Category: blog

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.

It didn’t take long for that theory to break down.

Then as the training began, I thought, okay, so you take a movement and do a thousand subtle variations of direction or intention. That’s how they work. And at that stage I tried to invent ATMs for myself on that pattern.

Nothing wrong with that pattern, and there’s a lot going on in the trainings that takes that form–I presume with the purpose that budding practitioners should notice and feel those subtle variations.

The Alexander Yanai lessons came on me like an enormous challenge to everything I thought I knew about ATMs. In every one of them there is some [set of] idea[s] going on that contains echoes and elements of all the techniques I could see in the work, and something more, something more global about complete actions.

I’ve enjoyed Advanced Trainings with Ellen Soloway, and with Jeremy Krauss (most recently this last weekend in Baltimore) that have given the time and space to explore these lessons, and the setting to do so on a fairly intellectual and analytic plane–refusing what some would like to have as a Feldenkrais orthodoxy “thought=bad, feeling=good”. Every occasion has helped develop my sense of the range of things going on in these lessons.

The other day–I was preparing some of the primary image/five cardinal lines/simpler lessons from 7B, and I noticed for the first time how far back the genesis is for how he approaches 338 and 339–with the movement of opposition in 333, he’s trying to get at something about the head/neck relationship, and the next 8 or so lessons are all like housekeeping to raise the level of awareness and sensitivity of the class so that what he was getting at in 333 becomes approachable.

So I set in the back of my mind a challenge: I started the October fingers-to-spine month with a lesson I put together, using one simple idea. And then I taught “by the book” two Alexander Yanai lessons–ones I am still in the process of figuring out. And then I wanted to teach a fourth lesson that came out of what I was seeing in the room and developed some more focused idea than just “trying variations.”

The first lesson is Clock Hands. Actually it’s two simple ideas–when you travel around a clock, methodically checking your self-image against an idea of an objective orientation to your movements in space, you create the conditions for yourself to find all sorts of hidden places and non-habitual movements. I list this under “activities” you can do with a lesson here. And the second idea is that of lengthening from the other end–so with each movement we lengthen ourselves by reaching with the fingers, then by reaching with the hip in the opposite direction, then back to the fingers. (I list this approach under “activities” here.)

I started this “invention,” by the way, with doing Vreni Booth’s lovely online sample lesson, and added the hip movements. (Her teaching of that lesson in itself, by the way, is a great example for me of how every simple lesson pattern is its own new lesson when taught by a particular teacher with a particular vision and style. That’s why the question of how many lessons invites a zen koan response!)

I watched this first lesson unfold, and I watched the students make their way through the AY lessons. And I thought about the specific anatomical and neurological challenges of the AY lessons, while not yet grasping them fully. And I came up with Lengthening and turning arms by the fingers, which gives me some satisfaction insofar as I feel like I got to a new level of integrating elements in creating a new lesson–I worked from what I was seeing in the room that the students might benefit from (shifting intention from core to fingertip, and exploring the rotation of the arms), that old pattern I first noted (the particular transformation to the subtle organization of the core that you get when you do the one side, the other, then both; the way that shift addresses old habits too), and then the particular aspect I’m most pleased with–out of the formulaic variations, I discovered in doing it myself some sense of it coming together into a direction or focus. It seemed to me that the extension of having the arms overhead, combined with lengthening the arms with their rotation, introduced a subtle rebalancing of the flexors and extensors, an appropriate tonification of the core muscles–engaging the extensors, but lengthened, not in an anxiety pattern. I taught the lesson, and sure enough one student stood up and said, “hey! my abdominals feel subtly readjusted, like they’re working now!” (Or something like that!)

Anyway, during this month, someone wrote a lovely post on Feldyforum about reading each lesson as a play–a drama, gathering plot, Act I, Act II, Act III (I can’t track it down now…apologies). This is an element of my puzzle about what is particularly characteristic of the AY lessons. I’m going to put that idea in the back of my mind and see if something emerges from having that thought present. No hurries. It might be another year or two.

I post this under my quasi-subversive “technology of the self” theme because I still nurture the thought that the DIY ATM section isn’t just about letting people do the recordings, but about people learning the Method as something they actively create, and that belongs to them. (Though I’m happy if you just do them too. Making the Method available to people who can’t find or afford a teacher is also a big motivation.)

