2022 The Feldenkrais Journal #32

Feldenkrais

Cover Marina Rosenfeld, Deathstar, exhibition poster, 2017

Deathstar, the title of Marina Rosenfeld’s solo exhibition at Portikus (Frankfurt, Feb 17-April 16, 2017), referred to an unrealized line of research conducted in the late nineties in the last days of the sound laboratory at AT&T (formerly Bell Labs). Rosenfeld reconstructed a multi-microphone array associated with "perceptual soundfield reconstruction," that is, a recording technique that aimed to reproduce a vivid, dimensional and experiential account of one acoustic space within another. For the artist, the "deathstar," the abandoned device's informal nickname, pointed to an intriguing alternative technological future where a potentially non-linear, decentered subjectivity, tied to difference and the particularities of bodies, might have supplanted the coming emphasis on portability and standardization that fed into the rise of the cell phone. For the work, Rosenfeld took up the deathstar’s idea of environmental recording but inserted it back into a more immediate and complex temporality, that of the gallery, which was co-opted as a site of continuous, simultaneous recording and playback for the twomonth duration of the exhibition. An audio score consisting of extended “silences” punctuated by vocal utterances, noise and brief eruptions of electro-acoustic sound, was emitted at floor level, where it co-mingled with environmental noises (geese, visitors, traffic, bells) and entered the

system via the microphone array high overhead.

From Donaueschinger Musiktage festival book

Letter from the Editor 5

26 A Refinement of Weber’s Law Mercedes von Deck 34 The Advantages and Disadvantages of a Diagnosis: The Case of Yuval Michal Ritter 39 On Listening David Kaetz 42 At the Piano: The Hidden Physical Component in Listening Alan Fraser 71 Back to Back Breathing Alice Friedman 75 Two Senses of Hearing David Kaetz Contents

78 Leftovers / The Orienting Stone D. Graham Burnett 87 Learning to Listen, Learning to Hear Maggy Burrowes 97 On the Primacy of Hearing Moshe Feldenkrais 102 The Nature of Singing: A Conversation Deborah Bowes, Karen Clark, Richard Corbeil, Drew Minter, Stephen Paparo, Robert Sussuma, and Kwan Wong 118 Contributor Bios

© Copyright 2022 Feldenkrais Guild of North America. All rights revert to authors and artists upon publication.

Letter from the Editor

Editors of The Feldenkrais Journal ™ often wonder whether a themed or general issue would better suit the interests of our readers. Based on the quality and breadth of the submissions we received we opted for a hybrid format this time, publishing research and case studies alongside contributions with the theme of "listening." Fortuitously, this theme allows us to listen, metaphorically, to its echoes in the general pieces as well. Indeed, Dr. Feldenkrais himself did not often address "listening" explicitly. And yet his article, "On the Primacy of Hearing," first published in 1979 in Somatics magazine, suggests the broad view that we attend to the resonance of this theme throughout the method.

We start this issue with several articles that highlight the value of what we could call a metaphorical listening or attention. “A case study of Gabriel Mata and his recovery from the West Nile virus" is Daniela Schellenberg’s moving account of how one client listened to his potential and made unanticipated progress as a result. In "How the Feldenkrais Method® of Somatic Education Helped Me to Control My Rage" Mark Snyder applies close listening skills learned in Functional Integration® and Awareness Through Movement® lessons to his behavioral challenges.

For “Learning to Teach the Feldenkrais Method Online and Outside,” David Hall, Fritha Pengelly, and Fariya Doctor attend to the potential resonance of high and low-tech options for staying connected (wait till you see what these practitioners have rigged up!). In "A Refinement of Weber’s Law" Dr. Mercedes von Deck unpacks recent research into why listening takes time. We are blessed with the benefit of her expertise. Michal Ritter’s empathic listening propels “The Advantages and Disadvantages of a Diagnosis: The Case of Yuval," as she questions who we listen to and why.

David Kaetz, an erudite Feldenkrais® practitioner, musician, and poet, has generously adapted the foreword to his book Listening with Your Whole Body to start off the second half of this issue. There isn’t a better story or storyteller. The following contributions engage the theme of "listening" in the Feldenkrais Method explicitly, accompanied by vivid illustrations.

Alan Fraser’s “At the Piano: The Hidden Physical Component in Listening" presents a rigorous and yet accessible piano playing technique. This entry will bring out the musician, not to mention the child, in every practitioner. Maggy Burrowes is at the mic in “Learning to Listen, Learning to Hear,” gracefully blending insight on singing and healing in a roman à clef to which we can all relate.

Between these two musical pieces, Alice Friedman, an assistant trainer and former dancer, has choreographed a beautiful Feldenkrais

lesson called "Back to Back Breathing." Friedman brings new meaning to our familiar “feedback mechanism” of the floor, inviting trainees to lie on their sides, backs touching, listening to each other breathe.

David Kaetz’s second contribution to this issue, "Two Senses of Hearing" weaves together unexpected stories and histories that prepare us for D. Graham Burnett’s “Leftovers / The Orienting Stone,” a rich evolutionary perspective on the relationship between hearing and navigating space.

Which brings us to Moshe Feldenkrais “On the Primacy of Hearing," the heart of this issue of the Journal. It would take a whole Feldenkrais training to identify the various threads in the piece. In one turn not otherwise explored in the issue, Dr. Feldenkrais ties the arrested development of our hearing to the overreach of our vision, which he describes as having become “domineering instead of dominant.” As in other texts published and republished here, there is a lesson at the end inviting readers to experiment with their eyes closed.

Deborah Bowes, Karen Clark, Richard Corbeil, Drew Minter, Stephen Paparo, and Robert Sussuma wrap the issue in a conversation on "The Nature of Singing," a workshop series organized by Kwan Wong that has twice featured these dynamic practitioners, in 2020 and 2021.

The last few years have provided ample opportunity to apply what we have learned in Feldenkrais training and practice. The Covid pandemic, social inequity, and global conflict have called for bold action. But they also have called for us, collectively, to cultivate listening—both metaphorically and actually—with our whole selves.

—Helen Miller

A case study of Gabriel Mata and his recovery from the West Nile virus using the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education

I trained as a Sport Kinesiology and Human Movement Science teacher in Switzerland, exploring many different sports and athletic activities. During my studies, I suffered a serious back and neck injury and was told by doctors that I would not be able to return to sports or teaching. Luckily, the massage therapist I worked with in the hospital was studying the Feldenkrais Method and introduced me to a community of practitioners. Inspired by their approach, I entered a training program and became a Guild Certified Feldenkrais PractitionerCM , a life-changing experience that has helped me recover from my injuries. I entered the profession formally and soon opened my own practice helping others to recover and regain function.

Years later, I had the opportunity to work as an independent consultant at a pain clinic where I met Gabriel Mata. Mr. Mata’s willingness to learn and his curiosity were immediately apparent and proffered a chance I could help him. This is the story of how we started

Daniela Schellenberg

working together and, over a period of two years, made significant improvement in his ability to recover movement and function.

Introduction

Gabriel Mata is a 53-year-old male from Desert Hot Springs, California who presented with chronic pain secondary to a mosquito-transmitted virus called the West Nile virus. He was bitten and became infected with the West Nile virus on or about July 3, 2015, at the age of 50 years. During the infection, he felt very weak and had influenza-like symptoms, including chills and diarrhea, loss of balance, sleeplessness, dizziness, and blackouts.

On July 7, he had a seizure that preceded a coma which lasted two days. When he awoke, he could not move his legs and arms. He then lapsed into another coma for ten days. He was taken to two different hospitals over a period of eight weeks.

Because the doctors could not diagnose the etiology of his signs and symptoms, Mr. Mata was taken to a specialty clinic. When he awoke from the coma, he had feeling in his legs but could not move them. His weight fell quickly from 82 to 64 kg (180 to 140 lb).

Mr. Mata experienced severe pain in his hips and pelvis, which radiated down both legs, and also felt tingling in his toes. At the specialty clinic he received individual physical therapy. He was brought to the intensive care unit where three times per day doctors performed lumbar punctures, also known as spinal taps, during which a needle is inserted between two lumbar vertebrae to remove a sample of cerebrospinal fluid.

Mr. Mata exhibited both pain and paresthesia, a burning or prickling sensation, in the lower parts of both legs. He had no muscle strength in the left lower leg, severe soft tissue swelling in both feet, and Sudeck’s atrophy, a disturbance in the parasympathetic nervous system, in his left leg. The bones in his left leg were weaker than normal, and bony changes were present. The intensity of his pain ranged from moderate to severe and was worsening. He was treated with medications and regular physical therapy.

When Mr. Mata was discharged he had to continue using a wheelchair, and neither his home therapy nor the physical therapy in the regional hospital appeared to help his condition significantly. Staff at the regional hospital referred him to a local pain clinic with a multidisciplinary treatment plan that included the Feldenkrais Method. I informed Mr. Mata that the Feldenkrais Method was likely to be effective but would require substantial time and commitment. He responded positively to my caution, and we began.

Process

In January 2016, Mr. Mata started Feldenkrais® lessons with me. He had been employed in industrial construction and painting, and liked to ride his bicycle. Taking his interests and background into account, I tested his righting reflexes and lifted him up during the first lesson to check his ability to use ground forces in standing. He was amazed that he could feel the blood rushing to his legs and feet during the two seconds of standing. This encouraged him immediately and helped him to believe that it would be possible to improve significantly.

Many patients with paresthesia do not realize how much they can actually do through visualization. This was the case with Mr. Mata. The idea that a little mosquito had taken his life like this made him feel depressed at times. He felt sad, stuck, and somewhat humiliated, especially in his hometown where he had regularly ridden his bike to work. Because doctors told him that he had to accept his situation, that there was nothing he could do about it, he felt like he had no other choice. He was too weak to go anywhere else at that time other than to his doctor appointments and to the hospital for therapy.

At the beginning of our work together it was difficult for Mr. Mata to do most everyday activities, such as going to the bathroom or getting onto the floor and back into his wheelchair. Because he had been able to stand for a second on his right leg, feeling the ground forces, I decided to have him get on a stationary bike each time he came to the lessons, using his arms to get on the bike and then pushing the legs down to regain strength and stimulate his feet. His motivation and discipline were unbelievable.

With this activity, Mr. Mata experienced the powerful effects of his own willpower, and that a lot might be possible. Rather than being in a state of hopelessness and apathy, he became engaged, enthusiastic, and a rush of energy was visible on his flushed cheeks. Mr. Mata was already a very positive person, with a lot of faith and a great sense of gratitude, which helped him in the whole recovery process.

During the individual Functional Integration® lessons we did substantial foot and toe work, stimulating the brain to recognize the feet and connect them to the pelvis and spine from below. I had Mr. Mata roll and crawl a lot, and reconnect to his locomotion. I gave him resistance to push against when necessary, and had him tuck his toes under in lying in order to practice pushing from his feet.

I showed Mr. Mata what he could do using past experiences, images, and a broader idea of functioning such as looking up to engage his back muscles and looking behind at his foot. We explored distal motor control of the feet and hands and also leveraged a proximal approach to reactivating toe, foot, ankle, finger, hand, and wrist movements from the core or center. We coordinated the movement of his eyes with visual cues and the recollection of past experiences, stimulating efferent

neurons and motor neurons that carry neural impulses away from the central nervous system towards muscles in the pelvis and down into the legs and feet.

Before asking him to use his lower legs, in which he reported decreased sensation, I decided to help Mr. Mata develop a clear sense of the movement possible in his knees, which he reported feeling more clearly, connecting them to his pelvis and core while engaging his upper body. Eventually he was able to kneel in front of the table, using his upper body and arms to help bear his weight while upright in various positions: standing on his knees, shifting his weight, leaning, and turning. By using his better side and visualizing how he could apply what he learned and remembered from the right, he was able to stimulate his left side and regain sensation little by little.

During the Awareness Through Movement® classes, Mr. Mata took advantage of a number of opportunities to move more. He crawled, rolled, pushed up, used his core diagonally with hands on the feet or lying on a roller. He used his hip and back muscles to extend and his head to orient himself in space in a prone position. Gradually he was able to push himself up through the feet and hands. Mr. Mata learned how to sit on his heels and squat and how to stand up from a squatting position. Eventually he balanced on a big gymnastic ball while sitting and also while lying over it, kneeling on hands and knees. It was not easy for him, yet we stimulated the deeper spinal muscles in many different ways, working with the ball and other wobbling objects such as a roller and a balance disc. In class he was always willing to try, sometimes with my help, often employing his own efforts. In fact, Mr. Mata frequently showed off, expressing his pride and sense of accomplishment and engaging others around him.

As we worked, using the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education and other alternative therapies, Mr. Mata appeared more and more inspired to keep going. His hope and newfound freedom were palpable. He said he felt understood and supported by me and my colleagues. He said that seeing other people with even worse conditions was also motivating. Over time, his spirit brightened. He told me he felt more alive and did not feel so sorry for himself anymore.

Mr. Mata responded positively to assistance at every stage and each success increased his motivation. In multiple ways Mr. Mata stimulated his nervous system to recognize the function that had been there previously. He moved better every day through awareness and practice. He relearned to move every part of himself, even when movement seemed lost forever. Mr. Mata got stronger and stronger, embracing memory and discovery to “make the impossible possible.”

Towards the end of our intensive work together, Gabriel said to me:

I feel like a person again, like a human being. When I go to the bathroom to urinate, I feel like a man again. There is nothing

Fig 1 Gabriel Mata standing up from a chair without help after being in a wheelchair for three years (2018)

stopping me. The Feldenkrais Method has helped me stand up. Every little muscle in the body remembers, like when you were a child, a baby, when you learned all the movements. It’s all in the mind. It taught me that anything is possible with willpower and knowledge and wanting to stay alive and wanting to live. Life is beautiful.”

Results

In August 2017, two years after the initial arbovirus infection, Mr. Mata stood up by himself at the counter of the pain clinic, using what he learned from all the weight-bearing movements on the floor, in sitting, and on his hands and knees. [Fig 1] His improvements gave him confidence and motivated him to continue to learn and improve. Once he had sensation in his legs, he felt renewed purpose and possibilities for his life.

With diligence and discipline and sticking to his home therapy program like squatting, balancing on one leg, weight shifting, rolling from side to side, sitting on the heels, and working with his toes and feet, he got inspired. “Every day I wake up and have something to do. I get to meet the therapists and learn and regain strength and confidence. It gives me a meaning and a goal in my mind. I could never tell myself I did not at least try and give it a chance. And it worked!” he said.

Indeed, he put a lot of work into it. His mantra became, “It works if you work it.” Because of his positive attitude, we all got inspired, all the therapists and other patients. Mr. Mata was so excited during Functional Integration sessions when he was able to wiggle his toes or when he felt a muscle firing in his thigh, dormant for so long. He made us all cry when he got up the first time in class or in front of the medical doctor when he showed him how he could walk with the crutches. One day, when he had to make his schedule, he just stood up from his wheelchair in front of the main desk; everyone was blown away not expecting him to stand up. What a surprise! It seemed to affect other patients too in the sense that the collective struggle seemed lessened after seeing Mr. Mata improve that much.

He had been told by doctors that he would be paraplegic and dependent on caregivers for the rest of his life. Instead, he was experiencing a significant improvement of his functionality, in the middle of a promising journey. “One day, I will show other people and talk in front of other people, to help others,” Gabriel said.

Through Gabriel’s work with the Feldenkrais Method, he has seen the many ways he can help himself. He has learned the principles of the Feldenkrais Method, which have helped him to take care of himself in many situations that had previously been difficult or impossible to tolerate. For example, he has fallen many times in many places, such as in the bathroom and in the shower. He learned how to roll when he fell

without hurting himself, how to be agile when he hurt his ankle, and how to use proper posture in balancing and weight shifting for walking. Most of all, he learned how to keep his positive mind, and to remain motivated by his success, his hard work, and by therapists who challenged him and offered him insight and support. As a result, he continued to improve steadily and get on with his life.

Mr. Mata responded very well to his process with the Feldenkrais Method and somatic learning. He is walking with crutches after three years and continuing to improve strength in his legs and coordination, especially on the left side. The right-side leg function has improved from virtually nil to 80%, and the left side from virtually nil to 50%.

His left stabilizing core muscles, dorsiflexion, and toe curling on the left foot, and knee extension and stability on standing, are still weak. The left hip muscles and muscles around the knee are relatively atrophied but are getting stronger and more innervated. His lower back pain from the lumbar punctures was treated with cortisone injections, which have helped. He has applied movements from Awareness Through Movement classes to end his back pain, using “the pelvic clock”, “oscillations through the body”, “sitting on the heels” and many more related lessons. He can balance on the right leg for about 20 seconds with eyes open, and on the left leg he can balance with the crutches for about two seconds. His left gluteus-muscle strength is about half of that on the right side. For longer distances he still uses a wheelchair, but for short distances or going out to a restaurant he uses crutches.

Due to Mr. Mata relying more on his right side and right leg, which have recovered more quickly, he is favoring this side. The left side is still much weaker. Doctors have assessed that the West Nile virus is still present in his left leg but localized in that leg and inactive. This might contribute to why the left side is slower to recover in comparison to the right leg. Nevertheless, the signs are encouraging that with time Mr. Mata will regain more coordination and strength on the left side and eventually walk unaided or with one crutch. According to Mr. Mata, his neurologist was most impressed that he has been able to regain the function of walking.

Conclusion

By working with the somatic learning approach of the Feldenkrais Method, Mr. Mata has regained partial leg and gait function after being in a coma for 12 days with no leg function. After three years of being in a wheelchair and not being able to stand up or walk, he is able to stand freely, weight shift, and walk with crutches. He is continuing to make improvements on a weekly basis by consistently practicing everything he has learned. His goal is to drive a car again, which seems realistic considering his determination and what his recovery and progress have shown so far.

How the Feldenkrais Method® of Somatic Education Helped Me to Control My Rage

1 Feldenkrais, Moshe. Body Awareness as Healing Therapy: The Case of Nora (Berkeley: Somatic Resources Frog, Ltd., 1977).

2 Body and Mature Behavior: A Study of Anxiety, Sex, Gravitation and Learning (New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1949).

Over the past few years I suffered a series of rage reactions or tantrums triggered by events connected with the sale of my parents’ home in 2015. These reactions were worse than any I had previously and gave me pause. For some time I felt helpless to change my behavior, but I have made progress using what I learned from the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education. I would like to share some of my observations in the hope that others with similar problems might benefit.

I am not a Feldenkrais® Practitioner, nor have I received any professional Feldenkrais training. Most of what I learned about Feldenkrais I learned from the late Deedee Eisenberg of Califon, New Jersey, through her series of Awareness Through Movement® (ATM®) classes and ten Functional Integration® (FI®) sessions in 2002-2003. After these sessions ended, I read a few of Dr. Feldenkrais’ books. The Case of Nora and Body and Mature Behavior left the most lasting impressions.1, 2 In 2015 I had another ten FI sessions with Michal Ben-Reuven of Princeton, New Jersey, to help with a gait issue. I felt like I needed to learn how to walk better because my hip joints often became sore. The lessons cured the soreness.

Mark Snyder

My interest in bodywork was motivated by lower back pain that started in high school. It would come and go without apparent reason and wasn’t a problem until I started working. I would get spasms that sometimes prevented me from walking, as well as neck pain and stiffness. I tried a number of approaches, including Trager®, chiropractic, and Rolfing®, without lasting relief. Only after my fifth session with Deedee did I sense a reliable shift. Since then I have been relatively pain free, even when doing strenuous work like house-moving. When I feel something is not right, I apply what I learned from Deedee.

The following procedure summarizes what Deedee taught me in working with my back: First, pause and respect the pain, as it is a form of information. Second, explore the movement in slow motion to find the earliest discomfort. Stop at the first hint of discomfort and go back to neutral. Try this a few times and notice what you feel. I call these, “baby steps.” Finally, try the movement again. After two or three “baby steps” I can usually resume activity without pain or worry.

I started out employing these steps with my back, but I have learned to apply them to other parts of my body as well, such as my knees, ankles, and neck. As I will discuss in some depth with this article, the process has also helped me to manage my rage.

Losing my temper had been a persistent if infrequent occurrence for most of my life. It got much worse leading up to and after the sale of my parents’ house. Although I had seen other people behaving in a similar way, some claiming satisfaction as a result, I finally accepted that losing control of my anger was not healthy for me. My reactions to frustrating situations were consuming. Fortunately, I never directed my outbursts at another person; instead, I attacked the objects around me and broke my things.

In the summer of 2016, looking forward to visiting my Uncle Don in North Carolina, I decided to clean out the back of my minivan. It was late afternoon. I thought it would be a twenty minute job, after which I would cook something on the grill, and enjoy a small sense of accomplishment.

I thought the rear hatch was unlocked so I went to the handle and pulled, but it did not open. I unlocked it from the driver’s door and tried again. No luck. I wondered if the latch had gotten loose, something I had fixed the year before. No, there was no play in the latch. I tried unlocking it again. Nothing. I locked it and unlocked it a few more times, pulling the handle, pacing between the door and the hatch. Nope. Using my keychain, I did it again, watching the lock button through the rear windshield. The button went up and down, but it didn’t matter. “Dammit!”

“This shouldn’t be happening!” I thought. “The latch got loose, but I fixed that!” I tried to remember what the hatch looked like inside, but the image was foggy. “Those goddamned engineers think they are so perfect! Why didn’t they figure out a way to prevent this? I need to open

that hatch!” I punched and kicked the hatch a few times, denting it. “Damn those engineers! Some cheap little plastic part broke, and now I can’t use my van.”

By now the sun had set and it was getting dark. I could no longer make out the button through the window. I could feel my face on fire, my ears steaming. “Why won’t you open for me?!” I pleaded. I wanted to break something, anything. I kicked a tire, and went inside, slamming doors as I went. I collapsed in my chair in the twilight, no longer hungry, my plans shattered.

I felt like a rock, stuck in place. I was humiliated and ashamed. A weight pressed on my chest; it took effort to breathe. I felt paralyzed. After a little while it became difficult to keep my eyes open. Before I realized, it was past ten o’clock. Defeated and humiliated, I went to bed and slept for a long time, a hard sleep.

I did not feel much different the next afternoon when I finally woke up. I was not hungry. I did not want to move, but I made myself eat, watch TV, and clean up the kitchen to make the time pass. I tried to read, but could not. I was a zombie for about twenty-four hours.

Flying into a rage in front of my condo was embarrassing enough, but the rage-induced hangover was what really impaired my functioning. The blow up might last, at most, 45 minutes, but the shame and humiliation overwhelmed me for hours, even days. In that state I had difficulty performing simple acts of daily living such as eating or cleaning. I often surrendered to sleep instead. I feared I would explode and break something I needed, or just stay frozen. How could I stop repeating this pattern?

My first steps in taking control of my behavior were two small changes in my thinking, both inspired by the Feldenkrais Method. Neither of them were conscious at first. It was only as I tried to articulate what I was feeling that I was able to piece together an explanation. I asked myself questions and felt for answers, finally putting them into words.

First, I realized I could no longer convince myself that my frustration was normal. All of a sudden, losing control had become unacceptable and potentially dangerous. Just because I had never taken my anger out on anyone before did not mean I never would. If I reacted like that at work I could be fired. I did not want to be someone who lost control like that anymore. Second, I could not help but see each tantrum as a link in a long chain, each outburst having less to do with its trigger and more to do with something not right inside me. My anger was not a response to my current environment, but an unconscious reflex.

Without realizing I was applying Deedee’s (and Dr. Feldenkrais’) first step, I decided I had to pause, to interrupt my habitual pattern. Then, again without realizing it, I applied the second step she had taught me. I tried to find the earliest “discomfort.” How did this pattern start? I tried

to break down my rage. In hindsight, I realized it was my experience with the Feldenkrais Method that inspired me to approach the problem in this way: to interrupt the habit, then try to find the beginning.

My rages all started the same way, with the same thought: “This is not supposed to be happening!” The phrase acted like a switch, giving me permission to lose control.

One day in 1979, a few months into my first professional job, I came home from work very frustrated. I had been asked to work outside the scope of my education, a BA in physics, and my job of production engineer, to conduct a chemical analysis using a mass spectrometer, a task more suited to a PhD chemist. Interdepartmental politics were likely behind the scheme. Accepting the assignment would put me in the middle and set me up to fail. “This is not supposed to be happening!” I thought. “My bosses are supposed to protect me! They knew about this assignment when they hired me, but they didn’t tell me! If I refuse, they’ll let me go now. If I accept, they’ll fire me later, when I fail!” I churned my predicament over in my mind on the commute home. When I arrived I played my drums as loudly as possible, screaming at my bosses.

But it was not enough to quell my rage. I needed to break something—my drum heads, all of them. It was very hard to do. I had to stab them with the sticks, but I punctured them all. Replacing them cost nearly $100. But I felt ashamed and stupid even before I tallied up the bill. I ate dinner with my parents in silence that night.

I remembered other rage reactions I’d had, like getting stuck with my tractor in the upper field. Looking back I saw that they all ended the same way. I always felt deep shame and humiliation when the adrenaline ran out. Why, after sixty years, had I not learned?

My attitude toward this behavior changed a little as a result of these thoughts. Before, a rage reaction seemed to be one solid, unbreakable thing. Now, it had a beginning and an end. The problem had been demystified somewhat and that gave me hope.

Thinking about the broken hatch a few days later, after I calmed down, I wondered how I might have felt if I had articulated my thoughts differently. “Yes, the hatch should have a better design, but I can’t do anything about that now.” Having options in my language was like having options in my movement. I felt a distinct wave of relief that suggested I had found a crack in my wall of rage. It was in the word, “now,” the present. It allowed me to see that my rage was an escape from the present, where the hatch was locked, to a place where the hatch might be open.

And there were other cracks in the wall. Instead of being the victim of far away engineers, choosing different words had exposed me as a perpetrator of my rages. I was talking myself into them. In the moment I considered the word, “now,” I could feel my body relax. If I changed the way I talked about my frustration, could I maintain control over my anger and prevent a tantrum?

I thought, talking is a process, each word following another. This

reinforced the idea that the rage was a process, something built out of parts, steps. It was not the solid wall it appeared to be, rather it was made up of separate elements, like a differentiated movement in a Feldenkrais lesson. I felt relief upon articulating that thought. My body was giving me feedback, lifting the weight I still felt. “I am on the right track,” I remember thinking.

It was still murky. I knew I was reacting unconsciously, but the anger was so strong. What did that mean? A door is just a door, but I was acting as if it were trying to kill me. If so, why was I not afraid? “Because I was too angry,” came the response. So what was I afraid of? Oh, a bunch of things, wouldn’t you know! I might not be able to see my uncle again; he was almost 90. But that made me sad, not afraid or angry . . . .

I had bought the minivan to move all my stuff when I sold the house. If I could not use the hatch, I would not be able to move my stuff, and then what? It did not take long to remember the thought that flashed into my head around the third time I switched off the locks. If I could not use the hatch, I might have to leave my stuff behind. It would be like being homeless. Homeless! That was the big fear behind the broken hatch.

Spotting the initial fear was like noticing the earliest discomfort in a movement. Ignoring that pain and barreling through took me on a path that was different from what I wanted. Seeing the beginning gave me choices to go in other directions.

I had found and made progress with the beginning and the middle. I had found the end but I had not felt any progress. What did I know about the end? At the end was another transition, from aggression to surrender. When I gave up on the hatch I had felt only defeat and humiliation, crushed by a tiny piece of plastic I could not see. But in hindsight, there had been a ray of light. I had come back to the present and accepted that I was powerless over the door.

Giving up a losing strategy was a real victory.

Applying Feldenkrais lessons in this way changed my understanding of my rage from “something that just happened to me” to “my reaction to something that frightened me.” Even as a child playing with blocks, I had turned my fear into anger so quickly that I didn’t even remember being scared. If I could pause and acknowledge the fear, and feel it, could I interrupt my old habit enough to prevent myself from flying into a rage? Could I direct my attention to what was actually happening in the present rather than being dragged into the past or future? If I had talked myself into it, could I learn to talk myself out of it? By directing my attention consciously, rather than falling into the old rage rut, could I teach myself to behave differently? What would it be like to accept a broken car door, or office politics, as things I could not or did not have to change immediately?

As a result of this process I began to be more careful with my self-talk when I started to feel frustrated and to incorporate soothing messages whenever I felt the rage pattern being activated. Mostly by reminding myself to stay in the present, I directed my awareness to articulating and addressing the threats I was unconsciously reacting to, such as worrying about bills. I began to prioritize my day to lessen my financial threats. For example, I started spending more time earlier in the day pricing my record collection to sell. Fighting great internal resistance, I spent time working on my resume and searching job postings. These steps seemed to help. My anxiety level came down and my days brightened. I applied myself to volunteer work using my skills of writing and editing. I even got some freelance jobs. Since it was now clear that my rage reactions were triggered by things I had every right to be afraid of, like losing my job or becoming homeless, I began to understand why I was getting so upset. Facing my fears and doing something to reduce the threats made my symptoms more manageable. I was not “cured,” but I had made progress. In the months since the battle with the hatch, my progress has mostly held and even expanded, despite new threats.

I found the Feldenkrais Method to be the most effective approach to solving my long-standing back problems. The Feldenkrais Method gets to the root of the problem and provides effective tools to reestablish functional movement whenever the old habits return. I have incorporated Feldenkrais teachings into my daily routine, mostly by doing “mini-ATM sessions.” Rather than trying to force change onto my body, Feldenkrais allows me to work with my existing patterns.

As an undergraduate, I studied physics. The language of physics seeks to describe the patterns of the universe in concise mathematical statements. I searched for patterns in the Feldenkrais lessons I learned from Deedee. Then I searched for patterns in my own thoughts and emotional experiences.

Like each of my movements, each rage reaction has a beginning, middle, and end. I approached my rage as a Feldenkrais practitioner might approach physical movement. To turn the head, one must also make adjustments in the torso, the eyes, the shoulders, and the arms.

To reduce a rage, I had to address the larger threats to my well being, and break them down. I had to interrupt habitual emotional reactions and seek more functional options. I had to look at the various components of my fears and take the time to articulate and understand them.

I was still bewildered by the overwhelming shame I felt following a tantrum. Where did it come from? I noticed a strong association between loss of control and feeling ashamed. When I was out of control, I was unable to direct my attention from the present to the past and

future. I lost perspective. Not being able to control my attention seemed to be a mark of immaturity. Without accurate information gained from directed awareness, I felt less secure, internally and in terms of my place in society. Now, whenever I begin to get frustrated, I try to bring my attention to the present, ask what threats I might be facing, and allow myself to feel afraid.

Learning to Teach the Feldenkrais Method® Online and Outside

David Hall Fritha Pengelly Fariya Doctor

David Hall GCFPCM , Assistant Feldenkrais Trainer Sydney, Australia

The level of group cohesion and engagement that has evolved over the last two years of my online lessons has been amazing. I’ve been practicing the Feldenkrais Method for over thirty years and I am more inspired than ever. I cannot see myself going back to weekly “in the flesh” classes. I love the fact that I can share my screen and give students a front row view of anatomical structures or other inspiring imagery.

I have always been interested in the meditative and philosophical aspects of the work. The method as process and path. It’s not the most popular perspective and the number of people in my city who share that interest is limited. Around the world I’ve found a larger community.

I use a webcam, Zoom, Logic Pro, and the UA Apollo audio interface. I do the lesson as I deliver it using a DPA wireless microphone (experience!). The lesson I lead each week is created in the moment after immersion in the theme and preceded by an exploratory email.

Inspired by Moshe, I’ve always found recording and reviewing my lessons an invaluable source of professional development. Since May

2020 I have uploaded 124 new recordings. It’s so satisfying!

It was quite a job to get set up: the website, recording gear, and Zoom landscape all required a great deal of thought and tech savvy assistance. It has been an ongoing process of refinement that can be measured in my recordings. The thing is that you can now invest one or two thousand dollars in a set up that enables you to produce professional quality content that would have cost an arm and a leg a few decades ago.

The opportunities of this new medium for Feldenkrais® practice are endless. It’s the tactile nature of the voice that gives us the ability to create immersive educational experiences online. I'm still on a roll, creating new lessons each week, and look forward to tapping the potential for collaboration. [Fig 1]

Fig 1 David Hall in his new and improved Zoom landscape

As with most Feldenkrais practitioners I know, I transformed my practice during the pandemic. Since completing my ATM® Practicum in 2011, I had been teaching one weekly ATM class, often attended by just a handful of students. Since making the transition to online teaching in April of 2020, I am now teaching four weekly classes online with students from all over the world. After shutting down my in-person private practice in the spring of 2020, I transformed my front porch into a studio and re-opened for outdoor in-person sessions in the late summer. I’ve been successfully working with students outdoors since. The changes I’ve implemented over the past year have accelerated my learning, expanded my reach, and allowed me to continue to support my community through this time. Exploring many ATM lessons a week, teaching outdoors in a neighborhood with unpredictable elements (delivery trucks, kids playing in the pool next door, birds, heat and cold), and supporting students to develop resilience and adaptability has helped me to clarify what it means to survive in an ever changing environment, how to bring that larger context into my teaching. Additionally, teaching online has allowed me to share more responsibility for learning with my students . . . which is as it should be. [Fig 2]

Fig 2 Fritha Pengelly teaching on Zoom across from her porch studio Fritha Pengelly MFA, GCFPCM Northampton, MA

Fig 3 Fariya Doctor sustaining her Feldenkrais practice in style

Fariya Doctor B.Sc., RMT, GCFPCM Ontario, Canada

I had been teaching online for a couple of years prior to the Pandemic. When Covid hit and I had to shut down my clinic, I felt compelled to do more online teaching. My motivation was driven primarily by a feeling of isolation. Being an extrovert, I found it very hard not to see and share with people. I was grateful for my regular students showing up and we had a chance to bond and commiserate over Zoom. Thanks to online opportunities, I was also able to keep some income flowing in. Zooming has been a lifeline for me, a wonderful way for me to help people, especially those feeling disconnected or out of touch, and a vital way for me to earn a living these past two years. [Fig 3]

A Refinement of Weber’s Law

Mercedes von Deck

Weber’s Law

Dr. Feldenkrais often referred to Weber’s Law to explain his rationale for reducing effort in movement. Weber’s Law states that there is a constant ratio between the magnitude of a sensory stimulus—such as a sound, light, pressure, or muscular work—and the change in that stimulus needed to create a difference that the brain can recognize. In practical terms, if our senses are exposed to a large stimulus, a large change in the intensity of that stimulus is necessary for us to notice any difference. On the other hand, the smaller the initial sensory stimulation, the smaller the amount of change needed for us to discern a difference. Dr. Feldenkrais frequently brought up the example of a fly landing on a weight:

1 Moshe Feldenkrais, “Mind and Body,” Elizabeth Beringer, ed., Embodied Wisdom: The Collected Papers of Moshe Feldenkrais (Berkeley: Somatic Resources, 2010), 37.

2 Moshe Feldenkrais, “Learning to Learn” (1980), http://thefieldcenter. org/06resources/ downloads/learning_to_ learn.pdf

If I hold a twenty pound weight, I cannot detect a fly landing on it because the least detectable difference in the stimulus is half a pound. On the other hand, if I hold a feather, a fly landing on it makes a great difference. Obviously then, in order to be able to tell the differences in exertion one must first reduce the exertion. Finer and finer performance is possible only if the sensitivity, that is, the ability to feel the difference is improved.1

If we are unable to sense the differences between two or more ways of performing an action, we will be unable to choose an option that is more comfortable or more efficient. In his treatise "Learning to Learn" Dr. Feldenkrais stresses, “It is easier to tell differences when the effort is light. All our senses are so built that we can distinguish minute differences when our senses are only slightly stimulated.” 2 While many of us have been taught we must work harder in order to perfect a skill, proceeding with more muscular force actually makes it more difficult to feel the small changes that will allow for lasting improvement. Weber’s Law launched the field of psychophysics—the science of measuring the effects of physical stimuli on the perception of sensations in the mind of the observer. Previously, science was focused on describing the physical world. Mental activity—our consciousness,

3 The Champalimaud Foundation, funded by the Portuguese entrepreneur Antonio de Sommer Champalimaud, created this state-of-the-art research facility in 2010 to support biomedical research that can improve the quality of life of individuals around the world through preventing, diagnosing, and treating disease.

perception, thinking, judgment, emotions, and memory—appeared unquantifiable, subject to force of will and random thoughts. In the 18th century, Ernst Weber showed that it is actually possible to measure processes occuring in the brain and to use these measurements to predict how the mind will perform. As it turns out, how accurately we can sense differences in weight and pressure has nothing to do with willpower.

4 Jose L. Pardo-Vazquez et al., “The mechanistic foundation of Weber’s law,” Nature Neuroscience 22 (2019): 1493–1502, https://doi.org/10.1038/ s41593-019-0439-7

The operation of Weber’s Law, also called the Weber Fechner Principle, has been replicated in hundreds of studies over the last two centuries. The effect across all sensory modalities has been observed in many animal species. At the same time, while Weber’s Law is reproducible, it has eluded definition by mathematical models. Multiple models have been proposed, yet all have failed to accurately describe the data—until recently. In August 2019, the journal Nature Neuroscience published the work of a team of researchers from the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Lisbon.3 By adding in the variable of reaction time and analyzing the time it takes for rats to make a decision regarding differences in the intensity of sound, the researchers were able to derive an accurate and precise mathematical model describing the cognitive processes underlying Weber’s Law.4 Weber as well as other scientists until the Champalimaud group did not consider the time it takes to distinguish differences in sensory stimuli when they noted that the difference in size of the smallest stimulus needed to detect differences in sensation is always in the same ratio to the magnitude of the starting stimulus. By adding in reaction times, the researchers from Lisbon were able to define a mathematical equation that reproducibly describes how animals sense differences between sensory stimuli based on the magnitude of the initial stimulus, no matter how small or large the stimulus. The research group emphasizes that the time it takes to sense differences is key to understanding how the brain processes sensation.

The History of Weber’s Law

5 Dennis Leri, “The Fechner Weber Principle,” 1997, Mental Furniture #10, Semiophysics, accessed November 1, 2022, http:// www.semiophysics.com/ SemioPhysics_Articles_ mental_10.html

6 Moshe Feldenkrais, Body and Mature Behavior: A Study of Anxiety, Sex, Gravitation and Learning (Berkeley: Somatic Resources, 2005), 147.

Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795-1878), for whom Weber’s Law is named, was a German physiologist and anatomist. He was interested in how people sense differences between varying amounts of sensory input, and studied the perception of weight, temperature, and pressure. In his research, Weber discovered that the minimum difference required to discern between two similar stimuli is proportional to the magnitude of the original stimulus.5 In other words, if the original stimulus increases, the magnitude of the difference between the stimuli required to sense the difference does too. Below the threshold of the smallest perceptible difference, no difference will be noticed; for instance, to identify the stronger of two pressure-stimuli applied to the skin, one must be at least 12% more intense than the other. For weight, the ratio is 1/20 to 1/40.6 If you have ever tried to compare the weights of melons in the grocery

7 Leri, ““The Fechner Weber Principle”.

store and have wondered why it is so hard to tell the difference by holding one in each hand, Weber’s Law has the explanation. If one melon weighs six pounds, the other melon must weigh about five ounces more or less for most people to tell the difference. This amount is the smallest detectable difference. A difference of a quarter pound, or four ounces, for example, would not be appreciated.

8 Feldenkrais, Body and Mature Behavior, 147.

Another German physicist and philosopher, Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887), furthered Weber’s work by inventing a unit of just noticeable differences (JND) and measuring sensation in terms of this unit. He explored touch and weight as well as visual acuity and brightness. Fechner confirmed that just noticeable differences were proportional to the size of the starting stimuli; furthermore, smaller differences can be appreciated more clearly when the starting stimuli is small. Fechner wanted to establish an exact relationship between a physical stimulus and the mind’s perception of that stimulus in order to quantify behavior. He tried to formulate an equation that could mathematically characterize the relationship between physical stimulation, the sensation of the stimulation, and the recognition in the brain of the stimulation.7 Since logarithmic scales represent the percentage of change, he determined that S = k log R where S is the intensity of sensation and increases exponentially in relation to the stimulus (R) where the constant k varies depending on the sense being tested.8 This equation seeks to quantify the nervous system’s ability to sense a change in each sensory stimulus as a proportion of the starting stimulus. If there are 100 x 100 watt lights in an indoor amphitheater and one burns out, spectators watching the game won’t notice. If there are ten lights and one burns out, this is beginning to approach the just noticeable difference. If there are five lights in the same size space, turning off one will be immediately apparent.

9 Myrl Cowdrick, “The Weber-Fechner Law and Sanford’s Weight Experiment,” The American Journal of Psychology 28, no. 4 (1917): 585–588, https://www.jstor.org/ stable/1413900

Fechner’s equation above was later shown to be only approximately true and to work best in the mid range of stimulus. Not all the measured data fit his equation.9 The key point is that he realized that our perception of physical events could be represented in a reproducible manner in the brain. His work advanced the field of psychophysics, making unseen mental activity available to scientific measurement.

Weber’s Law, also called the Weber Fechner Principle in honor of both men, continues to be understood intuitively and measured in terms of ratios, yet no mathematical model has been able to completely explain the law up until now. Finding a mathematical model has important implications for how the brain makes comparisons between two similar sensory experiences. A precise model of Weber’s Law could help us determine how the brain interprets differences and how perception works.

10 “Transduction” in Sensory Processes, Boundless Biology, Lumen (n.d.), accessed November 1, 2022, https://courses. lumenlearning.com/ boundless-biology/chapter/ sensory-processes

The Science of Weber’s Law

Weber and Fechner showed us that the human brain can tell differences between differing magnitudes of sensation as a proportion of the starting stimulus. Other scientists later confirmed the same phenomenon in other species. How might our knowledge of the brain and nervous system help explain the observations described by Weber’s Law? In turn, can Weber’s Law lead to better understanding of how sensory information is processed by the brain?

A sensory stimulus causes the sensory receptors in our skin, eyes, ears, nose, or tongue to fire and send nerve impulses, or action potentials of electrical activity, along the sensory nerve to the spinal cord and brain. Sensory receptors communicate the size of the sensory stimulus through two different mechanisms: increasing how fast the nerve impulses are sent (the firing rate), and increasing how many receptors are activated. A more intense stimulus initiates faster firing of more nerve impulses in more sensory receptors.10

The integration of sensory information begins as soon as the information is received in the central nervous system. How the brain translates this data into perception is largely unknown. Research building on Weber’s Law by the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Lisbon might provide a key. Mental processes previously considered unmeasurable, such as sensations and thoughts, may be usefully measured.

Knowing how perception occurs in the brain could have important implications for the treatment of disorders of perception such as hearing loss, vision loss, or loss of proprioception, which can lead to difficulties with balance. While these disorders can originate at the level of the sensory organ, they can also occur centrally in the brain. We don’t know if each sense receptor is mapped to its own neuron in the brain or whether the impulses activate wider networks of neurons. If we can better understand perception, perhaps we can find a way to improve the connection between our sense organs and our brains, or activate larger or different areas of the brain when a deficit occurs. This concept of neuroplasticity suggests that healthy parts of the brain can take over the function of injured or malfunctioning parts.

As discussed, it is easier to feel differences when the starting stimulus is smaller. The brain seems to be able to discern the addition of a few more receptors when there are small numbers of receptors firing in the first place, but we cannot tell if a few more receptors are added when there are a large number of receptors firing to begin with. What is happening in the brain to make this true?

Many models of neuron operation in the brain have been previously proposed to describe Weber’s Law. Before the recent discovery by the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown research group, none were entirely successful. Most older models tried to use Signal Detection

11 Joshua I. Gold and Takeo Watanabe, “Perceptual learning,” Current Biology 20, no. 2 (January 2010): 46–48, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. cub.2009.10.066

12 Stephen W. Link, “Psychophysical Theory and Laws, History of,” International Encyclopaedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences vol. 19, 2nd edition, ed. James D. Wright, (Oxford: Elsevier, 2015), 470–476.

13 Stephen Link, “Fechner’s Pillars: Contributions to Hypothesis Testing, Statistics, Psychoanalysis, and Cognition,” (2001), accessed November 1, 2022, http://psychologie. biphaps.uni-leipzig.de/ fechner/generalinfo/PDFs/ SLink.pdf

14 Lester E. Krueger, “Reconciling Fechner and Stevens: Toward a unified psychophysical law,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12, no. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989): 251–320, https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0140525X0004855X .

Theory, a computational framework that describes how to extract a sensory signal from background noise. Signal Detection Theory effectively describes how the brain overcomes noise in the environment and noise resulting from its own internal processes in order to perceive sensory signals; it has not, however, been able to explain Weber’s Law.11 The psychologist Stephen Link has written extensively about Fechner’s experiments, and created a model explaining Weber’s Law in terms of the accumulation of sensory impulses; more impulses allow the brain to notice bigger stimuli.12 What Link could not explain was how the brain factors out the magnitude of the starting stimulus.13 Stanley Steven’s Power Law fit curves to data points of sensory detection but used averages and could not explain individual data points.14 None of these models managed to account for how the brain distinguishes differences differently depending on the starting magnitude of the stimulus. Meanwhile, in the context of movement education, Dr. Feldenkrais knew that we had to decrease the magnitude of what we were doing in order to allow our nervous systems and brains to notice the difference between various ways of performing a movement.

Prior to the work in Champalimaud, researchers began to fear that mental phenomena could not be described by mathematical equations. They were concerned that there might be too many confounding factors in the functioning of the brain and that willpower, thoughts, and distractions could not be factored out.

Recent research

The research from the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown, led by Jose Pardo-Vasquez, is innovative; it is the first to create an accurate mathematical model of how the brain processes sensory information. As described in their 2019 Nature Neuroscience paper, Pardo-Vasquez and his team studied the ability of rats to notice differences in sound intensity by recording the time it takes for the rats to respond to louder sounds. Noting that Weber’s Law looks at only one aspect of discrimination—its accuracy—they examined the role played by time.

The researchers fitted the animals with mini-headphones, which delivered sound simultaneously to both ears. The sound in one of the two headphones was made to be slightly louder. The researchers recorded how long it took for the rats to turn their heads to the louder sound, and found that the rats’ behavior followed Weber’s Law exactly.

The rats’ ability to tell which sound was louder depended on the ratio between the intensity or loudness of the sounds. The rats were just as capable of telling the difference between two loud sounds and two soft sounds as long as the ratio between the sound intensities was the same. Just as when we are comparing larger weights, the absolute difference between the two sounds had to be greater the louder the sounds. But again, the ratio stayed the same. The louder the sounds, however, the

15 Pardo-Vazquez et al., “The mechanistic foundation of Weber’s law,” 1493–1502.

shorter the time needed by the rats to discriminate between the two sounds.

To describe this psychophysical regularity or rule, the researchers defined a new term: the time-intensity equivalence in discrimination (TIED). The TIED describes how reaction times change as a function of the size or magnitude of the initial stimulus. The TIED is smaller with louder sounds.

The team showed that by adding in reaction times, they are able to derive an accurate mathematical model that links the intensity of a pair of sounds and the time it takes to discriminate between them. Weber’s Law only describes the fact that for sound, it is easier to hear the same difference between two soft sounds than between two loud sounds. The new mathematical model confirms this relationship and also predicts reaction times accurately. The relationship between the loudness of the sounds and the time it took the rats to react was found to be incredibly precise. The research team obtained similar results with sound in humans and with the sense of smell in rats, suggesting their model may be applicable for all senses across species.

Surprisingly, although it has long been recognized that reaction time is a key diagnostic in sensory discrimination (e.g. recall how fast it takes you to hit the brake when you see a squirrel dart into the road), few studies previously explored the effects of reaction time on Weber’s Law. As stated above, most models of Weber’s Law have been cast within Signal Detection Theory, which seeks to determine how the brain picks out one sound or sensation in relation to other less important sensations, and do not address reaction times.15

When sensory receptors are stimulated, they relay how great the stimulus is by increasing the firing rate of the neurons. By studying how the time it takes to react to differences in sound intensity changes when the sounds are softer or louder, the Lisbon research group hopes to eventually explain how stimulus intensity is encoded in the activity of sensory neurons. All senses studied so far display the same relationship. To mathematically describe Weber’s Law, researchers also had to contend with the fact that nearly all sensory judgments can be changed by the context in which a stimulus is perceived. The beauty of the time-intensity equivalence is that it is not affected by other sensory input other than what is being studied in each trial. Despite distractions, the reaction times to softer or louder sounds remained the same if the ratio between the two sounds was above the threshold of noticeable differences.

16 Armin Iraji et al., “The spatial chronnectome reveals a dynamic interplay between functional segregation and integration,” Human Brain Mapping 40, no. 10 (July 2019): 3058–60, https:// onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ abs/10.1002/hbm.24580

Recent research in brain mapping focuses on flexible brain networks created by the interaction and communication among neurons, known as "functional connectivity." These brain networks shift depending on the cognitive tasks. Rather than discrete areas of the brain being solely responsible for interpreting sensory information, whole networks of neurons may work together to process a sensation and to create a motor response.16 The neurons involved seem to change from moment

17 Feldenkrais, “Learning to Learn”.

18 Moshe Feldenkrais, “Image, Movement, and Actor: Restoration of Potentiality interview with Feldenkrais,” Embodied Wisdom: The Collected Papers of Moshe Feldenkrais, ed. Elizabeth Beringer. (Berkeley: Somatic Resources, 2010), 101.

19 Layna Verin, “The Teaching of Moshe Feldenkrais,” accessed November 1, 2022, https://feldenkraisnoho. com/wp-content/ uploads/2012/12/ Feldenkrais.LVarticle.pdf

to moment. Different or larger networks could be activated depending on the intensity of the sensory stimulus. The new mathematical model may help tease out whether brain network activation can explain Weber’s observations that smaller differences are easier to pick up when the starting stimulus is smaller, but can still be distinguished for larger stimuli if there is a large enough difference between the stimuli.

Applications to the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education

The recent research at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown is consistent with Dr. Feldenkrais’ insight that moving slowly with minimal effort is necessary to discern subtle differences. The brain can then chose the better way. Just as distinguishing between the intensities of soft sounds takes longer than loud sounds, distinguishing between subtle aspects of physical movement takes time. While we don’t need a lot of muscular effort to achieve proficiency, we do need to sense the differences and explore the options. In "Learning to Learn," Feldenkrais writes, “The lighter the effort we make, the faster is our learning of any skill; and the level of perfection we can attain goes hand in hand with the finesse we obtain. We stop improving when we sense no difference in the effort made or in the movement.” 17 Sensing differences is crucial.

To be able to tell the differences between various stimuli and clarify our movement, we must also reduce the strain we hold in our bodies. While Signal Detection Theory does not fully explain Weber’s Law, it does recognize the significance of the brain's ability to filter out important sensory stimuli from background noise. Dr. Feldenkrais said that “the keenness of our self-realization depends on” our awareness of unnecessary effort, noting that “most people do not realize the amount of useless strain they have in their eyes, mouth, legs, stomachs.” To be able to pick up on subtle differences—those that make the difference— we have to reduce the background straing and constant firing in the brain. When “your brain becomes quiet . . . you see things that you never saw before. The possibility of making new combinations, which were inhibited before, is restored.” 18

Feldenkrais often combined movements in novel ways, which required students to slow down and pay attention before even attempting to engage in the lesson and “mobilize”. “Making you aware of the minute interval between the time your body mobilizes itself for a movement and [the moment] you actually do that movement . . . allows you to exercise that capacity for differentiation and to change.” 19 The research done in Champalimaud, which describes the time it takes

to react to differences in sensory inputs, clarifies that sensing slight differences requires more time.

Knowing the mathematics behind Weber’s Law and the time-intensity equivalence in discrimination may not help people move better.

Understanding that our nervous systems can sense differences better when muscular effort is minimal can help students of Feldenkrais® lessons to appreciate the easy movement that improves how they feel and use their bodies. The deeper understanding of why this takes time afforded by the research at Champalimaud is good confirmation.

Feldenkrais lessons often seem to create magical results. Weber’s Law and its refinement provide insight into why.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of a Diagnosis: The Case of Yuval

Michal Ritter

Yuval first came to my office with the complaint of lower back pain. The stiffness in his movement was immediately apparent. At 65, Yuval walked without differentiating the main parts of his body; his chest and pelvis moved as more or less one unit. In addition, his knees remained bent as he walked. As we approached one another, I could see that there was no expression in Yuval’s face. His voice was unclear.

These qualities of movement are all typical presentations of Parkinson’s disease.

According to Yuval’s answers in my routine questionnaire, however, he had not received a diagnosis and was not taking any medications at this point. He considered himself to be a “healthy person”.

During our first Functional Integration® (FI®) lesson, Yuval began to feel the ability to move with greater ease and less effort. He became aware of his breathing, accompanied by the movement of his ribs and diaphragm. In feeling the balance between the agonist and antagonist muscles, Yuval was able to distinguish between his chest and his pelvis. This newfound awareness contributed to his uprightness when standing and walking at the end of the lesson. Yuval realized the difference. Rediscovering the ability of his jaw to move readily changed Yuval’s facial expression, and with the hint of a smile he reported that he had almost forgotten of his back pain.

I was thrilled; it was surprising to observe such a change during one lesson. I wondered what role the lack of a diagnosis had played in Yuval’s ability to improve so much so quickly. I was impressed by how receptive Yuval was to the options I put forward during the lesson. He embraced them with great curiosity and optimism. Furthermore, Yuval accepted my suggestion to start a series of Feldenkrais® sessions.

Yuval and I continued to work together for three months, at which

point Yuval reported feeling much better. He said that his back pain had disappeared completely and that he enjoyed significant improvement in performing his daily life activities.

Dancing to rhythmical music was a regular part of our lessons. Yuval seemed to enjoy every moment of it, his body responding to the music with a soft, smooth motion. So I suggested he ask his wife to dance with him, but he determinedly refused, claiming that his wife would not be happy to dance with “such a clumsy man like me”.

Every so often Yuval would tell me that his wife had various complaints about his appearance and functioning. She was not happy with the way he moved, saying he walked with a bent back and did not move his hands while walking. She said that his facial expressions were different from what they used to be. She urged him to see a neurologist in order to understand what had caused these changes.

I wondered whether Yuval’s wife had already assumed a diagnosis. Fearing what the future could bring, she may not have been able to recognize the progress that Yuval was making through our FI lessons. Later on, Yuval told me that indeed, she had guessed the diagnosis a while before.

Yuval finally gave in to his wife’s urging and visited a neurologist. The title that doomed his fate came as a surprise to him. Just as he was experiencing easy and free movement, feeling more secure, and enjoying his ability to dance, Yuval received the bitter diagnosis: You have Parkinson’s disease.

I was also surprised when I saw Yuval at our next lesson, shortly after he had been diagnosed. Yuval walked in stiffly, his knees bent, which reminded me of our first encounter. I didn’t understand what had happened. When he sat down to take off his shoes, his right hand began to shake vigorously—a symptom that hardly manifested before—and it took him a long time to carry out the task. Then, without looking at me directly, in a hoarse voice, his face frozen, Yuval said: “I have Parkinson’s. Now I understand why my wife was complaining all the time.” “And what about the tremendous progress you have experienced during the past months?” I asked. “I don’t remember that I made any progress. With a sickness like this we just deteriorate,” Yuval answered sadly.

I asked him to lie on the FI table and placed a flat round air cushion behind his chest. I gave him an FI lesson in which every movement came to pass freely through his chest, aided by the air cushion under his ribs. The movement was transmitted readily throughout his body and his breathing pattern changed to include the full expansion of his entire rib cage.

At the end of the lesson, when Yuval stood up and began to walk, however, he resumed the truncated gate he had displayed at the beginning of the lesson. He thanked me and left with a despondent look in his eyes. I feared that the achievement of his journey so far had been lost along with the joy of dancing he had experienced only a few days earlier.

What happened? Why had there been such an extreme negative change in Yuval’s condition? The answer struck me . . . but could it really be? Could the simple fact of a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease have such an immediate negative impact?

Considering the case of Yuval, and similar responses following diagnosis and the naming of conditions for other students of mine, I would like to highlight some of the negative aspects of receiving a diagnosis, while also acknowledging important benefits.

A diagnosis is a title, a heading at the top of a list of symptoms that fill certain criteria. Nowadays, at least in the western world, it is common to seek and to provide a diagnosis when someone feels badly or when someone is experiencing anything unfamiliar in their health. But what compels patients and doctors to search so hard for a diagnosis, and what effects can receiving a diagnosis have on our bodies and abilities? As complex symptoms appear, such as pain or physical changes, feelings of worry and helplessness can arise and with them the desire to find an official understanding that encapsulates what’s going on, which we often believe will lead to a solution.

It is important to mention some of the advantages to diagnosis. A diagnosis offers more certainty, even if it is difficult to accept. For the patient, the moment diagnosis is given, a sense of control over their life is often regained. A diagnosis is something tangible that they can point to when others want to know what’s wrong. At times, reaching a diagnosis may allow a physician to provide appropriate care, which they may not have considered or implemented without the diagnosis.

A diagnosis can lead to solutions that fulfill the needs of both patient and doctor, alleviating suffering and illuminating a path forward. When a diagnosis is discovered, there are protocols the doctor can follow and clear instructions for the patient regarding how to deal with the problem. At times, the patient receives a prognosis that fulfills the need to know what to expect in the future.

But the process of naming a condition can, at times, become long and exhausting. The state of suspension itself can produce fears about what might happen in various possible scenarios. Ideas about what lies ahead may cause anxiety, which can, in certain cases, become severe.

If and when a diagnosis is given, patients read about the illness on the internet, where information about further characteristic symptoms appear. Patients may anticipate these symptoms and begin to feel them, in accordance with what is “expected” of people with their diagnosis. Curiosity and possibility may diminish as a result as limitations set in. When diagnosed, patients sometimes lose their sense of self, valuable connections to their self-image, and the internal sense of what is good for them.

Diagnosis can be a form of prison, or an illusion. Once a diagnosis has been made, patients often come to rely on the medical treatment offered to them as the only option. They become more distant from their own body and more dependent on external evaluation. This dependency blurs their ability to feel and define what is right for them. Patients often come to expect the treatment to do all the work—that way they can continue to live according to their previous patterns and behaviors. But these patterns may have contributed to the development of their condition, and their continuation may in fact cause more stress and damage.

A diagnosis is made at a point in a person’s life when they are temporarily weak. It can perpetuate this state even when the condition that led to the diagnosis is no longer relevant.

When I was 16 years old, my dance teacher told me, in an explicit manner, in front of my peers, that I would never be able to become a dancer. Taking her word for it, I stopped dancing for many years. Studying the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education enabled me to place a huge question mark on this estimation. Nowadays, despite having been labeled a non-dancer at a formative time in my self-development, dancing is one of my favorite activities, and many dancers and dance teachers take part in my classes.

At the beginning of a Feldenkrais lesson, we may feel it is difficult to carry out a function; some activities even feel impossible. During the lesson, after some reorganization and new experience, we discover that the activity is possible, and can even be carried out easily and with pleasure. Imagine if we allowed our initial inability to become our definitive "diagnosis"? We would never have tried carrying out actions in new and different ways, and we would be living a life of limitations.

Looking back, most of us can remember a label or diagnosis that has limited our ability to function. Only by becoming aware of their effects can we reverse such limitations and regain control of our lives.

A diagnosis is given by one person, or group of people, to another. To what extent are the people giving the diagnosis aware of all the implications of the diagnosis for the person receiving it? This question is even more significant in the case of mental health practice, where doctors are often tasked with determining to what extent a person should be considered normal.

Without a diagnosis, we are more likely to discover self-treatment and an approach tailored to our specific needs. Instead of dark clouds, symptoms can function as red traffic lights, alerting us to the detrimental effects of certain habitual behaviors. Becoming intimately aware of our particular condition, we can experiment with different paths forward. Of course, there is no rule book saying that a diagnosis should prevent us from doing any of these things.

Alongside the medical practice of diagnosis, where identical labels are often applied uniformly to different people in different life

circumstances, each unique person can continue to discover the path forward for themselves. In a best case scenario a person can work with their diagnosis and not let it paralyze or overdetermine the possibilities.

Yuval’s management of his situation following the diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease was mixed. On the one hand, he was depressed by the chronic nature of the disease and fearful of what the future would bring. On the other hand, he eventually remembered his progress over three months of FI lessons, which gave him hope for improvement. Slowly, with increasing awareness, Yuval has gone through a long process of dealing with the diagnosis. As part of this process, he has continued with Feldenkrais practice.

With each lesson Yuval feels the ability to move with more ease. He experiences the diversity of breathing options by using his voice in different ways. He experiments with differentiating his chest and pelvis, which enables him to use the center of his body to mobilize his limbs. Moving his ankles and hip joints has taken some pressure off his knees, allowing them to unbend a bit when he walks. Moving his eyes and tongue in various directions has contributed to varied facial expressions. Attempts to transfer his weight in different directions have improved Yuval’s balance. Working with a mirror has enabled Yuval to imagine the movement of his shaking hand as if it moves like the “better” hand, which he sees in the mirror, and helps him with fine motor activities. Dancing to music at the end of each lesson integrates all of these experiences.

Another factor that has contributed to Yuval's condition is the anxiety from his expectation that the tremor will appear and cause him embarrassment and shame. In order to regain control of his body, I have suggested that he exaggerate the tremor on purpose and extend it to the "better hand". Voluntary cessation of the added tremor has been followed by diminution of the involuntary tremor as well. This technique among others has helped Yuval regain control of his body.

Considering the case of Yuval, it can be argued that diagnosis plays an immense role in the way that we see ourselves and in how we approach and deal with physical and mental challenges. Yuval’s awareness and understanding of the negative impact of the diagnosis on his self-image has, over time, enabled him to behave in a manner different from what is generally expected of a patient with Parkinson’s. Still, it is clear that the diagnosis accompanies Yuval wherever he goes and is always on his mind. I believe that my role as a Feldenkrais practitioner is to look beyond the generic title and instead see the unique person in front of me.

Awareness of the advantages and disadvantages of a diagnosis may create an opening for therapy and an opportunity for the Feldenkrais practitioner to help give the client perspective in the context of a diagnosis.

The following article has been adapted from the foreword to my book Listening with Your Whole Body, which introduces an integrative, somatic approach to the improvement of hearing.1 In its current form, this piece also serves to introduce an array of contributions by colleagues in somatic education, including Dr. Feldenkrais himself, along with a guest article by a historian of science.

On Listening

David Kaetz

1 David Kaetz, Listening with Your Whole Body (Hornby Island, B.C.: River Centre Publishing, 2017).

2 Lawrence Rosenblum, See What I’m Saying (New York: Norton, 2011), 280.

The long-held concept of the perceptual brain being composed of separate sense regions is being overturned. Your brain seems designed around multisensory input, and much of it doesn’t care through which sense information comes. Your brain wants to know about the world—not about light or sound, as such.

—Lawrence Rosenblum, See What I’m Saying (2011)2

3 Lü Bu Wei, Das Weisheitsbuch der alten Chinesen: Frühling und Herbst des Lü Bu We, trans. Richard Wilhelm (Cologne: Anaconda, 2005), 192. This quotation is the author’s own translation from the German.

All people need a certain exercise of the spirit to be able to really listen. Those who do not have this exercise have to acquire it by learning. It has never happened, not in the old days and not today, that someone could really listen without learning. —Lü Bu Wei, Spring and Autumn (circa 239 BCE)3

We begin to hear—and to remember what we hear—long before we are born into this world. And, as we take our leave, our sense of hearing is our last link to the plane of existence we call life. Our hearing is in place long before we have any idea of a self, and it is there while all that we cherish of that self is dissolving.

And in between these fateful bookends, whether we like it or not, hearing is on all the time, reaching out in all directions. Our auditory sense gives us constant bearings on our surroundings, animate and inanimate. It is by this evidence, the first and last and most continuous, that we construct a life. And because hearing connects us to others through language, we use it daily to make and remake a world where we are not alone.

Because the auditory sense is there all the time, we tend to take it for granted . . . until, that is, this fundamental link to the world is compromised by one or the other form of loss or distortion. It is then that we face a serious challenge to our well-being, both personal and social. When we seek help, the range of solutions on offer is, compared to what is available for the rest of the body/mind, rather slim, and almost exclusively technical.

There are economic implications to this narrow band of technical

solutions: they are manufactured, marketed, and sold by vertically integrated multinational corporations. This means that access to help is, in countries without socialized medicine, dependent on social class or caste. And this is so despite the fact that the actual electronic components in your hearing aids are far less complex than those in your smartphone, while the latter is far less expensive.

We are in this situation partly because of choices in social policy, and partly because the reigning paradigm of audition comes to us essentially unchanged from the era when Descartes ruled the roost. By this paradigm, the body is seen as a machine without its own intelligence, and the mind—to the extent it is acknowledged to exist apart from thought—is assigned to a closet in another part of the house.

When audition is seen as a thing independent of the rest of us, the questions we ask about it are mostly one-dimensional and quantitative: Enough? Not enough? And since the answers we get tend to fit our questions, this paradigm yields one-dimensional, quantitative solutions—i.e., tools to turn up the auditory signal.

To be sure, volume is crucial, and with digitalization and Bluetooth, we are getting better and better at turning it up, and in ever more differentiated ways. But there is far, far more to sound than volume. To sense from which direction and at what distance the cougar has cried, to be swept into the tonal dance of a Bach fugue, to relish the rustle of leaves in the wind or waves breaking on a pebbled beach . . . for all of these and more, we want more than volume. We need our whole sensing being, imagination included.

In a basic hearing test, auditory thresholds are measured at various frequencies, left and right, through headphones. A device is prescribed, and this alone can vastly improve the quality of life. And yet, there is more. There are many other aspects of the perception of sound, and to gain access to their improvement, we would also need to take note of how people are using themselves in various situations involving listening. This would include the interplay of the senses, the quality of attention, the quality of movement and support, the degree of effort, personal history, unconscious attitudes, and the experience of resonance in the body.

Listening with Your Whole Body™, the method that has occupied me over the last decade, restores the power of self-care in the auditory realm. It shifts the paradigm, and starts by challenging a number of idées fixes. The most implacable of these is the notion that hearing involves only the ears. Surely, if it is the whole person who walks and runs, and not just the legs, it is the whole person who listens and hears.

Working with the whole sensing person produces qualitative shifts in perception. In other words, by learning to listen differently, people (whether their hearing is normal or compromised) do, in fact, hear differently. Attention to the "how" of your listening can alter the dimensionality, depth, color, and texture of your auditory experience, along with your satisfaction from it. These changes in the experienced

quality of perception do not occur in the ears, but in the brain, and as such they may not show up in the quantitative measurements by which diagnoses are made. Thankfully, we are infinitely more complex than the devices we invent to measure ourselves.

The understanding of the sense organs themselves lies in the domain of the natural and applied sciences. The anatomist describes the outer, middle, and inner ear, as well as the auditory cortex. Pathologies of the ear belong to the otolaryngologist, audiometry to the audiometrist, the fitting of hearing aids to the audiologist, and the way the brain creates sound out of vibrations is the domain of neuroscience.

By these paths of inquiry, the sense of hearing can be described, quantified, mapped, treated, and understood along several parameters. Listening, on the other hand—one of the most intimate activities of which we are capable—is something else again. Like consciousness itself, it defies description. It also defies quantification because it dwells in quality. In a most fundamental way, listening both subsumes and transcends understanding. No path of inquiry can grasp listening in its entirety, because listening is the foundation of inquiry. It is how we find the path, if not the path itself.

Listening belongs to the arts as much as to the sciences. It is an act of presence, perhaps the purest practice of love. To paraphrase the poet Kabir, it is the breath inside the breath. It has dedicated practitioners among poets and musicians, shamans and psychotherapists, ecologists, ornithologists, teachers, yogis, lamas, Sufis, monks, dancers, lovers, and parents.

To get to listening, it is not enough to know everything there is to know about hearing. You have to be there. You have to listen.

At the Piano: The Hidden Physical Component in Listening

The Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education can empower the pianist’s listening on multiple levels not only aural, but also physical, musical, and emotional.

Conscious vs. unconscious movement in musical performance

A piano recital. The sound of the piano is multi-coloured, shimmering, something like a whole orchestra or a human voice, expressing thoughts and feelings naturally, without trying to be expressive. The artist achieves this by engaging in a keyboard choreography that is both inspired and intentional—she’s shaping the invisible. Her fluid, lateral arm movements sculpt the musical structures: a melodic contour, a harmonic turn, an articulation. Reproducing the musical notes alone would create something akin to a computer-generated voice, but lending the myriad inflections of human speech to the notes through physical gesture brings the notes to life, infusing them with hundreds of subtle variations in emotion.

At another recital the pianist waves his wrists in supple movements, but they have nothing to do with the music. This performance seems like a caricature of the first. The choreography of the hands and arms

Alan Fraser

is generic; its purpose has been perverted to mere physical relaxation rather than the shaping of individual phrases. The musical feeling has become generic too—it is “expressive,” but doesn’t express anything specific to the particular music being played. The pianist’s Beethoven is expressive in the same way as his Bach, his Chopin, or his Rachmaninoff.

Yet another pianist has been trained to lend the weight of his arm to every tone, enriching it, beautifying it, fattening it up before the musical slaughter. And so his performance goes—a series of rich but disconnected notes, musically unintelligible—a s i f I w e r e t o w r i t e e v e r y w o r d o f t h i s a r t i c l e l i k e t h i s. You were able to decipher those letters, but you had to make an effort. So too the listener must make an effort to make musical sense out of the music being played, instead of being able to simply enjoy it. The pianist tries to express his musical ideas, but his physical organization is at cross purposes with his musical intention.

A fourth pianist slams his hands onto the keys and stands them up into rigid arches intended to produce a clangorous, exultant fortissimo. Instead, the compressive element of the movement abuses the soundboard—the tone is ugly and aggressive. At the end, the impressed audience applauds, perhaps relieved to finally escape this musical torture. Here again, the pianist’s physical organization hinders rather than helps express the music.

In piano playing, the quality of a person’s physical movement is inextricably linked to the quality of the music they produce. Some pianists actively avoid questions of posture or comportment, thinking it best to let the body respond intuitively to one’s musical intentions—but a growing number of pianists are drawn to the fascinating world of Piano Somatics: the art of shaping musical inflection with conscious physical gesture. The Feldenkrais Method can play a significant role in this exploration.

Everything you do has an effect on your sound

When a pianist strikes a key, it causes the piano’s mechanism (the piano action) to launch a felt hammer onto the strings, the sound of which is then amplified by the soundboard. The piano soundboard is amazingly sensitive, the action as well. One particular part of the action, the double escapement, allows the pianist to feel a constant, intimate connection with the hammer. Launching the hammer onto the string cleanly, with no parasitic contractions, produces a pure and ringing sound. Any additional shock, and the sound suffers. The piano key is a free lever, but if compressed, it loses its responsiveness—and the impact of compression sends interference vibrations through the soundboard that act like static on the clean sonority of the note, ruining the tone.

The Feldenkrais Method, with its focus on skeletal mechanics, empowers the pianist’s interaction with the key by minimizing the unwanted shocks—leading to a blossoming of sound and a more individualized sense of phrase and expression. We capitalize especially on the specific skeletal mechanics of the hand, which is designed first and foremost to grasp. When the grasping function of the hand is in action as it moves the key, fewer compressive shocks are transmitted to the soundboard, beautifying the tone and freeing the pianist.

Adduction & opposition: two forms of grasping

To pick something up, most primates can only adduct the thumb, that is, move it sideways to squeeze it against the hand. But our thumbs can oppose, moving down and away from the hand in a circular motion that eventually presses the thumb against the underside of the fingers. Thumb opposition is a far more potent, capable grasping action than adduction.

Grasping to create a hand arch

The grasping action done while the hand lies on a flat surface evokes another curious phenomenon: the surface blocks the extremities from approaching one another, so instead the center of the hand rises, creating an arch structure. [Fig 1]

This has important ramifications, because this arch structure is at the heart of a pianist’s technique. Maintaining a deep space within the arch maintains the richness of the piano’s voice, whereas letting the keystone drop, emptying out the arch, makes the voice of the piano thin and insipid.

1. Lay the hand palm down on a table and, leaving the fingers straight, grasp.

2. As the thumb tip approaches the fingertips, sense the table interfering with the completion of that action, causing the center of the hand to rise like the peak of a circus tent. [Fig 2]

3. Notice the top knuckles—the metacarpal-phalangeal joints— becoming the keystone of an arch. Sense the power of this arch. Perhaps even press down on the keystone with your other hand, confirming the arch’s strength.

4. Repeat this several times. Do the fingers and thumb alone initiate this movement, or can you sense the involvement of muscular activity elsewhere: in the forearm . . . upper arm . . . shoulder . . . neck . . . clavicle . . . shoulder blade . . . and even the torso?

Fig 1 The arch structures of the standing hand: the hand grasps by drawing the elements of the arches towards one another.

Fig 2 Arch creation in the prone grasping hand (flat-fingered)

Fig 3 The hand as a mini-body

5. Grasp firmly . . . or lightly . . . . Which way helps you better sense the proximal efforts in different parts of the body animating the distal activity in the hand?

Take time with this. The more you delve into the details of this sensory experience, the more you are “listening” to your physical self, preparing the ground for a dialogue between physical and aural listening.

Sense the difference between muscle tension and muscle tonus

Consider three types of muscular activity:

• Moving contractions that completely transform into kinetic energy: there’s no holding; it’s all movement.

• Tensing contractions that create too much stability: holding that blocks movement.

• Tonic contractions that offer stabilizing support: holding that facilitates movement.

6. As the hand grasps to create an arch, can you sense the difference between moving contractions, tensing contractions, and tonic contractions throughout the forearm . . . upper arm . . . shoulder . . . neck . . . clavicle . . . shoulder blade . . . and torso?

Unstable equilibrium

The “skeletal arch” created in the hand by grasping possesses tremendous structural integrity, as long as it does not collapse—but an arch that’s too solid lacks functional integrity. To play piano, this hand arch needs a “moving stability” akin to the human body’s in walking— it needs to maintain a state of unstable equilibrium. When playing the piano, the more the hand maintains this state of movement availability— a state of tonicity that’s neither tense nor overly relaxed—the better the quality of the sound.

The hand as a mini-body

If we see the finger as a leg (with an ankle, knee, and hip joint), the hand as a pelvis, the forearm as a torso, and the elbow as a head, the pianist’s hand bears a remarkable resemblance to the human body in its movements—“standing,” “walking,” “running,” and even “jumping” on the keys. [Fig 3]

The gait of human walking is smooth because the pelvis follows a complex, subtle three-dimensional figure-eight pattern while the

legs carry the torso. In “piano walking," the hand follows similar subtle figure-eight patterns while the fingers carry the forearm. The resulting lateral forearm movements not only smooth out the hand’s gait, they also sculpt the phrase much as a dancer sculpts the phrase of a dance. Let’s feel how this works in practice, first teaching our hand to “stand up” and then to “walk.”

Piano standing

1. Lay your hand on the table again.

2. Grasp with one finger only (still keeping that finger straight), pulling the finger towards you to stand it up alone. Let the top knuckle (the hand’s “hip joint”) rise as high as it can comfortably, and let the wrist float up from the table.

3. Let the forearm flow forward to make the wrist movement easier. Don’t overdo it; leave the wrist behind the metacarpal-phalangeal joint for now, not above it.

4. Continue to sense any muscular efforts in the arm . . . shoulder . . . neck . . . and torso . . . that contribute to the finger’s standing. Can you feel the shoulder and torso following the forearm forward?

5. Do you detect differences in this effort when you stand a different finger . . . or the thumb?

6. Prepare a walking movement by standing one finger up and tapping the table lightly with another finger or with your thumb. Does the standing finger lose its stability when you tap? Does it buckle? Does it stiffen to maintain stability? Does it continue to stand well, in other words, does it maintain its tonicity? If it feels more comfortable, let the wrist rise just a little higher than the metacarpal-phalangeal joint to tap. [Fig 4]

Piano walking

7. Explore moving the forearm gently right and left, or forward and back, while simultaneously standing on one finger and tapping with another. Do these forearm movements make it easier or more difficult to maintain integrity in the standing (now the swaying) finger as you tap? How do the muscles of the arm . . . shoulder . . . neck . . . clavicle . . . shoulder blade . . . and torso . . . accommodate this new demand?

8. Stand on one finger and don’t just tap with the other, actually take a step. “Walk” between one finger and another, allowing the forearm to flow laterally, smoothing out the movement. Does each subsequent standing finger maintain its stability before, during, and after stepping? Can you sense the hand subtly, gently adapting to the movement, smoothing out your “piano gait?” [Fig 4]

Fig 4 A standing hand getting ready to walk

Why piano walking?

The percussive nature of the piano is at once one of its greatest strengths and its greatest weaknesses. When the density of the hammer felts is just right, the rich tone of a well-struck string is glorious, unlike any other instrument. Varying the strength of the hammer’s attack gives the pianist another big advantage—a huge dynamic range, from a sweet, whispering pianissimo to a roaring, monumental fortissimo. But that same percussive element presents a danger, making it so easy to bang the notes, so difficult to make them sing. All pianists face this challenge, and mastering the ability to “walk” from key to key, transferring the weight from one standing finger to another without collapsing, without a shock, is one crucial way of transcending the percussive nature of the instrument.

Falling vs. standing

1. Lay your forearm gently on the table again. Knock the table robustly with a single fingertip by standing the finger up suddenly.

2. Move the finger as quickly as possible, noticing the knocking sound it produces.

3. Continue to stand up/knock as quickly as possible, simultaneously moving your forearm forward lightly. Hear the knock becoming almost inaudible even though the movement is still high energy.

4. Now explore a contrasting approach. Raise the whole arm in the air and let the hand fall. As the fingertip hits the table, resist the inertia of the falling arm by standing the finger up. Notice that, whereas moving the arm forward reduces the sound of the impact, falling makes a much louder and fatter knocking sound. When you play a piano key by falling into it, the vibrations of the louder knocking sound transmit through the frame into the soundboard, interfering with the clean vibration of the string.

5. Again compare the light, almost inaudible “stand up” attack with the falling attack. Which one creates more stress in the body? Which evokes more tension that must then be released? Which movement is most instantaneously in balance, reflecting the body’s sophisticated capacity to maintain a state of unstable equilibrium? Which is more in the spirit of the Feldenkrais Method?

6. Compare these contrasting attacks at the piano. How do these different ways of moving the key affect the sound of the notes?

1 Rudolf M. Breithaupt, Die natürliche Klaviertechnik, II: Die Grundlagen des Gewichtspiels (Natural Piano Technique, II: The Basics of Weight Technique) (Leipzig: C. F. Kahnt Nachfolger, 1906).

2 Dean Elder, “Interview with Claudio Arrau,” in Pianists at Play: Interviews, Master Lessons, Technical Regimes (Evanston: The Instrumentalist Company, 1982), 38.

The evolution of weight technique

Sadly the vast majority of pianists have been taught to play forte with something closer to the heavier touch.1 The average student is taught to relax the arm by feeling its weight, and the louder the sound, the more they invest that weight in moving the key. The key is struck while the arm is in free fall. The hand stands up on the finger, catching the still-falling arm and pulling it upwards. This evokes tension in the hand and forearm, tension which must now be dissipated by adding an additional outwardupward arm movement—which pulls the standing hand further off balance.2

Whole-body walking that imitates a weighted piano technique

Nobody walks “feeling the weight of their torso” at every step, but let’s try it now.

Stand up and take a step, feeling your body’s heaviness: bend your knee to allow the torso to slump, then catch the torso with your leg and laboriously bring it back to its full height. Notice how your feet are thumping the ground.

Believe it or not, most pianists are taught to use their arms the way you’re now using your torso, stressing out their fingers as you are stressing your legs, in the belief that this touch will “warm up the tone.” The strength developed in the hand by this practice is good, but we need to put that strength to a more functional purpose.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the piano was “beefed up” with an iron frame, higher string tension, and more massive hammers. The pedagogues of that time believed a weighted touch would compensate for the new heavier action. Unfortunately they had no understanding back then of skeletal mechanics in the Feldenkrais® sense, where each lever in the kinematic chain—hammer, key, finger, hand, wrist, forearm, etc.—remains responsive to its neighbors and freely moveable. To the pianist who understands the kinematic chain and uses it well, the increase in key weight from the old fortepiano to the modern grand is insignificant. Using the hand’s strength for movement is far more effective than using it to support the arm’s weight.

Using structural function to bring potent movement to the hand

Compressing the hand’s arch structure in any way evokes muscular holding contractions in the hand and arm. Although this does prevent further collapse of the arch, it also stops it moving. By contrast, animating the hand’s arch structure from within frees it from compression and holding. The soundboard senses that significant change in function. It likes it.

1. Play a C major triad with a weighted touch. Notice the tone you produce.

2. Now play the same triad, beginning with a low hand and standing the fingers up vigorously as the triad sounds. What difference is there in the tone? [Fig 5]

3. Play the same triad a third way: sound it, and leaving the three fingertips in the three keys, slide them forward until all the fingers, along with the hand, lie down on the keyboard. “Melt” the palm and fingers into the keys. Sense the contact between palm and keys, between the undersides of the fingers and the keys. Slide forward and back, “listening” to that contact, sensing the keys with the skin, and with the bones within, as the chord gradually dies away. [Fig 6] This technique evokes a distinctly different sonority by returning the hand to its infancy—when it lay on its belly like a baby in a state of delicious let-go, long before it was faced with the challenges of standing and walking.

The future creates the present

How did the sound change when you played the triad the third way? What was its new timbre? When the neuromotor system knows that you are going to “melt” into the keys after playing the notes, it changes the way it prepares and initiates the movement, creating a different sound. Conversely, when it knows you will play the triad with weight, the whole neuromotor system establishes resistance beforehand. It prepares for the arm’s onslaught. It gets ready to defend itself—worsening the sound.

4. Play the chord by raising the arm above the keyboard and letting the hand fall, intensifying the sense of weight. As the fingertips strike

“Lying down” to create yet another, contrasting sonority

Fig 5 The hand grows into this shape naturally when it stands while playing a triad (here the help of the knee makes the shape more tangible).

Fig 6 Melting the hand into the keyboard

the keys, resist the falling arm by standing the hand up. Did this feel pleasant or unpleasant? How much resistance did you feel, and where—in the arm . . . the clavicle . . . the neck . . . the shoulder . . . the shoulder blade . . . the back . . . the spine? How was the sound? Ugly? Beautiful? Different? Indifferent?

5. Try the same falling technique, but this time imagine that your arm is a bungee cord that pulls the hand up just before it crashes into the keys, so that the fingers barely impact the keyboard although the sound is loud. What change is there in the physical sensation . . . in the sound?

6. Experiment with these different ways of playing the chord. Vary each way, creating subtle nuances, smaller changes in the physical feeling and the sound. Can you perceive each change in the physical sensation reflected in the sonority? Is your physical listening beginning to map on to your aural listening?

Wallowing in weight

When I demonstrate the weighted touch, sometimes I surprise myself by liking the sonic result. Done well, weight technique produces a juicy, rich tone, which can be satisfying. Chords produced this way are more homogenous whereas a “skeletal” touch produces a more differentiated chord, one that has more individuated voices. Both can be good—the choice can become an artistic decision. But weight technique done badly creates a harsh tone and can lead to injury. We need to explore alternatives. There is always another way.

“The key does not go down”

Obviously the key goes down when one sounds a note, but I like to provoke my students by telling them that it doesn’t. When the pianist perceives the key going down, problematically something somewhere in the body follows it down as well. A slight or substantial compression is the inevitable consequence, along with the arm tension that follows. It is best to avoid this altogether by changing the perception: consider the key as a lever that could just as easily be constructed to move sideways, or back and forth—it is only by chance that it moves along the vertical plane. Don’t think that it goes down: just manipulate it. And now, consider the finger in a similar vein—as a lever that needs to move freely:

1. Stand a finger up on the table: feel its “hip joint” flex and rise. Notice that nothing goes down—not even the fingertip—it’s a clean standing

action. The metacarpal-phalangeal joint (the top knuckle, the hand’s “hip joint”) rises just as the pelvis and its hip joints rise when you get out of a chair—a result of the feet meeting the ground and the legs straightening. In whole-body standing too, nothing goes down.

Trick the mind

Now, trick the mind:

2. Go to the keyboard and stand the same finger up as you did on the table top.

Was it a clean “stand-up,” or did the finger succumb to the illusion that the key goes down? If you completely avoid following the key down, the stand-up feels light—as Feldenkrais said, “Any truly efficient movement will be perceived as effortless.” If some trace of compression creeps in, there’s a heaviness to the movement; it feels more lethargic, effortful, or there’s some sort of jamming. Try not to follow the key down at all. Just . . . stand . . . up . . . . Any stiffness in the finger, wrist, or arm is a sign of compression. Any harshness of tone indicates compression. It is really difficult to rid your central nervous system completely of the compressive action. Practice the stand-up, first on the table, away from the keyboard where it’s relatively easy, then at the piano, where that nagging impression of the key descending wields its influence, making it insidiously difficult. Trick your mind. Really tell it, “The key does not go down,” and then act accordingly.

The key is a lever

Playing with a “stand-up,” or playing with a tapping action, treats the key like a lever. The key descends but is not clamped down—it can still rise. It retains its lever nature—and so does the finger. Clamping the key robs both the finger and the key of their lever nature. Just for an instant, there’s no movement in the system—but that split second is enough to interrupt the flow of the music. Musical life without movement is unthinkable. What we perceive as harsh tone is actually notes produced with these miniscule interruptions, these imperceptible cessations of physical movement.

Establish the hand’s skeletal sense of self—developmentally

A hand which retains a sense of its skeletal nature—which can actually sense its bones and their need to be freely moving levers—improves its

Fig 7 Roll the hand onto its back.

Fig 8 Lie the hand on its inner edge.

chances of being in constant movement. First introduce this sense of skeletal self by laying the hand down and rolling it around, like a baby whose pre-standing apprenticeship lasts a whole year.

Rolling sideways

1. Lay the hand palm down on the table. Let the fingers be naturally curved; don’t force the entire underside to press the table.

2. Supinate the hand by rolling it gently . . . heavily . . . slowly . . . until it flops onto its back. What lets go in your neck and shoulder area? [Fig 7]

3. Pronate the hand by rolling it slowly . . . heavily . . . onto its palm again. [Fig 7]

4 Continue rolling to pronate some more . . . until your hand lies on its inner edge, on the side of the index finger and the back of the thumb. [Fig 8]

5. As your hand lies ultra-pronated on the thumb and index finger, sway it a little bit back and forth to evoke an even more intense inner letting go, the better to feel its bony internal structure . . . .

6. After some time, roll back to the neutral position.

7. Repeat this whole sequence several times.

8. Stand the hand up into its arch structure again—has its sense of self changed? Is the movement easier . . . more difficult . . . just different?

The central nervous system can better sense the hand skeleton when the hand folds and unfolds without the usual muscular effort. This clarifies the internal bony lever relationships kinaesthetically. Later, moving the fingers actively, the brain can make more informed decisions about which muscles to engage, when to engage them, and how much to engage them.

Rolling forward and back

1. Lay the hand on the backs of the fingers on your thigh or on a table. [Fig 9]

2. Move the forearm forward . . . away from yourself . . . (farther forward than you could if your hand was on the keyboard as in the illustration) until the back of the hand touches the thigh, or comes close to the thigh—don’t force it. Lie there awhile, sensing an internal let-go in the hand . . . .

3. Return . . . slowly . . . to the starting position . . . sensing which bones fold and how . . . .

4. Now move the forearm towards yourself . . . slowly folding the fingers in on themselves . . . until the heel of the hand rests on the fingertips.

Fig 9 Starting position for rolling forward and back, seen here on the keyboard

5. Continue sliding the heel . . . towards yourself . . . until the heel rests on your thigh.

6. Drag your forearm even closer . . . to yourself . . . so the fingers passively uncurl.

7. Move your forearm forward so that:

a. The fingers curl passively . . . . [Fig 10]

b. The heel slides up onto the fingertips . . . . c. The heel continues forward until the fingers are lying on their backs and the hand is vertical—the starting position.

d. The hand angles farther forward to lie almost supine on the thigh.

8. Roll slowly . . . forward and back like this . . . leaving the fingers entirely passive . . . and giving them an internal massage . . . . The slower you go, the more you can sense every internal detail of the hand’s folding and unfolding.

9. Once more, stand the hand up into its arch structure—has the sense of its movement changed again? Is it easier . . . more difficult . . . just different?

Most pianists play by unconsciously forcing the keys down and clamping them there with the finger and sometimes with the forearm as well. To become aware of this, to facilitate change, they must first be able to sense what they are doing. They need to listen to themselves kinaesthetically, in ways described above. This listening can easily begin with the passive rolling exercises on the thigh, and then continue in an exploration of standing functionally on the keys as we did earlier, and finally moving through a whole group of notes as in this next exercise:

Standing and walking

1. Play a little scale pattern on the table, first weighting the touch. Tap one fingertip after another, bringing the weight of the forearm in behind each finger, feeling the impact. Where do you feel strain?

2. Do the same, adding a “rounding out” forearm movement to each note to “release the tension.” Does this feel easy? Awkward? Does it make sense, or nonsense?

3. Rest the hand loosely on the table and stand the index finger up by doing a light, whole-finger flexion. Make it easy by allowing the forearm to follow the hand forward as the finger stands. (Make sure the wrist doesn’t take over by moving farther forward than the top knuckle.)

4. While standing there, first tap the table with the middle finger a few times and then “walk” onto it so you can eventually release the index finger. Did you manage this transfer of weight with no collapse of the metacarpal-phalangeal joint, the hand’s “hip joint?”

Fig 10 Curl the fingers passively by sliding the arm.

5. Now play a whole scale pattern with these light, standing-tappingwalking finger movements—with a complete absence of weight. How do the feeling and the sonority of the tapping sounds compare to those of the weighted touch?

6. Now let’s explore these three ways on key. Play a weighted scale pattern, then add the rounding arm motion to release the tension created by the weighting, and finally play the pattern with a vital, light finger stand-up action—using one stand-up over several notes instead of a stand-up for each note. How do they compare? Take your time, try each approach again. Which one sounds more melodic, singing? Which one sounds pedantic, ploddingly note-by-note?

The monster

Do you remember how grasping, the basic action of the hand, is fundamentally related to the hand’s standing and walking on key? Grasping is powered by the muscles and tendons of the palm and the underside of the finger that surround the hand’s “hip joints,” the metacarpal-phalangeal joints. If the fingers still collapsed a little in the previous exercises, don’t worry, this next one should help by further increasing the vitality of the hand’s hip joints. Once a young pupil of mine played a melody with a pumping arm movement on every note. A theoretical explanation of the hand’s grasping and standing would have been of no interest to his young mind, so instead I invented something more practical, a monster—kids love monsters.

1. Lay the hand on your thigh, palm down, fingers flat. Imagine a sleeping monster in a swamp.

2. Gently, ever-so gently, sense the beginnings of a flexing action in the fingers and thumb. Make this so internal that there is almost no visible movement—simply sense a subtle effort growing within. [Fig 11]

3. Eventually let the hand develop just the tiny beginning of an arch shape—enough to get the monster’s eyes above the waterline, like an alligator’s. Those two eyes would be the top knuckles of the 2nd & 3rd fingers—the two metacarpal-phalangeal joints.

Uh oh, the monster may be waking up.

4. Let that internal effort go . . . let the monster go back to sleep.

5. Flex internally again for a moment, then rest again. Flex and rest.

6. Gradually develop the internal movement of the hand until the top knuckles rise a little more each time, millimeter by millimeter. Oh, my God, he’s really beginning to wake up! His eyes are rising from the swamp, and eventually the rest of him too! Put him back to sleep!!!

7. Always return to the resting state after each incremental “wake-up” movement—thank God you can still induce his slumber . . . .

For a few minutes my pupil fooled around with gradually making his monster hand wake up, then immediately played his melody with a beautiful flowing legato. The arm pumping had disappeared without my having said a word about the arches of the hand, standing and walking, etc. The learning had been neurological, kinaesthetic, involving familiar imagery, illustration, and association. He was a kid, so listening to himself was natural and easy. Would that my grown-up students were so responsive!

8. How does your hand walk on the keys after doing “the monster”? How does the sound of the piano change when you walk on the keys with a hand informed by this exercise? Listen to the difference between a segmented, note-by-note melody produced with a pumping arm and a flowing succession of notes smoothly blending into one another, produced by a better-organized physical action. Listen to the difference in physical sensation, and listen to the difference in the sound.

The bird beak

Stand up—get out of your chair, and stand on one leg. Sense the strength of your hip muscles working to hold you upright. If they were to relax, you would quickly collapse, no?

In our real hips, this high tonus is taken for granted. It supports our movement without our needing to be aware of it. The vital tonicity that powers our standing and walking is a normal, automatic part of our daily movement. This is not tension, but on a scale of tonicity between absolute tension and absolute relaxation, it is closer to tension.

With the hand it’s a different story. That healthy tonus is completely foreign to the hands of many pianists because they were constantly admonished to relax. Creating the necessary tonus within the hand is often a struggle for them. Never have they been told that the hand’s “hip joint,” just like the actual hip joint, should maintain quite high levels of tonus while walking on the keys. The pianist’s training—just to relax—is at cross-purposes with their intention—to play with a healthy vitality.

The following “bird beak” exercise stimulates the central nervous system to right action by creating really high muscle tonus in the hand with no weight-bearing. Instead there’s a crisp and efficient feeling of agility and ability. Habituated to overly low levels of tonus, the hand needs to “experience the other side of the coin” in order to find the middle. When the hand has experienced “too high” as well as “too low,” it can recalibrate to a level of tonus that feels right and gets the job done.

Fig 11 The sleeping monster

Fig 12 The thumb-2nd-3rd4th-5th bird beak

Fig 13 Thumb & 2nd bird beak

Fig 14 A 5th finger bird beak

Fig 15 A thumb bird beak

1. Bunch the five fingertips together tightly, forming the hand into a bird beak.

2. “Peck” different surfaces, making a knocking sound. Even peck your forehead!

3. “Peck” a black key. What sound does it make? This movement is percussive, but the tone is not ugly or harsh—it’s clear and precise. How can it be so when it looks like we’re compressing the key with a “down” movement? Exceptionally high tonus in the hand prevents any compression, or even the slightest collapse. It’s healthy percussion, like a drumstick. Do it staccato to make it even more so. [Fig 12]

4. Curl the 3rd, 4th & 5th fingers tightly into the palm, and clamp thumb to index finger. Peck some keys with this more compact bird beak. Again, note the cleanliness of attack, the precision that produces a clear, bell-like tone. [Fig 13]

5. Experiment with different bird beaks, using fewer fingers but always clamping with the thumb. How wide a variety of sonorities can you evoke? [Fig 14, 15]

6. Return to playing normally—does the hand stand better because it remembers the “bird beak” sensation? Is it easier to stand fully because the image of augmented tonus has been more clearly established in the central nervous system?

The “Magic Flute” exercise

Pushing the key down imposes a sound, forcing the tone out of the piano, whereas treating the key as a three-dimensional lever moves the sound, releasing the tone. This next exercise does away with any remaining traces of imposition, heightening the sense of “up” by flipping the hand away from the keys even as the fingers fly through a quick group of notes. The extra-vigorous “arm up,” makes the quick scale pattern quite brilliant while avoiding even the slightest sense of heaviness. [Fig 16]

1. Drum the fingers on the table as you did on your desk in school when you were bored. Most of us drum from the pinky to the thumb, but there are some who find 1-2-3-4-5 more natural. Do whatever comes automatically to you.

2. As you drum the fingers, whip the hand away and up towards the opposite ear—that is, whip the right hand across the body towards the left ear, left hand up and across towards the right ear.

3. Do the same with the right hand on the keys, playing the notes G-F-E-D-C so quickly that they almost smear together. Did the notes still swoosh lightly or did you get bogged down trying to press the keys? It may take some time to really lighten up your touch.

Fig 16 Whip the hand up & across the body

Photo by: J. Bernardo Mijailidis, Wikipedia

4. If you can’t get it, try just E-D-C with middle finger, index finger, and thumb, or even try just two notes or one note to start with.

5. Play C-D-E-F-G with the left hand in an upper octave with the same technique, and you have the famous signature tune from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute!”

In this latest antidote to an overly weighted touch, the arm whips so vigorously as the fingers activate that the fingers’ “down” action barely brushes the keys. The resulting sound is bubbly and airy, light as a feather. It is also super-quick, giving the central nervous system a preliminary impression of a velocity that most young players never dream of achieving until much later. It creates a template where the basis for speed clearly has nothing to do with a weighted touch, setting the stage for further developments in virtuosity.

The whole body

1. Sit in a chair or on the piano bench. Sense your sitz bones. What sort of contact do they have with the bench? Do they bear equal amounts of weight?

2. Gently rock on the sitz bones, forward . . . and back . . . left . . . and right . . . . Did your head move in the same direction as your torso?

3. Try again, leaving your head in the middle, counterbalancing the rocking torso and freeing it of holding contractions.

All these exercises concern the fingers, hand, and arm, but we play the piano with our whole self. As a final part of this exploration, quickly review the hand exercises we’ve done, attending to the sense of your torso perched on your sitz bones. Cultivate the slightest sense of rocking, so that your body follows your fingers, hand, and arm through their various movements on the keys while your head stays in the middle to keep you in balance—allowing your whole body to maintain unstable equilibrium. This helps the fingers, hand, and arm do the same even more effortlessly and automatically on the keys.

Feel this subtle change in the contact point of your sitz bones in the smallest possible increments, even as small as tenths of a millimeter. A tiny shift is infinitely better than nothing at all. Discover how especially in this case, less is more. How does the sound of the piano change when you integrate your whole self into your playing in this way?

3 Jean-Jaccques

Gravity provides the down; the pianist creates the up

These exercises all share a common theme—moving the key with a judicious “up” motion somewhere in the body, which neutralizes the tendency to clamp the key down. A weighted touch, so widespread in classic approaches to piano technique, fails to recognize that gravity provides all the “down” we need, requiring no further help from us. No, the elegance of human movement lies in its capacity to neutralize the down forces completely.

Most pianists never think of trying the Feldenkrais Method until they are in pain. Functional Integration® (FI®) and Awareness Through Movement® (ATM®) can often eliminate the problem, but Feldenkrais® reaches its full fruition for pianists when the lessons go beyond simple pain resolution—when they address the pianist’s basic movement style. When the hand learns to stand, walk, and run instead of falling on the keys, resolving the pain becomes almost secondary to the main benefit— the new world of sound that opens up to the pianist, where listening to one’s physical organization improves musical listening as well.

A Feldenkrais lesson addresses parasitic contractions throughout the body. In the pianist, many of these parasitic contractions arise directly from a particular anomaly in their technique—the compression and contraction somewhere in the body when they fail to balance the down forces with a judicious “up.” Watch the pianist play. Look for these telltale signs of blockage-inducing movements in their technique. Then, on the FI table, structure the lesson to evoke change in these background parasitic contractions. (This is easier done away from the piano, far removed from the context that evoked the contractions to begin with.) These changes make possible a greater “skeletal functionality” not only in their daily movements, but also in their actions at the piano. When they return to the piano, do you see “spontaneous” improvement?

If an unproductive habit persists, feel free to address it not only on the table but also directly at the piano. You are not transgressing the realm of their piano teacher—you are not teaching them technique—you are simply bringing a Feldenkrais perspective to the pianist’s interaction with their instrument. The FI lesson alone should make the habit more amenable to change, but a direct intervention at the instrument may go even further towards integration of the new organization. A technique that continues to use weight hasn’t gained all there is to gain from a pianist’s experience of the Feldenkrais Method. The temporary improvement won’t last. Pianists need to know what they’re doing.

Classical piano technique aims to minimize the percussive element— but perversely, the weighted touch itself first causes the percussive element3 to become problematic, then deals with the consequences

Eigeldinger, Chopin: Pianist and Teacher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

4 Tobias Matthay, The Act of Touch in All Its Diversity: An Analysis & Synthesis of Pianoforte Tone Production (London: Bosworth & Co. Ltd., 2003).

as best it can.4 The Feldenkrais approach as presented here minimizes percussion in the first place, opening up a richer and more varied world of sound, where one is free to create instead of forced to compensate— because one is in constant, well-organized movement.

Playing the piano by establishing a functional moving relationship with the key reconnects the self to the instrument, enriching the music in its sound, in its elegance of shape, and in its emotional color. Becoming more intimately involved at a physical level with the sound vibrations puts pianists in more direct touch with the musical experience— allowing them to better direct their expression, creating richer emotional soundscapes. This approach cultivates not just an improved physical mastery of one’s instrument, but a more complete engagement with the subtle vibrations—both physical and emotional—of the music. When one remains free and balanced—where not only one’s physical body but also one’s emotional world is in a state of living, vital, unstable equilibrium— one can respond to every subtle nuance in the music, touching the hearts of the listeners more deeply and transporting them to realms sublime.

The photographs and illustrations in this article have been adapted from Alan Fraser’s books on the Feldenkrais Method and piano technique:

• The Craft of Piano Playing (artist: Sonya Ardan)

• Honing the Pianistic Self-Image (artist: Sonya Ardan)

• All Thumbs: Well-Coordinated Piano Technique (photographers: Sonya Ardan and Igor Peyovitch)

• Play the Piano with Your Whole Self (photographer: Igor Peyovitch)

• Pianimals: 28 Feldenkrais Lessons for the Beginning Pianist’s Hand (photographer: Igor Peyovitch)

Bibliography

Breithaupt, Rudolf M. Die natürliche Klaviertechnik, II: Die Grundlagen des Gewichtspiels (Natural Piano Technique, II: The Basics of Weight Technique). Leipzig: C. F. Kahnt Nachfolger, 1906; III ed. revised 1913; IV ed. 1922.

Eigeldinger, Jean-Jaccques. Chopin: Pianist and Teacher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Elder, Dean. Pianists at Play: Interviews, Master Lessons, Technical Regimes. Evanston: The Instrumentalist Company, 1982.

Fraser, Alan. Play the Piano with Your Whole Self. Novi Sad: Piano Somatics Press (forthcoming, 2023)

———. Pianimals: 28 Feldenkrais Lessons for the Beginning Pianist's Hand (Teachers Manual; Pupil's Book Volumes I & II, Pianimals Pointers; Pianimals Playbook). Novi Sad: Piano Somatics Press, 2021.

———. "Mapping Body Awareness onto Piano Performance for Artistic Rejuvenation." In The Feldenkrais Method in Creative Practice: Dance, Music and Theatre, edited by Robert Sholl, 137–157. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.

———. "Feldenkrais Method and Piano Somatics: From the General towards the Specific in Piano Technique." International Feldenkrais Feldenkrais Research Journal, 6 (2019). https://feldenkraisresearchjournal.org/index.php/journal/article/view/32.

———. All Thumbs: Well-Coordinated Piano Technique. Novi Sad: Maple Grove Music, 2012.

———. The Craft of Piano Playing: A New Approach to Piano Technique. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2003, 2nd edition 2011.

———. Honing the Pianistic Self-Image: Skeletal-Based Piano Technique. Novi Sad: Maple Grove Music, 2010.

Gerig, Reginald. Great Pianists & Their Technique. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2nd edition 2007.

Mark, Thomas. What Every Pianist Needs to Know about the Body Chicago: GIA Publications, 2003.

Matthay, Tobias. The Act of Touch in All Its Diversity: An Analysis & Synthesis of Pianoforte Tone Production. London: Bosworth & Co. Ltd., 2003.

———. The Visible and Invisible in Pianoforte Technique. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947.

Schultz, Arnold. The Riddle of the Pianist’s Finger. New York: Carl Fischer, 1936.

Back to Back Breathing

Alice Friedman

We are born into relationships—with gravity and the air around us, with other people, their touch and voices. Out of the womb, our senses immediately engage our new surroundings, while at the same time our capacity for movement is significantly altered from the buoyancy we knew in utero. We cannot calm ourselves but must learn self-regulation, relying on contact with caregivers to lead the way.

Such reflections informed my plan for a five-day segment on early human development at The Feldenkrais® Training Academy in Seattle.

As I prepared, I became intrigued by the enormity of adjustments required of a baby in the hours after birth. How could I bring these foundational experiences “onto the floor” in a novel, engaging way?

I decided to begin with breathing, as we often do in Feldenkrais® trainings.

Breathing involves muscles, bones, and joint articulations, as well as internal organs. The interface of breathing is responsive to circumstances such as hunger, pain, wetness, exertion, and tone of voice. The earliest pattern we develop, breathing is greatly impacted by the manner in which we are touched and held.

In order to foreground the primary role of connection, I started the first Awareness Through Movement® (ATM®) lesson—a breathing lesson—by asking trainees to lie on their sides, back to back, so that they could breathe together. The arrangement was intended to function as a reminder of a baby’s first moments of contact with a caregiver, the effect of that contact on breathing and internal states of being. [Fig 1]

The trainees lay back to back with their partners and spent a number of minutes just breathing, sensing, and listening. I directed their attention to their breath, weight, and contact with the floor and then to their partner’s breath and to the points of contact between them. I followed with a breathing lesson inviting trainees into different orientations. At the end, I asked them to return to lying on their sides, back to back with their partners, simultaneously breathing, sensing, and listening to themselves and one another.

Fig 1 Alice Friedman teaching Back to Back Breathing at Jeff Haller's Inside Moves' Feldenkrais® Training Academy, 2020

This exploration provoked engagement, inspired insight, and established an environment characterized by trust and play. When I asked about their experience of the back to back breathing, trainees responded:

• Being so close to another person took me back to a younger emotional time, which created a quieter internal space for sensing and observing myself.

• The first time we lay back to back, my partner and I tried breathing together. The second time, there was flow between us and an easy sense of connection, a mutual listening.

• The I/thou boundary has always been an issue for me. Lying back to back the first time, I lost myself in the listening. When we revisited the position later, I felt a wave between us; I experienced a sense of contact and at the same time held onto my sense of self.

• When we were lying back to back before the lesson, I discovered that I could read the environment in relation to myself, which was missing when I only had the ground for feedback. The feeling of another person, in contrast to the feeling of the ground, provided more information about the quality of the environment and me moving inside it. I had a different sense of the boundaries of my skin when working with another person, a more dimensional experience.

We develop in relationship to self, other, environment, and culture, and yet the ATM process primarily highlights our relationship with gravity and space. As an experiment, I tried being more explicit about the interpersonal aspects of development by bookending the first ATM lesson in the ways described above. Building out this exploration, I later introduced a selection of soft toys to concretize the intentional and action-oriented aspects of infant development. Students selected their toys on day one and they became a surprise hit. Attachments grew, not unlike the ones kids establish with their toys. There were little performances, games, and the toys came to play a role in many classic ATM lessons, adding a ‘function’ to the action of reaching, for example. Some trainees also reported that touching the toys facilitated rest periods and body scans with noticeable shifts in breathing.

I added interactive activities as the trainees advanced in their investigation of human development from infancy to walking, in effect asking students to step into roles first filled by the toys. The trainees rolled and exchanged toys or reached for a toy after crawling together across the room. They interacted with each other through mirroring and touch, the entire group coming together as a kind of ensemble for one spontaneous activity. In a large circle trainees began to clap opposite hands with the two people next to them, then added feet touching and finally made sounds as they touched in a hilarious way to find the rhythm of the entire group moving in unison. The permeable boundary between self and other, object and world, continued to reveal itself, and the

significance of relationship for human development proved a vital part of the five-day segment. Beginning back to back set the stage. Themes of relationship and interaction continue to inspire curiosity and the cohesive atmosphere of this particular training. I look forward to seeing what else emerges as we listen and respond to one another in this experimental approach to Feldenkrais training.

