2019 Feldenkrais Journal

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2019

Journal

#31

The

The

Feldenkrais

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 Journal 30 General Issue

Š Copyright 2019 Feldenkrais Guild of North America.

All rights revert to authors and artists upon publication.

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Digital drawings on archival photographs made by Texas Manning before an Awareness Through MovementÂŽ lesson (ATMÂŽ), 2018

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Contents 3 Letter from the Editor, 2019

21 On Better Judo Moti Nativ

5 Teachable Moments John E. Franklin

42 Including Strength and Learning in a New Approach to Range of Motion Edward Yu

10 The Primacy of the Hands... and the Mouth, and the Eyes, and the Pelvic Floor: Working with Jack and Christina Louise Runyon

48 A Vision Quest for Development: The Case of Phillip Annie Thoe 62 Reversibility – A More Global Definition Adam Cole

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Letter from the Editor, 2019 This issue of The Feldenkrais Journal brings six different articles together that you are sure to find worthwhile. As usual, the authors come from very different backgrounds and experiences, and the articles are wide-ranging.

Having spent a lot of time with each of the articles individually, I am struck by their commonality when I consider them part of the same issue. Each article allows the reader a close-up vantage point, often to view a scene of intimacy. As Feldenkrais® practitioners, we are privileged to enter into learning partnerships with our students. And the learning environment that Feldenkrais practitioners create often gives rise to the revealing of secrets, the discovery of things previously unknown, and a connection that is deep and trustworthy. But unlike what often happens in our work, the articles you are about to read make these strands of intimacy explicit.

Two of the articles, Annie Thoe’s A Vision Quest for Development: The Case of Phillip, and Louise Runyon’s The Primacy of the Hands are classic case studies. Each article invites you to understand the unique relationship forged between practitioner and student. The care and communication that runs through these relationships is front and center and you will come away with new ideas about how to inhabit the intimate space of our work.

John Franklin’s memoir about his own professional training program, which began in 2000, will take you into the heart of a Feldenkrais training and the heart of a trainee. It’s a treat to have a front-row seat at this extraordinary program, which included Dr. Esther Thelen.

Adam Cole leads us deep into an exploration of the concept of reversibility. As Adam points out, all practitioners use the term, but how much time do we really spend considering it? This article will give you the chance to consider and ponder, with the advantage of a knowledgeable guide.

In a similar vein, Edward Yu has produced an article that will bring you new ways to think about stretching and to experience your own particular ranges of motion. Edward’s outside-the-box take on range of motion may provide some concepts useful for you during your interaction with students who are confirmed stretchers.

And finally, Moti Nativ has written a piece about martial arts, Moshe Feldenkrais, and the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education. The experiences, thought processes, and writing of Feldenkrais on these topics is a rich source of understanding. In this article, Moti has brought to light connections that are important for practitioners. Whether you are a martial artist or not, you will find Moti’s clear and well-researched article illuminating.

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Each author and each member of the Editorial Board of the Journal labored long to bring you this issue. The volunteers who contribute so generously to make the Journal a reality have my unending gratitude. Special thanks to Helen Singh-Miller, Assistant Editor, whose contributions have been essential, and who even in difficult circumstances, always finds a brilliant path.

Enjoy the learning!

—Anita Noone

Digital drawing on archival photograph made by Texas Manning after an Awareness Through Movement® lesson (ATM®), 2018

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Teachable Moments John E. Franklin An unexpected email from a Feldenkrais® training program classmate, Chuck Graybill, sparked memories of my first professional training.

Mark Reese, the Educational Director, had split the segments between San Diego and Indiana University Bloomington. Dr. Esther Thelen, a professor at the school and a leading expert in child motor development, was a student in our class.

I had learned about the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education from my friend Beth Scott, a physical therapist and a soon-to-be Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner . As I sat on her table, she explored the curves of my spine with a gentle touch. She invited me to lay flat and explore the space beneath my low back with my own hand. A tennis ball would have had ample room to pass beneath the lumbar curve.

She placed supports beneath my head, knees, and ankles. Her subtle movements with my head, shoulders, hips, and legs felt different from the deep myofascial release technique in previous visits to her office. My lower back touched the surface of the table when she finished.

After twenty-one years of diagnosing and treating animals, my wife Sharon and I sold our practice to pursue other interests. During our career as veterinarians, we had taken time to explore territories beyond the paradigms of western medicine. We had traveled to Peru to work with indigenous healers, and spent week-long retreats at the Monroe Institute and the Omega Institute to experience expanded states of consciousness. I had studied the subtle energies of the body with various teachers. After my Functional Integration® lesson with Beth, I headed west to explore yet another body-mind frontier—this time through the lens of the Feldenkrais Method.

I had never experienced an Awareness Through Movement® lesson (ATM®) until I arrived in San Diego to study with Mark Reese and Donna Ray. I joined a second-year class of 40 plus students, many who were either physical therapists or occupational therapists. I was to make up the first year by attending other trainings.

I came early the first day and sat beside my new friend Frank on the floor of the dojo where our training was taking place. We watched an Aikido class, the students clad in white gis, practice their Aikido rolls across padded mats. Frank already knew how to do a judo roll. He had learned it in the first year. Worried that I should know this already, CM

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I persuaded him to teach me before our class started. I had read of Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais’ background in judo and assumed that the ability to roll forward over my shoulder was part of Awareness Through Movement.

The first ATM lesson of my training was taught by Mark, who instructed us to lay on the floor. I found a space among the supine bodies spreading across the vacated dojo in orderly rows. The voices of my fellow students faded into soft murmurings and then silence. Mark’s melodic voice invited us to witness the places where we contacted the floor and the places where we did not.

Easing us into a side-lying position, he described different movements with which to explore the shoulder. Moving my shoulder forward and back, sliding it up and down, and making clockwise and counterclockwise circles invited a childlike sense of play. Mark’s preoccupation with the ribs beneath our shoulders and how, along with our breath, they might improve the quality of our shoulder movements, suggested a body that I apparently knew little about. I watched the students around me to see what they did.

We gathered around Mark afterwards to discuss the lesson. Curious over what he meant about feeling the movement of our ribs, I raised my hand. I said that I was a veterinarian. In the world of the four-legged, the ribcage protected the heart and lungs and supported a weightbearing scapula on each forelimb. I agreed that the shoulder girdle of a two-legged being was unique, but how my ribs influenced the movement of my shoulders was not clear.

Mark’s narrowed gaze signaled a keener, more personal interest in me than I intended. He invited me to lay on a nearby Feldenkrais table, to turn onto my side with my knees bent. Unaccustomed to the stares of a curious crowd, I closed my eyes, better appreciating the feelings of the four-legged beings I had palpated on stainless steel exam tables. When Mark asked the students to give us more space, I took another breath. In the clarity of his voice, I heard that he had my back.

Mark sat behind me, my shoulder cupped between his hands.

His touch, attentive and delicate, was inquisitive. He explored the cardinal points along the rim of the joint. In the tiniest of movements, he maneuvered around the bumps and twitches and jerks that I had earlier pushed through. I scarcely breathed, as though a small part of myself lay hidden beneath my shoulder blade.

I edged into a dusk-like darkness beyond what I could feel—a dream from a boyhood too long ago for me to be certain. I heard a voice behind my lips whisper in silence, You have been touched by the hand of God. Mark followed a rib upward along my side and I took a deeper breath.

In increments, my shoulder yielded to his hands, circling clockwise and counterclockwise as though moved by tiny eddies. My shoulder blade slid across my back freer than before.

I shared my experience with the class afterward. Only later in private did I tell Mark about God’s hand. He looked surprised but said nothing.

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After a break, we worked in pairs to explore the relationship between the ribs and the shoulder. My partner was an older woman with a history of shoulder issues. She was the student Mark had chosen to demonstrate what he wanted us to try. I felt oddly free of anxiety and expectation placing my hands on a person I did not know. She lay on her side with her knees bent. I cupped her shoulder as Mark had mine, in search of an invisible compass.

I moved her shoulder slowly, gently, testing for ease, for clarity. If only in my imagination, I focused on making a connection through her shoulder to her ribs and to her breath.

Later in the training, Mark showed us a video of Moshe lecturing to a class in the Amherst training. He walked among rows of students seated on the floor in a large gym-like space. His tone was gruff, almost caustic at times: pain was part of life—our birth was painful. I cannot recall what else Moshe said in that video.

I do remember a slight woman with wire-rimmed glasses who raised her hand when Mark asked for comments or questions after the video. Her name was Dr. Esther Thelen. Mark had introduced her at the beginning of our training.

Esther said that the way in which Moshe spoke to his students was patronizing, patriarchal. She would have walked out, had she been in that class. She could not tolerate that way of being addressed.

Mark answered with equal passion, his head bobbing forward as though he sought to demonstrate a “hen-pecking” ATM lesson.

Embodying words like attractors and markers, he spoke of behavioral psychology and other concepts that Esther paused to consider. He polled the class to gather our reactions to Moshe’s lecture. A few agreed with Esther, a few with Mark. Most of us did not venture an opinion.

Esther’s expression softened a bit and their conversation ended as though it had been a brief thunderstorm with the barest of rain. I was amazed that such a discussion could happen in a class. Later I learned that Moshe might vehemently argue a particular point before reversing his position in contradiction to what he previously said.

The next morning, Mark discussed Dr. Milton Erickson, hypnosis, and neurolinguistic programing. My friend Frank, who came from East Germany, raised his hand. Frank said that he studied hypnosis and that he had never heard of Erickson. What made this man so important?

Mark’s features softened, his nod conveyed a gentle patience. He said that Erickson was an important figure in American psychiatry and family therapy. Several of Moshe’s assistants had studied with Erickson.

My friend Frank did not appear convinced, but I was impressed by Mark’s tone and choice of words. He embodied the respect that a good teacher gives a student’s question. I thought about Moshe, a man who survived persecution through two world wars and who lived amidst unending conflict in the Middle East. That a failure to adapt intelligently to life’s challenges could have harsh consequences might have informed how he spoke to his students.

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Most of my classmates took lunch in the bistros tucked along the beaches of Cardiff by the Sea. I took my brown-bag to a bench outside the dojo. I spoke with Mark, who sat across from me with his lunch. I heard that he was writing Moshe’s biography, a work that would come to embody volumes of intense research. I asked what Moshe was like as a person. Mark paused. He said that Moshe could be extraordinarily kind and, on occasion, extraordinarily rude. He was a genius: brilliant, complex, and passionate. Mark spoke kindly. His dark eyes, curious and shy, touched me in the way that his hands had earlier done. Compassion comes when I think of that day.

I traveled to Indiana University Bloomington for the second session of my professional training. Mark had created two parallel tracks to accommodate Esther’s professional schedule. Roger Russell and his partner Ulla Schläfke came from Germany to teach the 10-day segment.

Our class numbered around twenty students. We met in a carpeted, softly lit room in the student center. I remember the morning that Ulla taught an ATM lesson sometimes referred to as the Spinal Chain. We lay on our backs, scanning our contact with the floor. With our knees bent and our feet brought to stand, we tilted our pelvis toward our head.

To sense my lower back flatten against the floor without strain was to reverse the effort of my previous strategies and exercises. The chronic tightness from years of hoisting large dogs onto exam tables yielded to a more flexible movement.

I rolled my pelvis toward my feet, lifting my back from the floor, each vertebra individuated in my imagination. I rolled from the back of my head to my feet with a multitude of variations, my neck and low back no longer separate entities. Movements of childhood play returned to a spine too long given to the duties and habits of daily tasks. I imagined an undulating serpent traveling through my vertebrae. My chest and ribs folded in a softening of effort and intent. Mobility was freedom called by a different name.

After lunch, Roger asked us to choose a partner. To create a beginning of a Functional Integration® lesson, one of us was to lie face down on a mat and the other would place a hand on his or her back.

We were to sense the other’s breath through the movement of their ribs, to witness the different areas of the back in motion. The role of the “practitioner” was to listen to the “client” through non-judgmental touch, not to force a change.

I glanced at the slight woman with wire-rimmed glasses beside me.

She dabbed saliva from a corner of her lips—a part of her jaw had been removed. Esther was a cancer survivor. She accepted my self-conscious offer with a reassuring nod.

Roger instructed us to give feedback to our partners after the lesson. Esther and I shared our experience—what we discovered in the movement of our own breath, in the presence of the other’s hand. That deep awareness when touching another without agenda, feeling different movements as ribs reflect each inhalation and exhalation. That we could

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2 Mark Reese, The Feldenkrais Method and Dynamic System Principles, accessed July 7, 2018 http://feldenkraislearning. com/html/dynamic_ systems.html.

share such profound intimacy in fifteen to twenty minutes, more deeply felt than with people we had known for years, was more than our words could convey. Even a piece of a Functional Integration lesson could have a significant emotional impact. Sacred comes whenever I remember that day.

Esther had co-authored A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action. During our training, she coordinated a series of activities to introduce us to leading edge research in the field of developmental psychology. We toured her labs, watched her assistants record movement patterns of a musician from the school orchestra. We attended the presentation of a research paper and mingled afterwards with doctoral students who did their work under Esther’s supervision. Esther and her husband Dave invited our class to their home for a dinner of baked salmon, a welcome break from the intensity of our training. She arranged for us to attend an opera at the university’s famed school of music.

I settled into a pleasant routine during the Bloomington segment. I often took a run through campus before class. After class, I might take a walk or meet my classmate Chuck for a sandwich. He was a physical therapist from another state and, like me, eager for conversation.

Sometimes we met with other classmates for a fancier meal. I enjoyed the social interaction with people who shared my interest in the body-mind field of exploration.

At the end of the day, after I climbed the stairs to my tiny room in a high-rise dormitory, I would call home to visit with my wife. After sliding into the spartan student-sized bed, I might weep for 15 to 20 minutes before I fell asleep. The crying was cathartic, an emoting of my own cognitive and neural development. Awareness Through Movement and Functional Integration lessons left few stones unturned.

I was sitting on a couch in the student center one afternoon when a distraught Esther sat down on a nearby sofa. She had just taught an introductory psychology class for freshmen. First year students should know the full range of what the field of psychology could offer them.

She saw the blank stares at the end of her lecture. Esther, a tenured professor who mentored doctoral students, suffered a sense of failure because she might not have connected to a class of freshmen. I understood better why Mark brought a Feldenkrais training to Indiana University Bloomington.1 Esther was herself a passionately devoted, lifelong student of how we learn to do what we do—a teacher not unlike Mark and Moshe. 2 I came to understand that the Feldenkrais Method and Dynamic Systems shared more than the science of movement and cognition.

The genius of Mark and Esther was to bridge the world of behavioral research and the frontier of human potential by bringing a professional Feldenkrais training program to Indiana University Bloomington. Moshe’s genius was to create a method in which our experience might expand into what we imagine is possible—awakening us to move more fully, more freely, into more of who we are.

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1 Linda B Smith, “Movement Matters: The Contribution of Esther Thelen,” Biological Theory, no. 1 (2006), 87-89, accessed July 7, 2018. https://pdfs. semanticscholar.org/9768/ 2b1f4e1f9ca841587a5206d 5dd566c9fbd92.pdf

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The Primacy of the Hands... and the Mouth, and the Eyes, and the Pelvic Floor: Working with Jack and Christina Louise Runyon The “little person” and the sphincter system Working with the hands looms large in my work as a Feldenkrais® practitioner. This derives from my understanding of the neurological significance of the hands as disproportionately represented in the “little person” of the motor cortex, known in medical science as the “little man” or homunculus. [Fig 1] In my Feldenkrais training program I was taught that this little person’s mouth, hands, and genitals were much larger in the motor cortex than its legs, arms, spine, and torso, and the reason was thought to be that bringing food to the mouth and reproducing are essential for the preservation of the human species. Other explanations are currently offered by various medical sources: that the amount of space in the motor cortex given to any part of the body is proportional to how richly innervated that area is; that the amount of space in the motor cortex in the human species reflects the human emphasis on

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Fig 1 The Homunculus, based on Penfield's classic diagram

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1 http://www. paulamethod.com/

speech and use of the hands (the whiskers having the greatest space in the motor cortex of rats); and that the lips, hands, feet, and sex organs have more sensory neurons and therefore more space in the sensory homunculus (as distinct from the motor homunculus).

Although the genitals are no longer seen by scientists as disproportionately large in the homunculus, they are certainly a “richly innervated region.” The pelvic floor sphincters are also closely connected to the mouth and hands in what is sometimes called the sphincter system, made up of ring muscles. Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais was influenced by the work of Paula Garbourg, who wrote Secrets of the Ring Muscles, first published in Israel in 1979. The ring muscles of the sphincter system constitute a primitive movement pattern of expansion and contraction.

These movements were the only means that one-celled organisms, the earliest forms of life, had for ambulating and for acquiring, digesting, and eliminating food. For humans as well, “These [ring muscles] are in every part of our body, both internally and externally, and it is their coordinated and harmonious contraction and relaxation that initiates breathing, digestion, circulation, elimination, and all muscular motion.”1 In terms of voluntary movement, the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education has explored movements of the three pelvic floor sphincters (connecting to the colon, the bladder, and the reproductive organs); the teleceptors of the face (specifically the eyes and mouth), and the “bell” movements of the hands, which correlate neurologically to the feet. In the pelvic floor lessons developed by Australian practitioners Barbara Bell and Judy Pippin, the engagement of the pelvic floor sphincters is linked in movement to the squeezing of the eyes, the pursing of the lips, and the wrapping of the fingers around the thumb. The latter enhance and clarify the former: if you engage the pelvic floor, then add squeezing the eyes, pursing the lips and/or wrapping the fingers around the thumb, you will probably feel an “echo” in the pelvic floor—a deeper, clearer engagement. This synergy of the sphincter system is much like the synergy of flexion, for example, where the folding of the spine is connected to the rocking upward of the base of the pelvis, the folding of the ankles, etc. An image brought up in my training was that of a kitten simultaneously nursing and kneading, probably also rhythmically squeezing its eyes and expanding and contracting its pelvic floor sphincters as well.

Of course, the Bell Hand movements have been used extensively in the Feldenkrais lexicon. The movements require opening and then closing the hand so that the fingers curve into a “bell” shape, not into a fist but in the direction of a fist. There are many Awareness Through Movement® (ATM®) lessons involving the Bell Hand. In my Functional Integration® (FI®) work I find this movement particularly useful on the surface of the person’s torso if they are lying down, or on the surface of the person’s thigh if they are sitting up. I find that the tactile experience of sliding their finger pads towards each other on their body surface grounds and clarifies the movement. It also is a way to reduce effort,

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2 Louise Runyon, THE STORY OF REN AND MERE Using the Feldenkrais Method® with Someone in a Coma, http://feldenkraisatlanta. com/pdf/Journal%20 Article%20-%20THE%20 STORY%20OF%20 REN%20AND%20 MERE%20v2.pdf.

3 Louise Runyon, GETTING RHYTHM, HAVING A BALL! Improvisation in Functional Integration – Lessons from Music, http:// feldenkraisatlanta. com/pdf/journalarticlegettingrhythm.pdf

as I can ask the person to keep their finger pads in contact with their body surface as the hand opens, reducing the tendency to “stretch” the fingers in opening the hands.

I frequently find a person’s nervous system so distressed that it is unproductive to work with the feet, spine, ribs, etc., without first addressing the state of the nervous system through the hands. Often the hands themselves demand my attention—fingers always moving and never resting or hands and arms disproportionately heavy or held rigidly. These characteristics appear to signify an over-activation of the sympathetic nervous system—“all guns firing” or a constant state of “fight or flight.” After doing some work with easing and connecting the hands to the rest of the self and exploring Bell Hand movements, it seems that my work can proceed with the person more open to learning, and their parasympathetic nervous system more activated.

Nowhere is a person’s nervous system more in distress than in a coma, and on the two occasions when I have worked with individuals in comas, the Bell Hand has been the first port of call. In both situations the person came very quickly out of the coma2 (see my article in the Fall, 2010 Journal). Bell Hand, of course, has also been used extensively with people who have had a stroke. In this article, I would like to describe my work primarily with Jack, and less extensively with Christina, whose story I have described in another Feldenkrais Journal article.3

Working with Jack Jack is a 42-year old man with whom I’ve worked for almost 3 years. He has a congenital neurological disorder in which the sympathetic nervous system is “in charge.”

4 http://www.diffen. com/difference/ Parasympathetic_nervous_ system_vs_Sympathetic_ nervous_system

The parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) controls homeostasis and the body at rest and is responsible for the body's "rest and digest" function. The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) controls the body's responses to a perceived threat and is responsible for the "fight or flight" response.

The PNS and SNS are part of the ANS, or autonomic nervous system which is responsible for the involuntary functions of the human body.4 Despite extensive interventions and opportunities, many of which have helped him greatly, Jack is not able to live independently. He has structural deformities of the feet (partly corrected through surgery), major hearing impairment, a stutter, and a severe speech impediment.

He does not feel pain, so he does not avoid activities that aggravate his limp or his problem left hip. His walking is compromised. He has sensory integration and spatial orientation issues.

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Jack is amazingly functional and involved given his situation. He works, thanks to a special program, and has his own home business.

He participates fully in family life, including doing chores and keeping the family schedule. He graduated from high school and is good with computers. He does not drive, but has a close friend (also with special needs) with whom he gets together along with a caregiver, and he participates extensively in sports activities for adults with special needs.

He reads the newspaper, votes independently, and has a strong sense of humor.

When Jack first came to see me, he stood and walked with his shoulders fixed backwards and belly forward; he appeared stuck in this position. He did not make eye contact. The most startling thing on the first visit was that he put his fingers in his mouth and chewed on them as we worked. He made other involuntary movements with his hands and fingers, and would habitually squeeze his eyes tightly shut. He sometimes makes a movement of opening and closing his mouth like a fish. Jack habitually grinds his teeth and has deep ridges on his fingers from biting them. As in the motor cortex, the face, hands, and mouth figure significantly for Jack, but not in a neuro-typical manner.

Initially Jack seemed depressed, answering all questions with “I don’t know” and not appearing to care about anything. As he became more engaged with our work, he began to do very large movements, potentially destructive to the environment and to himself—banging, stamping, and vocalizing in high gear and with great glee. It was almost impossible for him to lie still without banging his legs or head on the table, or otherwise shaking and fidgeting. It has been the thrust of our work to find gentle, directed movement and the ability to rest. I have done many lessons of all kinds with Jack, but the lessons with the hands and the teleceptors have visibly paved the way for the rest.

We began with connecting the head and the hand in rolling and other movements. At the end of the first lesson, Jack spontaneously sat with his arms folded across his chest, which was very non-habitual.

After other lessons he spontaneously put his hands in his pockets to sit and to walk. Both arms-across-the-chest and hands-in-pockets were foregoing his initial stuck stance of shoulders back, belly forward. As we continued, his arms began to swing as he walked; he also spontaneously began to run with contra-lateral arms, as opposed to his more habitual “flapping arms.”

Early in our work, we used bongo drums extensively to help Jack feel the sensory relationships between the movement of his hands and the feedback of sound, touch, vibration, and rhythm. We began to find different ways to touch: tap, knock, slide, bang, scratch; and then to differentiate individual fingers in touching the drum and in touching different parts of his face, all with the aim of developing his awareness and kinesthetic sense of his hands, and their clarity in his self-image.

We also worked a lot with alternating hands on the drum, with an eye

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towards the function of contra-lateral walking. The rhythm of alternating hands echoes the basic functioning of our internal organs.

Jack began to greatly enjoy all manner of percussion—patting his own head, stomach, and chest, and stamping his feet as well as playing the drums. He had never before engaged in any form of percussion.

This seemed to be an expression of a strong sense of self and personal power, not only to feel the percussion, but to hear it and feel the vibration.

We then had to explore inhibition, to tone down this exuberance. We played “Mother, May I?” This is a children’s game in which one child, the “mother,” asks other children to do various movements, e.g., to take one step forward or two steps back. The other child must respond, “Mother, may I take one step forward?” Only if the mother says “Yes, you may,” is the child allowed to do the movement; if they do it without asking permission, they have to go back to the beginning. This game was a powerful exercise in inhibition and quite difficult for Jack, who is always on “go!”

Neither rhythm nor counting have traditionally been easy for Jack, but he gradually came to find regular rhythm, including in singing and walking, and more consistent counting. Initially his mother and I thought that the small involuntary movements of his fingers and toes were responses to stimuli. This may have been the case, but we began to see these movements also as neurological “interference”—involuntary, unnecessary activity.

Jack has been gradually able to slow down, stop, inhibit, and be gentle. I began having him walk on a diagonal path across the room. It was not easy for him to walk from corner to corner, so I had him touch the “seam” between the two walls at each corner. Spontaneously he began to kiss the corners of the room. He also spontaneously began kissing each finger as we differentiated it. If he kissed his index finger, he could tap with it; if he didn’t, he would tap with a different finger.

Again, there were very strong connections between hand and mouth for Jack. I propose that this interesting new action was due to the strong correlation between hands and mouth in the motor cortex, which Jack was able to spontaneously tap into.

At one corner of my studio I have a bookshelf with various breakable objects on it, as well as a plastic skeleton. Initially, this was problematic because Jack couldn’t touch things gently. But very quickly, the situation improved. Jack began to tap the skeleton and another, wooden figure very lightly on the tops of their heads, with one finger. On request, he could play a quiet piece on the drum. He could even open my heavy storm door without letting it slam.

Despite very poor hearing, Jack began to tell the difference between a resonant sound of the drum (one that reverberates) and a flat sound (one that doesn’t), and to bounce his finger pads on the drum, as opposed to slamming them down, in order to find resonance. I believe

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this was because he could clearly feel the vibration of resonance as opposed to hearing it, thus providing a furthering of sensory experience and integration.

Jack began to motor plan; for example, he could now slide my table out of the way without banging it into the wall, bending both of his knees and looking at the wall while sticking out his pelvis, thus engaging his spine. His neck, which had been hard to see or feel, emerged as his shoulders dropped and his head began to float more freely.

Another breakthrough was in his ability to rotate his arms/hands outwards—he had never been able to accept change in a store, because he could only extend his hand palm down. Interestingly, thanks to years of sports activities, Jack has very good eye-hand coordination in throwing a ball. But he could not follow his hand (or mine) as it moved in space, and he still finds this difficult. To help him learn to rotate his arms outwards, I drew his initials on the front and back of his hands with marker. He immediately turned his hand from one side to the other to see each letter. He could do it, he just didn’t know he could.

One aspect of Jack’s speech impediment is his inability to use his tongue in different configurations. To help differentiate his teeth, tongue, and lips, I have traced and tapped these with a plastic straw. At first he would bite the straw gleefully, but gradually allowed this touch. As with the habitual squeezing of his eyes and the “fish mouth” movement, he simply had not been aware of what he was doing. He puts his hands in his mouth less often now as we work. Before, when I would ask him to put his hands on his stomach he would do so with hands clasped, elbows off the table, but now understands the concept of “hands separate” and can rest his elbows on the table.

We have worked with vowels and the movement of the lips—“ooh” is easy for him, “ee” is not. Gradually, he is able to slow down his speech and pronounce words more clearly. Sometimes, Jack looks “normal” at the end of a lesson—he sits with arms crossed, quietly and composed as if he is really comfortable, perhaps for the first time in his life.

I have worked with Jack blindfolded to enhance sensory experience, and with an eye patch to clarify each eye in his self-image. We have drummed blindfolded, and in doing so he was able to count to 30 without missing a number, a huge accomplishment.

Almost always, I work with Jack with his mother present. The first time I worked with him alone, it was almost completely counterproductive because he was so hyped up at the change. But the last time I did so, he was extremely calm and quiet. He bangs the table with his feet and makes other involuntary movements less and less often. Sometimes I work with him lying on a mat on the floor. Because he has come to interpret this as being about rest, it is easier to do a hands-on lesson.

Recently we have gone back to using a gymnastic ball on the floor.

Jack is able to roll off and on without clunks or bumps and with amazing balance, looking like an athlete or a dancer—taking great pleasure in the

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ease of his movement..

Jack is now able to walk backwards, sideways, turn in circles, and turn in circles while walking. About six months ago, he negotiated a crowded, narrow sidewalk filled with lots of big dogs, historically a problem for him, with aplomb.

Gradually, there is more and more movement in Jack’s back as he walks: use of the shoulder blades, ribcage, and spine has now become habitual in walking. Jack has begun to sing at home, and to otherwise vocalize rhythmically. After getting the bongo drums as a gift about two-and-a-half years ago, Jack brought the drums to every single Feldenkrais lesson with religious dedication. We used them at the beginning of each lesson for a long time, but have long since moved on to other things. Bringing the drums is one of many things that Jack does habitually and compulsively, perhaps for comfort and a sense of order.

But recently he said, “I don’t need to bring these any more because we’re not using them now.” This was a big new concept—using only what you need.

Recently, he has been able to tell if his eyes are squeezed closed or simply closed, and he is able to do either upon request. I have attempted to coordinate the squeezing or closing of his eyes with the closing of his mouth and hands, thinking about the synergy of the sphincter system.

One thing that’s been successful is to have him say “mmmm” (lips closed) while squeezing his eyes and/or fisting his hands, and saying “haaaa” while opening them. The sound has contributed to the sensory experience. These days we work with the teleceptors just a little at a time, because Jack zones out—he goes to sleep. The zoning out is a good thing, however, and I think demonstrates how this work soothes and quiets the nervous system.

Also recently, Jack composed a speech to make at his basketball dinner, a huge first. He practiced it with me, slowly, and his pronunciation was almost completely understandable. He didn’t get to make the speech, but it is still a victory that he took the initiative to go up to his coach and ask if he could. He has also danced at community center dances, a huge step.

Several months ago, Jack had hip replacement surgery. When I saw him before the surgery, I asked how he was feeling about it. His response was “nervous and scared.” He stuttered heavily in saying it.

This was the first time I heard him articulate emotions. Taking a tip from the film The King’s Speech, I had him sing a repetitive song with me: “I’m scared… I’m nervous… I feel like I’ll never see my friend Joe, or my friend Louise, or take out the garbage (which he loves to do) again… I’m going to be OK… I will see my friend Joe/Louise/I will take out the garbage again… I’ll see Louise in three weeks… etc.” Jack did not stutter once singing these things, just as the King of England didn’t stutter while singing. To close the lesson, I placed his hands one on top of the other on his chest as he lay on the table, and gently rocked his chest with

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his hands, for comfort. When he got up and left, he seemed much less scared and nervous.

Jack’s parasympathetic nervous system is a little more in charge now, his sympathetic nervous system a little less. Of course we have done many, many other kinds of lessons besides those dealing with the teleceptors and the hands. But I feel very sure that the latter lessons have allowed his nervous system to quiet enough so that the other kinds of lessons can better reach him, and that these lessons have further clarified his sensory organs in his self-image, allowing him to have a more multi-dimensional experience of himself and the world.

There have been some fascinating changes in Jack since his hip replacement surgery. The first shift was in his outlook. Jack generally gets very excited when there is a big change going on, such as a tornado warning. With the surgery, there was a big change going on, and he was at the center of it. He has been very engaged and in great spirits, despite his frustration at not being able to work and do chores. Also, his speech has become almost completely understandable. From the first FI lesson post-surgery, he has appeared more neuro-typical and has been relatively quiet and easy.

Jack’s tendency, both pre-and post-surgery, has been to sit with his left foot under the table. Because there is less reason for that now that the left hip and leg are more solid, his physical therapist keeps saying “left foot” to remind him to bring it forward. My approach was to work with sliding the right foot behind him, then to begin what I call “the switcheroo”—alternately sliding right and left foot forward. Jack has been able to do this rapidly, rhythmically, and for a long period, a great advance for him. He has also been able to stamp alternating feet rapidly and rhythmically, much more than before, and to add slapping his thighs, left then right, without confusion. He is much better able to slide alternating feet on the wall, and to walk left then right between the wall and floor with precision. During rests he has done small, involuntary, quick pelvic rocks, also previously unknown to him. He can keep hands out of his mouth on request, and can lie equally comfortably now on both sides.

There has perhaps also been a change in perception of self. I have encouraged Jack’s mother to have him watch The King’s Speech, to see if he could see himself in George VI, also a stutterer. Jack has no interest in movies. He reads biographies, but not fiction or stories. Recently I took the movie out of the library and gave it to them to watch, asking Jack’s mother not to comment or interpret. “Boring,” he reported to me, which I saw as a typical teenage response of indifference rather than expressing feelings. Jack was in a phenomenal mood, however, and has been ever since. In telling me about a recent trip to the beach he said it was “WONDERFUL!!” He has never expressed that degree of enthusiasm before. He has been singing constantly at home, joyfully. It may be that, although he could not express it, he did see something of

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himself in George VI, thereby enabling him to see himself better, surely a cause for joy.

Why these marked changes after surgery? I am curious as to what affect anesthesia has on the autonomic nervous system, and would welcome any thoughts readers might have on this. I wonder also if having his pelvis more available, symmetrical, and functional is helping to bring his lower sphincters more into his awareness. Certainly the functioning of the pelvis affects the functioning of the pelvic floor, and vice versa. I’m not sure yet how to proceed with connecting his teleceptors to his pelvic floor, but I do think this is a key direction to pursue. I believe that clarity about one’s pelvis and pelvic floor, the seat of life, is a strong factor in expanding one’s self-image.

Working with Christina I have worked with Jack around many elements of the sphincter system—notably the hands, mouth, and eyes—but we have not worked with the pelvic floor sphincters. I would therefore like to describe the pelvic floor work I have done with another neurologically atypical client, Christina. She is a 12-year old girl with cerebral palsy.

As with Jack, I have worked with Christina in clarifying and naming all of her body parts, including each finger and each toe. She knows the body parts, but is reluctant to say them out loud, particularly with the pronoun “my.” Similar to Jack, she makes many vague and involuntary movements with her fingers. Christina is often in a world of her own, but when I squeeze and move each individual finger she keeps eye contact with me the whole time and appears delighted and engaged. I sense that her nervous system has craved this clarification.

I was able to utilize clarity about each finger in addressing pelvic floor issues with Christina. Her dad was distraught when he brought her in one morning. She had not only wet the bed but had had a bowel movement and the night was spent with much crying, frustration, and linen washing. I gave her “mudras” I learned from Ruthy Alon in a Bones for Life® sphincter lesson. Like Jack, Christina has many cognitive challenges, but I was able to press her thumb and index finger tips together and say, “This is so you won’t pee in the bed;” to press her thumb and middle finger tips together and say, “This is so you won’t get cramps” (I wasn’t sure that was true, but I thought it would be a way to get her to think about her reproductive organs); and to press her thumb and little finger tips together and say, “This is so you won’t poop in the bed.” Her bladder and bowel incontinence improved dramatically. I repeated this lesson a few weeks later, and there has been virtually no problem since.

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Greater self-awareness What I hope and wish for both Jack and Christina, and all of my clients, is an ever and ever greater sense of self. I hope that by continuing to gain more clarity about hands and mouth, eyes and pelvic floor— the ancient and primitive sphincter system—they will continue in the direction of increased self-awareness.

Neurotypical people often take much for granted with regard to their eyes and hands and mouths. It is a gift of the first order for those who are neurologically impaired to make these connections many take for granted. But for all of us there is room for improvement. The potential for easing and calming our nervous systems, and those of our clients, is vast.

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On Better Judo Moti Nativ Better Judo is a series of five articles Dr. Feldenkrais wrote for the Quarterly Bulletin of the Judo Budokwai Club in London between January 1948 and January 1949.

1 Adin Steinsaltz, The Thirteen Petalled Rose: A Discourse on the Essence of Jewish Existence (New York: Basic Books, 2006), trans. from the Hebrew edition.

“A true secret is still a secret even when it is revealed to all.”1

5 The Budokwai (武道会 The Way of Knighthood Society) in London is the oldest Japanese martial arts club in Europe and the first judo club in Europe.

It was founded in 1918

by Gunji Koizumi. https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Budokwai.

Judo concepts and techniques had a significant impact on Dr. Feldenkrais’ development of the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education. We can see the results in many Awareness Through Movement® (ATM®) lessons, although the judo component may not always be obvious to those without the proper background. In my research on Moshe during the years 1920–1950, I did a detailed study of his judo and self-defense books. 2, 3 As a martial artist, my study was not just theoretical. It involved experiencing the techniques myself and teaching them to others. Through this study of Moshe’s work, I came to better understand his way of thinking about self-preservation and how this relates to the Feldenkrais Method in general.

Recently, with the help of Dr. Mike Callan, I managed to obtain a series of five articles, entitled Better Judo, which Feldenkrais wrote for the Quarterly Bulletin of the Judo Budokwai Club in London between January 1948–January 1949.4, 5 In this essay I will share my thoughts and insights on those articles. I refer to these years in Moshe’s practical research as the “turning point.”6 During this period, he labored on writing Higher Judo (1952) concurrently with Body and Mature Behavior (1949) and The Potent Self (published posthumously in 1985). It can be clearly seen that Feldenkrais was already carrying, in his mind and body, his method of Awareness Through Movement, which did not yet have a name. In this period, Feldenkrais was at his peak as an experienced judoka. From then on Moshe decreased his activity as a judoka and applied his experience and knowledge of judo to lay the foundations of the Feldenkrais Method.

In Better Judo, Moshe reveals his thoughts about judo, digging deep into the means of mastering it. He goes through a complex process, applying his ingenuity and leveraging his skilled body, and we can observe in these articles an early understanding of the foundations of the Feldenkrais Method.

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2 Moshe Feldenkrais, A.B.C. du JUDO (Paris: E. Chiron, 1938), Higher Judo: Groundwork (Berkeley, CA: Blue Snake Books, 2010), JUDO–the Art of Defense and Attack (London & New York: Frederick Warne & Co. Ltd., 1953).

3 Moshe Feldenkrais, Jiu-Jitsu and Self-Defense (1930), Practical Unarmed Combat (London & New York: Frederick Warne & Co. Ltd, 1942).

4 Dr. Mike Callan holds the judo grade of 7th Dan. He is the President of the International Association of Judo Researchers and a Scientific and Didactic Expert for the European Judo Union. He founded the Richard Bowen Judo Archive at the University of Bath.

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6 Moshe Feldenkrais, Higher Judo: Groundwork (Berkeley, CA: Blue Snake Books, 2010).

7 Moshe Feldenkrais, ed. Reuven Offir, Thinking and Doing (Longmont, CO: Genesis II, 2013).

These were chapters that Feldenkrais added to the original. These chapters were published in the English translation in 2013 and appeared in the original translation into Hebrew in 1929.

8 Kōdōkan Goshin Jutsu (講道館護身術) are the judo skills of self-defense. This is a set of prearranged self-defense forms in judo.

It is the most recent kata of judo, having been formally created in 1956. It consists of several techniques to defend oneself from: unarmed attack, attack with a dagger, with a stick, and with a gun.

9 Moshe Feldenkrais, The Master Moves (Longmont, CO: Genesis II, 2011), 38.

10 Michel Brousse, Le Judo, son histoire, ses succès (Paris: Liber, 2002), 212.

11 D. Leri., C. Alston, M. Segal, R. Volberg, F. Wildman, A. Johnson, J. Karzen, Interview With Moshe, the Extraordinary Story of How Moshe Feldenkrais Came to Study Judo, (http://www. semiophysics.com/ SemioPhysics_interview_ with_Moshe.html ,1977).

Before discussing Better Judo, it would be helpful to remind readers of the milestones of Moshe’s unique approach to judo. The first, relevant to this article, is Moshe’s work in Tel Aviv at age 16, as a member of the Baranovichi group. In 1920, the Haganah, a paramilitary organization in British-mandated Palestine, was established. At that time, Moshe helped protect the properties of the Jewish pioneers and was engaged in real fights for survival, fights in which some of his friends were injured or even killed. Although the Haganah fighters were trained in jiu jitsu, they were not always able to make practical use of it in actual combat. Moshe was troubled by the results of these fights. He wondered why his friends could not use their skills to effectively protect themselves.

In what would clearly be the next important milestone, Feldenkrais published the first Hebrew self-defense book, Jiu-Jitsu and Self Defense. He based this work on a behavioral study of human beings that gave rise to the concept of using unconscious or instinctive responses for self-preservation. In other words, he wanted to design a self-defense system for the Haganah, based on “a movement someone would do without thinking.”7 Feldenkrais mentioned this concept in the introduction to his translation of Emile Coué’s book, Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion.

Feldenkrais’ background as a survivor gave him a unique perspective on the practical use of judo in an emergency situation, outside the dojo.

At the time, it was a rare judoka who thought about the use of judo for self-defense.8 We see Moshe’s interest in survival throughout his development of the Feldenkrais Method. As he said years later, “The most drastic test of a movement is self-preservation.”9 From a close reading of Better Judo we will also get a preview of Feldenkrais’ intellectualism. “In those days judo/jujutsu was an art of self-defense. Thanks to Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais it gained a scientific and more sophisticated facet. The Japanese art was increasingly seen as a science of combat practiced by intellectuals, university students, scholars…Moshe played a pivotal role in this evolution [of judo] from a utilitarian practice to a scientific one.”10 [Fig 1] Feldenkrais became involved with judo when he met its founder Professor Jigoro Kano in Paris in September of 1933. This was not merely a meeting between two giants; it was an event that would lead to a dramatic change in the direction and trajectory of Feldenkrais’ thinking. In his famous 1977 interview about martial arts, Moshe recalled that Kano had said to him that judo is “the efficient use of the mind over the body.”11 At the time, Moshe had thought that this was a funny way to describe a martial art. During their initial meeting, Moshe was introduced to the concept of seiryoku zenyo (minimum effort, maximum efficiency).

Kano challenged Moshe with a judo choking technique. Moshe attempted to free himself using the technique that had always worked for him, but this time it did not help him.

As Kano described in his diary: “I grabbed him in a tight reverse cross with both hands and said, ‘Try to get out of this!’ He pushed my

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Fig 1 Moshe Feldenkrais teaches judo in Paris in 1938, view of Notre-Dame from the dojo’s window.

Fig 2 Feldenkrais releasing himself from a choke hold.

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12 Jigoro Kano, Mind over Muscle (Tokyo, New York, London: Kodansha International, 2006), 47–50.

13 Moshe Feldenkrais, Manuel pratique du jiu-jitsu, la defense du faible contre l’agresseur (1944) from Jigoro Kano’s introduction to the French version of Jiu-Jitsu and Self-Defense: “At that time a Jewish scholar named Feldenkrais happened to be in the audience. His remarks to me after the lecture were very enlightening.

He brought a book he had written about judo with him and asked me to take a look at it…. I realized that though this book does not exactly conform with the concept of my judo, it is the best publication in another language than Japanese….

I feel assured that the author, by a study of the true judo, will progress rapidly towards a perfect possession of this method.”

14 Michel Brousse, Le Judo, son histoire, ses succès, (Paris: Liber, 2002).

This book was written for the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the French Judo Federation.

18 G. Koizumi knew Dr. Feldenkrais as a judoka–a student, a teacher and a scientist. He appreciated Moshe’s contribution to the judo community. Quoting from Koizumi’s forward to Higher Judo: “Dr. M. Feldenkrais has made a serious study of the subject, himself attaining Black Belt efficiency. He has studied and analyzed Judo as a scientist in the light of the laws of physics, physiology and psychology, and he reports the results in this book which is enlightening and satisfying to the scientific mind of our age. Such a study has been long awaited and is a very valuable contribution to the fuller understanding and appreciation of the merits of Judo. Dr. Feldenkrais, with his learned mind, keen observation and masterly command of words, clarifies the interrelation and the intermingled working of gravitation, body, bones, muscles, nerves, consciousness, subconscious and unconsciousness and opens the way for better understanding.”

15 Feldenkrais 2010.

16 Feldenkrais 1942.

17 Gunji Koizumi (1885–1965) was a Japanese master of judo who introduced this martial art to the United Kingdom and came to be known as the “Father of British Judo.”

He was the founder of the Budokwai.

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throat with his fist with all his might. He was quite strong, so my throat was in some pain, but I pressed on his carotid arteries on both sides with both hands so the blood could not get to his head, and he gave up.”12 Imagine a small Japanese man, at the age of 75, subduing a strong, young man of 29. This incident impressed Feldenkrais and changed his approach to the use of his own body. [Fig 2] Feldenkrais began to study judo and in a relatively short time was promoted to black belt. More than a skillful practitioner of the art, he proved to be a unique judo teacher of the highest quality. Kano had a great deal of faith in Moshe.13 Supported by Kano’s authority, and through his own considerable abilities, Moshe became the leading judo teacher in France.

Moshe’s influence on the development of the martial art in France was extraordinary, earning him the title “Pionnier du Judo en France.”14 As Moshe became more expert at judo, he learned from and cooperated with the judo master Mikinosuke Kawaishi. This partnership gave Feldenkrais the background to later write two judo books. He wrote in the forward of Higher Judo: “I wish to express my gratitude to my friend and teacher of many years, Mr. Mikinosuke Kawaishi, 7th Dan. The figures in the illustrations in this book represent him and myself.”15 After escaping Paris during the Second World War, Moshe served five years in the British admiralty. He continued to teach judo and also trained the soldiers on his base.16 After retiring from the service in 1945, he moved to London and joined the Budokwai Judo Club where he studied judo under the great master G. Koizumi.17 Moshe admired Koizumi’s skill.

He often mentioned Koizumi in later years while teaching Awareness Through Movement lessons. Moshe was in turn recognized as a judo expert by top judokas and researchers who knew him well, including Koizumi,18 Leggett,19 and Brousse. 20 Returning to Better Judo—the editor of the

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19 T.P. Leggett–The first Chairman of the European Judo Union. Notes from the First General Meeting of the European Judo Union–July 26th, 1948: The election of officers resulted in Leggett being appointed Chairman and Lt. Thieme of Holland as Vice-Chairman.

The next move was to form a Judo Council (a technical body as opposed to the General Committee).

Those elected were: Mr. G. Koizumi, Dr. M. Feldenkrais, Mr. P. Bonnet-Maury, Mr. E. Mossop, and Mr. T.P. Leggett. France intervened with the suggestion that each of the important judo countries should be represented on the Council. As Chairman, Leggett pointed out that the purpose of the Council was not to represent national interests but to be composed of real judo experts. At that time, Moshe was a man with no country.

Budokwai Bulletin invited Dr. Feldenkrais to compare the judo practiced in their club to the judo practiced elsewhere. Moshe started his writing by saying: “I do not think that such criticism would serve any useful purpose. Criticism leading to no improvement is wasted effort and as such is contrary to the spirit of judo. I prefer therefore, to present to you another way of looking at things you already know…” (As we Feldenkrais practitioners would say about his choice of words, “This is Feldenkrais.”) Reading Moshe’s writings, I find them sophisticated if not always easy to follow. At the time of their publication, others must have felt the same. We should remember that Moshe wrote Better Judo for the judo community, so the judoka must have understood the judo terminology he used, but we Feldenkrais practitioners can get lost. I will try to present his train of thought. At the same time, I will highlight points that provide basic knowledge about judo and martial arts.

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Part 1, January 1948

The first article in this series contains clues that, from our perspective as Feldenkrais Method practitioners, we can identify as basic concepts of the Feldenkrais Method. Here Moshe makes an effort to provide a logical background for acquiring skills that cannot be taught. 21 Feldenkrais begins by pointing out the difference in the performance 20 “The encounter of of a judo technique by Koizumi, the master teacher, compared to the these two men [Kano and learner. He challenges the readers, raising the question: “What precisely Feldenkrais] is a decisive moment in the history is the difference in performance?” Could it be entirely a question of of judo in France. The balance, as many believe? Moshe says that this would be true “if balance relationship of mutual 22 esteem united the two men. means balance of mind and body.” I would have been satisfied with Feldenkrais reoriented this answer, but Feldenkrais continues to dig into the question like a the teaching of jujitsu in psychologist or a philosopher. “We know quite easily how to distinguish France.” Brousse (2002) (trans. from French). such balance when it is there, but our problem is to acquire it, and this is a different matter altogether.”

21 Moshe Feldenkrais, “Better Judo,” Quarterly So what generates such learning? Feldenkrais says that the process Bulletin of the Budokwai has greater complexity than is immediately apparent. “When the Club (London, UK: January 1948): 13–15. mental qualities in question are acquired, certain physical qualities of the body’s behavior appear at the same time.” Feldenkrais shares his 22 Balance: Judo, as a own experience as a judo student and teacher here, adding that “the combative art, or a means of mental and physical knowledge of the precise mechanical qualities necessary to achieve training, or of moral physical balance is of great assistance in the process of growth of an and spiritual education, depends on the principle active and efficient personality.” Continuing and clarifying, Feldenkrais of balance, as do all things says that “we find ourselves approaching the same problem from in the universe. In action, balance must be retained. different directions but aiming at the same goal.” Feldenkrais goes on to Yet, to achieve such a state, ponder the idea of simultaneous improvement in mind and body, which one must run the risk of losing it. he considers an indivisible unit. Striving for a more tangible explanation of these general concepts, he uses basic elements of the practical performance of judo techniques, namely tsukuri and kake.

