technology of the self

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.

The question of situating a method such as the Feldenkrais Method is not a simple one. After decades developing his work in a European and Israeli context, the conduit of Feldenkrais into North America was the Esalen Institute, the spiritual home of the 1970s personal growth movement.

I'm reading the Elusive Obvious, one of Moshe's half-dozen books. He wrote it after the first San Francisco training of the mid-seventies, in response to a request to "summarize his teachings" of that four-year training program.

Moshe is a little like some eccentric old uncle who likes to brag about all the Nobel Prize winners he's ever known and laid hands on--and who have respected him. It used to bother me a lot more before I realized just how challenging it is to introduce an new practice to the world. Recruiting famous people to the cause is an effective method, and who he recruited and boasted of says something. He didn't go after the Beatles.

In his book Awareness Through Movement, Moshe imagines that a reader, after working through the twelve lessons he presents there, could continue with his or her own daily practice, thinking up new lessons and spending as much time as he or she chooses on them (p. 64).

The coordination of ourselves in the field of gravity as the fundamental form of action in the world is like the air we breathe, or like water for sea life. It's so ubiquitous that we don't isolate it as a process that can itself be investigated and improved--or as a kind of window on anything that we do.

I am reading a paper by Anthony Weston called "On the body in medical self-care and holistic medicine" that explores the difference between what you might call two kinds of challenges to medical authority: self-help movements (the Boston Women's Health Collective and the book "Our Bodies Ourselves" would be a paradigmatic instance) and alternative health practices (chiropractic, traditional Chinese medicine, ayurveda, homeopathy etc. etc.).

This is from the programme of a performance of La La La Human Steps' Amelia--it sounds remarkably like a description of what we do in the Feldenkrais Method: