming flexible, while we were discussing it on Feldyforum (Feldenkrais practitioners' mailing list). It's a delightful lens for this lesson. Many ways over.

First he starts that chapter talking about creating stability between the chest and pelvis as a precondition of any action -- "the stability of the whole body relative to the ground should be increased in the plane in which work is to be done."

So I'm happy just to take that sentence and do the whole lesson again, filling in commentary for myself around that.

This bit of discussion is an orphaned page on my website, so I thought I'd move it into the blog.

In Chapter 13 of The Potent Self ("The means at our disposal") and a similar passage in Body and Mature Behaviour (in the chapter "Tonic adjustment"), Moshe discusses the question: how do we effect change in deeply held patterns of action? The deep unity of body and mind seems an impediment to change, from an empiricist perspective: I can only think what I have already experienced, and so cannot even imagine the change I have to make.

If you read my (annual? are they that frequent?) posts on this blog, you know that I puzzle about the extent to which Moshe is a behaviourist, and the extent to which I think this is or isn't an adequate approach to a) human learning and b) the kind of learning we do in Feldenkrais.

It so happens that in the other 9/10ths of my life teaching bioethics, I also have an open bucket in the back of my head that is the question set: "what presuppositions and blindspots might there be in stories about learning as routinization, which are common in the critical thinking literature in medicine; and what are the prospects and pitfalls for extending these accounts of critical thinking to critical thinking about ethical and social issues in medicine?"

Sigh. This is why I tell you drupal (the Content Management System on which this site is built) isn't for amateurs. My theme stopped working after a security upgrade. I don't know if I'll take the time to retrieve my historical colours.

Sometimes a lesson is entirely on one side. If it alternates sides, there is still a choice that has been made to start on one side or the other.

One principle at work in this is to start where the person is at, and explore what they already do best: we typically start with the side that has an easier time with whatever it is we're exploring--movement, transmission of force, connection, etc.

But the choice of side in ATM has to be for everyone at once; even in choosing for the individual, there may be a tendency or pattern that individuals share with others.

A significant proportion of google hits on my site come from people looking to find out which is the dominant leg.

How people write and think about the dominant leg is fascinating. At one end, there's a lot of "common sense" that is nonsense. Like the article summary on this website--your top google hit for "dominant leg." At the other end, there's recent scientific frameworks and data that are quite consistent with ideas that, for Feldenkrais practitioners, are as "common sense" as the idea that, in standing, one's head is generally above one's feet.

People's "dominant leg" as the literature defines it is usually their right leg. It's not related to left and right handedness. It's also not their dominant leg for the reasons you think it is.

I'm reading a chapter of Body and Mature Behaviour, Moshe's most scientific book, originally published by Routledge in 1949, reviewed at the time in the NEJM and the Quarterly Review of Biology.

I'm working through the chapter on Pavlovian conditioning (Chapter 6). It might seem that the process of conditioning a dog's salivation is far from the kind of learning we do in Feldenkrais. Feldenkrais is about developing the capacity for a creative and attuned response to our environment, manifesting more clearly our intention, with elements of spontaneity and problem-solving, right? So what's the path from reductionist behaviourism to what we do?

From Irene Gutteridge, Feldenkrais Practitioner in BC, and her Next 25 Years project:

At http://line04.unblog.fr, Yveline Cyazinski, a French psychoanalyst, philosopher (and poet), is engaged in a wonderful project of questioning Feldenkrais orthodoxy about the word (and analytic orthodoxy about the body).

The question came up in class recently "How many ATMs are there?"

Ron suggested the answer "5,243", which is as good an answer as any other!

From the beginning, I started taking notes on ATMs (Janet Alexander in Toronto) with an eye to "how these things work." So at first I thought, okay, you do one side, then the other, then both. That's how it works.