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Tsukuri means “making”—making an opening by positioning yourself in such a way as to disturb the opponent’s balance. Basically, tsukuri is effected by: • The opponent’s voluntary action.

• Maneuvering, enticing, or forcing the opponent into the desired position or action.

23 Moshe Feldenkrais, “Mind and Body,” in E. Beringer, Embodied Wisdom: The Collected Papers of Moshe Feldenkrais (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2010).

Kake means “applying”—applying a throw by a coordinated action of the body that will cause the opponent’s body to fall.

Although the technique is performed in one smooth movement, for the purposes of convenience, we learn and practice tsukuri and kake as two distinct elements in a static situation. The challenge is then to perform the technique in a free training environment (randori 乱取り), which is anything but static.

Feldenkrais uses the term “phrasing” to describe the ability to connect one movement to the next when the two opponents are continuously moving and changing their relative position. The difficulty of phrasing is that the opponents move with the intention to surprise one another, looking for opportunities to attack in combat simulation. Making the opening (tsukuri) and applying the throw (kake) are dynamic. In such a fluid situation there are no precise rules for performing the techniques as practiced in static training. Here is where Feldenkrais’ unique thinking on the matter is most apparent. Feldenkrais writes, “phrasing in judo, as in all cases of a dynamic relationship between individuals, is a most personal element.” It is one not easily acquired because it involves the idiosyncrasies of the individual as a learner.

Moshe suggests that the best way to acquire this most elusive part of the art of judo would be to practice with a master of great skill. Here again, however, he raises objections, warning that repeated acts during practice become habitual. Practicing by repeating and imitating the master will not, by itself, lead to mature independence. So how can we discover the quality that the master possesses and that we lack?

Feldenkrais talks about two different approaches. Some people are able to derive benefit from the suggestion of poise and serenity and will put themselves in the frame of mind that will help them control their body as they want. Others will succeed better with slow adjustments to control the body first. Here again Moshe emphasizes that “mental and physical qualities must be present simultaneously.” Quoting from Mind and Body, Feldenkrais’ 1958 lectures in Copenhagen, “There are… two major roads to change in a person's behavior: either via the psyche or via the soma. However, to make change real it must be brought about in a fashion which allows both the soma and the psyche to be changed simultaneously.”23 As Miyamoto Musashi describes this quality of simultaneous adaptability in the Book of Five Rings: “[The master] is slow and yet always ahead of his opponent…. Whatever the way, the master of strategy does not appear fast…. Very skillful people can

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24 Myamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings (五 輪書 Go Rin no Sho) (New York, NY: Penguin, Random House, 1992).

manage a fast rhythm, but it is bad to beat hurriedly. If you try to beat too quickly you will get out of time. Really skillful people never get out of time, and are always deliberate, and never appear busy.”24

Finally, Dr. Feldenkrais reveals his conclusion—which may not surprise us: As we think in terms of serenity, balance of mind, poise, and similar subjective feelings, we can only refer to what we presume to be going on in the mind of the master. What we observe in his action can be described in simpler mechanical terms, which describe what he is actually doing. And the results he obtains depend physically on what he does rather than on what his feelings are while he does it or the motive behind his action.

While acknowledging the mental aspects of masterful performance, Feldenkrais lays stress on the mechanics of body movements and what the person is “actually doing.”

If we as Feldenkrais® practitioners reread the section above, we find that it includes ideas that are familiar to us. We are left to wonder how the judokas, the original readers of the bulletin, perceived Moshe’s ideas. We are reminded of the chapter, “Correction of Movements is the Best Means for Self-improvement” in Moshe’s book Awareness Through Movement where he gives a detailed explanation of why he chose to give priority to movement in his Method.

Part 2, April 1948 25 Moshe Feldenkrais, “Better Judo,” Quarterly Bulletin of the Budokwai Club (London, UK: April, 1948): 46–48.

In this article, Feldenkrais answers the question, “Of what precisely does that difference of performance consist?”25 According to him, it is not a skill of one trick or one movement—it is the general manner of doing. The rationale of the elusive difference is based on qualities common to all the masters. Feldenkrais confidently lists those qualities, which implies that he is talking from his own experience. One must be a high level judoka to make such observations about the master’s hidden qualities.

I will summarize Moshe’s points and highlight the important details: • The master’s balance is difficult to disturb in any direction—pushed or pulled, but it will not affect the continuity he will maintain in his vertical carriage control (shizen tai自然体—natural posture).

• His attacks will come without any preliminaries. He has access to either of his feet, standing or moving, in any direction. He can push, pull, twist, or combine those in any possible sequence without apparent preparation.

• His counters come with automatic ease—spontaneously; it seems that he needs no warning.

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• His hip joint initiates the action of attack or defense—his body moves as a single whole unit around this joint.

• He creates an accurate contact of three points at the critical moment of any throw. Imagine the three points: two hands of the attacker and one foot, hip, or shoulder on the opponent’s body. All become connected and synchronized in their trajectories, so both bodies are moved as one.

• He moves smoothly with no sharp, angular change of direction in the trajectories of any part of the body.

• All his muscle groups are equally contracted in performing the throw. Consequently, no muscle effort is apparent in performing the technique and moving the two heavy bodies.

26 On the subject of stability–“In physics one distinguishes two kinds of balance: stable and unstable balance. A book lying on a table, or a stick or man lying down is [sic] simple examples of stable balance. . . . Unstable balance occurs when the center of gravity is high but directly above its support. . . . Such balance is easily broken up; the body falls into a stable equilibrium position. . . . This very simple scientific fact is the very basis of judo.

It is perfect knowledge of balance, the manner of breaking it and of recovering it which enables the jujitsian to throw the opponent to the ground with ease without using “force” in the usual sense of the term.” (trans. from French). Feldenkrais 1938, 14.

27 Feldenkrais 2010, 25.

28 Feldenkrais, Moshe, The Elusive Obvious (Santa Cruz, CA: Meta Publications, 1981), p. 43.

The terms in bold above, which summarize the master’s qualities, are concepts familiar to us as Feldenkrais practitioners. These points may explain the “magic” in Moshe’s hands, which originally developed through martial arts training, and which he discusses in The Elusive Obvious, in the chapter entitled “Biological Aspects of Posture.”

Looking at the list, we might think about our feelings during Functional Integration® (FI®) lessons as we position ourselves, support our clients, and push/pull/twist their bodies smoothly to the next position, creating the sensation that we have become one body.

Moshe returns to the element of balance first mentioned in Part 1, saying that all the above items describe, in one way or another, the properties of “unstable balance.” Let us see if this could be the answer to the leading question of this article.

He kindles our curiosity: "We are used to hear extolled the extreme ‘stability’ of the judo expert and it sounds somewhat paradoxical to find the word ‘unstable’ used to describe his action.” Moshe claims that “[i]mproper understanding of this point is the major reason of confusion of thought of many judoka.” Moshe uses his scientific brain to explain the mechanics of balance. This is not the first time he talks about balance.

He had already done so in his first judo book, where he dedicates a chapter to the judoka’s balance. 26 Generally, we tend to increase our stability by spreading our feet to widen our base of support, or by lowering the center of gravity, or both. This is what we do when we lack confidence. In this position, more power is necessary to put our body in motion. The confident master has higher control over the motion of his body—“We have seen that the Judo master behaves as if his body were governed by the principles of ‘unstable balance’ and that he achieves better results than other people even when he has a handicap of weight and strength against him.” In Higher Judo, Moshe uses the term dynamic stability to describe the quality of mastering unstable balance: “Dynamic stability is stability acquired through movement.”27 In The Elusive Obvious, the term dynamic stability has morphed into dynamic equilibrium: “A posture is good if it can regain equilibrium after a large disturbance.”28 Thus we see that

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29 Feldenkrais 2010, 26.

theories and principles Dr. Feldenkrais deduced in the 1940’s become the bedrock of the Feldenkrais Method.

An important element needed to develop such confidence is the ability to fall. Since Moshe does not mention the subject in this article, I should point out that he repeatedly writes about the importance of acquiring the ability to fall. For instance, in Higher Judo—“The untrained man finds only part of his attention free to deal with the opponent's action and is so engaged in preserving balance in the most primitive standing position, on two feet, that the only reaction he is capable of is the general contraction of his muscles initiated by his fear of falling.”29 In teaching dynamic stability, I combine learning the art of falling and recovering stability. Stability and falling complement one another.

In concluding this article, Moshe answers the question of the difference between the master and the ordinary person: “The judo master is merely conforming more truly with principles underlying human structure and he is therefore using capacities potentially hidden in every human frame, while the untrained man is deprived of them by his own ignorance.” When the “hidden capacities of the human frame” are used by the master, then he or she is controlling his or her own body while at the same time controlling the opponent’s balance (usually disrupting it).

How can these ideas be taught? How can we close the gap between the qualities of the initiate and those of the master?

Part 3, July 1948

31 Feldenkrais 1953.

In this article we see Moshe focus on how to break an opponent’s balance. He opens with “two ways of finding out and studying means of unbalancing the human body…. One, form a broad principle like that of maximum efficiency and then proceed selecting by trial and error those movements that satisfy the requirements of least exertion. Second, examine the human body from a mechanical point of view and apply the well-established laws of mechanics to this particular case.”30 He notes, “Both ways have their advantages and drawbacks.”

Regarding the first way, Feldenkrais says that no special knowledge is needed for it, “and every person is therefore capable of discovering new ways and details and contributing to the general development of the art.” This is the process of natural discovery that every judoka senses after a period of ongoing training. As Feldenkrais writes about the development of mind and body through the study of judo: “The constant presence of an opponent gradually develops a special attitude of ever-readiness to meet any emergency. Observation and watchfulness are trained by the constant attention to the opponent's actions. The powers of judgment and imaginative enterprise are brought into play when seeking to find the weak point in the opponent's position and contriving instantly the means of taking immediate advantage of it.”31

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“Contributing to the general development of the art” is a significant phrase—it is about the responsibility we take when we are learners of an art and also when we become leading experts of it. At the time Moshe wrote those words, judo was young, having existed only about 70 years 32 “Jigoro Kano.”

(Kano introduced judo in 1882).32 Moshe looked at judo as a method in Wikipedia. https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judo. the process of development. He saw that there is more to the study of a method than just personal development; there is also the responsibility of developing and advancing the art itself. Our Feldenkrais Method is now about 70 years old. This should be our attitude towards it as well.

So what are the drawbacks? “Each discovery usually becomes a ‘secret,’ which the inventor is generally loath to communicate to others so long as he can enjoy the fruits of personal usage of his discovery.”

We seem to be straying into the area of politics here! But what happens if the inventor shares his discovery? Moshe says that even when a personal discovery becomes common knowledge, “it retains the mystic character” so that nobody knows why it really works. He cites the example of Koizumi’s discussion on the use of the little fingers and toes.

Koizumi closed his book My Study of Judo with a chapter on “Little Fingers” saying: “A fraction of an inch may stand between working and not working. The length not only affects the power of the lever, but on its correctness, depends the subtleness of contact and direction of the movement you are able to give subtle touches to the action, for the 33 Gunji Koizumi, My Study fingers are more sensitive and dexterous than many parts of the body.”33 of Judo (London: Foulsham In the Amherst training, Feldenkrais talks about the power of the little and Co., 1960), 199. fingers: “It turned out that many experts, many high graded judo people, make this the essential thing of the movement (picks a tall student)... you see, if I pull you up, you won’t, but if I take with the small finger, look (controls the student’s body).”34 [Fig 3] 34 Moshe Feldenkrais, Amherst Training DVDs The second way requires “extensive specialized knowledge which 1980–1981 (Paris, FR: perforce involves a cumbersome terminology, so that the explanation International Feldenkrais Federation 2010), June 11, remains a closed book to most people.”

1981, minute 57–58.

“It is rational to use both ways,” Moshe says. It seems that he feels 35 S.K. Uyenishi, The that the second way is little known and not in use because “it is easier to Textbook of Jiu Jitsu as make people understand and learn something for which there is logical Practiced in Japan (London: necessity rather than teach them to remember a series of unconnected Athletic Publications Ltd. c. 1905–1921). Moshe arbitrary details.” presented the book to his Many judo books refer to the skill of breaking the opponent’s teacher Koizumi when he left for Israel in 1951. You balance. I can mention here an old book by Sadayaku Uyenishi entitled can find it, with Moshe’s dedication to the Budokwai, The Textbook of Jiu Jitsu as Practised in Japan, which Dr. Feldenkrais in the Bowen collection owned.35 Uyenishi wrote a chapter titled the “Principles of Balance,” in at Bath University (http:// which he declares that “Balance is the whole secret of jiu jitsu both for www.bath.ac.uk/library/ services/archives/bowen. attack and defense.” html).

Moshe read all the judo books and also learned the skill of disrupting his opponent’s balance. His idea is that a judoka should know the

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Fig 3 Feldenkrais demonstrates the power of the little finger, showing how it affects the opponent’s balance (Amherst Feldenkrais Training, 1980-81).

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Fig 4 Moshe performing okuri-ashi-harai, 1939.

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“reason” behind the skill. So he enumerates the unique features of the human body: • “The human body is more like a pole standing on its end. The easiest displacement that one can produce in a pole on one end is rotation round its vertical axis.”

• “The cross-section of the body is elliptical with the longer diameter from right to left."

• “Rotation of the body round the vertical axis when the feet remain motionless is taking place almost exclusively in the cervical and lumbar vertebrae."

• “The upper parts of the body are denser and heavier, especially in the male, than the lower ones, and the center of gravity is therefore high above the ground.”

These four features provide the rational basis for controlling body balance in judo techniques. Dr. Feldenkrais describes those features, but reminds us that the human body is not rigid like a pole. So, a well-performed tsukuri should bring the rigidity to the opponent’s body. Also “if we bring both feet together the analogy is complete and the mechanics of a pole apply.” Then the throw can be completed effortlessly.

He cites one of his favorite techniques, the okuri-ashi-harai (accompanying foot sweep), as an example for such an action. [Fig 4] In this technique, we control the opponent’s body by pulling/pushing with the hands and sweeping one leg toward the other, thus bringing both feet together.

“The rigidity of the body is essential for the transmission of force through it.” When sharply pulling the left shoulder, “the body stiffens reflectively and moves as any other rigid body would move.” He explains: “The object of tsukuri is essentially to satisfy the requirements of the four main features enumerated. The great variety of tsukuri is due to the fact that we do not need to satisfy all the four points at the same time.”

Here are the technical stages of tsukuri: 1. Pulling both lapels slightly forward and upwards—stiffens the extensors of the back and legs.

2. Twist the body in the larger diameter—exhausts the range of rotation of the lumbar vertebrae.

3. Apply force in the opposite direction at the lower end—which will be equally transmitted through the whole body.

So, to achieve the object of tsukuri: “Reduce the range of rotation of the trunk relative to the hips, further increase the rigidity of the body by shifting his weight on to one foot and, thirdly, reduce friction against the ground in one direction."

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36 Takuan Soho, The Unfettered Mind: Writings from a Zen Master to a Master Swordsman (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 2012).

Two thoughts come to my mind as I read Moshe’s words about tsukuri: • Moshe writes about principles and techniques. As said by Takuan Soho (Zen Master 1573-1645), “even though you may wield the sword that you carry with you well, if you are unclear on the deepest aspects of principle, you will likely fall short of proficiency.

Techniques and Principles are just like two wheels of a cart.”36 • The skill of controlling the opponent’s body, which Moshe develops through judo, contributes much to his skill in handling the bodies of people lying on his table.

Part 4, October 1948 37 Moshe Feldenkrais, “Better Judo,” Quarterly Bulletin of the Budokwai Club (London, UK: October, 1948): 17–19.

A surprise opening for the fourth article: “At least one of the readers is disappointed with Better Judo. I guess that this could mean more than one or even many readers.”37 Moshe thinks that the Budokwai judo practitioners, who read his article, expect that “the secret of Judo will be divulged and the perfection would be within easy reach of every reader.” On the other hand, he sees the positive aspect of having secrets in the dojo. “Imagine a dojo where everybody is simply godlike and has nothing to learn from anybody, being just perfect. This would be boring,” he says. Maybe he is rebuking the critics or he is angry and is trying to give the impression that he is above this situation: “I am curious to know how many more readers I have disappointed. The worst criticism is indifference. I should be very glad to have any other criticism no matter how devastating.”

This passage gives us the information that Moshe is writing while he is on his own journey, active in the Budokwai Club, connected with members of the club, sharing his way of thinking about judo and the use of the body. Around this time, Moshe was recognized as a real judo expert and was chosen to be a member of the Council of the European Judo Union (EJU). Also at this time, Koizumi had just completed reading the draft of Higher Judo and wrote the foreword for the book. Moshe again addresses the issue of professional “secrets” in the dojo. We feel that Moshe is touching on politics as he says that “Outside the Budokwai and the Kodokan important rules are often kept as ‘secrets’ and sometimes sold to keen and persistent students.”

My thoughts are that “secrets” are a kind of creative personal discovery about manipulating the body, a discovery made at an almost instinctive level of coordination. Such discoveries are a result of the learning process, so more than one person would likely discover the same secret. We already understand that to know such secrets, even if they are revealed to you, one still needs to “discover” them by the same learning process of practicing and training. Moshe lists some secrets, “all observable in the action of judo masters,” while implying that there are more.

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38 Moshe Feldenkrais, San Francisco training (1975), June 26.

For Feldenkrais Method practitioners, he writes, “It is not enough to know what to do to make good judo. The means to enact the rules are obtained by clearly visualizing configuration and for that, understanding and muscular feeling obtained through experience are indispensable.”

In our terminology of Awareness Through Movement, we say that “it's essential, following the general principle that it doesn't matter what you do, but how you do it.”38 As I point out earlier, you can be sure that Moshe understands those secrets in his body and has the ability to use them. Let us look more closely at some of the secrets that Moshe listed: • “Hold your body so that the action of kake forces air out of the lungs without resistance or conscious awareness.” This means that during the tsukuri, while making the opening to prepare the opponent’s body to the act of throwing, you preserve a good posture so the throwing action is performed with no inner resistance. Read Moshe’s words about “good posture” in his book Awareness Through Movement.

• “Start the movement with the hips, or more precisely, with the tanden, leading the body and the members, and not inversely as the poorly coordinated do.” Read Awareness Through Movement—“What Action is Good? “Use large muscles for the heavy work—in a well-organized body work done by the large muscles is passed on to its final destination through the bones by weaker muscles, but without losing much of its power on the way.”

• “Put your legs on the ground so that the vertical line passing through the middle of the knee cap of the weight-bearing leg passes exactly in the space between the big toe and the next.” To this “secret” I will not add anything, as it is simply a good suggestion for standing, walking, running, and even sitting.

We see that many of those “secrets” are incorporated into the Feldenkrais Method as techniques and principles.

I find that the closing paragraphs of this part are most sophisticated.

Moshe is challenging the judoka, presenting his ideas about a good learning process. Through my perspective as an experienced Feldenkrais Method practitioner, I can cope with the sophistication of such a presentation, but it occurs to me that it might have been peculiar for many judokas. Again Feldenkrais says, “It is not enough to know what to do to make good judo.” He goes on to explain that enacting the rules by visualization of their configuration requires physiological understanding that can only be obtained through experience—meaning training.

He also proposes this idea: “You will find it very instructive to break these rules deliberately and then to repeat the movement strictly observing them. Try them one by one. You will see that the movements in which you are normally more successful, you do in fact unintentionally abide by them. You may find it easier after that to extend their

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application to movements which have felt foreign to you hitherto.” I’m sure that such a concept was not accepted by many judoka, but we already have accepted it as a contrivance to enhance learning. We often encourage our students to make mistakes and not to succeed.

Another confusing point that comes up is that “these rules should be visible in our movement, but that there should be no intentional observance of them.” As I read it, this is the goal of the judoka: to perform the “secrets” spontaneously and naturally.

The next and last part of Better Judo lays out his purpose in writing these articles: “To clarify the more fundamental principles from which the above rules, and many others, are a natural consequence… one cannot fuse rules and corrections into a coherent whole by simply practicing them.”

Moshe adds, “Only those who form a vivid personal image, binding practice, and understanding into one whole, ever do spontaneous and proper Judo.” At this point we may expect that Moshe will talk about “more fundamental principles,” as they should enable the “spontaneous and proper Judo,” meaning Better Judo.

Part 5, January 1949 39 Moshe Feldenkrais, “Better Judo,” Quarterly Bulletin of the Budokwai Club (London, UK: January, 1949): 13–15.

40 T.P. Leggett, “Butsukari,” Quarterly Bulletin of the Budokwai Club (London, UK: October, 1948): 13–15.

We have waited since October 1948 for Moshe to reveal in his final article his fundamental principles for better judo.39 He was fortunate with an article that T. P. Leggett published on the Budokwai bulletin in October 1948, titled “Butsukari.”40 I should remind you that at this time Leggett was the chairman of the EJU. Moshe praises Leggett’s article and it seems that he uses it as an additional foothold to support his ideas on the fundamentals essential for achieving better judo.

Leggett’s article is about the importance of butsukari (now known as uchi komi or repetition training in the western judo world), a training for improving the judoka’s performance of throws. Butsukari is a basic training in which the judoka attacks an opponent who is standing still.

The judoka enters the preparation stages of a throw. He performs tsukuri (creating the opening and moving into the throw position) and kuzushi (taking out of balance), but stops at the point of the kake (the throwing action). He returns to the opening position to perform this act again and he repeats this sequence many times. In each act the attacker reaches the peak point when his body parts create connections with the opponent’s body while he pulls/pushes him with his hands. At high speeds there is an effect of the attacker’s body striking lightly against the opponent’s body. This is the meaning of butsukari—come together or strike against.

According to Leggett, “[butsukari] is one of the important methods of practice, especially for those approaching Black Belt standard.” The principle behind butsukari training is the physiological contention that one must perform a movement at least ten thousand times for it to

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become integrated into the nervous system. Although that number of repetitions sounds rather daunting, you must take into consideration that because of the speed of action a large number of iterations can be performed in a minute and hundreds in the space of an hour.

Leggett states, “Judo is not a question of merely knowing a series of moves, but a question of carrying them out at sufficient speed to defeat the opponent’s counter-action. You have to get the ‘feel’ of them, after ten thousand repetitions you begin to get the ‘feel’ of a throw and after about a hundred thousand repetitions the throw begins to come naturally.” What does getting the “feel” mean? Repetition clarifies the different elements of the throw.

For example: • The exact placement of the pelvis and shoulders relative to the opponent.

• The optimal action of the arms and hands.

• Identifying the critical moment to initiate the throw.

• Being aware of body organization at the starting point of the technique.

The judoka achieves a clear sense of efficient body organization necessary to perform a throw without actually executing the throw.

Through butsukari the judoka can practice many throwing techniques and, depending on his or her mastery of one technique or another, can make an informed decision about the number of repetitions needed.

On the surface this sounds like quite a boring training session.

However, I have learned through long experience that rapid execution of butsukari (hundreds of repetitions in quick succession) is an uplifting experience due to the need of maintaining concentration, the flowing sweat, the intensive breathing that is coordinated with the movements, and noticing how the technique improves and is internalized.

Generally this is not an approach that we encounter in ATM lessons.

However, we hear Moshe ask that a movement be repeated ten to twenty times, and he even instructs us to increase the speed of the action. In the Amherst films of him teaching a “four points” lesson, we hear how he asks students to repeat the movement many, many times and much faster. The students are sweating in the summer heat and Dr. Feldenkrais shows them no mercy.

Moshe talks about judokas’ concern: “repeating a movement as often we are advised, when we know that our performance is far from being perfect, are we not going to perpetuate our faults? They are bound to become so deeply rooted that we will never be able to perform the movement really properly.” He also asks, “Bad habits being so difficult to get rid of, how can we know that we are doing the right thing?” Let’s examine how Dr. Feldenkrais, in his great wisdom, shows the judoka the way. “The concrete answer to these questions is: Hold your body so that the throw you perform forces air out of your lungs without hindrance and

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41 M. Feldenkrais, The Potent Self (Berkeley, CA: Frog Books, 2002), 108–126.

without having to make a conscious effort or change of body position and attitude.” So it is fairly simple to ensure this correction.

Dr. Feldenkrais presents the fundamentals of good posture in his book The Potent Self which was being written at the same as this series of articles. First of all, he recommends utilizing the principle of executing movements slowly and paying close attention to oneself. Applying this fundamental principle, the judoka will find that he or she can avoid creating unnecessary muscle tension in the shoulders, neck, and chest.

Thus basic deficiencies can be avoided and continuing the training will only improve the performance.

Reversibility of the movement is the next important principle he mentions. “A correct movement is so performed that one can stop at any instant and return to the initial position without holding one’s breath, and the body, in general, complying with the preceding rule.”

These principles allow us to judge the action by how much energy is expended and to conserve energy by avoiding unnecessary movements and parasitic efforts. Dr. Feldenkrais advises using someone more experienced to elucidate the process and point out errors or one must be capable of sensing deviations.

He asks, “How do we feel these things?” Dr. Feldenkrais explains the importance of enhancing the ability to sense small differences in our body manipulation. He uses this elegant analogy: “Thus, we cannot tell whether there is a letter in a book when we lift it, but we have no difficulty in telling that an envelope contains more than one sheet of paper simply by picking it up…." This leads him to: “The main thing is to understand that, when we make a big effort, we cannot ‘feel’ any small reduction or increase; there must be a large difference before we become aware of it.” When the body is well organized at the vertical position we can sense very slight extra efforts. Then “[w]e assume a new position in which the muscular effort is smaller than before and we become capable thereby of feeling [awareness of] even slighter imperfections. We cannot but go on improving.”41 He disagrees to a certain extent with Leggett’s statement, “We can understand now why butsukari practice is normally more beneficial to advanced students who already have rudimentary feeling of correct movements. They produce the movement with reduced effort and their progress is assured.” Dr. Feldenkrais maintains that beginners who have learned these principles of achieving a goal can find their training sessions “beneficial and more entertaining.”

Conclusion “I do not teach you but you are learning” is a well-known phrase that Moshe often repeated to his students. Better Judo explains this sentence. The gap between teaching and learning is understood when

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Moshe says that such “secrets” cannot be taught but they can be learned.

Throughout this series of articles, which were written over the span of a year, we witness the integration of judo and the Feldenkrais Method.

We clearly see how Moshe guides the judoka, coaching according to ideas and principles that we now know as the fundamental theories of the Feldenkrais Method. These principles indicate the trajectory that will provide the judoka motivation for mature self-learning.

These ideas and principles can be summarized in a simple list: • Make mistakes.

• Start learning with slow movements.

• Attain reversibility in action.

• Attain good posture for freedom of movement and breathing.

• Reduce effort to increase sensitivity (Weber-Fechner law).

Moshe’s thinking about the principles of learning coalesce through his practical experience as a martial artist. His encounter with Kano and subsequent dedication to judo is a significant turning point in his outlook.

I believe that judo delineates the path that leads to the development of what is known today as the Feldenkrais Method.

I note the change in how Feldenkrais relates to using oneself: use less effort, use more sensing. Dr. Feldenkrais taught martial arts, and from 1933, he taught judo. In Judo and the Art of Self-Defense, he wrote extensively about the image of action and the importance of orientation.

His thoughts on the importance of executing an action slowly during the learning process can be found in Practical Unarmed Combat. It is obvious that he developed his basic principles long before he devoted himself exclusively to developing the Feldenkrais Method.

Some of the main principles are: • Kano’s words about the “Efficient use of the Mind over the Body” becomes Moshe’s leading principle that mind and body are not separated as we act.

• Seiryoku zenyo (minimum effort, maximum efficiency) leads to effortless action.

• Shizen tai, the natural stance as a basis for understanding good posture.

• Balance and stability are the key factors for successful action.

• The primary importance of awareness and learning.

• The amalgam of judo and the Feldenkrais Method: “In judo the body is educated to respond faithfully and materialize the mental image of the desired act.”

When I decided to write an article about Dr. Feldenkrais’ judo series, I did not realize what I had taken on. This was not such an easy mission, and

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Fig 5 Bulletin in which last article of the series appears.

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42 Koizumi 1960, 186.

I feel that what I have written is dwarfed by the power of Dr. Feldenkrais’ insights. I hope that my writing will provide some benefit for the Feldenkrais community, martial artists, and anyone who has taken the time to read the article.

I feel that it would honor Moshe Feldenkrais to close with words of G. Koizumi, his most valued judo teacher: “Indeed, we realize as we make progress in training that self-confidence is the first line of defense and the factor for disarming; security is not secured by security measures alone; contentment is not obtainable by gaining, but by giving. Happiness is found not by external seeking, but by researching within. All things are necessary components for man’s advance toward maturity.”42 [Fig 5]

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The Feldenkrais Method® has a unique relationship to stretching, and every Feldenkrais teacher is familiar with the usual positions staked out by stretching proponents. Feldenkrais® practitioner Edward Yu posits a more nuanced approach.

Including Strength and Learning in a New Approach to Range of Motion Edward Yu

1 Charlotte Selver & Charles V.W. Brooks, Reclaiming Vitality and Presence: Sensory Awareness as a Frontier for Life, Ed. Richard Lee and Stefan Laeng-Gilliatt.

Berkeley, Calif: North Atlantic Books, 2007, p. 67.

A person can get heart disease by climbing a mountain but a person can also get rid of heart disease by climbing a mountain.

It depends on how we climb.

— Charlotte Selver, Reclaiming Vitality and Presence: Sensory Awareness as a Frontier for Life (2007)1

Flexibility is not good, Flexibility is not bad We normally think of range of motion, or ROM, as the maximum degree to which a single joint or group of joints can articulate without incurring damage—and hopefully without incurring pain. ROM of a joint may be tested by isolating the joint and pulling in the direction of increased articulation of the joint until it reaches its maximum point of extension or flexion. This action, commonly known as stretching, pulls not only against the tonic contraction of antagonist muscles and the concomitant tendons surrounding the joint, but in some cases, the ligaments holding the joint capsules together. It follows that regular prolonged stretching— as is commonly performed in martial arts, dance, gymnastics, acrobatics, and certain forms of yoga—can lead over time to micro-tears

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in the affected muscles, tendons, and ligaments. Though all forms of soft tissue are susceptible to damage, stretching ligaments may be the most problematic. Unlike muscles, most ligaments are only meant to lengthen a minute amount, if at all. Once stretched and therefore damaged, ligaments seldom return to their original length.

While conventional stretching, known popularly as static stretching, can and often does increase the ROM within particular joints, the increase may both destabilize joints and damage muscles surrounding the joints, reducing the power of the muscles. More telling, conventional stretching normally increases ROM without increasing range of learned motion, or ROLM. ROLM is the increase in ROM attributable to learned coordination.

Why is ROLM important? Increasing range of motion in a joint is equivalent to increasing degrees of freedom in that joint. But increasing degrees of freedom without learning how to control the new degrees and coordinate them with the other joints in the body can lead to injury, and a loss of dexterity, strength, agility, and balance.

An extreme example of the downside to increasing degrees of freedom without improving the coordination of those degrees can be witnessed when a patient is given general anesthesia. After the anesthesia takes effect, all 630 muscles lose their tonicity and the patient’s body becomes so flexible that doctors must take care not to dislocate any of the newly destabilized joints.

General anesthesia may turn the most rigid and inflexible body into a pliable one, and consistent stretching may produce a mildly similar effect, but is maximum pliability what I should be aiming for? Flexibility is not intrinsically good, nor on the other hand, is it intrinsically bad. In and of itself, flexibility has no value or meaning. It does, however, take on value and meaning when placed into the context of a function or purpose. Once movement has a function or aim, it requires more than simple flexibility or ROM. Mastery of a function requires learning the optimal ROLM. Whether to perform a back handspring during a gymnastics competition, transport water from the well five kilometers away, drive across town through rush hour traffic to get to work, vanquish my opponent in the boxing ring, or reach a higher state of consciousness while sitting in the lotus position, my purpose for moving will affect the nature of my movement. The purpose for my actions, in other words, crucially influences the control I manage to have over all my degrees of freedom and their coordination.

ROSM versus ROM The distinction between range of strong motion (ROSM) and ROM can be readily seen in sports, dance, and martial arts. During these activities, a beginner will move with less coordination than a professional. The

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beginner articulates some joints too much, others too little, some at the wrong angle, others in the wrong direction. Thus, while her joints may exhibit a normal or even high range of motion, the beginner has yet to acquire the sensitivity needed to coordinate them so that they articulate just the right amount, at just the right time, at just the right angle, in just the right direction, in a fashion that will maximize power, balance, and agility. The beginner has not yet learned how to keep her entire system and all of her 230 joints within their ROSM for the purpose at hand.

While a conventional perspective on ROM involves looking at joints articulating in isolation, the concept of ROSM demonstrates how all 230 joints can be coordinated to work with each other in a synergistic fashion in order to generate increased power, agility, and balance.

Where ROM simply refers to how far particular joints or groups of joints can articulate in isolation, ROSM refers to how far, in what direction, and at what angle they can articulate within the context of a complex system.

Using the concept of ROSM, we can readily see why a contortionist may exhibit more ROM in all of her joints when compared to a gymnast, yet not be able to generate the same amount of power or maintain the same level of joint stability. In this way, ROSM refers to the coordination of all joints articulating as part of a neuromuscular pattern.

A specific organization is generated to carry out a particular task— whether that task is purely functional or part of an attempt to conform to an aesthetic ideal. Given this, the ideal ROSM while performing one particular action may not correspond to the ideal ROSM for another.

While performing her floor routine, a gymnast’s ROSM will reflect her purpose of sprinting, leaping, tumbling, spinning through the air, and landing with great stability. While standing, sitting, or lying on the floor 2 It is normal for a gymnast between sprints, leaps, tumbles, spins, and landings, the gymnast may or acrobat to hyperextend hyperextend her lumbar spine and so bring it outside of the ROSM her lumbar spine in the appropriate for power moves. During the sprinting, leaping, tumbling, initial stages of a back spinning, and landing, however, she will only hyperextend her spine when handspring or while performing any movements compressive and shearing forces have been minimized and/or when where she attempts to doing so creates greater momentum for the next movement, such as flip her legs over her body while moving backward. If during the back handspring. In maneuvering this way, the gymnast both the movement is done at protects her spinal column and increases her efficient strength, agility, a high velocity however, (as it is during a tumbling and balance. 2 routine), the moment when Similarly, a Major League pitcher winding up and throwing a fastball her palms touch the floor during a back handspring is will go through ranges of motion in his hips, spine, shoulder, and elbow, the moment when her spine many of which would not be appropriate for the hips, spine, shoulder, has already righted itself and elbow of a person on first base trying to steal second. While and her center of mass is traveling obliquely to her throwing the fastball, the pitcher’s appropriate ranges in these joints will spine, thereby minimizing also be different from the appropriate ranges for throwing a curveball compressive forces. In any case, and with some or knuckleball, though perhaps not as different than those of the base exceptions, a gymnast will runner attempting to steal second. generally hyperextend her lumbar spine only when The many ways in which the body’s 230 joints can be collectively there is a minimal load on synchronized to maintain ideal ROSM appear even more disparate top of it and it is therefore safer to so do. when comparing actions from different fields of activity, such as

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different sports, types of dance, styles of martial arts, etc. Compare the movements of a pitcher throwing a fastball with somebody executing a movement sequence from pole dancing, classical ballet, rugby, or tai chi. You get a sense of how the purpose of any action dictates the appropriate ROSM for that action.

Furthermore, because all humans are different, the ideal ROSM for any two people performing the same action will not be identical.

Compare different people participating in tennis, running, swimming, or any sport, type of dance, or style of martial art, and you will see significant variations in movement, even among the top professionals.

Any person who has learned a skill to a minimal level of proficiency should not be surprised to discover that there are often variations in the performance of the same action at different times in her career.

Coordinating the articulation of joints to maximize power, agility, and balance is no easy task, which is why few mechanical robots have more than a handful of electronically controlled joints. Improving ROLM and ROSM involves active and attentive exploration, making full use of the nervous system’s prodigious creative and learning capacity. From a neurophysiological standpoint, ROLM and ROSM insinuate all of the neural connections that must be made. Through exploratory movement, neural connections better control the shortening and lengthening of each muscle fiber. ROLM and ROSM represent, in other words, the non-reducible biological system known as a human being, rather than the reducible assembly of mechanical parts known as a machine.

Increasing degrees of freedom sometimes decreases freedom and response-ability Range of learned motion, or ROLM, distinguishes an infant who learns to stand and walk in her own time from one whose caregivers “encourage” her to stand and walk by pulling her up by her arms. Both infants possess the flexibility and range of motion to stand up and walk, but only one has truly learned how to do so independently. Standing on our own two feet has a different neurological and emotional meaning than being physically held up by someone else.

With an infant who has been given time to learn on her own, we witness the organic unfolding of skills that is the outward manifestation of neuromuscular/neurological development. By exploring movement and gradually increasing her ROLM she eventually learns to stand and walk on her own. By increasing her ROLM she simultaneously increases her independence.

In contrast, the second infant’s neuromuscular and neurological development is not yet sufficient for her to stand and walk on her own.

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3 By this I do not mean to imply that we should never rely on others for help or offer help to those in need, but that not all help is actually helpful. Within our “hurry-up,” results-oriented culture, for example, there is a tendency for adults to search for faster ways for their children to develop.

Ironically, attempting to hasten sensorimotor and/ or intellectual development tends to stunt learning and, therefore, sensorimotor and/or intellectual progress. Reflecting on what happens when we manipulate young children into performing for us, Ruthy Alon states: “With inexhaustible energy a child will direct all effort to satisfying benefactors and parents, and to gaining more of their love and vocal praise, desiring to be the center of attention….

Performances may change, but what remains is the accompanying feeling, the implied message that one needs to strain the body before the eyes of the people who are important, so that they should see, react and give high marks.”

–Ruthy Alon, Mindful Spontaneity: Lessons in the Feldenkrais Method, p. 226.

4 When ligaments and cartilage bear the responsibility of translating force through the joints, it means that the neuromuscular system has yet not learned to do its work efficiently. Force that a highly coordinated neuromuscular system would otherwise translate cleanly and efficiently through the joints consequently ends up damaging the connective tissue within the joint (namely the ligaments and cartilage).

She may possess the range of motion to stand and walk, but it is not a range that is fully under her control. When her caregivers pull her up to standing, her newly extended range of motion does not correspond to her range of learned motion. Her newly extended range is largely due to her caregivers’ neuromuscular control, upon which she must rely in order to stand and walk. In this manner, extending degrees of freedom without extending range of learned motion will not provide our second infant with more freedom.

When the infant has to rely on others to stand, she has less freedom. For everyone, infant to adult, any degree of freedom that is not a learned degree of freedom is a degree that is not fully under her neuromuscular control. In some cases the degree of freedom may be more appropriately considered a degree of external manipulation. Any increase in range of motion without a corresponding increase in control can result in a loss, rather than a gain, in freedom and independence.

It follows that for our second infant, the response-ability for completing the neuromuscular task of standing and walking has been largely taken over by her caregivers. Implied in the act is the message that she must rely on someone else in order to stand on her own two feet.

The message is that performance is more important than exploration and learning. Whenever anybody—infant or adult—is pushed, pulled, or otherwise physically manipulated without prior consent, the underlying message is that her body is at least temporarily in someone else’s possession, controlled like a puppet or a machine in whatever fashion the puppet master or machine operator desires.3 We adults unconsciously give over some of our response-ability whenever we unnecessarily lock our elbows or knees, experience recurrent ankle sprains, or forcefully stretch our muscles.4 In the case of the joint lock or sprain, ligaments are forced to take over—with poor results—where the neuromuscular system has not yet learned and therefore lacks the ability to respond appropriately. In the case of forceful stretching, we are trading learning for passive manipulation of muscles and in so doing, increasing ROM without increasing ROLM or ROSM. Finally, and as mentioned earlier, if done regularly, forceful stretching can damage muscles, tendons, and ligaments, further decreasing their ability to respond appropriately.

A few final words on stretching Conventional stretching, while possibly damaging to the body, appears necessary for some people if they want to participate in certain activities. In order to manage the rigors of, say, acrobatics, gymnastics, yoga, sumo wrestling, certain forms of dance, certain types of martial arts, contortionism, or playing a supporting role in a Jean Claude Van Damme film, it is imperative to be able to push particular joints well beyond what would be considered a normal range. Unless I’m

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already born with very loose ligaments and shallow hip sockets— and therefore relatively unstable joints—I often find myself employing forceful stretching. I may damage certain ligaments and the cartilage sandwiched between the joint surfaces in the process. Perhaps this is why the ranks of contortionists and to a lesser degree, yoga aficionados, are filled with a disproportionate number of people who are congenitally flexible; by virtue of being born with loose ligaments and shallow hip sockets, they are naturally able to do what others cannot without first enduring a great deal of suffering—i.e., without having to tear apart their own living tissue.

But no matter what degree of flexibility or range of motion you hope to achieve, it’s probably not such a good idea to stretch forcefully or to attempt to “improve” too quickly. As hinted above, conventional forms of stretching often demand that my body do things for which it is not yet prepared: to move with increased range of motion and internal degrees of freedom that my nervous system has not yet learned to govern. In this regard, any degree of freedom that is not a learned degree is not only useless but potentially detrimental to efficient strength, coordination, agility, balance, and posture as well as the health of the joints involved.

Degrees of freedom that are forced, rather than learned, decrease my response-ability and my independence.

So, whether or not I want to participate in one or the other of the above-mentioned activities or simply “become more flexible” in everyday life, many interesting alternatives to conventional stretching exist. The most intelligent ones involve going slowly and gradually, paying conscious attention to what I am doing and listening to how my body is feeling. Such an approach gives my neuromuscular system the opportunity to learn and expand. This powerful alternative more fully involves my brain and nervous system by allowing time for gentle, attentive, and methodical exploration of movement and learning. Over time, I can increase my degrees of learned freedom and range of strong motion and, in the process, increase my efficient strength, coordination, agility, balance, and posture, all while minimizing risk to the connective tissue in my joints. Doing so will, in short, increase my independence and response-ability.

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A Vision Quest For Development: The Case of Phillip Annie Thoe

1 Trainings with Tom Browne, Jr. 1994-5, Kamana Naturalist Program 2001-10, Anake Graduate 2009-10, Tracking Intensive 2005-6, Wilderness Awareness School.

2 For more background on vision quest see Tom Browne, Jr., The Vision, (New York, NY: Berkley, 1988); and M. Norman Powell, Ingwe, (Shelton, WA: Owl Link Media; 2nd edition, 2001).

When I first met Phillip he was almost two years old. I was just beginning my naturalist and survival studies—observing bird behavior, animal tracks, and signs—and applied these new skills in my Feldenkrais Method® practice.1 One of the quintessential teachings in nature survival is the vision quest, a four-day ceremony involving fasting alone in nature to pray for a vision to clarify one’s life journey. Observing everything that happens during the quest provides insight into how one perceives and responds to the world, and is used for further reflection on key questions about life.

I learned from Tom Browne, Jr. that the first vision quest carries all the messages one needs for the rest of one’s life. 2 I have contemplated this case with Phillip as if it were the first vision quest of my career, though instead of four days, the case spans six lessons over a six-week period. Both my first vision quest and my work with Phillip occurred at a similar time in my life and laid the foundation for an ongoing practice in sensing cues from my body and the environment while refining methods of inquiry for development and self-expression.

Phillip’s situation reflected what I was trying to achieve in my new practice. He required help with his development—at two years old, he was unable to walk, talk, or perform typical functions for a boy his age.

At the time of this case, I was in my third year of training, although I had started studying the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education ten years prior to meeting Phillip. I had a full-time massage practice, and taught clinical massage and kinesiology. I was eager to apply what I was learning about development with children and to find my own style of

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3 The memoir of Margaret Murie, famous tracker Olaus Murie’s wife, describes her remarkable journey of acquiring naturalist and survival skills in the arctic wilderness.

Margaret Murie, Two in the Far North, (Anchorage, AK: Alaska Northwest Books, 1979).

working with awareness and learning. Phillip and I shared this need to stand and walk on our own two feet.

Becoming a mature Feldenkrais practitioner has been like learning to navigate a wild river with unexpected turns, snags, log jams, and forks. I have arrived at many dead-ends, and at other times drifted along in solitude, graced with insight and revelation. While case studies tell the story of a client’s development, this one also reflects my own development as a practitioner.3

The case Initial contact In 1995, I received a call from Angela, Phillip’s mother, who had heard about my work from a friend who recently attended an Awareness Through Movement® class with me.

Angela explained that Phillip was not developing as expected. At fifteen months, he was unable to walk, had difficulty rolling over, could verbalize only one or two sounds, was unable to laugh, and had difficulty focusing or recognizing visual details. He had been going to physical therapy twice a week for many months with little noticeable progress.

She added that his head movements appeared very unstable for a child his age.

I asked her to list activities Phillip could do. She replied: • Crawl on his hands and knees; • Stand while holding onto something; • Roll over onto his stomach with moderate effort (she often found him stuck in a “turtle” position on his back for long periods of time after rolling over, unable to return to his stomach).

I told Angela I didn’t have any experience working with children and was only in my fourth year of Feldenkrais training. However, I assured her I would love to see what we could do.

4 From my Feldenkrais® training with Jerry Karzen and studying Moshe’s videos, I followed Moshe’s example and directed my primary attention to the child and spoke very little with Angela, while still including her in the beginning. See Jerry Karzen, Video with Moshe Feldenkrais and Commentary, Erin Learns to Walk Better, Five Lessons, (FeldenkraisResources. com, Product Code 3821, 2017).

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Lesson one Angela carried Phillip into my office. Once she sat down, he nestled against his mother. She held him comfortably in her lap. He seemed to be a happy little boy. I sat across from them—at his eye level— and greeted Phillip first.4 In response, Phillip initially buried his head in Angela’s chest, hiding his face from me. I hid my face, pretending to be shy. I did not say a word. After a minute or two, he peered around from his mother's arms until he caught my eye, at which point he seemed to laugh, smiling with rapid breaths, albeit without sound. We alternately hid from each other until he wriggled down to the floor. As he crawled

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to investigate some large rocks in the corner, I observed that his back looked quite stiff (not flexing or rotating), and that his fingers and toes were curled and drawn closely together. When he managed to pick up a rock to roll it, I was curious to see how he would maneuver himself in relation to it.

I joined him and moved the rock to various places—onto a shelf, underneath the shelf, up on my table—places that would require new or slightly more complex coordination from him if he were to be able to retrieve it. My intention was to work with his balance and spinal movements. He responded enthusiastically to this “game” of grasping the rock. I stood nearby to spot him with light support or to guide any falls and protect his head. His head wobbled quite a bit, which must have made seeing, reaching, and grasping more difficult.

Up to this point, our communication remained non-verbal and entailed actions alone.

Phillip seemed to have a voracious appetite for using his mouth, eyes, hands, and feet to explore the new environment. My own questions arose: What affected his appetite for learning? What is the difference between curiosity-directed and goal-oriented movement? When Phillip became bored during the lesson I realized that I was bored too, and wondered about the relationship between curiosity and boredom.

I sensed our “games” needed to evolve to acquire a new or more sophisticated function that would engage our attention.

His movements reminded me of free association: how the mind can explore sensation without assigning value or words. What were his thoughts like? How would differentiated movement affect his language?

Would clarifying his skeletal pathways for movement clarify his thinking and language processes?

Phillip’s interest in balls led me to work with him for a few minutes lying prone and sitting on a small beach ball, working with sensing his feet touch the floor. Even though Phillip did not speak, I noticed that he recognized some words but did not necessarily differentiate between them. For example, I commented on the ball and asked him which other balls he liked. He pointed to many objects in the room that were not balls. He did not seem to recognize physical details enough to distinguish between the words for these common objects. [Fig 1] After a few minutes, Phillip wriggled off the ball and appeared bored.

Following a brief pause, I took a small three-inch foam roller and rolled it to him.

Phillip rolled the roller back to me and we played a short game of back and forth. Every moment felt pregnant with, “What next?” as he quickly became engrossed in each activity until another looked more tantalizing. I gently rolled the small roller under his foot to explore the flexion and extension of his ankle with the intention of preparing him to walk.

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Fig 1 Annie assisting Phillip on belly over ball.

Fig 2 Annie following Phillip into crawling.

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Using a long, narrow roller as a stick, I nudged him with it. Then I placed the roller on its end and assisted him to stand. I motioned to him to hold on to the roller. I thought he might use it to help himself balance while standing but he began playing with it and got distracted. He dropped the roller accidentally and when he picked it up and stood I said, “Go walk over to your mother.”

Well, he did just that. He tottered about five steps to Angela with the roller in one hand and crashed triumphantly between her legs. Angela’s mouth dropped open in amazement. In only a half-hour, he was walking for the first time!5 Although I was flabbergasted by this breakthrough I 5 I felt the urge to celebrate but remembered did not stop the flow of discoveries to celebrate. how Moshe (and Jerry I picked up the rock and showed Phillip how to look between his legs Karzen) cautioned against praising children for normal to reach under himself for it. From there we played with rolling ourselves learning. This “reward on the floor in a judo-style shoulder roll. I rolled him and then rolled for natural behavior” may condition a child to perform myself. He looked at me, wide-eyed—this was a bit scary but temptingly for adults rather than fun. After a few rolls he crawled away quickly and climbed up on my naturally exploring for his or her own sake, and create Feldenkrais table. I held one of Phillip’s legs in a gentle constraint to give self-doubt in the child’s him a different sensation of using his pelvis and legs while crawling or natural ability to learn. climbing and then alternated with the other leg. [Fig 2] At the end of the session, Phillip was physically tired and sweaty from the intensity of learning and activity. I was exhausted. My brain buzzed from orchestrating so many new learning situations to keep up with his curiosity. It felt as if I had exercised my creativity twenty times more than anything I had experienced before. His mother commented that she had never seen him bond so quickly with a stranger.

I was pleased Phillip trusted and liked me but unsure what specifically I did that made his walking possible. While the events with Phillip seemed like fast learning, was it? In one hour my prior beliefs about the speed of learning had been blown to bits. I planned to follow my intuition to build agility into his walking by improving his balance and his skill in falling. I would continue to work with rolling, foot and ankle differentiations, and finding more skeletal support.

Lesson two In less than a week, I saw Phillip for our second lesson. He now walked short distances (five feet) but held his neck in a very rigid hyper-extension. When he moved his head, it wobbled in stiff movements like one of those upright dolls that collapses and tightens up again with the press of a button. His toes were curled in a flexed position under his feet when he walked instead of rolling through extended toes. His entire spine looked stuck in extension and I wondered what might help him bend more easily and address this pattern of flexed toes. Most notable were Phillip’s hands, which he held in a curled, undifferentiated way.

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At first, I had no real idea what to do with the rigidity in Phillip’s neck and spine. My initial plan was to continue working with Phillip rolling on the floor as we had done in lesson one, to engage more flexion and control of his head to prepare him for falling. I also wanted to clarify the use of his feet for walking. However, his curled hands felt more important and my intuition urged me to begin with his hands, and possibly revisit rolling later on.

I asked myself, “What would be a fun way to enliven and differentiate his fingers from one another?” I looked around for inspiration and noticed the holes at the end of my Feldenkrais table intended for attaching a head support. I picked Phillip up and positioned us on the floor near the holes. Peering into the hole with raised eyebrows, I silently suggested the question,“What do you think that strange hole is doing here?”

He crawled tentatively towards my table to look, and slowly poked his index finger through the hole, breathing slowly with concentration, then faster with excitement. We played with my finger poking from the other end: he would touch my finger, I would touch his, and back and forth. His discovery of his index finger was like finding a mysterious, delightful toy. He found the other two holes in the table with his finger (I have attachment holes on each end). He explored poking the holes with the index finger of his other hand and other fingers. He then poked a finger from each hand so they touched each other from both sides. After his curiosity waned and his fingers were less curled together, I clapped my hands on the table making a “thwack” sound. He looked at me and clapped the table in response with a flat hand. After a few moments I clapped his hand with mine. He clapped back into my hand. He looked at his hands and clapped both hands together with a look of wonder and awe.

I asked myself, “What next?” looking around the room again. I felt my original impulse to roll on the floor and decided to go with it this time.

Without speaking I laid out some rollers on my floor as a kind of obstacle course. Since we ended the first lesson with rolling, Phillip picked up on this cue and began rolling on the floor and crawling over the rollers strewn across the floor. His rolling was still a little stiff, but he had more range of motion in his spine and pelvis than I expected. Was this improvement in mobility related to the new differentiation of his fingers?

At one point I partially “stood” on my head (with my feet on the ground) and looked at him curiously between my legs. He did the same immediately. We played for a while mirroring each other upside down.

His bold curiosity, like that of an alien visiting from another planet, fascinated me. I felt more relaxed and was encouraged that I could communicate and work with him.

For the next session I planned to continue to work on rolling, introduce diagonal connections for walking, and play more with upside

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Fig 3 Annie working with Phillip sitting on balls.

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down movements. I would also observe the state of Phillip’s toes and spine: how flexible could they become?

Lesson three The next week Angela brought a friend—an occupational therapist and Feldenkrais student—who had heard about Phillip's rapid progress.

Another Feldenkrais colleague of mine also came to observe. Needless to say, Phillip looked like a zoo animal among all these expectant adults.

He clung to his mother with eyes darting back and forth at the new observers. I could sense his perplexity at all of the attention: Had he done something wrong? Why were these people watching him instead of doing something else that adults did? I felt embarrassed that I had not considered the impact of their presence on him nor prepared him somehow ahead of time. After a few uncomfortable minutes I asked the observers to leave and Phillip slowly warmed up to playing with me.

Phillip’s back and neck were still stiff in hyperextension and his abdominal area also appeared tense, but his head moved a little more freely since our last lesson. His toes were still curled under.

I gently moved Phillip's toes and feet to sense the quality of connection and ease available through his skeletal support while we crawled around on the floor. We explored his “turtle” problems using the giant “X” lesson with rolling. I gently pulled one arm or leg to slowly turn him, helping to connect the diagonal lines of movement through his skeleton. Soon he was flinging himself onto his stomach and back and rolling by himself, while keeping his limbs in the “X” shape. After positioning him over a beach ball which was much too big, I followed with a small one so that he could explore rolling from his stomach to his back on the ball. We reviewed rolling in various directions using the beach ball as a prop to improve his rolling. His head and neck were still stiff and guarded while he balanced on the ball. He also had difficulty keeping himself from falling backward while rolling. [Fig 3] My lesson plan focused on improving his balance in sitting. After experimenting, I found the small beach ball too unstable for Phillip to sit on comfortably. Instead, I asked him to sit on an eight-inch hard foam roller while I placed one hand behind his back for support. I slowly turned the roller to rock Phillip’s pelvis forward and backward while feeling the response throughout his back (sometimes sensing his neck or the top of his head) with my whole hand. His breath, which felt restricted, changed with the shifting of his weight over the roller. I adjusted what I was doing with my hand—touching gently on various vertebrae or the muscles on his back to monitor his response—and slowed or stopped the roller to listen and respond to his breath. His movement, jerky at first, became smoother, and the muscles around his spine, which were initially splinted together into one big bunch, softened. His head looked more balanced as well. He was able to turn and bend with more ease and less stiff

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teetering for balance in his upper body. This gentle process of attending to his back and slow balancing on the roller seemed to ease the tension in his spine.

As we ended the session, I invited Angela’s OT friend to come back and “play” with us. Phillip now seemed agreeable to her presence.

The OT slid one of her rings onto his finger and then slid the ring onto his toe. He was lukewarm about playing with her ring compared to the game we had played at the table with the holes. Did Phillip resist playing with her rings because she was doing all the movement for him, leaving him with little choice to explore? The ring on his toe gave me an idea. I asked Phillip to put his toe in the hole in the table since he had had so much fun poking with his fingers before. Once he mastered the “toe in the hole” game, smiling widely, all his toes became more independent.

He now became interested in playing with the ring and soon caught on as to how to put the ring onto his own toe. He also began to explore his other toes.

While the OT played with Phillip in this game of ring and toe, I positioned him so that he sat on the hard foam roller. As he remained distracted by the rings, he sat perfectly balanced on the roller. I rocked the roller slightly so he would have to adjust his pelvis to avoid falling, even as he continued to slip the ring on and off his toes. I thought, “What adult can do this movement so well?” He flexed and extended his spine smoothly compared to the jerky movements from earlier lessons.

We stopped playing with the rings and Phillip continued to sit comfortably by himself on the roller with his feet and toes flat. He looked so much more relaxed and at ease on the roller. When he stood up, he walked with even more balance for a greater distance—tipping a little less from side to side, with more head stability, and flatter feet. His progress continued to amaze me.

Lesson four Three weeks after our first lesson Phillip could now catch himself with his hands on the ground as he fell backwards, flexing his spine and bending his knees to fall so that he landed on his sit-bones. Angela mentioned that over the past week and a half, Phillip had been rolling at home and exploring what we had done in the lessons. She felt that in doing so he had progressed developmentally from twelve months to two years. His physical therapist was very impressed. His progress seemed fast to me, but I did not know if our work was the tipping point or if this was “normal” learning.

To show me, Phillip took a few steps from his mother and threw himself on the floor with a big smile. He rolled from his back to his stomach with his arms outstretched, reaching across one arm after another with legs wide in a big “X.” Angela commented he was doing this

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new “X” rolling at home, too. While we watched, Phillip propped himself onto his hands and knees and placed the top of his head on the floor.

He picked up his knees and pelvis and balanced on his head, hands and feet, looking and turning his head around side to side. He lifted one arm, then the other, one leg and the other. I lifted his legs so he could feel himself upside down on his head. We had done this modified headstand in one of the earlier lessons, but now he seemed obsessed with being upside down. Phillip ran to his mother and threw himself onto her lap, then walked his feet up to stand on his head there. He could raise his spine over his head but couldn't quite kick his legs up. His mom looked at me with a puzzled face as he repeated this strange activity again and again. I wondered if his playing upside down might have liberated his diaphragm and rib cage by allowing gravity to affect these structures in a different orientation. By the end of the lesson, Phillip began to make more sounds and laughed more audibly. He was so much more engaged, more flexible, and happier this week.

Lesson five Now that Phillip could walk, my objective was to improve his balance while standing and walking. He still teetered precipitously side to side, swerving across the room, before falling. However, his falling looked much easier and more relaxed. I guided him as he walked over rollers, holding one hand or carefully restraining or supporting one limb or part of his spine for stability while he could explore greater differentiation with the rest of his body. He loved this game of finding movement and balance, enjoying himself for the full hour, falling and catching himself, or rolling with the fall. His head and spine were coordinating much better so that he could fall safely. I “spotted” him for safety but let him fall frequently so he could practice in a fun, safe environment.

As the lesson progressed, Phillip became much more confident with his balance on the ground, teetering less when he turned his head while standing. He laughed audibly now, and pointed at various objects while turning his head, eyes clearly and keenly focusing on them. He also carried items around the room, falling after a number of steps. I was not sure how to guide his learning at this point, but was curious if his walking and standing would continue to improve if I created more challenges for developing his balance.

Lesson six On our last lesson, Phillip came in walking and moved quickly across the entire room without falling (I had an 800 square foot office at the time).

When he did eventually fall, he caught himself so nicely he barely missed a breath. His eyes were brighter than during the previous lesson and he

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looked actively to find new objects to examine in the room. Phillip also handled many more of these objects. His fingers moved independently, he used his whole foot for walking instead of walking over the tops of his toes, and his head moved more easily in all directions while bobbing only slightly side to side. Phillip’s torso was also more supple. He breathed more freely, too. He behaved in a more demanding and manipulative manner, much like any other stubborn, independent two-year old! To my surprise, he also wanted to play exclusively with his mother.

I asked if he would play with me for a minute. My next objective was to help Phillip improve his balance enough to explore stepping up and down onto a slightly more elevated surface. I held him while he stood on a hard three-inch foam roller and slowly moved him forward and back over it. I noticed I held my breath as he held his. This action of standing on the roller was much too difficult, too fast, and too risky, even though I had earned his trust. He let me know this by returning to his mother’s lap to resume playing with her.

For a safer exploration of stepping up and down, I arranged several one to two-inch styrofoam squares on the floor for different kinds of balance and foot dexterity exploration. Some of the squares were hard foam and others were soft. I did not explain what I was doing and hoped to coax Phillip away from his mother in order to check these squares out. He looked over curiously. I hoped that if he stood near them, his curiosity might lead him to step on them. I behaved as if I was just goofing around—pushing the squares with my toes. He wandered over to the squares and looked down at his bare foot before lifting his leg and stepped on the edge of a square. His big toe broke off a small piece of the styrofoam by accident. He looked up at me with a worried frown. I took the little piece to show him I might wedge it gently between his toes. He parted his toes for me to do this. We played like this for a while until he could put the piece between each of his toes by himself— eventually standing and walking with it. This game helped differentiate his toes and prevented him from walking on the dorsal part of his toes. I removed the little piece of foam and tucked it into his pants pocket as a joke while he was standing. Of course, he had to pull the foam out. This joke became a practical lesson as his fingers became more and more dexterous and relaxed in pulling the piece out of his pocket and putting it back in while he kept his balance on his feet.

I thought that if his hands could stay relaxed with this kind of dexterity, his feet and entire body might function better for balance. Our games evolved, but I kept thinking about this “goal” of stepping up with his foot. I had given up on Phillip stepping on the foam squares after the broken square experience but spread a few more squares around the floor just in case he might accidentally step up on one. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a very curious look from him before he stepped up on a square by himself. For the next five minutes, he stepped up and down on the squares with focused concentration.

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After he grew bored with this game, Phillip insisted on walking out of my office door to explore my waiting room while holding his teddy bear in one arm and the piece of foam we had played with in the other hand. Phillip paused and stared intently at the two steps down to the bathroom. Before Angela could get her belongings together, he walked to the top of the stair and paused, still holding his bear in one hand, the foam in the other. Neither hand was available to hold onto the railing or wall. Decisively, he stepped down with one leg and plopped to sit, stood up, and stepped down the next step—all the while holding his bear and piece of foam! He achieved my ultimate goal and surprised me further by initiating this difficult task of balancing with both hands occupied.

Then he turned around smiling, eyes radiant with a newfound confidence, as if to say, “Did you guys see that?!” He lifted his leg high and took a step up with his hands still unavailable to help. He wobbled a bit but stepped up both steps. Angela remarked, “Well, I think we're going to take a break for a few weeks before we come back.”

I thought the same thing but was glad she initiated the decision.

I said, “Yeah, you probably don't want him to get too far ahead of the other kids, now.”

Phillip walked almost normally at the end of the lesson—in a straighter line with very little swerving—although he still walked somewhat on raised tip-toes without completely dropping his heels. I would have liked to resolve this foot pattern but hoped his mother could help him from here. This was my last session with Phillip. Two years later I called Angela to check on Phillip’s progress. He had just turned four at that time and was doing very well. She commented that his initial difficulty was hardly noticeable, and that she continued to work with him using the games and activities from my lessons.

A vision quest for maturity

7 Thomas DeMichele, Tiffany Morgan and Jon Young, Animal Tracking: Basics, (Stackpole Books, 2007); Tom Brown, Jr., The Science and Art of Tracking, (New York, NY: Berkley 1999).

An experienced wilderness tracker spends a lot of “dirt time” comparing one track with another. The tracker looks for what catches the eye as different or “abnormal,” in order to build observation skills for tracking the movement patterns and behavior of each species. Since my work with Phillip, I’ve logged many hours of “dirt time” as a Feldenkrais practitioner. During my fourth year of training, Feldenkrais Trainer Chava Shelhav said that one should look for whatever is “not normal” in a client.6 As a new practitioner I bristled at this remark. “How do I know what is ‘normal’ if I have no experience?” I asked. She replied, “You will learn.”

At that time, I was irritated that I had to wait to learn what “normal” was in terms of skeletal alignment, movement, function, and development. But after studying tracking for many years, I realized Chava was right. Humans (as well as most animals) possess a patternrecognition ability in the brain which seeks out what is “normal.”7 Even

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6 Chava Shelhav, The Feldenkrais Method® for Children with Cerebral Palsy, (FeldenkraisResources. com, 2015).

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an inexperienced practitioner can notice or sense something that does not feel right or look “normal” and practice to improve their observation skills by building a bank of observed patterns to establish a “baseline” 8 For learning “baseline” or for normal.8 normal behavior in nature, Even though I could not articulate all the details in my observations see Jon Young, What the of Phillip in the first session, I could see that the way he used his hands Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal Secrets of the and feet was not “normal.” Neither was the rigidity in his neck, back, and Natural World, (New York, abdomen. I began asking questions that all trackers ask: Who, Where, NY, Mariner Books, 2013).

When, What, How, Why? Who is this person? Where is he most likely to move? When and with what part does he move first or easiest? What does he do or want to do? How does he use his feet or other body parts? Why are his hands and toes curled? Questions like these led me to clarify more questions throughout my practice until I picked up the details I needed to work with my clients.

Two years ago, I took a second vision quest for direction in my life and work. The contrast in my awareness between the two quests was remarkably rich, like viewing a flat black and white photograph compared to a four-dimensional color landscape. Both were beautiful and connected with the environment, though I was surprised how much more aware I felt in the second quest. As I reflected on the future of my work, I remembered Phillip’s transformation in speech and laughter and my early desire to advance self-expression, whether in speaking, playing music, singing, or writing.

Eight years after working with Phillip, I visited my mother who was eighty and near the end stage of Alzheimer’s disease. Her vocabulary was reduced to three words: “ball”, “toss”, and “Bob” (my father’s name), which she cleverly substituted for every object, verb, and pronoun. In the past I had given her massages, which had little impact on her cognition.

Since she was experiencing severe pain when she moved her legs, I gave her her first and only Feldenkrais lesson that day. After ten minutes of working with her legs, she lifted her head from the bed and pointed her finger at me with a look of amazement and relief and exclaimed, “You are doing something really different there!”

My jaw dropped after hearing this complete, articulate sentence. For the past fifteen years I had not been able to talk with her because of her memory loss and diminished vocabulary. Why could she speak clearly now after just a short Feldenkrais lesson?

“What’s different about what I’m doing?” I asked. She continued with a clarity in her eyes, “What you are doing is so…so…intelligent. It’s different. I can feel it’s different and it’s intelligent. You are really doing Something!”

My mother was excited to express herself, and I was excited to witness the mysterious links her body made with language. Her sentient remarks reminded me of the effect each of us has to observe awareness seeing itself. We talked a bit more while I worked, the first real conversation we had had in many years. Though it was not possible

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for me to continue working with my mother at the time, the tracker in me still wonders what facilitates language and expression. Her differentiated vocabulary reminded me of my work with Phillip—when he initially called all the objects in the room “ball,� and later vocalized, and laughed in his last lesson. [Fig 4]

Fig 4 Annie with elephant jaw bone in the Serengeti.

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Reversibility— A More Global Definition Adam Cole

1 Moshe Feldenkrais, The Body and Mature Behavior (Berkeley, CA: Frog Books, 1949), 104.

Before we dig in, I would like to try a little experiment. I’m going to tell you part of a familiar story. I’ll start in the middle.

“When Goldilocks saw the third bowl of porridge, she tasted it and said, ‘This porridge is just right.’”

Would you be able to finish telling this story yourself? Having heard only this much, could you tell it from the beginning? Could you go forwards or backwards in the story, regardless of where I started?

Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais emphasized a concept he called “reversibility.”

In The Body and Mature Behavior (1949), Feldenkrais described reversibility as a characteristic of people with “proper body control.”1 Such people can change their state without “preliminary or preparatory movements” or unnecessary exertion. As a result of this control, they can also reverse their movements or direction at any time.

This characteristic is often expressed as a sophisticated martial arts concept. In tai chi, for instance, there is a notion that, as one moves forward through a form, one should be able to stop and reverse course at any point. This requires that the mover is so cognizant of the body image that they can prevent momentum, physical or mental, from dictating their movement.

Many Feldenkrais® practitioners use the term “reversibility” when promoting Feldenkrais’ ideas around the subject. In expressing a quality they hope to see in themselves and their clients, practitioners define reversibility as the ability to change direction without preparation. Yet, as sophisticated as such an understanding of reversibility may be, I believe we need a more meaningful, clearer definition—one that assists us in identifying and attaining this state of reversibility.

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Physical momentum, mental momentum The peril of physical momentum is well known to us: if you cannot stop your body mass from advancing at any second, your forward impetus may be used against you, to pull you along, to trip you, and so forth. As the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education deals with integrating mind and body, it is imperative that we have a way of defining momentum in thought processes as well as in the body. When we memorize a script or a piece of music, just as when we memorize physical movements, we are often relying on the previous note or line to cue the next one.

Imagine you are moving through a martial arts form. You imagine the series of movements as links in a long chain, each connecting to the next. You know, for instance, that you must punch upwards now because you just swept your left foot back.

This chain-memory is useful in the short term. It gives us our first connected sense of the form, or the script, or the music. Yet the danger is obvious—one broken link invalidates the chain, and can spoil the performance.

If we are relying on chain-memory—the previous movement of a form to cue us for the next one—we are dependent upon mental momentum.

Any flaw or deviation in the prior movement will throw us off, making it a somewhat unreliable way to recall the next part of the sequence, and its uncertainty will manifest in the physical act. A better kind of memory is necessary to ensure that we can begin our sequence at any point without having to back up—in other words, without having to use a preparatory movement—to cue us.

I chose the Goldilocks story because I was confident that most readers knew it so well that they could move forwards and backwards through it at will, running it like a film, at any speed, to any destination.

Furthermore, most of us familiar with such fairy and folktales do not need the story to be told in sequence to remember its details. We could start from any point and finish the story, and some of us could tell it backwards.

When children are first taught the alphabet, it is usually through the aid of a melody, sung in sequence, known as the “ABC Song.” As a teaching tool, this song incorporates rhythm, melody, and rhyme into the alphabet to render the alphabet more memorable. The infusion of these other elements provides a powerful means for greater reversibility by organizing the letters into different sections carefully sequenced with the music.

Children who know the song could probably pick up the alphabet anywhere along the line. As a result, they are able to learn all the letters

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more quickly, and to develop a sense of where they fall—earlier or later, in the middle, around a high note. Their understanding of the alphabet goes beyond the sequence of the letters.

There is an even higher organization of alphabet knowledge available that most children do not pursue because we have little need of it in our language: what we might refer to as true reversibility of the alphabet. People who do learn this skill include word-puzzle experts and musicians—puzzle experts because they must rearrange letters to solve puzzles, and musicians because letters correspond with musical notes, which can appear in any order or sequence you can think of.

When I teach music notation, which makes use of only seven letters of the alphabet (A through G), my students must be able to look at a dot on a music staff (five lines/four spaces) and know by looking at the location of the dot which letter corresponds with it. Even though only seven letters are in play, the children are often very slow in recognizing that if a dot on the bottom space is F, the dot on the line below it will be E. Lack of reversibility with the alphabet is one reason for the difficulty.

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It took me a while to recognize the problem because I failed to recognize that I had already gained such reversibility. Most people learn only enough flexibility with the letters to form words out of them. If and when letters are combined to form a nonexistent word, such as “pxgleqo,” we have a little more difficulty recognizing the letters and remembering the new combination. As a musician, because I have learned to play the seven notes of the musical alphabet in any order, AGBD, CFAFCFAF, and so forth, I have gained a much greater understanding of the possible connections between the letters. My students do not have this global understanding. When asked to say the letters backwards from G to A, many have difficulty, not instantly recognizing that E and C surround D.

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In order to assist my students, it helps to call their attention to the fact that we are using the letters in a different way. Many students must first get comfortable with the dots and the pictures they make before they can comfortably assign letters to them. As they learn to read the notes through the act of making music, requiring the letters as a reference point for where to put their fingers, they gradually gain this unusual skill of being able to identify letters of the alphabet out of order.

Providing this kind of understanding to my students empowers them in many other areas of study. Many students, who can only work math problems going step-by-step, find word problems more difficult because word problems require them to acquire a global sense of the problem in order to determine the method that will produce the desired solution. They must first understand the entirety of the problem before they can begin to work it out, as a good storyteller often benefits from knowing the entire story, which they can play on in giving a compelling performance.

It should come as no surprise to any Feldenkrais practitioner that reversibility in thinking will benefit students in their athletic endeavors as well. Beyond the obvious fact that one must know the rules and techniques of any sport backwards and forwards before playing it effectively, there is the more subtle matter of how a person functions while playing. The somatic approach encapsulated in the Feldenkrais Method brings a sense of reversibility to the player in ways that are enormously helpful for their agility and coordination.

The importance of reversibility It would behoove us as practitioners to recognize the complete concept of reversibility as we are communicating its value to our clients. The significance of reversibility goes beyond having more control over the sequence of a movement, like reaching or bending, which is often where practitioners’ understanding stops. Rather, reversibility provides us with the instantaneous, complete comprehension of the reach, so that we are no longer dependent on the sequence. With true reversibility, we can begin, reverse, or skip around the movement, which allows for greater ease and freedom in every situation.

If we return to martial arts, we can imagine someone who has learned the movement sequence so well that they have gained true reversibility. They could execute a form as though they were in a film, starting at any place and moving at any speed, forwards or backwards. They would never need to prepare because they have an instant understanding of where each move belongs in the sequence independent of its execution.

When I am learning a piece of piano music I often come across difficult passages that cause me to fumble and miss notes no matter how many times I practice the piece. Through a process of exploration

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and reflection I have discovered that, if I learn to play the passage backwards, something astounding happens: my difficulties vanish, and so completely that it seems like magic.

One reason is simply that going backwards slows me down so much that I am forced to examine the music more thoroughly. Taking nothing for granted, I start to develop the right balance of engagement and flow to really learn the musical passage. I do not get caught up in the mental momentum: I can’t be misled by what I think I know.

Yet there is another, more subtle gain from backwards playing, which better accounts for the “magical” improvement. If I can play a passage backwards then I know enough about the music, and how I move while I play the music, to start anywhere and go in either direction. This is not possible without a non-sequential appreciation of the music, one free of the constraint of having to play it in tempo.

In fact, the act of reading music itself, rather than simply learning it by ear, provides a powerful route to musical reversibility. If I can look at a piece of music, take the structure of it in with my eyes as a kind of picture, then I have the freedom to move anywhere in that score— backwards, forwards, jumping around. While reading the music does not automatically provide me with a global understanding of it, the act of reading greatly enhances my ability to gain that understanding: if I am a good reader it may take only thirty seconds to become familiar with a piece of music that would take five minutes to play. Skillful reading of the music can provide more efficiency in my learning.

It can also result in greater mastery and artistry when playing the music. If I can lay my eyes on any section of the music and recognize it instantly, then I am more intimately familiar with the piece and have an improved capacity to express connections between emotional and structural moments throughout.

The legacy of reversibility Feldenkrais created a profoundly efficient method for gaining this kind of total appreciation of a function through the process of differentiation and integration. When we differentiate a movement, we playfully examine our functionality in detail, looking at the various elements of reaching or bending. Taking ourselves out of gravity and time, we use our proprioceptive sense to get a better idea of what is happening. When we integrate the pieces we have been examining, we put them back together, emerging with a more profound sense of their relationship to one another, almost as if we had taken apart what we thought was a jigsaw puzzle and realized that we could reassemble it in many different ways other than the original picture.

Our integrated state should provide a significant degree of reversibility. After a lesson, our clients should be much more cognizant of the relationships between the parts of the body and the mind in their

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execution of a function like reaching. Should they choose to take the action in a different direction from the one they knew previously, they should have little difficulty.

At the end of a lesson, clients often express their experience of lightness or freedom in their mental and physical state. With reversibility, we have a concrete way of describing that experience: the clients have a bird’s-eye view of all possibilities of their skeleton, an integrated concept of their bodies in space, which provides them instantaneous understanding of the easiest pathway from one configuration to another.

Because they have a more complete understanding of “getting off the floor,” for instance, they are not confined to a particularly awkward way of doing it and, in fact, can rapidly sort through many alternatives to find the one that is the most elegant in the moment.

We have limited ourselves too much by relying on the term “reversibility” without plumbing its depths. Reversibility in a linguistic sense suggests only the ability to move back and forth along a linear pathway. We must go beyond this apparent simplicity.

Reversibility really means the capacity to make use of a complete comprehension of an idea rather than a limited, sequential view. As Feldenkrais practitioners, we are familiar with the results of reversibility and often tout them, even when we may not be able to explain why the client has achieved certain results. It is essential that we develop a deeper account of this integral experience in the Method, experience this state at a conscious and replicable level, and in so doing, greatly increase our power to teach and articulate what we are teaching.

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Christiana Antico is an undergraduate Illustration student at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and a 2018 Massachusetts State Internship Awardee. Her work is based in drawing and incorporates a wide variety of analog and digital media and techniques.

While interning at the Storefront for Somatic Practice in Cambridge, MA, and learning about the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education, she illustrated the front and back covers of this issue.

Adam Cole is a public speaker, educator, and jazz musician. Co-Director of the Grant Park Academy of the Arts, Adam uses his Feldenkrais® training to improve the conversation about learning in the arts. He has designed curricula for the State of Georgia and recently presented at Hebrew University on the subject of Mathematics and the Feldenkrais Method®. www.acole.net John Franklin graduated in 2003 from the Santa Fe 2 Feldenkrais Professional Training Program. In addition to Mark Reese and Esther Thelen, Franklin owes much to his Educational Director Yvan Joly, the other amazing Feldenkrais teachers in his training and his most awesome fellow practitioners. Franklin explores the joy of movement with his students in Lynchburg, Virginia, focusing on Awareness through Movement® classes and Functional Integration® lessons. His workshop at the 2018 Feldenkrais Method Conference, A New Country for Seniors, is inspired by Jack Heggie’s Total Body Golf.

Texas Manning is a junior in Studio for Interrelated Media (SIM) at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Sometimes a clown, sometimes too tired to be a clown, Manning strives to make a positive change anywhere they can. Before and after Feldenkrais® lessons, Manning processed their views and experience of the practice by drawing on archival photographs.

Moti (Mordehai) Nativ, a retired colonel of the Israel Defense Forces, has been an active martial artist since 1966, lately promoted to Dai-Shihan, a master teacher of Bujinkan— Budo TaiJutsu. In his early years as a martial arts practitioner, Nativ injured his body to the point of no choice but to learn the Feldenkrais Method. He graduated from the first Jerusalem training in 1994 and has served as the president of the Israeli Feldenkrais Guild.

Nativ currently leads the Bujinkan Dojo of Awareness, where he teaches and researches the influence of the martial arts on the development of the Feldenkrais Method.

Louise Runyon has been practicing the Feldenkrais Method in Atlanta, GA since 2000, completed Bones for Life training in 2003, and works with a wide variety of clients including performing artists, people with neurological conditions, pelvic floor issues, and chronic pain. In addition to Awareness Through Movement® and Bones for Life classes, Runyon offers workshops on the pelvic floor. Also a dancer, choreographer, and poet, she has published four books of poetry. www.feldenkraisatlanta.com, www.louiserunyonperformance.com Annie Thoe, GCFP, Assistant Trainer, practices in Seattle, WA. Her articles and stories combine her work with nature awareness and the Feldenkrais Method. Thoe has published an extensive audio library of guided audio Awareness Through Movement lessons with CDbaby, iTunes & Amazon for improving balance, breathing, vision, shoulders, neck and head, and lower back. Her video lessons can be found on the YouTube channel: Sensing Vitality. www.sensingvitality.com Edward Yu is a writer and martial arts enthusiast, currently residing in the economy section of an Airbus 380. He is the author of The Art of Slowing Down: A Sense-Able Approach to Running Faster and The Mass Psychology of Fittism: Fitness, Evolution and the First Two Laws of Thermodynamics (Undocumented Worker Press). He currently lives between Southern California and Portugal, where he teaches classes in Bagua, Tai Chi and running.

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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 August 1, 2019.

Editor Anita Noone Assistant Editor Helen Singh-Miller Editorial Board Adam Cole Dana Fitzgibbons Belinda He Jacki Katzman Elin Lobel Anita Noone Helen Singh-Miller Jessica Pink Margot Schaal Design AHL&CO Image Credits Front and back covers Digital collages by Christiana Antico, photos of San Francisco Feldenkrais Training, Lone Mountain College, Haight-Ashbury

by Bob Knighton (1976) used with permission of the IFF Archive© International Feldenkrais® Federation Archive Pages 1, 2 Digital drawings by Texas Manning, photos of Amherst Feldenkrais Training, Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts

by Michael Wolgensinger (1981) used with permission of the IFF Archive© International Feldenkrais® Federation Archive Page 11 Accessed 12/8/2018. http:// www.intropsych.com/ch02_ human_nervous_system/ homunculus.html and used with permission of Russell A. Dewy, PhD Pages 23-40 Photos and video stills used with permission of Moti Nativ and the IFF Archive© International Feldenkrais® Federation Archive Pages 51-54 Photos used with permission of Annie Thoe and Angela, Phillip’s mother Page 61 Photo by Moon Dickson used with permission

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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Front, back cover, and inside back cover Digital collages by Christiana Antico