2017 The Feldenkrais Journal

The Feldenkrais Journal

2017

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The design of this issue of The Feldenkrais Journal is inspired by mid-twentieth century drawings from the archives of the Noa Eshkol Foundation for Movement Notation, a selection of which appear in the following pages. Not only do these beautiful illustrations of human movement speak to (and from) the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education (Noa Eshkol, Feldenkrais’s student, notated hundreds of his lessons), they reflect aspects of drawings and other visual notation made by Feldenkrais practitioners and students today, such as the drawing to the right by Tiffany Sankary.

Developed in Israel by choreographer Noa Eshkol and architect Abraham Wachman, Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation is a system for representing movement in written or drawn form. The analysis of movement is based on a spherical system of reference, in accordance with the structure of the human body, and charts the orientation and arc of embodied movement. Originally developed for choreographers to use with dancers, much as a composer would write out a musical score, Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation has been used to record all manner of movement, both human and animal.

In his Introduction to Noa Eshkol’s 50 Lessons by Dr. M. Feldenkrais, Feldenkrais wrote the following about his former student and her colleague’s novel approach:

1 Noah Eshkol, 50 Lessons by Dr. M. Feldenkrais (Tel Aviv: The Movement Notation Society, 1980), v.

The notation of movement as seen by Eshkol and Wachman gives an intrinsic principle for movements. They use the structure of our skeleton in which the principle joints work so that a polar representation and not an axial Cartesian one represents their configuration almost as clearly as we see them, but more precisely.

The polar representation shifts the origin of movements to the body itself instead of to some arbitrary point in space, such as a stage . . . .1

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The Feldenkrais Journal

Contents 5 Letter from the Editor, 2017 7 Dennis Eugene Leri 1945-2016 Elizabeth Beringer 8 Selling Water by the River Dennis Leri 14 Complex Problems Todd Hargrove

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20 49 LGBT Elders and the The Origin of Feldenkrais Method: Consent Lessons from the Shannon Lynne SAGE Centers in New Sullivan York City Frederick Schjang 55 Remembering 26 Michael Krugman The WeberJean Elvin Fechner-Henneman Movement Optimization Cycle Roger Russell 40 An Introduction to Sense Writing or Life, I thought, was harder than that Madelyn Kent

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Illustration of conical movement from the archives of the Noa Eshkol Foundation for Movement Notation

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Illustration of rotatory movement from the archives of the Noa Eshkol Foundation for Movement Notation

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Letter from the Editor / 2017 One of the best things about our work is that it gives a feeling of timelessness. Students in Awareness Through Movement (ATM) classes walk around after a lesson, see the clock on the wall, and exclaim that an hour couldn’t possibly have passed. Through the years, we’ve appreciated this break from linear, relentless time, over and over.

Given our out-of-time learning, putting together an issue of The Feldenkrais Journal can feel like an exercise in irony. The year is a series of deadlines, and each deadline builds on satisfaction of the one before.

Analysis of articles, staying within budget, and editing footnotes happen very much on a timeline.

This year our intrepid team of volunteers includes two new members of the Editorial Board: Margot Schaal and Dana Fitzgibbons. Both Margot and Dana have impressive backgrounds, and they were excellent partners as we worked through the task of putting together the 2017 Journal.

This edition has articles all along a spectrum that stretches from rigorously intellectual to dreamily experiential. Roger Russell’s article expands on the Weber-Fechner law, along with the ideas of theoretical and experiential learning. In a not dissimilar inquiry, Todd Hargrove describes and illustrates the difference between complex and complicated systems. Frederick Schjang and Madelyn Kent offer articles straddling the divide between the experience of our students and our own experience as teachers. And Shannon Sullivan takes us along as she ponders the heart of a dog, and her experiences in relationship with canines.

Your idea of the continuum from time-bound to timeless may be different, or may not exist at all. And we all know from experience that even the most structured and academic author will day-dream about topics and writing. And a poet may scrutinize and count syllables. An ATM student can be distracted by a noise outside. The linear happily coexists with its opposite.

Two of our articles may take you out of time, into the realm of memory, as you reflect on the character of people you knew or heard about: Elizabeth Beringer writes on Dennis Leri, and Jean Elvin on Michael Krugman. Their articles celebrate lives lived and invoke the work, inspiration, and spirit of two of our own. Please also enjoy Dennis’s own voice in “Selling Water by the River,” his thoughtful introduction to the transcript of the San Francisco training.

I invite you to turn the page and experience this edition as a member of a special community. We gather in these pages to intellectualize, remember, and learn; to join with the ideas of others, and to use them as part of timeless learning.

—Anita Noone

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Photo by Liz Sisco

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Dennis Eugene Leri 1945–2016 Elizabeth Beringer Dennis Leri profoundly shaped and inspired generations of Feldenkrais practitioners. He was one of the first practitioners and one of the first trainers in North America, and his engagement with the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education stretched over five decades. Dennis’s impact on the development of the Method is ongoing and widespread.

Most of the senior teachers working today in North America were impacted by his teaching at some point in their career.

Dennis’s originality and independent thinking shaped his approach to pedagogy in the Feldenkrais training programs. He started a number of innovative trends that rippled through the larger Feldenkrais world.

He led the controversial transition from video-based trainings to trainings rooted in live teaching. He also created numerous ingenious approaches to training teachers, such as introducing the much-beloved practice of guided Functional Integration explorations.

Dennis asked students, colleagues, and friends to join him in his passion for inquiry. His devotion to craft was balanced with an appreciation of how our understanding can develop in novel directions.

He entered a room silently, constructing slowly, and without fanfare, a spaciousness that encouraged the natural arising of awareness.

Dennis’s interests ranged over a rich landscape that included martial arts, Buddhism, neuroepistemology, philosophy, and poetics. He was a consummate storyteller. He layered his stories with humor and mystery, spicing them with meandering sidetracks that turned out to be all about life, development, and the practice of the Method. Dennis employed this wide array of perspectives masterfully in his teaching, jostling those who worked with him out of their settled views of what the Method was or could be, into something larger and more magnificent.

Dennis died after a prolonged and unpredictable illness. During this journey, he was nourished and accompanied by his friends, his extended family, and especially his wife, Maria Leri. His poetic spirit and the unique artistry and rigor with which he embodied the Method will, without a doubt, continue to inspire our community for years to come.

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Selling Water by the River Dennis Leri Summer 2005: it’s 30 years since Moshe Feldenkrais began the so-called San Francisco training. Organized and administered by the Humanistic Psychology Institute, it was the second of three trainings begun by Dr. Feldenkrais. It was his one and only training to incorporate and integrate, from day one, both Functional Integration and Awareness Through Movement lessons. Dr. Feldenkrais’s previous Tel-Aviv training was with a dozen Israelis and it was entirely centered on his table work.

Following the San Francisco training, Feldenkrais led the Amherst training for two of four years. It was an unwieldy 230 person free-for-all focusing for the first two years almost entirely on Awareness Through Movement lessons. For the last two years an ad hoc group of assistants followed the Functional Integration format from San Francisco. Virtually all present trainings, after many experiments in training format and content, have now converged on a program that presents concurrently from the beginning Functional Integration and Awareness Through Movement lessons. So, it is of no small value to be able to study for ourselves Moshe Feldenkrais’s one attempt at an integrated training.

In this landmark transcript plus audio format you will read and hear Dr. Feldenkrais engage his students with a beguiling and dazzling mixture of Awareness Through Movement lessons, Functional Integration explorations, Functional Integration demonstrations, lectures, and many great stories.

What was it like to be in a training in 1975? Who joined such a training? Then, there was no such thing as a Feldenkrais practitioner, Feldenkrais trainer, or assistant trainer. There was no Feldenkrais Guild.

Most of the students had never seen a Functional Integration lesson and many did not know Functional Integration even existed. There was, however, Moshe Feldenkrais. The time was ripe for the man and his method. Even though it began in 1975, the training was attractive to and a receptacle for people sympathetic with the aspirations and zeitgeist of the Sixties. The Sixties had been a time of great social and individual upheaval in America and the world. Many San Francisco students were on a quest and many were looking for a way to live the high (no pun intended) ideals of that era. Civil rights, women’s rights, ecological activism, and environmental preservation, along with anti-war protests, mobilized people to act to change the world. The desire of

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many individuals to change society and the outer world coexisted with a growing desire within many others to change their inner worlds. For some, that meant exploring Eastern or Western esoteric practices, for others, mind altering psychedelic substances. Whether the path was inner or outer change, there was in the air the notion that one had to live one’s change. People were looking for teachers who could “talk the talk and walk the walk.” The idea of embodying knowledge was a fresh idea at the time. And in the domain of embodied knowledge Moshe Feldenkrais—Judo master, world-class physicist and originator of the Feldenkrais Method—was perceived as “the real deal.”

Sitting in a hip restaurant on a then very chic Union Street in San Francisco I was having a business lunch with Ruthy Alon with whom I had organized a summer-long Awareness Through Movement course.

It was a mere week before Feldenkrais was to begin his training. Ruthy recognized and began talking with a man at the next table. It turns out he was an epidemiologist on his way to Africa the next week. It was a chance meeting and while the man had done some work with Dr. Feldenkrais, he had no plans to take the training. He changed his mind about Africa and instead joined the training. It was Jerry Karzen and it’s hard to imagine an Amherst training or Moshe’s later years without the consequences of that chance meeting. A woman hurrying to class in drama school fell flat on her face and the first thing she saw when she looked up was Moshe’s image on a training poster pinned to the bottom of a bulletin board all but hidden from sight. In the clarity of that shock she applied to the training. I had written to Dr. Feldenkrais in 1972, and to my surprise he’d written back and so began a correspondence.

So by 1975, I was eager to find out if the work was as profound as I’d imagined. Of course, I was to find that the limits of my imagination could not contain Feldenkrais’s method. Each of us in that group of nearly 65 students had our own story of how we’d come to brave the cold summer weather of San Francisco for the hottest ticket in town.

There are at least three ways to position one’s self towards this material: as a student, as a practitioner, and potentially as a trainer of the Feldenkrais Method. As students, at some point we ask ourselves the question whether it is better “to be or not to be (a student in the training)?” For some the question arises before the training, for others it emerges sometime during the training. In 1975 it was all so new, so different, and it wasn’t cheap. When I listen to the audios and edit the transcripts I relive “my” training and I am a beginner again. The power and potency of this material stays new. It may seem familiar but it is still fresh.

We respond to the call to examine ideas, emotions, thoughts, and ways of acting. One feels the sincerity of Moshe Feldenkrais’s project. His is a life of inquiry and one senses he has lived in and through this mode of inquiry. I trust he knows what he’s doing even if I don’t always understand what he’s driving at. Awareness becomes a grounded concept. One senses that he cares. By design, and through Dr. Feldenkrais’s intention, for each of us the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education becomes

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our method, “my” method. The lessons, the lectures, the demonstrations are rewarding or punishing in accordance with the quality of our attention. The venue is a place for the honest recognition of my limits and my capacity to act beyond my limits. With each interpretation and reinterpretation of a lesson directive I chart my own life direction.

The days roll along and the shape of the training emerges: the themes, motifs, the finding of one’s own level of participation, the pedagogical timing operating within the time management of the day. There’s humor, a lot of it actually. There’s surprise at the kinds of experiences myself and others are having. We are learning to deal with lesson material, new concepts, and experiences of change. We and Dr. Feldenkrais are trying to get the measure of the other. There’s no question that Feldenkrais’s knowledge is broad and encyclopedic and carries with it a depth one is touched by. You will read and hear the questions we asked, some silly and some heartfelt. Know that now any of us would ask very different questions of him. We pit the profound questions our classmates and Feldenkrais are asking against the mundane ones we ask ourselves: Who’s that asking questions?

Again? Who talks too much? Who is silent? Who will we choose to go to lunch with? Is it me or are these lessons too difficult? Too easy? Those kinds of questions are no doubt a balance to the enquiry initialized by Dr. Feldenkrais. The challenge to my sense of self, the revelation of unknown facets of my experience, the new and different sensations, and the provocations to my thinking need a little trivial pursuit. Yet, for each of us as we go along, the training becomes my training.

As a graduate of this very San Francisco training, as a Feldenkrais Practitioner, and as a continuing student of the Feldenkrais Method, what can I say about the San Francisco training with the experience of having been in dozens of trainings? First, it was of its time. The passing references to the events of the day, to authors, athletes, performers known instantly to any person remotely alive at the time locate it in that era. Regarding content—the lessons and training themes—all the usual suspects are there. I recognize what’s at stake, the genre is familiar, and yet, and yet. . . Can we ever fully plumb the depth of any one lesson let alone the thousands we come to find out he, Moshe Feldenkrais, has minted? Can I, can anyone learn this? The answer in hindsight is, of course, yes. But what relation does the training have to our learning the Method? In Israel Feldenkrais and I went through Body and Mature Behavior and he expressed to me how amazed he was at how prescient he was regarding the theme and the reach of that book. He said of himself, “Who was that fellow? How did he know that?” The freshness of the book, its novelty, meant one thing to the younger version of Feldenkrais and quite another to the mature exponent of the Feldenkrais Method. The book had a great premise: it programmatically challenged approaches to human self-understanding in ways I submit have still not been fully comprehended. Many people judge it by the circa 1940s science in it and find it by that measure wanting or inadequate judged

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by today’s standard. I submit that by and large critics of that ilk don’t get what was unique then and is still unique about the aim of that book.

And yet there was at the time of its writing no method, that is, no practice which could deliver on the book’s promises. Feldenkrais would need many years to cobble together what we now come to think of as the Feldenkrais Method. So it is with the material and form of the San Francisco training.

We knew enough to find and take the training, but it’s taken years to understand what we understand. We may quibble with Feldenkrais regarding his use of this or that expression, this or that way of dealing with a student. We may think he should have done this or said that differently or “better.” Never heartless, sometimes artless, the San Francisco training asked the tough questions in new and playful ways and gave us room to convert the questions into our own way of enacting a solution. The content—the lessons, talks, demonstrations—connected us to the process of self understanding, to Feldenkrais, to our fellow students. Awareness connects. Being connected changed the shapes of lives.

As a fellow trainer I am very interested in how Dr. Feldenkrais proceeds day to day. There are, to state the obvious obvious, so many levels to a training. Form, so the poets say, is an expression of content. The lessons have the form they have because of their content: functional themes, pedagogical strategies, relationships to other lessons, resonances with Judo, Yoga, or any starting idea. The order of instructions in an Awareness Though Movement lesson is not random but carefully thought through and tested and retested and then artfully adjusted to the students present for it. So it is with a training. We could see in a single lesson the shape of a day of the training, a week, a segment, the entirety of the training. In a training we can see the shape of a lesson. It’s also instructive to look to how the training content is punctuated: the overlapping time frames, the breaks in the day, time between segments. Does the training begin on time, late, even early?

What students are always late, what teachers? The utilization of space between students, how the room affects that, how the students position themselves in a room. The field of the training—form and content, structure and function, teacher, teaching, time, place—simultaneously brings us into play as we bring it into play. Listen carefully to the audios and think for yourself: Is it better to conduct the training in the way he says he should or how he actually does? Should it be noted that he first demonstrates what it is that he’s going to rail against so as to better knock it down? Is it accidental, planned? Or is it the hallmark of maturity as defined in Body and Mature Behavior, that is, as an example of how not to abuse conscious control?

In lessons, demonstrations, lectures, stories, question and “was that an answer” sessions—his various modes of enquiry—Dr. Feldenkrais makes an appeal to rigor and to a peculiarly higher order rigor at that. It is not a rigor that is just thought through, deliberated upon. Neither is it the rigor that results from a kind of lived-through empiricism. You know, the school of hard knocks, older and wiser kind of wisdom. Feldenkrais’s

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rigor makes sense only in the context of someone wanting to free himself from his Blakean ‘mind forged manacles.’ As Gurdjieff noted, “What can be serious for a man in prison who is condemned to death? Only one thing: How to save himself, how to escape: nothing else is serious.” Of course, some of Feldenkrais’s intellectual and aesthetic thoroughness derives from the disciplines and domains of knowledge he mastered.

In any particular moment he can and will choose to exercise his critical faculties. And, he makes those applications fit the moment. For example, the science he introduces in the first few weeks is basic and foundational. And it is not easy, it’s not intuitive. Feldenkrais, in fact, finds he must describe and define the term intuitive in a very sophisticated and essential way as it relates to the counterintuitive formulation of the scientific ideas he presents. Yet, for all his acquired conceptual clarity, he indeed points to a rigor beyond the purview of science in his reformulation of the eternal quest to “Know Thyself.” It is his experience that science, art, and the search for the Real can work together to unburden us of our neurotic conditioning. He brings that to the table. He is, he once told me, uncompromising and unrelenting in his efforts to separate himself from what is fraudulent in himself. And when that mixes with his work with us, well sometimes it’s raw and rough and often times it’s sublime. So it was that his long quest brings him to be with us, the San Francisco training. His task is not to clone himself but provide the means for us to rid ourselves of our mistaken neurotic identities. Including, I might venture, the identity of being a “Feldenkrais” practitioner.

Moshe Feldenkrais claimed he would be our last teacher. Not because he would be the greatest, but because from him we would learn that there are no Teachers but only learners and those learning to facilitate learning. Some individuals learn particular things. Some individuals learn how to learn. And some learn how to facilitate others learning how to learn. There is a conversion process from learning “things” to learning how to “self.” As that conversion process plays itself out in the theater of attention I see it happening in three acts. First, there’s the outer world as I day-by-day see it, live it, and that contrasts with the outer world before, during, and after a lesson. This outer world—my world of people, places, and things—shows up as I relate to it through my senses, thoughts, actions, and feelings. Learning in the quest to Know Thyself starts with my taking the world, as it appears to me, to be “the way things are.” It shifts to become “a way things are.”

Based upon the evidence that my habits are constructively changeable, I infer that others experience something like that, and that is what others report. So a new way of doing, of being, presents itself in the lessons Dr. Feldenkrais presents. At first it seems that the “teacher” is he that gives the lesson. But Feldenkrais, as you will read and hear, disavows that title. It is not semantics and it is not a coy verbal manipulation. At first, because we know no other paradigm, we relate to him as the teacher.

But, soon enough we shift from testing and trusting him to learning that we may ourselves be trustworthy. Through the lesson as a necessary

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construct and the teacher as a necessary construct, we learn we can direct our own learning. Necessary constructs become contingent as we deconstruct old habits and construct new means for action. We cross a threshold into our own inner world.

The inner world is where I locate, develop, and refine the ability to observe and experiment with thoughts, sensations, feelings, and virtual actions. As Dr. Feldenkrais has stated, and as we have demonstrated to ourselves over and over again, in learning to evaluate and judge the very elements of our experience, we are also finding new ways to experience. We can uncouple thought from compulsive action, compulsive thought from action. Later we can act while thinking or think while acting. The context and the content of our experience reshapes itself as we lean towards what works for us. All the considering and nuancing of inner experience fostered by a Feldenkrais training can have immediate and positive effects on our appreciation of our shared outer world. An entire generation of trainings subsequent to San Francisco have proven that there are profound effects of being in a training. But, there’s more. In developing familiarity with our inner workings we can find ourselves inhabiting an even more inner world, where observing is the only action and the only result. As each lesson affords us an opportunity to observe the breakdown, transience, and reorganization of our thoughts, sensations, emotions, and actions, the ability to maintain our attention stabilizes. As such, our observing is spacious, vital, creative, and not caught by individual thoughts, sensations, emotions, or actions. This is our own teacher. It is this core of awareness that replaces the external teacher.

A lesson offers rewards well beyond good posture or brochure promises. Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais said most people asked too little from a lesson and sadly what they got they were happy enough with. In 1975, maybe he was the only one who knew what non-trivial benefits could issue from a lesson. In this new millennium there are many. Then he was like a vendor selling water by the river. Studying with Dr. Feldenkrais was the same for everyone, that is to say, it was unique. So will it be for you as you go through this San Francisco training.

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Playing with Complex Problems Todd Hargrove

1 Sholom Glouberman and Brenda Zimmerman, “Complicated and Complex Systems: What Would Successful Reform of Medicare Look Like?”

Commission on the Future of Healthcare in Canada, Discussion paper No. 8 (July 2002), accessed August 7, 2017, http://c. ymcdn.com/sites/ www.plexusinstitute. org/resource/ collection/6528ED299907-4BC7-8D008DC907679FED/

Moshe Feldenkrais had a profound respect for the complexity of human movement. One of his central ideas was that movement and awareness are not distinct functions but in fact completely interdependent. We cannot move our bodies well unless we can perceive them accurately, nor can we perceive without movement. So action is inextricably connected to perception, and indeed it is connected to thoughts and emotions as well.

Another central idea for Feldenkrais was that movement is best improved through a process that is playful. This means education should be student-centered, engaging, exploratory, variable, and open-ended.

This is in direct contrast to the opposite set of qualities, which describe most mainstream approaches: teacher-centered, boring, repetitive, and highly structured. Feldenkrais’s disdain for the latter approach is evident in his famous quote: “It is incorrect to correct.”

These two basic ideas from Feldenkrais—an appreciation for the complexity of movement, and a preference for playful methods of education—might at first glance appear unrelated. There is, however, a very logical connection. The relationship is well-articulated in recent work by several complex systems theorists who describe how we should attempt to solve certain kinds of problems. In short, we cannot hope to solve complex problems by seeking to “correct” them. Instead, we need to “dance” with them.

The difference between complex and complicated In a classic 2002 paper addressing how to improve the Canadian healthcare system, authors Sholom Glouberman and Brenda Zimmerman distinguished “complex” problems from those that are merely “complicated.”1 Although we use these terms interchangeably in everyday life, their technical meanings describe two entirely different situations.

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The classic illustration of the distinction is sending a rocket ship to the moon (complicated) versus raising a toddler to be a happy healthy kid (complex). Both are challenging problems but in very different ways.

Here are some other examples: Complicated Complex Designing a social media platform Getting millions of people to use it Building a highway Reducing traffic congestion Removing a brain tumor Treating depression or anxiety Winning a war Keeping the peace In general (but not always), complicated problems relate to the design and repair of machines, while complex problems concern the behavior of organic systems like clouds, flocks of birds, economies, and the human brain.

Complex and complicated systems are similar in that they are both composed of many parts that interact to produce some overall effect.

One crucial difference is that, in a complicated system, the parts can be measured and/or controlled with extreme precision. For example, each component of a rocket ship is an entirely known quantity in every relevant respect: size, shape, stiffness, durability, friction, etc. Further, rocket engineers have a near perfect understanding of how all the different components work together. For example, Part A causes a very particular effect in Part B, which causes certain changes in Part C, and so on. With this knowledge in hand, engineers can fix broken rockets by applying diagnostic techniques to identify the exact part at fault and then correct it.

Rocket ship building is therefore an example of the power of reductionism—the attempt to understand or control a whole system by focusing attention on its parts. This is a “divide and conquer” strategy, where one large insurmountable problem is transformed into many small easy problems. Reductionist methods account for almost all of the amazing success stories in science—physics, chemistry, engineering, technology, and the surgical and drug treatments of modern medicine.

So reductionism works incredibly well in solving complicated problems.

But it fails horribly in addressing complex problems.

This is because it is impossible, as a practical matter, to collect accurate information about all the individual parts in a complex system.

We can never know the positions and movements of all the water droplets in a cloud, or birds in a flock, or neurons in a toddler’s brain.

Even if we did, computing the results of their interactions would be even more difficult, because they are too frequent and dynamic. The series of events that lead to the formation of a cloud, or a thought inside a toddler’s head, or the movement patterns we use to take a single step, are far more numerous and interwoven than the linear chain reactions which create action in a machine.

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To appreciate the complexity that arises from dynamic interaction among many parts, watch the motion of schools of fish, or water from a faucet, or swirls of cream blending into your coffee. The patterns will sometimes be smooth and even, at other times turbulent and chaotic, but never simple and linear. It all looks very familiar, and we can easily get an intuitive feel for how these patterns shift. But it is hopeless to try to predict them by turning your attention to the microscopic level of the tiny parts. You need to look at the whole and tune into the overall rhythms.

But even this “holistic” perspective will only take you so far, because the behavior of a complex system is inherently variable. A well-functioning machine is characterized by regularity—it should always give the same response to a particular stimulus. In fact, failure to do so would indicate that it is broken. But the healthy functioning of a complex adaptive system like a person is the opposite—variability is a feature not a bug. In order to be adaptable, resourceful, and capable of learning, we need the ability to respond in diverse ways to a given situation.

Thus, although we behave according to relatively predictable patterns of behavior, we never do exactly the same thing twice, and we will occasionally do something completely unexpected.

It is a pretty good guess that a toddler will be happy if you give him a treat, sad if you take away a toy, and cranky if he doesn’t get a good night’s sleep. So his behavior is not by any means random, but there is always the possibility of the unexpected—a huge meltdown out of nowhere. Stock market analysts will say the same thing about the rise and fall of the Dow Jones, as will experts in traffic congestion or weather prediction.

People familiar with the behavior of chronic complex health conditions (e.g., autoimmune disease, depression, anxiety, or back pain) will notice similar patterns in their symptoms. There are some fairly predictable ups and downs in relation to certain stimuli like stress, sleep, nutrition, exercise, or the lack thereof. But there are also flare-ups and remissions that seem to have a mind of their own.

So we can, through observation, become familiar with the general habits or tendencies of a complex system by looking at its behavior as a whole. But no matter how much expertise we gain, there will always be major limitations in our ability to predict or control it. This is why our health system can barely outperform common sense or folk wisdom in treating chronic conditions like obesity, diabetes, and autoimmune disease, even as it achieves nearly miraculous results in dealing with acute conditions like infections or trauma. The reductionist approach that characterizes modern medicine is good at solving complicated problems and near useless at solving complex problems.

But the certainty implied by the reductionist approach is very compelling, so we try to apply it in contexts where it won’t work.

Glouberman and Zimmerman state that health care officials often treat complex problems as if they were merely complicated, in hopes that

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they can provide definite and permanent solutions, just as rocket ship engineers can identify and correct a defective part in a machine. They liken this error to the drunk who loses his car keys in the dark street but looks for them under the lamp post, because the light there is better.

Fortunately, Feldenkrais was smarter than a drunk man in the street! He knew that, unlike a rocket ship, the systems that create motor control and body awareness cannot be easily divided into parts.

If these systems are having problems, there are not simple objective diagnostic tests that can identify the precise subpart at fault. Nor are there simple sets of exercises that can be prescribed to “correct” movement “dysfunctions.” For example, inefficient use of the foot may not involve any problem with the foot at all. The problem might be some larger pattern of movement between the foot, knee, hip, and back. Or maybe the problem is not really with movement at all, but with patterns of interaction between movement, perception, and thought. These larger dynamics are invisible if you look too closely at the level of the parts, so you need to keep your eye at the level of larger wholes.

So Feldenkrais certainly had a healthy respect for the complexity of the body, and he did not mistake it for a complicated machine that can be corrected with mechanical interventions. But what exactly does this have to do with play?

Why play matters If you acknowledge the fact that you do not know exactly how to solve a particular problem, you will be more likely to use a problem-solving approach that is flexible, exploratory, and experimental. Esther Thelen was a developmental psychologist (and Feldenkrais practitioner) who applied principles of complex systems theory to her understanding of how infants learn to move.

According to Thelen, an infant’s amazing ability to solve movement problems does not come from following a genetic plan or blueprint for movement. Instead, babies are born without a clue about how to move, and they therefore need to learn through playful experimentation: In basic form, the developmental pattern is this: The presentation of an enticing toy is arousing and elicits all sorts of nonproductive actions, and very different individual actions in different babies. These actions are first, quite literally, all over the place with no clear coherence in form or direction. But by acting, by movements that explore the whole range of the movement space, each baby in his or her own unique fashion, sooner or later makes contact with the toy—banging into or brushing against it or swiping it. These moments of contact select some movements in this space, carving out patterns that are then repeated with increasing frequency. Over weeks,

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2 Esther Thelen and Linda B. Smith, “Dynamic Systems Theories,” Handbook of Child Psychology (Somerset, NJ: Wiley, 2007), 286, 287, accessed August 7, 2017, http://www.iub. edu/~cogdev/labwork/ handbook.pdf. Emphases added.

3 Glouberman and Zimmerman, 20.

the cycle repeats—arousal by the sight of some toy, action, and occasional contact.

Young mammals—including children—spend a lot of time in behavior with no apparent goal. They move, they jiggle, they run around, they bounce things and throw them, and generally abuse them in ways that seem, to mature minds, to have no good use.

However, this behavior, commonly called play, is essential to building inventive forms of intelligence that are open to new solutions. 2 Thus, a baby successfully achieves complex movement in the face of uncertainty with a process that is playful and exploratory. Feldenkrais had a similar openness and curiosity in his work with clients. He knew there wasn’t any simple algorithm or objective test that could determine exactly what needed to be done with each client. Instead, a workable answer could only emerge through a process of exploration.

Another way to look at the connection between complexity and play is in reference to the different ways we can control a complex versus complicated system. The means of controlling a machine such as a rocket ship is external to the ship itself. Experts sitting at mission control issue orders in a top-down manner, and everything happens according to a central plan.

By contrast, a complex adaptive system is “self-organizing.” Its orderly behavior “emerges” from the interaction of all the subparts.

For example, a bee colony can build a nest, even though no single bee knows how to build it. The intelligence that builds the nest doesn’t live in a set of blueprints, or any particular locality, but is distributed in the pattern of interactions between the bees. We therefore say that the hive’s intelligence is “bottom-up” as opposed to “top-down.”

Further, a beehive (and any other complex adaptive system like a toddler), has agency, motivations, and desires to accomplish certain tasks. It also has “memories” of past experiences, and the ability to adapt and learn.

So how do you control a complex adaptive system from the outside?

You cannot simply tell it what to do, because it has its own set of priorities and goals, many of which are unconscious. And you cannot get on the inside and reprogram it to operate by a different set of rules, as if it were a computer.

Glouberman and Zimmerman note that we tend to forget these simple facts, treating living things as if they were machines. “The machine metaphor of the complicated approach suggests external managers—or mechanics—need to fix the system or its parts,” they write. “The life metaphor suggests that solutions (and new problems) have the potential to emerge from within. The external role becomes more facilitative than mechanical.”3 In other words, you need to work with a living system in a much more indirect way that is respectful of its intelligence and motivations.

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4 Donnella Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008), 170.

Complex systems theorist Donella Meadows uses a simple metaphor to describe her approach to solving complex problems: you need to “dance” with them.4 This means observing the behavior of the system as a whole to get a feel for its habits and motivations, its patterns of rhythm and self-regulation, and then engaging with the system in a collaborative, creative manner. Her strategy sounds quite a bit like what a Feldenkrais practitioner might do to help a client find a new way to move.

Conclusion Despite all the variability and uncertainty in human behavior, not all of our problems are complex. Some are quite simple—maybe our foot is sore because we are wearing the wrong pair of shoes. Some problems are merely complicated—we have some structural damage that requires surgical repair. But more often than not, our movement problems involve at least some aspect of complexity, because they are wrapped up in higher-level emergent phenomena like habits of perception, awareness, thought, or emotion.

How can we tell the difference between complex and complicated problems? The easiest way is to simply ask yourself whether expertise is absolutely necessary to solve the problem. There is no question that you have to be an expert to perform heart surgery, or to send a rocket to the moon. But you absolutely do not need to be an expert to get over your back pain or raise a toddler. Experts might help you with these goals, but laypeople achieve them on their own every day by using common sense, intuition, and experimentation. Further, if you ask 10 different experts how to get rid of back pain or raise a toddler, you might get 10 different answers. This should tell you right away that there is no universal blueprint, formula, or magic series of steps that can guarantee success in these areas.

So if we don’t know in advance how to help each client, what do we do? Somewhat paradoxically, complex problems often suggest simple solutions. To help our clients, we simply engage in a process of exploring movement that is collaborative, playful, and respectful of the client’s current set of motivations, habits, intelligence, and adaptive capacity. It’s not rocket science.

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LGBT Elders and the Feldenkrais Method: Lessons from the SAGE Centers in New York City Frederick Schjang

1 SAGE stands for Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders. The largest and oldest elder-LGBT advocacy organization in the country, SAGE is a non-profit that operates nationally, including five centers in New York City. For the national organization, visit http:// www.sageusa.org. The NYC chapter’s website is at http://www.sageusa.org/ nyc/.

The Feldenkrais Method of somatic education has so many applications, and we never know where we can plant seeds that will grow. Over the years, I’ve taught in a physical therapy program, at fitness clubs, the JCC, with the New York City Parks Department, and elsewhere. Two years ago, my manager at Equinox Fitness Clubs asked me if I wanted a new project—one that challenged me as a teacher and expanded my notion of what is possible through the Feldenkrais Method.

She asked if I would initiate programs with the elder LGBT community, and especially its transgender component at SAGE, an LGBT elders center here in New York City.1 I didn’t even know that such a place existed. I had next to no experience with the transgender community. As a “cisgender” male (I have since learned that this means my body and gender identity are in alignment), I felt a bit out of my depth.

But I love to learn, so I accepted the challenge.

The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. What community could benefit more from the Feldenkrais Method than people who not only were born in the wrong body but had also spent much of their lives being discriminated against specifically because of being born in the wrong body? Stretching back to when they were just children, LGBT elders have lived through decades of divorcing themselves from the validity of their actual sensations in order to function within society.

Feldenkrais teachers create a format where sensations are validated

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and brought into the functions of daily living and all facets of life.

The process of gaining the community’s trust and creating classes at SAGE was not easy, but the students are enjoying better, fuller lives as a result of our work together using the Feldenkrais Method.

Starting classes in a hesitant community Once I decided to take on the challenge of trying to teach at SAGE, the first step was to learn more about the community. I learned that a number of other fitness and wellness classes that had been offered there had failed.

I believe I know why: many LGBT people have negative associations with physical group classes. As members of sexual minorities, LGBT elders have, for the most part, had a tumultuous relationship with sports, locker rooms, and the like. The macho ethic and locker room banter associated with athletics has historically been less than inclusive.

Many of my students experienced adolescence before Stonewall. I’m younger than that, but as a gay man myself, I know what it was like to grow up in an oppressive environment. The word “faggot” was still in common use when I was a student. Though I was the fastest sprinter in my class, that did nothing to eliminate the phrase “run like a girl (or fag)” while I was in school.

In order to overcome people’s hesitancy, I realized I needed to become a familiar (and charming) presence in the community. In the weeks prior to starting the classes, I attended dinners at SAGE and chatted with many of the members. By getting to know them, they got to know me. They saw that I wasn’t a threat. Certainly I wasn’t going to call them pejorative names—something that, astoundingly, still occasionally occurs within the walls of the center.

I attended some of the other programs on offer there, such as meditation and LGBT History, and I even took American Sign Language for a while. As I became part of their group, the people at the center opened themselves up to seeing what I had to offer in the classroom.

With their trust and curiosity, I was able to develop a variety of strategies for long-term engagement. I learned in the SAGE meditation class that members enjoyed saying a phrase or word at the end of classes, so I started implementing a similar strategy, which has been empowering for my students. In our work as Feldenkrais teachers, we often relate our movement lessons to life outside the classroom. During rests between exploring movements, I often talk about gay themes in movies or share anecdotes from my life. For example, I was able to convey my non-binary sense of gender by sharing that I was invited to the Women’s March in D.C. I also periodically spice up the class with gay-oriented humor. For example, I recounted my dreadful attempt at

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cross-dressing at a party. My male sitting pattern—legs apart, looking like a guy—drew criticism from other partygoers. Telling that particular story gave me a chance to talk about male versus female skeletal structure and sitting patterns in class. People were starting to be drawn into the experience of embodied learning.

Allan learns to get to the floor Allan, a stroke survivor, always comes to class with a smile and an open mind. When he first came to class, he was clear that he could definitely somehow get down on the ground. His only problem was that he wouldn’t then be able to get back up. I almost always teach floor Awareness Through Movement (ATM) classes, so I thought this might prove a problem.

He started taking classes in a chair in the back of the room, and on his own he rather inventively transposed the instructions, turning a mat lesson into a chair lesson. After about a month, I noticed that Allan was moving much better. Instead of falling backwards into the chair and needing help to get back up, he was sitting down and getting back up on his own.

One day I told Allan that, as an ex-football player, I had a lot of experience both knocking people down and picking them up. I suggested he might now be able to get back up with my help. Allan calls me “The Master.” Though I’m not thrilled with the name, I realized that his calling me that suggested a trust I could use to my advantage.

For the next class, I put a chair next to his mat and, referencing the “pelvic clock,” a series of lessons which he knew, showed him how to keep his pelvis over his feet as he lowered himself towards the floor.

With his hands on the chair for support, he got down on one knee, but then he fell sideways and landed on the mat with a thud.

Ever joyful, he was thrilled! He had gotten down on the floor for the first time in a long time. Now Allan has sought out lessons with other teachers in different centers, and he even came to the citywide Feldenkrais Festival NY, where he took an ATM class in the big studio and had a Functional Integration (FI) lesson!

Art comes out—as a fitness trainer Art is part of a subset of gay men who came out late in life. After a long marriage that produced two children, now adults, he is looking to create a meaningful life as a gay senior citizen.

Art told me he felt old and unable to find his place in the gay community. He started taking the SAGE Feldenkrais classes, in which

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I emphasize personal empowerment and listening to your own voice.

Art loved the classes and started bringing friends. But he felt that much of life had passed him by. Gay friends whom he had had when he was living a heterosexual life had abandoned him for some reason. He felt that he was too old to go to bars or other places where gay men would congregate. As we became friends, I saw that he was seriously depressed.

He finally told me that one of his dreams was to become a personal fitness trainer—a new form of “coming out,” I suppose. He described that dream as “ridiculous,” since he is now almost 70 years old. He volunteers at an organization near SAGE, and I recommended that he approach that organization about starting a senior fitness program. There, his age would be an asset! He approached them, and they were interested.

They offered to pay him a small stipend to develop a senior fitness program, and several weeks later, the program began. Initially, he was very enthusiastic, and he even began to take on more responsibilities.

He spearheaded the creation of a separate Feldenkrais program at his organization, and dozens of people attend class there every week. All seemed great.

But after a few months, he confessed to me that the funding didn’t come through for his program, and he hadn’t gotten paid. In addition, he had failed his written fitness trainer exam and therefore didn’t have the requisite paperwork for the job. I was afraid that Art’s dream was coming to an end, and I feared that this might have devastating consequences for his well-being.

But I was wrong. Art’s confidence surprised me: he threatened to quit if the center didn’t find funding for him. They found the funding. He has apparently evolved into being so valuable at his new job that his responsibilities have increased. He now runs a speaker series at the center and is one of the speakers!

Natalie expands her confidence When Natalie first came to class, she felt that it “might not be good for her.” English is not her first language, and she was afraid that she wouldn’t “get it.” She was very timid, afraid of not following the instructions “properly.” Instead of listening to instructions in class and then exploring them, Natalie would often look around the room and mimic what others were doing.

After Natalie’s third or fourth class, she told me she wasn’t coming back: she felt that class was “not for her.” We chatted for a while, and I soon realized that though part of the problem was language, a bigger part was that Natalie was hard of hearing. She simply couldn’t hear the instructions. I suggested she position herself in the front of the room near me, as the class is crowded.

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Natalie now arrives to class early every week and positions herself near the front. She still has problems trusting herself with instructions, but we’ve developed a good relationship. I’ve sat with her at holiday meals at the center (many LGBT elders have no family, and holiday meals are very well-attended events), and she now feels confident enough to attend other classes in the area. I have seen her attending pay-as-you-wish classes at the Feldenkrais Institute, and she proudly bought a full price ticket to the recent Feldenkrais Festival.

Challenges along the way Although the Feldenkrais program at SAGE has been a success, I’ve encountered a few missteps along the way. Because SAGE is an elders center, many of the participants have the maladies that come with aging. Like Natalie, some of the students are so hard of hearing that they miss my instructions. I suspect they are uncomfortable telling me of their deafness and so try to do the lessons despite not hearing the instructions. Obviously, that doesn’t work. One of them now positions herself at my feet, and when she doesn’t hear me, I use my hands in FI form to convey the instruction.

Allan had the problem of being able to get to the floor, but not back up. There was one member who had the opposite reaction to lessons.

She repeatedly identified herself as someone who could not get down on the floor easily. After a few weeks, she discovered that she was transitioning down and up from the ground almost effortlessly. Proud of her achievements, I pointed out the change. And then, I never saw her again!

One of my colleagues is a voice expert. A cisgender gay man, he noticed that a lot of transgender people have difficulty talking naturally in their new vocal range. He teaches people to find their authentic voice.

And he’s extraordinary. My immediate supervisor, a transgender gay man, absolutely refused to have a cisgender person teach transgender people about voice. I was shocked. Obviously, few people have transitioned to have a vocal range that matches their new body. But a barrier I never considered between the transgender and cisgender community stopped the workshop from ever happening. At first, I was appalled.

Then I remembered how appalled I felt, earlier in my life, when a white South African assumed the directorship of an education department in jazz studies. And then, I took his class and realized that he was brilliant and didn’t have a racist cell in his body. I guess we are all learning.

A widening circle of success The original class I taught at the SAGE Center was a Friday afternoon class. Despite a questionable timeslot—Fridays at 3:15 p.m.—the

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class has continued and thrived. Since its inception, 10 different Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioners have come in to guest teach, do special presentations, and, yes, get paid! The success of the program has led me and others to take new steps in offering the Feldenkrais Method to the LGBT population.

During International Feldenkrais Week last year, Feldenkrais Guild of North America (FGNA) Board Member Robert Sussuma and I hosted the first annual LGBT Feldenkrais Festival, and SAGE has asked me to do another one this year. The Feldenkrais Method is now a fully entrenched part of the programming at the center. They’ve asked me to do periodic workshops on different aspects of movement, touch, and human interaction. Dozens of people attend.

Although I have no plans to leave the center anytime soon, I feel that the program has grown so strong that, if I were to leave for whatever reason, Feldenkrais classes would continue there with other teachers.

I’d like to end with another anecdote about a Feldenkrais success story in the LGBT elders community.

Recently, the SAGE Center hosted a health fair that drew hundreds of people. I asked the SAGE Directors if FGNA could be represented, and they accepted. The Regional Director of Health and Wellness for SAGE attended and came to my presentation. I taught a “seated to standing” lesson and one participant, a transgender woman with very long legs, had trouble, as her chair was quite low. She complained of bad knees and said she would never be able to do it.

After asking her permission to use my hands on her, we did some FI movement where she learned to “pour her weight forward instead of up,” and she then rose almost gracefully. The Health and Wellness Director was shocked. It’s one thing to see a popular class of contented members. It’s another to see before your eyes the “impossible become easy.” The Director now wants to add another weekly class!

We never know where our work can go or what populations and people we can touch through the Feldenkrais Method.

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The WeberFechner-Henneman Movement Optimization Cycle Roger Russell

1 ER Kandel, JH Schwartz, TM Jessell, Principles of Neural Science, 4th ed. (New York: McGrawHill, 2000), 419-428. The most comprehensive English-language source on Fechner is Michael Heidelberger, Nature from Within: Gustav Theodor Fechner and His Psychophysical Worldview, Cynthia Klohr, trans.

(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004).

Heidelberger’s book also serves as an excellent introduction to Weber’s work.

As practitioners of the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education, we’ve all heard of Weber and Fechner. But who is Henneman?

Before I get to that, I’d like to offer two propositions as a basis for this article. The first is general: Feldenkrais teachers can integrate two kinds of knowing—experiential learning and theoretical learning— to be more effective in their practices. The second proposition is a case study for the first. There is a neurological process which I call the Weber-Fechner-Henneman Movement Optimization Cycle. Knowing how this cycle works—which is to say, being able to use this theoretical knowledge—can help any Feldenkrais teacher understand how doing slow, easy movements with minimal force can improve coordination.

Ernst Weber and Gustav Fechner, German scientists of the nineteenth century, are the fathers of the Weber-Fechner law in psychophysics.1 The two men designed ingenious experiments to test sensitivity thresholds for the different senses. Over the course of several decades, they conducted experiments testing thresholds of perception (initial perception of a stimulus, as well as perception of changing intensities of stimuli) for pressure, temperature, sound, vision, and weight.

One of their conclusions from the experiments was that, across sensory systems, subjective sensations adapt to the intensity of the stimulus. The stronger the stimulus, the less sensitive we are to small differences. On the other hand, the weaker the stimulus, the more sensitive an individual is to small differences. To give an example—a person carrying a 40-pound load likely would not sense a half-pound addition to the load, while a person carrying a four-pound load would easily sense the addition.

For Feldenkrais teachers, this means that when we increase our effort and produce more force while moving, we are less able to sense small changes in what we are doing. Moshe Feldenkrais

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2 Elwood Henneman, “Relation between size of neurons and their susceptibility to discharge,” Science 126 (1957), 1345-1347.

liked to point out that this rule lets us increase our sensitivity to our sensation of movement by using less effort. In research published in the middle of the twentieth century, Elwood Henneman (1915–1995), an American neurobiologist who worked at Harvard, showed there is a similar lawfulness in how our motor system mobilizes muscle fibers to produce appropriate forces for our goals. 2 The process is called muscle recruitment. In this article, I will show how combining these two rules enables us to bring theoretical knowledge and experiential learning into a creative dynamic.

Know-how and know-what

3 Simon Blackburn, Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 123.

4 RS Reber, “Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 118, no. 3 (1989), 219-235.

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In order to delve deeper into the Weber-Fechner-Henneman Movement Optimization Cycle and its relationship to the Feldenkrais Method, I would like to explain an epistemological theory, a theory of knowledge, which outlines two ways of knowing: knowing how and knowing what.

I believe Feldenkrais teachers can use both ways of knowing in order to be more effective in their practical work in Awareness Through Movement (ATM) classes and Functional Integration (FI) lessons.

Epistemology is a field of philosophy which addresses how we can know anything, what knowing is as an activity, and how we learn.3 Stated very succinctly, knowing is differentiated into knowing how to do something and knowing what we are doing. Knowing how can be learned implicitly, without our being aware of how we learned.4 Knowing what is different; it means having an explicit, linguistic description of our knowledge. We know-what through explicit learning processes that involve descriptions and explanations of the content. This can be information such as, “The capital city of Colorado is Denver,” or “The Weber-Fechner principle in perception is such and such.”

In every Feldenkrais lesson, we participate in these two kinds of learning. We learn know-how by learning how to sense and move effectively. Every Feldenkrais student, teacher, and trainer has know-how in doing Feldenkrais lessons, which they learn only by experiencing the lessons. Knowing how cannot be done theoretically. On the other hand, we all form our descriptions and explanations about what Feldenkrais lessons are and why they have an impact on our lives. Often we search for and find valid knowledge in related academic literature. Often enough, we utilize a strategy of reduction to familiar explanations; rather than expanding our knowledge base, we reduce the explanation to what we already know. This is not always a valid know-what strategy. One of my points in this article is that by expanding our background knowledge, in this case by adding Elwood Henneman’s research on muscle fiber recruitment in the spinal cord to our understanding of the Weber-Fechner principle, we can enrich our way of doing Feldenkrais lessons.

Why? In our culture, most of us absorb the idea that the human body is a machine our brains use to carry the mind and personality around

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5 LR Squire, D Berg, FE Bloom, S du Lac, A Ghosh, NC Spitzer, Fundamental Neuroscience, 4th ed.

(Amsterdam: Academic Press–Elsevier, 2013), 616–651.

6 Moshe Feldenkrais, Body and Mature Behavior (Tel Aviv: Alef Publishers 1947/1988).

7 Kandel et al., 683–687.

in the world. The body-as-machine metaphor seems to be an adequate way of thinking about how people move. However, it has consequences.

Machines operate by creating and utilizing mechanical forces. When we repair a machine, it is necessary to apply force. When we think of force, we think of effort, speed, impact, or other kinds of violence. So we believe that, just as we can apply force to fix our car’s transmission, we can apply force to the human body to repair its problems. We push, pull, stretch, or jiggle our bodies and are astonished when they are not repaired.

Biological beings use feedback information to coordinate skillful action in complex and surprising ways. Every Feldenkrais teacher has experienced magical moments after an ATM lesson. We find ourselves changed in a surprising way. The lesson did not affect us mechanically but seems to have transformed something within ourselves. We also know clients who have had similar experiences. Sensing ourselves moving in so many different ways informs our brain about possibilities we normally ignore or are using too much effort to sense. The Weber-Fechner and Henneman principles in neurophysiology let us understand why taking it easy in Feldenkrais lessons is also taking it better.5

Muscle fibers and the Henneman size principle In the Henneman rule, we have an ally on the motor side of the sensorymotor system. Let’s look at how that works. In the late 1940s, as he worked on Body and Mature Behavior, Feldenkrais came to see that the differentiated control of the slow and fast muscle fibers was not well understood.6 Thanks to Henneman’s research, published between 1957 and 1985, it is now well understood. It’s as simple as it is ingenious.

Our muscles have three kinds of fibers [Fig 1], and each kind has a different job to do when we move. Tonic muscle fibers (black circles) contract slowly with low force and are practically inexhaustible. They have an aerobic source of energy, drawing oxygen and energy from the bloodstream while they are contracting. There are two types of fast-contracting phasic muscle fibers. Fast-resistant fibers (gray circles) contract faster than the tonic fibers, producing more force, but become exhausted after several minutes. Next are the fast-fatigable fibers (white circles). These contract very quickly, producing up to 15 times the force of the tonic fibers. However, these fibers function anaerobically, using their own internal energy supply, which they burn without oxygen.

Once their intrinsic energy is consumed, which happens within the first minute, they need to rest and replace their energy supply through the bloodstream.

This drawing [Fig 2] compares the force magnitude and contraction timelines of the three kinds of muscle fibers.7 The slow tonic fibers are always the first to contract, and they do so with low force. The

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Fig 1 Schematic diagram of a transected muscle showing the three muscle fiber types

Fig 2 Force and contraction time of: T) Tonic slow fibers; F-R) Fast-fatigue-resistant fibers; F-F) Fast-fatigable fibers

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Fig 3 Spinal alpha motor neurons and the three muscle fiber types—the size of spinal motor neuron cell bodies (triangles) matches the muscle fibers they enervate

Fig 4 Brain recruitment of spinal alpha motor neurons and muscle fibers—Elwood Henneman discovered that the size of the neuron cell body determines the order in which motor nerves and their muscle fibers are recruited

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8 NA Bernstein, “On Dexterity and Its Development,” in ML Latash and MT Turvey, eds., Dexterity and Its Development (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996); DA Winter, Biomechanics and motor control of human movement, 2nd ed. (New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1990).

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fast-resistant fibers start contracting as the tonic fibers reach their force limit, producing more force, but they lose force within minutes.

Fast-fatigable fibers only begin contracting if the fast-resistant fibers reach their force limit. Generating very large forces, they fatigue quickly and stop.

Most muscles have a mix of these three fibers, with a preponderance of one type, depending upon that muscle’s functional role. The extensor muscles of the spine need to contract for hours, so they are mostly slow tonic fibers. The flexors in the arms need more fast force; therefore, they have more fast fibers.

The order of contraction and force is always the same, and it makes biological sense. A short foray into biomechanics makes clear why this order is remarkably common across all vertebrates and all striated skeletal muscles.

In any movement, bones transfer active muscle forces and passive reactive forces through the skeletal chain.8 The first job of the muscles is to adjust the angles of the joints and bring the bones into the best relationship with each other so that the transfer of forces will be efficient. The second job is to create forces that course through the bones and create movement when those forces reach the floor or another object.

When an animal initiates a movement, the bones need to align in such a way that the forces produced when the fast, strong muscle fibers come on line can travel safely and efficiently through the skeleton. This protects the skeleton and saves energy.

Muscles need energy to create forces, and in evolutionary terms, energy—food—was hard to come by. Therefore, energy efficiency is a primary criterion for optimal movement. In the Feldenkrais Method, we sometimes refer to this as the “quality” of movement. Arranging the skeleton optimally as we begin moving enables us to eliminate parasitic muscular habits and save energy.

This alignment of the skeleton is accomplished at the very beginning of any movement, when the slow tonic fibers contract before their fast contracting cousins begin. The principle could be stated this way: control takes precedence over power. Or in a practical metaphor—get your hands on the steering wheel before you hit the gas.

Henneman demonstrated how the spinal cord networks manage which nerves fire which muscle fibers in which order. These figures show what Henneman found out.

The triangles on the left in Fig. 3 represent the alpha motor nerves in the spinal cord whose job is to excite the muscle fibers to which they are connected. The sizes of the muscle fibers match the sizes of the cell body of the motor nerves: small motor nerves for slow fibers, medium motor nerves for fast-resistant fibers, and large motor nerves for fast-fatigable fibers.

The arrow pointing downwards in Fig. 4 represents the multiple nerve pathways descending from the brain and influencing the spinal

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9 Elwood Henneman, EG Somjen, DO Carpenter, “Functional significance of cell size in spinal motoneurons,” Journal of Neurophysiology 28 (1965), 560-580; Elwood Henneman, EG Somjen, DO Carpenter, “Excitability and inhibitability of motoneurons of different size,” Journal of Neurophysiology 28 (1965), 599-620.

10 KV Kardong, Vertebrates: Comparative anatomy, function, evolution, 3rd ed. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002), 375.

11 FW Nutter, "Weber-Fechner Law," Plant Pathology and Microbiology Publications 71 (2010), accessed online July 27, 2017, http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/ plantpath_pubs/71.

networks where the motor nerves are embedded. These descending nerves excite (+) each of the spinal cord motor nerves. At the beginning of any movement, only the smallest nerve sends a signal along its axon to the slow fiber, which then contracts (+). The other nerves and their muscle fibers remain quiet. Why is that?

The cell body of a motor nerve needs to reach an electrochemical threshold before it fires. The threshold will be reached earlier for a cell with a small surface area, since it needs less excitement from the brain to reach its threshold. It is as simple as that: the smaller the nerve, the sooner it fires. This order of the threshold levels of the spinal alpha nerves ensures that slow tonic fibers always contract before the fast, high-force fibers.9 This is the rule that Henneman researched and published between the 1950s and 1980s. This order of muscle fiber recruitment is found even in fish.10 This deep evolutionary history means the mechanism is very reliable. Scientists have found no exceptions to the Henneman rule.

Therefore, tonic fibers are always available to coordinate the way the skeleton is used for optimal movement. Once we put Weber-Fechner and Henneman together, it becomes crystal clear what this means for our understanding of Feldenkrais lessons.

Sensory feedback and the Weber-Fechner principle Sensory feedback modulates the activities on every level of our neurological networks, ensuring the information we need to move successfully and efficiently. It is in these sensory feedback systems that the Weber-Fechner rule enhances our sensation.

Subjective sensations—of brightness, pain, muscle force, etc.—do not necessarily change in a one-to-one relationship to the objective stimulus quantity. How different sensory systems adapt to increasing stimuli depends upon functional biological priorities. Pain is an important message. As we see in Fig 5, we sense a slight increase in stimulus as a large difference.11 Sunlight is extremely bright compared to moonlight, so our brains become less sensitive to sunlight than moonlight. Muscle effort needs to be reliable in life. Only when it is very low, without external demands, or very high, when the difference is a life or death situation, does the curve change.

When we are moving, our ability to judge muscle force and effort is determined by how proprioceptive nerves adjust their firing rate according to the intensity of forces being created. The sensation of effort we experience changes as the force increases. The greater the force, the larger must be the difference in the force exerted before we can sense a difference in our muscle activity. Fechner labeled this important concept the “just noticeable difference” (jnd). (See Fig 6 for a line graphing jnd against changes in force/weight in different activities.)

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Fig 5 Subjective experience and absolute stimulus value in the cases of pain, light, and weight

Fig 6 Relationship between force/ weight and just noticeable difference thresholds in different activities—the just noticeable difference (jnd) for muscle effort varies for strength training, endurance, and coordination exercises— using low force in Feldenkrais lessons allows us to sense smaller differences in our movements

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Fig 7 Relationship between force/weight and information impact in different activities—turning the curve in Fig. 6 around shows that when force is reduced, the impact of feedback information for our coordination is higher than it is in strength and conditioning exercises done with more effort

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Fig 8 The Coordination Cascade illustrates how Feldenkrais lessons refine the functioning of our nervous system—at every level

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12 “Gregory Bateson,” http://www. informationphilosopher. com/solutions/scientists/ bateson/ (accessed July 27, 2017).

When we are practicing hard, we automatically make ourselves less sensitive. This is true in gymnastics, yoga, jogging, weight lifting, and Feldenkrais lessons too. When exercising, we purposely stress the muscles, the tendons, the heart, and the lungs. Our physiological response to this kind of intentional stress is to strengthen the muscles and tendons and to increase circulatory activity and endurance. When we apply the body to the goals of strength and fitness, the metaphor of body-as-machine works pretty well.

If we extend the machine metaphor to coordination processes, however, the metaphor breaks down. We are not enhancing our coordination. By going against the Weber-Fechner-Henneman Movement Optimization Cycle, higher effort means that we reduce our sensitivity to small differences in what we are doing. You do not have to squeeze harder on the steering wheel to have better control of your car. You need feedback about where you are, what the other drivers are doing, and how the car feels today. These are low-energy information processes.

Stressing ourselves will not improve the coordination process. On the contrary, the Weber-Fechner rule shows that the more force we exert, the less we can sense the small differences that we need to improve our coordination.

If information is, in Gregory Bateson’s famous phrase, “a difference that makes a difference,” then by reducing the force, we have more information, more noticeable differences, with which to improve our coordination.12 We increase the impact information has in refining our coordination. For the sake of this article, I will name this relationship “information impact.” As a rule of thumb, we can say that reducing effort increases information impact (see Fig. 7).

The Coordination Cascade

14 Squire et al., 616–651.

Having learned about Henneman’s rule and reviewed the Weber-Fechner principle, we are now ready to look at what I call the Coordination Cascade.13 As we have seen, muscle fiber recruitment in the spinal cord is an evolutionarily old process controlled by the brain.14 We do not need to—and in fact cannot—choose which muscle fibers fire first. Weber and Fechner demonstrated that sensitivity to sensory stimuli is partly under our control, in that sense that we become more sensitive when we reduce the intensity of stimuli. So if muscle fiber recruitment and sensation are at best only partly under conscious control, how can we improve at skilled movement? The answer is that we do have control of the neurological cascade that begins in the brain, and the mechanisms of this control are patience, curiosity, and skilled attention.

In a Feldenkrais Method lesson, we work with attention in challenging and novel ways. As seen in Fig. 8, our prefrontal brain system (1) modulates both our emotions (2) and our attention (3) as we engage a movement suggestion. A new plan (4) emerges as we now explore what

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13 Roger Russell, Poster: The Coordination Cascade and the Feldenkrais Method, 2014, FeldenkraiszentrumHeidelberg. This image is a top-down schematic representation of how movement experiments can be directed by the prefrontal system for exploratory fast learning.

Multiple sources in neuroscience literature have served as background knowing what for this poster, which is available through the FGNA bookstore.

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Fig 9 The Weber-FechnerHenneman Movement Optimization Cycle

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happens when we do non-habitual, and admittedly strange, movement combinations. The new plan includes reducing our effort. Spinal networks (5) follow the plan, using the Henneman rule to recruit only the low-force, tonic muscle fibers (6). If this “isn’t enough,” then instead of forcing our way through the lesson (7), we change our minds and become curious about what is interfering with the plan. With the force reduced, our Weber-Fechner sensory feedback networks (8) immediately adapt by lowering the just noticeable differences. Smaller differences mean we have more information. With a curious attitude, our brains are primed to plan the next movement more efficiently. Reducing force even more, and increasing kinesthetic sensitivity, our nervous system is tuned for the best possible feedback level. We have created a movement coordination optimization cycle that can enable us to discover highly refined movement strategies in any ATM or FI lesson. As depicted in Fig. 9: 1 The brain initiates and plans movements based on our

self-image, and directs 2 the coordination cascade through the nervous system

leading to 3 the spinal cord, where the Henneman size principle results in 4 specific (size-dependent) recruitment of muscle fibers which 5 enables optimal biomechanical organization of the ongoing movement 6 including force optimization, smooth movements, and

reversibility of the movement pattern 7 which by way of the Weber-Fechner principle increases

the sensitivity of the proprioceptive feedback networks 8 clarifying the body image, and resulting in more efficient

plans for the next coordination cycle. Movement coordination

improves as the Feldenkrais lesson unfolds.

15 Kandel et al., 661-663 and 726-730.

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Seen in this light, the Weber-Fechner-Henneman Movement Optimization Cycle lets us understand how doing slow, easy movements with minimal force can improve our coordination. This operates within the timeframe of the neurological feedback circuits between muscles, skeleton, and the brain, which is between 80 and eight hundred milliseconds.15 That is an astounding idea.

What difference does it make for you to know about this optimization cycle? Part of the genius of the Feldenkrais Method is that you don’t have to believe anything. You can try for yourself and decide. The next time you are doing an ATM lesson, slow way down—more than what you believe is slow—and pay attention to the unfolding stages of your Coordination Cascade. Most people, being accustomed to body-as-machine improvement methods, are surprised that these slow, small, and easy movements are so effective. The information impact curve shows us why.

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By changing your intention from achievement to curiosity and modulating your emotions, you are able to redirect your attention, enhancing how your brain can utilize the improved information feedback as you are moving. The decision to do something non-habitual also re-orders how your neurological planning networks do their job. The Henneman size principle will ensure slow, easy movements—if you give yourself the chance. The Weber-Fechner principle will refine your sensation. It works fast and is reliably built into your biological inheritance. You can use this in any ATM or FI lesson.

However, there is something more: returning to the reciprocal relationship between knowing how and knowing what, we are learning to learn in three ways. First, we learn through sensing: experiencing ourselves moving in new ways, which is the foundation of the Feldenkrais Method. Second, we expand our theoretical horizon. And finally, by informing ourselves and expanding beyond our habitual explanations, we awaken new questions and new ways to think, to see ourselves and each other in a world of new possibilities. We up the ante in this business of learning. We can become experts in learning to learn how to learn.

© Copyright Roger Russell 2017 for all images.

Art: Bettina Beiderwellen, Speyer, Germany.

Coordination Cascade: Susanne Mertner, Nördlingen, Germany and Stefanie Hoff, Saarland, Germany.

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Pen and ink drawings of “Book on Foot” and “Dead Bird” Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lessons by Andrew Dawson, 2016

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An Introduction to Sense Writing or Life, I thought, was harder than that

Madelyn Kent I took my first Feldenkrais class in the 1990s in an abandoned candy store on Henry Street, the original store sign still hanging out front. The floor inside was black, the walls too. The autumn light barely made its way through the closed metal grate over the storefront windows. The teacher, in a wheelchair from multiple sclerosis, talked plainly about the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education, the only thing that had improved her movement and well-being since she had been diagnosed with the illness several years earlier. On a thin mat in the dark room, a few light bulbs overhead, I imagined it the perfect place for a shakedown by the local mafia. But the teacher’s simple instructions quieted the noise in my head. The movements were so small and slow that I felt pleasantly puzzled. Yet, there was something deeply familiar in their gentleness, and I soon became absorbed in the ebb and flow of rest and movement.

I was there because I had seen a hand-written flier on a wooden telephone pole that simply read: Feldenkrais, Awareness Through Movement. I had never heard of it. But I remember walking out of that session into the bright Brooklyn afternoon having enjoyed myself fully, though not understanding why. I had a sense of grounded clarity, edged with mystery. That was my first experience of the Feldenkrais Method, and it would be my last for over a decade. I was in my twenties, an aspiring playwright looking for the kinds of leaps, breakthroughs, and

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revelations that writing spells and intense yoga provided. Although I knew “something” had happened in that class, I was not yet ready to learn so gently. I did not understand how much this kind of approach could benefit me. Life, I thought, was harder than that.

Choosing to be an artist, especially in the United States, often involves an enormous amount of struggle. In competitive environments where almost no one teaches or nurtures process, struggle can become a habit. And even though my own work as a theater artist was increasingly process-oriented, I was still not confident that I was providing my students—or myself—with a sustainable vocation.

I continued to write and direct, eventually forming my own theater company, while teaching playwriting and screenwriting as an adjunct at New York University. I could not help but realize that I, along with many of my peers in the art world, had prematurely accepted struggle as a dominating, and often costly, motivator. I understood that longevity as an artist would come for me, and my students, only if pleasure and curiosity—as opposed to struggle—were its engine.

Over a decade after my promising experience in the candy store, I moved to Tel Aviv to attend a Feldenkrais training. From the beginning of the training, I intuited connections and potential applications across Awareness Through Movement (ATM), Functional Integration (FI), and the creative process of writing. The Method echoed dynamics and processes I had encountered in classrooms and rehearsal rooms while working with students and collaborators back in New York. Sometimes, resting off to the side during a lesson, I would watch as a sea of people, from professional dancers to people with visible neurological disorders, rolled around the floor, each learning, perhaps for the first time, how to have a finely-tuned, empirical relationship with their kinesthetic self. I realized I was experiencing an intricate process of self-organizing with no endgame, a process of yielding that could be softly activated and refined.

A sense of relief—not a cloud-parting, revelatory kind of relief—but a steady relief, accreting over months, began to build in me. A dynamic system of implicit learning, specific and vast, self-empirical and partially lawless, was slowly revealing itself to me. The movement sequences, instead of pushing, provided contained-yet-open, suspended states of exploration where I would find myself in a kind of collaboration with my own nervous system. On a bone-deep level, both self-trust and risk-taking were fostered, a combination crucial to my creative process.

One Saturday afternoon a couple of years later, while teaching a writing workshop, I found myself spontaneously asking the participants to stand and do a short, light ATM lesson. We had just completed a writing sequence that started with a constraint and went into a free-write. I felt that the physical ATM sequence would enhance the underlying principle we had just been exploring in writing. Subsequently, I found that the more I folded Feldenkrais lessons into the writing

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classes, the more I came to a deeper understanding of the writing sequences themselves, many of which I had been teaching for years. I realized that what I had sensed years before—the ability of the Method to deepen processes of artistic discovery—had been made concrete. I was now able to tease out, develop, and share increasingly pragmatic structures for writing based on Feldenkrais principles and their frequent employment of paradox.

Possibility in the pause of paradox

1 Mark Reese, “Moshe Feldenkrais’s Work with Movement: A Parallel Approach to Milton Erickson’s Hypnotherapy,” Feldenkrais Journal no.1 (1984), par. 23, accessed July 16, 2016, http://www. achievingexcellence.com/ Moshe-Feldenkrais-Workwith-Movement-A-ParallelApproach-to-MiltonEricksons-Hypnotherapy. html.

In the Feldenkrais Method, paradox is a generative tool for learning, the proverbial door that opens when another shuts.

Perhaps inspired by his Hasidic childhood, with its culture of questioning rather than answering, Moshe Feldenkrais saw paradox as a way to give the nervous system the opportunity to improvise new habits by noticing and questioning old ones. In practice, his movements often accentuate a student’s own way of holding the body—it is a way to make the patterns more apparent, and therefore more open to change. Working one-on-one in an FI lesson, a practitioner will shape her hands to the contours of the client’s body in order to support—and even exaggerate—what is already being enacted. “Paradoxically, when a person is pushed sufficiently in his or her own extreme, it begins to feel right for the person to spontaneously correct his or her posture,” writes Mark Reese.1 Rather than opposing a person’s tendencies through stretching and manipulation, these techniques accommodate them, bypassing the resistance that might arise from direct contradiction. Intrinsic abilities of the person’s own nervous system can come out of hiding, gently coaxed through micro-movements into new manifestations. A more articulated subjectivity begins to emerge. In the pause of paradox, individuality finds space to offer, rather than to obstruct.

Mistaking paralysis for paradox 2 Moshe Feldenkrais, The Elusive Obvious (Capitola, CA: Meta, 1981), 118.

“I do not treat people, I do not cure people, and I do not teach people,” wrote Feldenkrais. “I tell them stories because I believe that learning is the most important thing for a human being.”2 Artists are drawn to paradox, to the complexity preserved inside stories. So too is the nervous system. Often, however, we can mistake struggle for paradox. Both can include an involuntary stop or slowness, a confusion of what comes next. Like paradox, struggle can keep us engaged and energized. We find novel ways of doing things when faced with either. However, struggle can also exploit tendencies towards vigilance and anxiety, which can grow dominant in our thought and

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Notebook pages with Sense Writing sequences by students in Istanbul, Israel, and the West Bank, 2015–2017 (pgs 43, 44)

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3 Mark Reese, “The Feldenkrais Method and Dynamic System Principles,” Mark Reese to Esther Thelen, undated notes, par. 12, accessed July 7, 2016, http://davidzemachbersin.com/2012/02/ the-feldenkrais-methodand-dynamic-systemprinciples/.

action. In American culture, the idea of the struggling artist is ubiquitous, and it is often internalized by artists who lack other options. In my own group of peers, I often saw people speaking in stark terms of survival.

Unlike struggle, which is rooted in choiceless-ness, paradox brings us into sustainable, open states that provoke new insight, interrupting existing patterns to allow the possibility of new actions. In the Feldenkrais Method, paradoxical or indirect techniques are meant to destabilize, to create what Mark Reese called a “highly exploratory phase,” where a person can find spontaneous solutions to new information.3 These open-yet-contained explorations were what I sought in my own creative practice, where I loved to linger.

Accepting what paradox offers Gradually letting many techniques and realizations coalesce, I started to develop what is now called Sense Writing, an approach to creative writing that combines movement and writing sequences to help people refine the innate intelligence of their own nervous systems and uncover richer processes of artistic discovery.

There are probably dozens of paradoxes that can activate these suspended states of exploration, and, of course, with experiential approaches, it is best to try things out rather than just reading about them. The following is my attempt to parse some of the paradoxes that enable us to enter a state of flow or “the zone,” as athletes sometimes refer to a similar phenomenon. At the end, I have provided two short Sense Writing sequences for you to try on your own.

1

Delayed interpretation yields sudden insight

4 Moshe Feldenkrais, The Potent Self: A Study of Spontaneity and Compulsion (Berkeley: Frog Books, 2002), 160.

Sense Writing is an approach to creative writing that is not only, or even mostly, about writing. Most classes and one-on-one sessions begin with body mapping, a technique of lying on the floor in order to allow antigravitational muscles to relax and structural habits triggered by coping with gravity to recede. Without the ambition to express anything (yet), participants bring their attention to an internal, wordless landscape, noticing how it shifts and changes, re-organizing itself moment to moment. We linger in our senses without trying to put those senses into language. Engaging with our subjective selves, before the force of narrative sweeps in, allows us to avoid what Feldenkrais called “premature interpretations.” Writer’s block (and really any creative block) can be viewed as a series of “premature interpretations” that keep us stumbling forward into blind alleys of resistance rather than basking in “the sudden insight” of enriched experience and options.4

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2 Blocks create more space, not less

5 Ruthy Alon, Mindful Spontaneity (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1996), 60.

Some of those who come to Sense Writing workshops are new writers hesitant to even begin, while others are experienced writers who feel stuck in a particular project. Instead of taking a pickaxe to this hardened terrain and forcing it to give way, in Sense Writing we till the soil elsewhere. Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, in a real or imagined landscape, if a student is stuck in a story or project, we work on a section that surrounds this hardened terrain, a section that is softer and more yielding.

In the Feldenkrais Method, there are many strategies that allow us to guide the nervous system to work around hardened terrain, and perhaps, afterwards, to soften it. Ruthy Alon writes in Mindful Spontaneity (1996), “When movement is difficult, you are entitled to the assistance of various compromises, such as partial movement, all kinds of supporting pads, rhythm change, activation from another direction, assistance from another part of your body.”5 All of these have their corollaries in Sense Writing. If, for example, a writer finds herself stuck, she might write into scenes that take place just minutes before or after the “problematic” scene and go deeply into these moments, though they were never part of “the story.” Or she might explore the scene itself more directly by reversing the chronology, or telling it from another character’s perspective. Whether these new passages stay in the story or not, they often lead to unanticipated breakthroughs. Alternating positions refines the writer’s ability to make new choices, and the problematic section or scene often stops being “problematic.”

I have found this indirect approach especially beneficial in the case of people who have experienced trauma. Some students come to the workshops eager to write into a part of their lives that they have never been able to express. Past experiences remain as shards of sensation not yet integrated viscerally or contextualized in narrative. As artists, we are encouraged to explore and find meaning in places that are difficult— to “dig”—and we can get stuck. Either the unexplored depths eventually stop yielding, or they yield too much, subsuming “the artist’s voice,” narrowing or limiting range and expressive choice.

In Sense Writing, through an ebb and flow of movement and writing sequences, participants first immerse themselves in surrounding stories that are easier to tell, even ones that initially seem “insignificant.”

Exploring the links among movement, thought, emotions, senses, and language, they discover how these can form and re-form into fresh combinations, and new unforced ways of telling stories emerge. New, untold stories are actually discovered. With the connective tissue

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between viscera and narrative strengthened, participants can then choose to spiral back into the more “resistant” story, finding that it not only unfolds more easily, but has itself shifted and changed as part of the whole.

3 Constraints lead to freedom

6 Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing (New York: Penguin, 2015).

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In all forms of art, constraints can open up new possibilities. In a writing constraint, for example, you might write a scene by starting every sentence with “I remember.” (This could be from your point of view or a fictional character’s perspective.) The constraint of the sentence starter “I remember” allows you to “aim low” and not worry about syntactically positioning yourself for each new sentence. Other parts of the self can be brought to the surface. Then when you switch into a free write, writing in any way you want into the scene, each moment will be more textured as you re-orient yourself, word by word, in the story.

Similarly, an ATM lesson might constrain the use of the neck in order to turn the head. Inhibiting the use of the neck, parts of the spine, ribcage, pelvis, or feet come out of the woodwork and support the movement.

This quiet dialogue among the lesser-used parts expands our internal kinesthetic space as a whole, and after, when walking, new sensations and possibilities can often be felt in places that were not specifically moved in the sequence.

Sessions involving “writing constraints” are followed by a period of free writing, where participants are asked to write into that same scene without the constraints. Afterward, they are invited to reflect on the difference between how it felt to write with the constraint and during the free write. Did one flow more? Was there one that was more awkward?

For some people, writing with the constraint will be easier, for others the free write will feel better, but for each person these differences will change throughout the process, effectively changing their writing as well.

To reflect on the writing and movement components of Sense Writing is a key step in the process. Like Feldenkrais lessons, these sequences make up a kind of empirical tracking system, and reflecting on our experience keeps us engaged in the dynamics of a process that is always changing and often full of surprising connections. In neuroplasticity, this kind of empiricism actually becomes a tool in the repair of function. Reading Norman Doidge’s The Brain’s Way of Healing (2015), I was struck by this crucial aspect in the case studies: recovery was often connected with a patient’s ability to be aware of what was going on as it was going on, and to be able to express this understanding afterwards— to self-report accurately.6 This ability to pay attention to finer and finer details allows the patient to recognize small improvements and to re-build trust in her own nervous system. The reflective aspects of Sense Writing increase curiosity and trust in the creative process as it evolves, keeping the writer engaged in her own work.

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Students begin to figure out that the constraints they encounter are there to make them feel more comfortable while they seek their own points of comfort inside the practice. This discovery of inherent abilities within a self-directed practice full of questioning is for me the very practice of being an artist.

“I like to work on a song until those slogans, as wonderful as they are and as wholesome as the ideas they promote are, dissolve into deeper convictions of the heart.”—Leonard Cohen7

7 Dorian Lynskey, “Leonard Cohen: ‘All I’ve got to put in a song is my own experience,’” The Guardian (January 19, 2012), par. 17, accessed July 15, 2016, https:// www.theguardian.com/ music/2012/jan/19/ leonard-cohen.

A brief Sense Writing sequence: This is a 10-minute introduction to the first principle of Sense Writing, which is Constraints and Freedom. Sequences are usually recorded or led aloud by a teacher, so it is best to use a timer so you don’t have to watch the clock.

1. Constraint writing (three minutes) Write into your morning using the sentence starter “I remember.”

Start every sentence with “I remember.”

Keep your hand moving. If you feel you are getting stuck, just repeat “I remember I remember I remember nothing. . .”

Aim low, with simple sentences.

2. Free write (six minutes) Write into this same morning in any way you want.

Don’t look back at any of the constraint writing.

Try to keep your hand moving.

3. Reflection Take a moment and write about the differences between the constraint writing and the free write. Without looking at the

To sample a recorded Sense Writing lesson, go to www.sensewriting.org/ samplejournal

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The Origin of Consent Shannon Lynne Sullivan I am, as of this June, a newly minted Feldenkrais practitioner. I also train dogs, and my study of the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education has deeply impacted this work. The dog trainer I am today strives to create optimal learning conditions in every moment for all involved. My personal values of deep listening and respect were once overshadowed by a habitual cultural denial of dogs’ right to social freedom and autonomy.

Now these values pervade and inspire the foundational, flexible kindness that is the basis for my work.

On a few occasions, my worlds have overlapped, and I’ve had the pleasure of offering Functional Integration (FI) lessons to canine clients.

Those sessions are among the simplest, easiest, most direct, and most impactful I’ve given. Quite frankly, dogs are excellent students, better than me by far.

In the earliest weeks of my Feldenkrais practitioner training, I remember spending hours on the floor in perpetual motion. I dutifully followed instructions, smugly certain I was doing it right. But then instructions were repeated, and then repeated again. Clearly someone in the room wasn’t following. Was it me? Should I be ashamed instead of smug? Why wouldn’t they just say who was doing it right and who was doing it wrong so I could know for sure? My mind swam these circles while I worked through pain, employed speed over patience, and generally tried to get to the point of the lesson as quickly as possible, despite all encouragement to the contrary.

With hindsight, I see I was unconsciously convinced that my teachers were covertly assessing my performance. I was running an internalized pattern of receiving orders and being compelled to obey, even when I didn’t understand. In my psyche, I was moving because I had to, not because I wanted to, and I anticipated condescension or punishment in response. Below that, I longed for praise. It was quite stressful and also 1 Acknowledgement to Sarah Stremming, trainer indicative of my lost ability to trust my own bodily consent. at The Cognitive Canine Consent is a word rarely considered in the dog world (and perhaps (https://thecognitivecanine. anywhere outside of sex or medicine).1 Non-consideration of canine com), for introducing me to using the word consent consent is still the status quo. The not seeing, or not even looking, for in direct reference to dogs consent has been normalized. Desensitization to the borders of canine and dog training.

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consent has tossed us out to sea, and all of us are wet. Even if we’re not drowning, we are at least a little damp.

There are, indeed, many caring humans who would never force a dog to perform non-essential activities they clearly don’t enjoy. But the reality is that many dogs, if not most, enter our human world under expectations to meet human wishes, wants, and emotional needs. They are expected to conform to human stories and beliefs instead of being seen as autonomous beings with preferences and desires of their own.

And these subtle forms of psychic claiming damage relationship.

I hear evidence of this from clients in their descriptions of their dogs: stubborn, doesn’t listen, dominant, rotten. I also see it in dog language: disengaging from training due to over- or understimulation, or squinching away from the forehead-to-forehead contact we humans so love subjecting them to. In Feldenkrais students, indications of such furtive dismissal can sound quite similar: bad knee, stubborn ankle, defiant muscle. And these too can be passed off as logic, e.g., “It’s my piriformis.” As dog trainer and practitioner both, my job is to listen below, to graciously honor the subtlest NO, and to seek for lost and new variations of enthusiastic, bodily YES. One of my canine FI students, a Carolina Dog named Frisco, had accumulated his 18 years living boldly. He was happy, smiley, and constantly on the move, since lying down required the eventual effort of getting up, and standing “still” was an ordeal on progressively shakier legs. “He’s like a shark,” Frisco’s human commented, “can’t stop swimming.” Frisco had also lost the ability to turn in all but the widest arcs, so he was quite adept at walking backwards.

Working with Frisco, I was free from the constraints of all of my professional settings. He was just visiting with my brother for Thanksgiving, as he had done before, but this time I gave him an approximate total of 45 minutes of FI lessons over the course of his three day stay. There were no time constraints and no commuting before or after sessions. My space was not new to him, so he didn’t need any extra time to explore and get comfortable.

Our first session started spontaneously in a quiet moment when Frisco swam by to give me a slurp. Placing a hand on his spine, I began to gently map, vertebra by vertebra, through attentive touch. He lingered a few moments and then off he swam. After a couple laps around the room, he came back over and presented his side, turning to look up at me. I took up again, and he lingered a bit longer before heading off for a lap and then swimming right back for more. Our intermittent session continued as I mapped and supported Frisco’s spine all the way to the tip of his tail and did the same for each of his ribs. He ended our work by melting in the corner for a nap.

To my eyes, consent is clearly something at which dogs are acutely adept. Case-in-point: Frisco’s self-regulation put my own to shame.

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Frisco resting between sessions

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He knew exactly when he needed a pause, he knew exactly when he was done for the day, and his communication of those boundaries was unambiguous. It took me two years of professional Feldenkrais training to develop a fraction as much clarity, or rather, to begin to re-develop my natural state.

One could say that all I had to do to respect Frisco’s boundaries was to listen and choose to never apply force, but that’s not quite true. For that choice even to be available, I first had to see through the cultural ocean of non-consideration of canine consent. I had to be grounded in respect and afford him, a dog, the dignity of personal boundaries in the first place.

For the dog trainer I am today, questioning whether or not a nonverbal animal is capable of consent would be like questioning gravity.

Exploring the many ways a nonverbal animal can communicate consent is a rich, joyous investigation. It also evokes a parallel consideration: all communication of consent is first and foremost nonverbal. At its foundation, consent is bodily—even for those of us who speak.

The morning after Frisco’s first session, he swam into our small kitchen packed with humans making breakfast. He had arrived at an impasse, but instead of habitually throwing it in reverse, he made a neat, tight turn and walked out with his head held high. Later that day, he came to me with imploring eyes, and I added hip and shoulder circles onto our previous work. By the end of this (also intermittent) session, Frisco was standing on stable legs without so much as a quiver. The next day, he welcomed my support in balancing movements that allowed me to lift each one of his paws. Then, on our afternoon walk, my brother laughed with pride when Frisco lifted a hind leg to pee on a bush, which he apparently hadn’t done in years. Frisco moved one bush down and lifted the other leg.

At the end of Frisco’s visit, he ambled up to the truck door, where he would normally wait to be lifted, and instead gathered himself to jump.

I appreciated the sentiment, as Feldenkrais lessons often leave me considering feats of physical prowess I have no business attempting.

But my brother quickly intervened, and Frisco made it home uninjured and with his relearned potential intact. Months have passed, and he’s still lifting his legs to pee. It is, as I imagine my teacher saying, quite the functional achievement.

As Feldenkrais practitioners, the curious search for boundaries of bodily consent is one of our primary tools and teachings. We know well the bounties of learning beneath respect-filled nuance of attention.

We are proselytizers of doing less to feel more. We know in our bones that struggling through movement is a violation of bodily consent, and that the application of force is costly. We know that when the well-distributed, mutually beneficial relationship is surrendered, all that remains is compulsion.

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I think, in culture generally, and with dogs specifically, we become explicit about consent far too late, if at all. By the time we’re discussing it, consent has long been transgressed. We are well past the moment of choice and solidly into the need for repair. But comprehension, and thus rectification, of this issue can be found at the heart of the Feldenkrais Method, because the process of sensitizing oneself to the borders of capability and consent is, in my mind, the foundation of this work. It is to acknowledge, with full awareness, those places where movement, be it physical, emotional, mental, or behavioral, is restricted. And then, instead of countering or fighting, to meet those restrictions with presence and respect, with curiosity and inquiry, with humility and trust, so that they may have the opportunity to shift in their own ways, in their own time, and on their own terms.

So I, the newly minted Feldenkrais practitioner, now watch my own students struggle in reaction to my instructions. I watch them try hard, and do more, and disparage their performance despite all my encouragement to the contrary. And I attempt to entrance them, as playfully as possible, in the joyful nuance of their own bodily consent.

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“Take all the time you need for each breath.”—Michael Krugman Photo by Nic Frechen

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Remembering Michael Krugman Jean Elvin Michael Krugman was a devoted student of traditional methods of self-healing and became a Feldenkrais practitioner in 1987. Michael was fascinated by the process and results of the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education and became one of its best known innovators. In 1995, he developed a system called Typelighter, designed to help people avoid keyboard-related injuries.

But Michael is surely best known for his 1999 creation, the Sounder Sleep System®. Michael’s humorous and self-deprecating description of his invention in his book, The Insomnia Solution, begins: “In spite of my commitment to healthy food, supplements, Feldenkrais, yoga, qigong, and inline skating, when that uninvited 3 a.m. wake-up call came, I was stumped.”1 The Sounder Sleep System resonated with a sleep-deprived world.

Michael developed techniques, workshops, and trainings, and published his well-received book in 2005. By 2012, his system was taught by more than 200 practitioners in Europe and the United States, including in corporate-sponsored “sleep competence centers” in many cities in Germany and Switzerland.

Michael’s contributions in the field of sleep were stamped with his unique combination of play, humor, and generosity. He taught the Sounder Sleep System to many in the somatic teaching community, to New York City patrol officers after 9/11, and to coal miners in Chile.

I fell in love with the Sounder Sleep System in 2001. I was drawn to the work with an immediate need for rest; I stayed for the content and the creativity.

At the Berkeley workshop where I first met Michael, he described studying with his own meditation teacher: sitting on the floor in a room of seekers, engaging in a guided practice after lunch. He recounted how row after row would succumb, giving into gravity and diving into a deep 1 Michael’s teachings are available through his book, state of repose, not unlike sleep. “Predictably and in waves . . . they went The Insomnia Solution: The down—just like bowling!”

Natural, Drug-Free Way to a Good Night's Sleep (New He could be a taskmaster. He taught me how to write marketing York: Warner Books, 2005), copy with relentless exactitude. His lectures were rigorously researched. as well as a set of audio On the other hand, Michael’s disarming candor, and his characteristic recordings, Rest Assured: Self-Healing for Insomnia playful, light presence snuck up on me. From him, I not only improved and the Stress of Life my practice of sleeping, I also gave it more respect. He changed my (2010).

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relationship to sleep, to life, and to teaching itself. He showed me how gentle both teaching and learning can be.

I went on to organize his Sounder Sleep trainings in Northern California for about a decade, becoming a Senior Teacher of the system by 2007, and helping to create a Sleep School with Cliff Smyth and Kathy Flock in San Francisco in 2011. Those years were dotted with short visits by Michael, sleep workshops and trainings, arrangements, discussions, and on our best days, stories over dinner.

Sleep is daring. Going unconscious for hours at a time makes us vulnerable, yet it is absolutely necessary for life. In spite of a stressful environment, a gentle attitude toward ourselves allows us to make the transition. Michael taught us to put ourselves first, before “the convenience of industry.” He guided us to be brave enough to unplug and create the space we need, in spite of the “busy, hurried, harried” layers of culture and responsibility.

Many who knew Michael felt deep sadness at the news of his unexpected death. He touched the lives of so many people: his close friends and family, international colleagues and clients, his surfing contacts, and those with whom he shared a dedication to Argentine tango dancing. His brilliant work is his gift to us all.

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Elizabeth Beringer studied and worked closely with Dr. Feldenkrais from 1976 to 1984 in both Israel and the U.S. She has been involved with the practice and development of the Feldenkrais Method for more than 30 years, including founding and editing The Feldenkrais Journal, developing educational programs and materials, and co-founding Feldenkrais Resources with David ZemachBersin in 1984. Currently she is the educational director of training programs in Switzerland and in California, at the Feldenkrais Institute of San Diego, where she maintains her private practice.

Roger Russell, M.A., PT, trained with Moshé Feldenkrais in San Francisco, Amherst, and Israel (1975 – 1982). A movement scientist, physical therapist, and Feldenkrais trainer, he is co-director of the Feldenkrais-Zentrum in Heidelberg, Germany. Since 1975, he has been intrigued by the network of ideas, including neuroscience, which stands behind the practical methods that Feldenkrais developed.

He is one of the initiators of the Feldenkrais Science Network and a leading participant in the FGNA/FEFNA symposia Movement and the Development of Sense of Self (2004) and Embodying Neuroscience (2012).

www.feldenkraisresources.com

www.feldenkraiszentrum-hd.de/de/

Andrew Dawson is a theater director, performance artist, Feldenkrais practitioner, and hand model. His diverse career spans the creation of original works such as ‘Space Panorama’ (1987), the story of the Apollo 11 moon landing told with only his hands, ‘Quatre Mains’ (1998), and ‘Absence and Presence’ (2005). He has also choreographed and directed movement for the Metropolitan Opera of New York and the English National Opera and presented on the Feldenkrais Method and neurological disorders for TEDMED San Diego.

Tiffany Sankary is a Boston-based Feldenkrais practitioner and the continuity Assistant Trainer for the Boston Feldenkrais Training. She is in the process of bringing more of her offerings online, including courses on the Feldenkrais Method, Authentic Movement, and creative process. Her first book, Feldenkrais Illustrated: The Art of Learning, was self-published by Movement and Creativity Press in 2014.

www.andrewdawson.info

Frederick Schjang is a veteran of the fitness industry. He is largely responsible for introducing the Feldenkrais Method to Equinox Fitness Clubs, Reebok Sports Club, and the New York Parks Department, among others. His Awareness Through Movement class was selected as one of the "Best Fitness Classes" by TimeOut NY, and his annual Feldenkrais Festivals draw national attention, with partners including Jazz at Lincoln Center and Sirius XM. Schjang is a founding faculty member of New York University’s Doctorate Program in Physical Therapy. He currently holds the position of Elected Representative for the New York Region of the Feldenkrais Guild of North America.

This year marks Jean Elvin's 20th anniversary teaching the Feldenkrais Method. She maintains a private practice in Palo Alto, CA, at Integrated Healing Arts. She also teaches at City College of San Francisco through the Physical Education and Dance Department (since 2008) and at Stanford University through the School of Medicine's Health Improvement Program (since 2004). At CCSF she offers Awareness Through Movement lessons as well as the newly designed program Feldenkrais for Dance and Performing Arts. Elvin lives in Santa Clara with her cat and husband, with whom she enjoys Argentine tango dancing on a weekly basis. www.sweetagility.com Todd Hargrove is a Feldenkrais practitioner, Rolfer, and author. Todd graduated from Hamilton College in 1990 with a B.A. in Economics and Philosophy, and from the University of Washington School of Law in 1995 with a J.D. While working as an attorney, Todd developed chronic neck and back pain but eliminated it through selfeducation, lifestyle change, and exercise. He quit the law in 2005 to help others with their pain and physical function.

Since 2008, he has written a blog focused on applying pain science and neuroscience to manual and movement therapy. In 2014, he published A Guide to Better Movement: The Science and Practice of Moving with More Skill and Less Pain. www.bettermovement.org Madelyn Kent is a Feldenkrais practitioner and the developer of Sense Writing, which she has taught throughout Europe, the United States, and the Middle East.

Her theater work has been presented at Soho Rep, PS 122, the New York Public Theater, The Flea, and other theaters.

She has taught playwriting, screenwriting, and theater at New York University/Tisch School of the Arts. www.sensewriting.com

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www.tiffanysankary.com

www.frederickschjang.com Shannon Lynne Sullivan teaches ATM and FI lessons to private clients, and she trains dog-human teams at Urban Pooch Training & Fitness Center. She lives in Chicago with her husband Stephen and Virginia, the rescued, rehabilitated Mountain Cur. www.shannonlynnesullivan.com

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Illustration of individual systems of reference centered upon the joints (and indicated by horizontal planes and vertical axes) from the archives of the Noa Eshkol Foundation for Movement Notation

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Inquiries regarding the publication of The Feldenkrais Journal can be directed to: The Feldenkrais Guild of North America, news@feldenkraisguild.com. If you have an article, image, or letter to submit to the Journal, please email journal@feldenkraisguild.com for information about format and computer compatibility.

The final deadline for all submissions including images is April 1, 2018.

Editor Anita Noone Assistant Editors Helen Singh-Miller Matthew Zepelin Editorial Board Adam Cole Dana Fitzgibbons Belinda He Elin Lobel Anita Noone Helen Singh-Miller Jessica Pink Margot Schaal Matthew Zepelin Special Thanks Alyssa Palance Mor Bashan The Noa Eshkol Archive Design AHL&CO

The following are registered trademarks, service marks, collective or certification marks of the Feldenkrais Guild of North America: FELDENKRAIS®, FELDENKRAIS METHOD®, FUNCTIONAL INTEGRATION®, FI®, AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT®, ATM®, GUILD CERTIFIED FELDENKRAIS TEACHER®, and THE FELDENKRAIS GUILD®. The following are trademarks, service marks or certification marks of the Feldenkrais Guild of North America: L’INTEGRATION FONCTIONNELLE , PRISE DE CONSCIENCE PAR LE MOUVEMENT , FRIENDS OF FELDENKRAIS , GUILD CERTIFIED FELDENKRAIS PRACTITIONER , FELDENKRAIS AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT TEACHER , FELDENKRAIS , and THE FELDENKRAIS JOURNAL .

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Image Credits Pages 1, 60 Pelvic clock drawings by Tiffany Sankary Pages 29–36 Design by Roger Russell and Bettina Beiderwellen Copyright Roger Russell Page 34 Design by Roger Russell, Susanne Mertner, and Stefanie Hoff Copyright Roger Russell Pages 43–44 Used with permission Page 54 Copyright Patricio Simon Pages 3, 4, 58 Illustrations and diagrams used with permission of the Noa Eshkol Foundation for Movement Notation and the Noa Eshkol Archive Back cover Different surfaces produced by movement about the same axis of movement Interpretation of EshkolWachman movement notation

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Back Issues Journal 1 General Issue (photocopy) Journal 2 Martial Arts Journal 3 Special Interest Groups Journal 4 Emotions Journal 5 The Arts Journal 6 Stories Journal 7 Conceptual Models Journal 8 General Issue Journal 9 Parallel Developments Journal 10 Children Journal 11 More Children Journal 12 General Issue Journal 13 The Self-Image Journal 14 Performing Arts Journal 15 Awareness Through Movement Journal 16 Performing Arts Journal 17 General Issue Journal 18 Parenting Journal 19 Awareness Journal 20 Awareness Journal 21 Open Issue Journal 22 Teaching Journal 23 Aesthetics Journal 24 General Issue Journal 25 Let’s Play Journal 26 Science Journal 27 Improvisation Journal 28 General Issue Journal 29 Aesthetic Experience

Š Copyright 2017 Feldenkrais Guild of North America.

All rights revert to authors and artists upon publication.