Maybe this is nothing other than the way people learned it before we had so many materials (lessons) available as a “canon.” They did a lesson, wrote some notes, half remembered it, consciously or not picked up techniques, principles, and patterns, and when they taught or did the lesson for themselves, they created a new lesson by necessity, whether they thought they were doing so or not, because they didn’t have the “canon.” So it’s back to the future, in the sense that this subconscious creativity existed under the guise of a very guru-focused culture in our community. “We’re just doing what Moshe did–after all, he’s a genius and we should all be happy just to sit at his feet and imitate him.” As though he said “I’m your last teacher, because no one’s ever going to be as good as I am,” instead of “I’m your last teacher, because you’re going to learn to teach yourself.”

We have a “canon” now, and we can get stuck in it, in the style of philosophers who see everything a pale echo of Plato or Aristotle, or we can finally make our own active and creative processes conscious, and work on them. That’s what I’m trying to do by blogging about “creating a lesson” in a community where this kind of thing is often considered the height of hubris. (And at the same time we wonder why there is a crisis of confidence in our ability to do the hands-on FI work!) I don’t for a moment think these two lessons are as good as or better than Moshe’s, or that there’s any idea here that doesn’t fundamentally appear in existing lessons. In fact, one value in “inventing” a lesson could be that we would then give one another feedback on our lessons along those lines! I’d love to have some comments like that! Then we’d really start to learn something about what we’re doing.

In any case, it’s not in me to spend my life reciting another person’s words either–I tried that for my PhD and decided that being an So-and-So exegete is an odd life. So for better or worse, I make my way, and hope the community considers the benefit that could be gained if we worked in this way and shared our learning.

This great old NFB short came to me via the Canadian Design Weblog. It’s very refreshing on the eyes after a decade of computationally-generated portrayals of gait.

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 will write in another post about how the problem of situating “somatic education” (if I may use that phrase as a general term for Feldenkrais and things like it) is not a trivial one at all. “Posture education” is not unknown to our culture; in its recent history, it was deeply tied with policing bodily markers of class and race. This concern was not at the front or even (perhaps) back of Moshe’s mind; but neither was he a child of the personal growth movement. His entry to North America (and the training of the largest single group of practitioners) was through a California personal growth setting, while it might not have been. F.M. Alexander’s entry was through schools of acting and music; another possible entry would have been through sports. Another would have been rehab medicine.

Indeed, he initially sought scientific audiences for his work, publishing his first book with the mainstream academic publisher Routledge. It may not have been apparent to foresight as we see in hindsight that a group like the Humanistic Psychology Institute was an odd home for an engineer with some theoretical room but little personal patience for psychologizing the pain and limitation that could arise through inefficient self-organization.

Awareness Through Movement was published in the U.S. in 1972 (the year he taught at Esalen) and must have played a role in bringing people to the San Francisco training that began in 1975. One can see it as situating the work for this new audience.

Apart from introducing the important idea of the Self-Image as governing action, Moshe's Preface to his “most accessible book” situates his work as a rebellion against the postwar era’s “grey flannel suit,” the value placed on social conformity.

In an era of “general agreement that the most important thing is to improve the social processes of employment, production, and provision of equal opportunities for all,” he writes, we stand in danger of reaching such a goal:

There is little doubt that in time we shall be able to develop units in the form of man that are educated, organized, satisfied, and happy; if we use all our knowledge in the field of biological inheritance, we may even succeed in producing several different types of such units to satisfy all the needs of society.

This utopia, which has a feasible chance of happening in our lifetime, is the logical outcome of the present situation. In order to bring it about we need only produce biological uniformity and employ suitable educational measures to prevent self-education. (ATM, p. 5)

Conformity as such (in the sense of sameness) does not bother Moshe; it’s the mechanism of achieving it that is his concern. His concern is with the cost to the individual of strengthening our orientation towards social approval as a reward for action and weakening our orientation towards internal satisfaction as a measure of success. This rhetoric made a nice fit for the children of the 60s, in the throes of the sexual revolution and the rejection of parental authority in all its guises.

But his rejection of conformity came from a very different place than the California summer of love. He was speaking as one of the pioneers of the state of Israel, the bold man who had walked as a boy across Europe and later dug right in to nation-building at all levels, from training fists to leading government departments. That’s the man who felt dismayed at the bland social conformity of the post-war world.

We carry this tension to this day in our work: our North American California-stamped Method says there’s no good or bad in organization, judgment has no place in the practice of the Method, you just sense what you sense, don’t judge it, and go with the flow. All process; no standards. And here we are, inarticulate and non-analytical in our understanding of the work.

The notion of Feldenkrais as the rejection of social conformity came from the birth of Israel and filtered through the Esalen Institute…where does it reach people bred through Sesame Street and “Free to Be You and Me”? Does the message of liberation from social conformity reach to Generation X and beyond in the same way?

If I had done a content analysis on my training program, probably more people gravitated to the theme of “limits” than “freedom.” Many of us found in this dialogue with our organism a more discriminating understanding of the range of ease of movement, the approach to limits, the backing off of limits. This turns the transgression of limits into a choice instead of a compulsion or an accident that arises through lack of perception.

This is there in Moshe as well: as I emphasized above, conformity in the sense of sameness doesn’t bother him, only conformity in the sense of failing to consult oneself. Some lessons are designed to show that we can trust the commonalities of the human skeleton in gravity to create fine coordination in movement. But this also can be a bit of a fantasy: roll around on the floor alone enough, and you’ll magically achieve integration into a harmonious society.

For me the process gave content to the notion of freedom that it had lost in my education in metaphysics. The metaphysical debate on freedom and determinism is by and large at its heart a debate about scientific reductionism–and not the most interesting approach to the debate on reductionism at that. “If reductionism is true then we lose freedom”–well, reductionism isn’t true, but you aren’t going to figure out that it isn’t and why it isn’t by thinking about freedom. You’ll just think, “maybe contemporary physics isn’t determistic either” (true); and then you’ll have proved too much. Not only can humans be free, so can rocks and molecules and all matter. You have to think about the historical and social contingency of the production of scientific knowledge to see something interesting about why reductionism is false, in my view.

So, never having been able to attach much real content to freedom and determinism as they are discussed in metaphysics, Feldenkrais brought home to me something I might have seen from other life occasions too, I suppose. But it became familiar, like second nature, a tool I can reach for in many many situations, through all that rolling around on the floor. It brought me the insight that freedom is situated in the confluence of learned abilities, sensory discrimination, and external constraining/enabling factors. Insfor as my situation permits certain actions, insofar as I can perceive that in my situation and make perceptual distinctions well enough to act intelligently, and insofar as I have developed the capacity as in the skill or ability–or the capacity is near enough that I can risk it and perhaps learn something new–I have freedom in action.

I did learn something too that is more closely related to his rejection of conformity. It is about an orientation to a certain inner sense of satisfaction. But I don’t see that in opposition to external social validation, as Moshe did. I can orient myself to academic achievement or to this inner sense of satisfaction, and either of these things can be taught, encouraged, reinforced by external sources, or driven by internal self-conception. To pose them in opposition is to deny that there is a genuine need for social approval and that its seeking can be informed by respect for that same sense of internal satisfaction. These can work together in the psychological balancing of human relations as the balancing of the skeleton in gravity works with external constraints as intrinsic to the situation of freedom: it is in managing these external factors skillfully in a situation that does not overpower my capacities that I find freedom.

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.

The Introduction focuses on something that is a central puzzle in the work: how can the same method be a means for rehabilitation of the severely neurologically damaged, a means for personal growth for the kind of anxious, medically health but vaguely unwell character we now label “the worried well,” and for promoting achievement for the president of the World Health Organization (Lord Boyd-Orr, proudly listed among his early pupils)?

The puzzle is real–when people hear about the Method, the first thing they want to know is whether it is for the sick or for the healthy. I had a social worker client once who came because a client of hers recommended it. She reported that her colleagues thought she was batty to take up a Method on the recommendation of her client.

What perhaps she understood is that someone who needs personal improvement with such urgent seriousness, and whose organism is in such a state that it can’t afford to fool itself, is a terrific source of recommendations for methods that work. Of course, that isn’t the ordinary way to understand the relationship between professional and lay expertise.

Feldenkrais connects the needs of this diverse group of characters through the idea that we are all overwhelmed in some sense by what our culture and upbringing tell us is possible, and fail to develop our own individual capacity to its fullest extent–and convince ourselves that our dreams can never really be achieved.

This thought may perhaps seem somewhat banal; it certainly wears on its sleeve our culture’s romantic heritage. Somehow before civilization, back when we were animals, we were in touch with our true somatic birthright…yada yada yada. If you go deep, deep inside yourself, you can find your true self and become who you really are. I dealt with this banality in learning the Method by not engaging with it at this theoretical level, but working with it in practice alone. After all, those who grew up on “Free to Be You and Me”–and found themselves at the end of the great journey of self-discovery cast out in the post-boomer job market of the mid 1980s–might well read freedom and individuality different from the children of fifties’ conformity launching into the world at that great pre-globalization moment of unprecedented prosperity and relative income equality. But let me situate his idea of the dream of achievement from which we are alienated by our culture in the context in which Moshe gives us this story pattern in the Intro to the Elusive Obvious.

He is attempting to explain what the great benefit is that all these diverse characters can find in his Method. He describes it in terms of getting “better” and feeling “more human.” But what does that mean? And then he tells two (highly gendered) stories of pupils who let him in on the one thing they have always wanted to do but that society has inscribed in their bodies as unachievable: the woman with cerebral palsy who always wanted to dance, the boy with an arm injured from birth who always wanted his peers to stop treating him as delicate but instead to give him the great pleasure of being beaten up, like all other boys his age.

The seeds of his deconstruction are not hidden too deeply here. That dream beyond the occluding effects of culture is highly culturally specific: the girl who wants to dance, the boy who wants to fight.

At the time I began with Feldenkrais, I somewhat identified my philosophical training as that which had injured me, so I wasn’t particularly interested in alienating myself from a practice that I found interesting, and that I thought might help me, because of a few post-foundationalist, feminist, and anti-romantic intellectual scruples.

Those of us who came of intellectual age in the heady “everything is constructed” days of the late 1980s have in various ways been working out paths through and beyond the idea ever since. I saw Bruno Latour speak at Illinois not long before I injured myself: is there an answer to the question of which ecosystem conquers which that is not determined by social forces and interests? He held the hard constructionist line against the scientists who turnout out (as they increasingly were in those days of the Sokol hoax) to challenge the philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists of science. Latour’s spur to take it further came out of the realization that in a world where vested interests are denying the reality of global warming, perhaps turning out hoards of graduate students trained to question all “facts” as socially constructed is a strategy that should be rethought. (I was pleased to re-encounter the Actor Network Theory version of Bruno Latour on returning to academic life.)

I “thought” the question through with 8 months of “put your foot here, push there, turn to the left, look up, look down…” on the floor in Colima, Mexico and a five-year sabbatical from academic life. My mind, restlessly contextualizing, critiquing, viewing the world from a distance and askance, was not the only thing rolling around on the floor. It shifted in my self-understanding from sovereign processor (or even maker) of experience, to one player among many who may be crowding–or absent from–the stage. Meanwhile gravity goes on forming bones and somehow, through processes deep in my brain (what does “deep” mean?) and distributed in the dynamics of my physical structure, I am managing to stand, walk, and get on with my day, not falling over, despite human beings being the most unstable animals around. Some days I was in more pain and some days less, and some days I more or less constructed as a person “with chronic pain”–one of those marvelous diagnoses that writes the state of medical knowledge or lack thereof straight into a patient’s body and mind as a thing they “have.” Year by year, I know more about how to organize myself to do what I want (and I might want to spend more or less time for every desire interrogating it critically or acting on it; and these are choices that sometimes I get to make and sometimes not).

Speaking of the struggles of an intellectual attempting to convince herself to take her embodied experience seriously, it is relevant that half the introduction to the Elusive Obvious is taken up with an orientation to what he means by “learning” and “education” in this context. He compares his method with two cases: learning to dance by going out dancing and dancing with someone more experienced, gradually gaining in confidence, and building implicitly on skills one didn’t know one already had, and an encounter he had with another famous friend, Heinrich Jacoby (perhaps less famous today than some of his other boasts). Jacoby taught him to draw in an evening: he asked Moshe to draw a lamp, then pointed out that in reality he saw not lines but light and shadow–so why had he drawn lines? Moshe astounded himself with the fantastic quality of the drawings he was then able to turn out if he paid attention to light and shadow instead of lines. The simple question Jacoby had given him removed a deep cultural preconception and opened a world of technique in which he could immediately put his own perceptual abilities to work in achieving what he had never imagined possible to him.

These two stories of learning bear little relation to academic learning. It’s not about sitting in a classroom and taking notes, learning the theory of, or memorizing facts. We often say (and Moshe does here too) that the learning is non-linguistic, sensorial. But we can get caught up in inappropriate intellectual dichotomies here too. Moshe talked about Feldenkrais not being classroom learning at a time when there was much more uniformity and passivity to classroom learning. Furthermore, his examples don’t demonstrate that learning has to be non-verbal (as we sometimes think in Feldenkrais, and sometimes take to philistine conclusions). The second example shows the power of a well-placed question or observation to open up a new world of perceptual and technical exploration.

The scientific and secular orientation of the work is strikingly evident in this Introduction. I wrote about it last year here. The vocabulary of humanism is not prominent today in the world of “alternative medicine” and we find ourselves as a practice in the position of watching a band wagon speed by: the route to public acceptability seems to be through the idea of a spiritual dimension of human health. Perhaps, we imagine, Moshe can be recast as a Hasidic mystic, just like Madonna.

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).

It is not my experience that people approach their learning in and through Feldenkrais that way. I know that for years I enjoyed coming and lying on the floor, being guided through these beautiful sequences of movements, doing less, feeling more, and most importantly, having no homework.

But I find for myself and for many students these days, there is much more interest in having a “personal practice,” as we say now, influenced by yoga. I’ve been setting up a project I call [[DIY ATM|”Do-It-Yourself ATM”]] designed to create better conditions for the possibility of people doing just that.

If you sign up at [[DIY ATM]], you have access to recorded ATM lessons, and brief discussions of principles and activities to make use of in doing the work. And you can share your experiences and your inventions with others in the process.

Feldenkrais teaches a deep form of basic literacy–the “logic” of the human being in action. We all learn to write for ourselves, in our own handwriting; this does not mean that we do not appreciate those who have cultivated and studied more extensively the art of writing and do it as professionals. Indeed the development of our own capacity to compose strengthens our ability to learn from and to appreciate those who make it a life study in another sense.

Register (it’s free) and try it out.

The project may be interesting to you as well if you are a practitioner; you are welcome to contribute lesson recordings or schema and theme discussions.

I have a dream…an unavowed dream that is about to become avowed…

It is a dream that ca. US$300 a year per practitioner could buy Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioners a professional organization that wouldn't respond to its members' requests for support in practice-building with veiled suggestions that real grown-ups don't expect their professional organization to support such trivial and grubby things.

A dream that we had something, well, like our beloved FGNA only…a little less disparaging of us.

But alas the latest issue of In Touch came today. I'm so sorry to say that what we have is like FGNA, only more so.

Mission statements are important things. At some point when I wasn't paying attention, the FGNA adopted a mission statement that reads:

Because the Feldenkrais Method® transforms people’s lives in deep and profound ways, freeing them to enact their avowed and unavowed dreams: It is the mission of the Feldenkrais Guild® of North America, a membership organization, to act in stewardship of the legacy of Moshe Feldenkrais. (Mission Statement of FGNA, 2004)

That might be a nice mission statement for FEFNA, the Feldenkrais Educational Foundation of North America, whose membership is the public. But for the practitioners' member organization?

In Touch features a dreamy lead article gathering and sharing the fruit that such a confused mission statement could be expected to bear in an organization with a culture like ours, disparaging the very notion that the practitioners' professional organization should serve practitioners.

The analogy with IBM — yes that's it! Behind the member request that FGNA act as an organization serving practitioners is the selfish demand that FGNA turn out diet pills instead of doing that dream magic thing FGNA does so well! Diet pills to fill my personal bank account! Legacy of Moshe be damned.

The public encounters the method through practitioners. Practitioners look to their professional organization for support in practice building because small or non-existent practices mean two things at one and the same time: they aren't making a living and they aren't getting to share the magic they love with the public.

These two things, making a living and sharing the method, are not separate, and they certainly are not opposite.

If they were, why in the world would we have this whole apparatus of training programs and service marks and a Guild?

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.

We might study logic and argumentation to improve the quality of our thinking, or rhetoric and literature to improve our quality of expression. In doing so, we thereby improve our capacity in a wide range of fields of action. When it comes to the coordination of our physical body in action, we think that’s something for someone else. Surely top-flight athletes pay attention in a detailed way to the coordination of themselves in action, but you can only do that if you’re already superhuman — strong, accomplished, talented — and you’re attempting extraordinary feats.

Feldenkrais’s method demonstrates that anyone can make intelligent application of processes of subtle refinement (decades of training and natural talent are not required) in order to achieve improvements in capacity that are astonishing, from the point of view of our ordinary “folk science” (or advanced science) understandings of the nature of strength and flexibility.

Through gradual and patient experimentation with options for the coordination of yourself in action, not only do you discover a number of specific keys to improved function, you also strengthen your own capacity to sense more of yourself more clearly in your environment, and learn/discover/create fresh in each moment the most appropriate action available to you for your intention.

Take part in the Do-It-Yourself ATM process to check it out.

Okay, so I’m the last Feldenkrais blogger out there who has figured out how to put a YouTube video in their site. This is Lea Kaufman, and is it possible that she’s doing this in Colima, during the second training program? (I was in the first Colima program.)