Two Senses of Hearing

David Kaetz

Fish have no ears—in any case, not like ours. This doesn’t mean that they can’t hear, or are unwilling to listen. Learning is another matter. How do we know this?

The story goes like this: Saint Anthony of Padua (13th century) went to the town of Rimini, on the Adriatic, to preach. Preaching requires listeners, however, and the people of Rimini were not disposed to listen. In fact, they were explicitly forbidden to listen by the town fathers. So Anthony went to the mouth of the Marecchia River and preached to the fish. They gathered in their thousands, with their heads above water, in rapt attention, touched by his message, his eloquence, and, quite possibly, by this unexpected opportunity to sit in the front row for a sermon.

As evidence of this event we have this charming fresco in a chapel in the town of Camposampiero, as well as several other masterworks devoted to the story. There is also a no less charming song setting by Gustav Mahler, from which we learn that once the sermon was over, the fish returned to business as usual. They listened, but they did not necessarily learn. [Fig 1]

For this issue of The Feldenkrais Journal ™, we consider the hearing of fish, which has much to reveal about ourselves. As for piscine moral progress, we can leave this for a future issue.

1 Neil Todd, “Do Humans Possess a Second Sense of Hearing?,” American Scientist 103, no. 5 (September–October, 2015): 348ff.

Neuroscientist and musician Neil Todd proposes that we have not one but two senses of hearing, one much newer than the other.1 The newer sense—the one we usually consider to be our first and only sense of hearing—we may label cochlear hearing. It provides the brain with the information it needs to analyze what is going on in the space around us. The older sense (about which we are just now learning and thus it gets called our second sense of hearing) starts with our primal need to orient ourselves in space. In humans this is the task of the vestibular system.

In evolutionary terms, the most ancient elements of the vestibular system are the saccule (Latin for “little bag”) and the utricle (Latin for “little leather bag”). They are considered ‘otolith’ (“ear-stone”) organs, for

Fig 1 Girolamo Tessari, Anthony’s sermon to the fish (detail of a cycle of frescoes representing Saint Anthony’s miracles), c. 1535-1537, Santuario del Noce (The Walnut [Tree] Sanctuary), Camposampiero, Padua, Veneto, Italy

they contain tiny ‘stones’ (of calcium carbonate). These little grains, with movement, weigh or drag upon hair cells (mechanoreceptors), which, by transforming mechanical force into electrical signals (mechanotransduction), inform us of our orientation and movement. For this reason the otolith organs can be described as gravity/movement sensors. In one form or another, gravity and movement sensing by means of stony bits and mechanoreceptors have been with us ever since we, as very simple, lightweight aquatic creatures, first needed to know up from down, and this way from that.

How does this get us to hearing? Mechanoreceptors detect movement; movement is displacement in space. Vibrations are movement by another name: in frequency more rapid than what we normally call movement, but nevertheless still displacement in space. Thus the same evolutionary adaptation that detects spatial displacement can also detect vibrational phenomena. For my own work this is a crucial connection: an undervalued, unconscious, and mostly undeveloped form of sensing can be brought into awareness, cultivated, and mobilized to enrich the auditory experience, of which the cochlea is the newest but not the only part. Thus, the somatic experience of sound is a fundamental principle of Listening with Your Whole Body™.

Because the vestibular system and the cochlea are anatomically linked, because both function by means of mechanotransduction, it has been postulated that the cochlea itself evolved out of the saccule. Thus what we humans call hearing appears to have evolved out of a more basic and central sense of orientation, our “second sense of hearing,” which is still with us. And this brings us back to Saint Anthony’s congregation: fish hear now, as they did in Anthony’s day, by means of mechanoreceptors in their skin and stones in their heads.

The consideration of the roots of perception has profound implications for a somatic approach to its improvement. These roots may be obvious, from an evolutionary perspective. They may also be hidden from the scientific eye, and more accessible to speculative thinking, creative imagination, imaginative movement, poetry, ancient myth, and this morning’s dream. To find these roots, one way or the other, is exciting; to feel them is more important yet, as that is where the recovery and the improvement happen.

As D. Graham Burnett, professor of the history of science at Princeton University, reveals in his richly researched and illustrated essay, “The Orienting Stone,” not only do piscine otoliths have something to tell us about where hearing begins; they also have other remarkable properties. Among them are an opalescent beauty and a surprising talent for maintaining a permanent and readable register of nutritional and environmental influences.

“The Orienting Stone” by D. Graham Burnett was first published in Cabinet magazine in 2008, in a column called "Leftovers," which investigates the cultural significance of detritus. Burnett has kindly granted us permission to republish the piece in this issue of The Feldenkrais Journal™ where readers should be primed to benefit from the illuminating perspective on the evolution of listening.

The Orienting Listening to our Stone: inner pearl

D. Graham Burnett

The black granite Ka’ba, the cubical structure that stands as the holiest center of Islam, features at its eastern vertex a small black stone about the size of a grapefruit, the al-hajar al-aswad, which may or may not have fallen to earth in the time of Adam and Eve. Supported in a silver frame, this obsidian-like cipher structures space for some billion Muslims, standing as it does at the culminating point known as the qibla—the direction to which devout followers of Mohammed address their five daily obeisances. Tradition has it that the rock was once snowy white, and has darkened over time through exposure to human sin.

A snowy white stone that gives shape to the universe: as it happens, we all carry within our skulls the vestige of such a thing, a kind of existentially reversed qibla (this one perspectival, the other metaphysical) that gives us our sense of being at the center of things, the sense that we are upright at the origin point of a three-dimensional space. The “otolithic organs,” as they are known, are a pair of sensors— the utricle and the saccule—nestled in the labyrinthine architecture of the inner ear. Grossly speaking, each consists of a bunch of tiny pebbles (of the white rock known as calcium carbonate) embedded in a gooey wad that sits atop a carpet of delicate hairs. The saccule is roughly vertical in our heads, and the utricle more or less horizontal. Together they orient us in the world, since they work as tiny inertial references: raise your head suddenly (or get in a jerky elevator), and the pebbles

of the saccule get momentarily left behind as your skull starts upward; this bends down the hairs against which those pebbles lay, and the sensitive hairs function like switches, sending signals to your brain that you register as a feeling of ascent. The utricle does the same work for motion from side to side, and between them these tiny organs generate the neurological data that give us our normal sense of being in the world. What would it feel like not to have those pebbles? Delete them from a mouse and it spends a lot of time falling over.

Both the utricle and the saccule contain what I have called “pebbles,” but they are little more than mineral crystals really, microscopic sand bound together into a mass by a matrix of protein. Not so the homologous structures in fish, our evolutionary ancestors. They retain, inside their skulls, quite clearly defined, and nearly always large enough to see (and sometimes as large as marbles), healthy little rocks known as otoliths, or “ear stones.” The minute pebbles of our otolithic organs would appear to be the powdered remains of these ancestral lithic pips. It is in this sense that I said we carry within us the “vestiges” of an orienting stone; only our oceanic kin secrete such a thing in an intact form. It is as if, in the course of evolutionary time, our inner al-hajar al-aswad came under the hammer of an angry god. We are, as it were, hanging on after this blow, but our sense of the center may not hold quite as it should.

Throughout: Twelve otoliths (not to scale) from various fresh and saltwater fish. Courtesy Doug Ferrell, New South Wales Department of Primary Industries. Above: Branchiostegus wardi (Ward's tilefish)

Epinephelus lanceolatus (Giant grouper)

Cyprinus carpio (Common carp)

Helicolenus barathri (Bigeye sea perch)

Macquaria ambigua (Golden perch)

Platycephalus caeruleopunctatus (Blue-spotted flathead)

Helicolenus percoides (Red gurnard perch)

Hyporhamphus australis (Eastern sea garfish)

Sarda australis (Australian bonito)

Sillago flindersi (Flinders’ sillago)

Nematalosa erebi (Australian river gizzard shad)

Fish otoliths are among the strangest and most wonderful bits of vertebrate anatomy. They are strikingly sculptural, and their clean surfaces tend to display an alluring opalescent sheen. No one is absolutely sure about all their functions (which would seem to vary from species to species), but it is safe to say that they generally serve in a sensory system very much like the saccule/utricle: they sit atop a mat of sensitive hairs and their sloshing around gives the fish information about its movement in space. Fish that have to deal with complicated spatial environments (reefs, kelp beds) usually have bigger otoliths; those open water predators that stick to swimming fast in straight lines (tuna, billfish) tend to have relatively small ones. Otoliths also seem to play a role in underwater hearing in many species: because they are stone (and therefore of a different specific gravity than the rest of the fish), their vibrations in response to sound waves are out of phase with those of the animal’s body; these differences can be translated into acoustic information. (Interestingly, although hearing in mammals is now handled by a very different system, it has recently been shown that human beings can “hear” very high frequency sounds by means of their otolithic organs, which appear to retain some acoustic sensitivity, despite having been converted almost entirely into sensors for movement and orientation).

There are several thousand researchers around the world who spend their whole working day looking at fish otoliths. This has nothing to do with their physiological functions, however, and everything to

Trachurus novaezelandiae (Yellowtail horse mackerel)

do with their structure and the staggering amount of information they contain. In the first place, each species of fish has a unique otolith shape. Couple this with the fact that they are stone (and therefore comparatively resistant to decomposition), and their utility as a biological marker becomes clear. Interested in the food habits of bottlenose whales? Pump their stomachs and you will end up with relatively few bones but lots of otoliths. Find an otolith expert and he or she will be able to give you a menu. Similar work has been done to reconstruct the ecology of seabirds or to determine, using kitchen middens from archeological sites, the diet of early coast-dwelling humans.

But the true wonder of these peculiar pearls lies within. Should you have occasion to tonsure a snapper or sea bass, slicing off the top of its skull just above the eyes, you might take a moment to remove the two largest otoliths (there are, as a rule, six in all, three on each side) from their velvet seats to the right and left of the brain stem. With the heel of a knife you should be able to snap one of them in two, and then, holding it to the light, you will discern a set of concentric bands. These are growth rings—annuli—which, properly counted, will give the age of your fish in years. This in itself is interesting, and enormously valuable to those who wish to understand the life cycles and population structure of commercial species. But about thirty years ago a curious geologist, tinkering with an otolith (it was a rock, after all), made the truly shocking discovery that those annual layers can be further resolved, microscopically, down to daily layers, layers that contain, in their chemical composition and size, information about the temperature and the salinity of the water through which the fish moved, the food that it ate, and various environmental contaminants it encountered. The result is a stratigraphy unprecedented in the organic world: the diligent student can peruse the otolith of a long-lived deep sea fish, and reconstruct not merely its age, but (and I am barely exaggerating) what it had for breakfast on 6 March 1964, or roughly where it was on the occasion of a particular nuclear test. Not for nothing have those who gather at the biennial “Otolith Olympics” (the insiders’ name for the scientific conference of dedicated otolith researchers) taken to calling the ear stone the “flight recorder” of the piscine world.

And that’s not all. Ever inclined to make an inscription, human beings have figured out how to write their own messages in the heart of the pearl. By sequentially altering the temperature of the water in which salmon fry are hatched and raised, researchers can lay a distinctive “batch label” into the chemical layers of the otolith—a kind of barcode, inscribed in stone, and indelibly preserved within the maturing adult fish (a puckish early student of this technique used it to write “hi mom” in binary inside his experimental animal). Later, when these free-swimming creatures are captured at sea, each can be traced unfailingly to its hatchery of origin. Some five billion Pacific salmon have now been marked in this way, their inner qibla reconfigured to refer to their point of origin, and thus the point to which they seek return.

Learning to Listen, Learning to Hear

Maggy Burrowes

I experienced increased confidence in my Feldenkrais® teaching once I could spontaneously improvise variations on Awareness Through Movement® (ATM®) lessons. My live class attracts mostly older students with deeply ingrained habits, chronic movement limitations, and busy lives. Once I was able to adapt and simplify ATM lessons in response to the particular challenges of my students, I felt involved in a way that was both mentally satisfying and emotionally exhilarating. It was a feeling I recognised from my life as a singer.

I began singing jazz in bars in my early 20s. I was blessed with a highly skilled accompanist, a guitarist who had no desire to perform any solos of his own. His support provided me with the rare opportunity to hone my vocal improvisation skills in front of an audience. Like many young singers in the popular music field of the UK at the time, I had little formal musical training, however there were several talented jazz musicians in my hometown and I learned a lot from them. I developed my jazz singing skills through listening and singing along to recordings by “the greats”. Thanks to the advice of musician friends and mentors, I was listening to horn players like John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, as well as singers Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McCrae.

At the time I would simply have said that I “loved” music. Recent developments in neuroscience have made me realize how vital music was for my physical health (I was severely asthmatic) and my mental well-being. I had found my “neuro-tribe”; the gigging community was full of people like me—highly sensitive, socially awkward, and all managing our anxieties in a variety of ways, healthy and otherwise. Current scientific evidence suggests that listening to music is a wonderful tool for calming the over-aroused nervous system, that making music yourself is even more effective, and that making music as part of a community is the most effective health strategy of all. On stage,

surrounded by musicians, I felt truly happy and in my element for the first time in my life.

The Performer’s Voice

As my singing abilities improved I became more frustrated by the quality of my voice, but the private singing teachers I could find were almost all from the classical music field. For vocalists these two genres are very different in approach: classical performance requires the singer’s vocal muscularity to be heard over the orchestra without amplification, whereas a jazz singer usually performs as part of a small amplified jazz ensemble. The jazz skillset requires a sophisticated use of the microphone and the ability to perform a wide range of vocal tones and pitches with lightness and ease.

Now, of course, I am grateful for this setback in my education because it was my own search for appropriate singing instruction that led me to the Feldenkrais Method® in the first place. Having a Feldenkrais practice has brought the excitement of improvisation and spontaneous action into all parts of my life, and opened up other somatic approaches to singing as well.

The Performer’s Eyes and Ears

My Feldenkrais training began in 1987, and as the first in the UK it attracted many excellent trainers, though Moshe on video was always my favorite. It was so wonderful to lie on the floor, eyes closed, and experience his teaching as if he were there in the room with us. As Moshe’s own voice guided us to bring our attention to our internal sensations he often suggested that we “listen” to ourselves, and this use of the metaphor of listening within made neurological sense to me.

To focus with our eyes is to pick out fine detail; focussing on the sounds reaching our ears can be a more expansive experience as we take in everything from the breathing of the people in the room with us to the drone of jet planes overhead, or the rumble of distant thunder. Listening internally feels like a natural metaphor for focussing our awareness on whatever sensations we can perceive within the boundary of our skin.

When improvising in performance I am always listening, both within myself, in order to catch the moment-by-moment rhythmic and melodic vocal impulses, and outwardly, to the musical soundscape around me. Surfing the waves of rhythm and melody produced by a group of musicians is a simultaneously internal and collective, shared experience.

I have had poor eyesight since early childhood, so I found Moshe’s lessons for the eyes especially intriguing. At the same time, as someone immersed in music, and most concerned about the health of my ears, I

1 Moshe Feldenkrais, “On the Primacy of Hearing” in Embodied Wisdom: The Collected Papers of Moshe Feldenkrais, ed. Elizabeth Beringer (Berkeley: Somatic Resources, 2010).

wondered if it would be possible to improve hearing ability in a similar way, and to retain better hearing acuity into old age. During my training I was given Moshe’s article “On the Primacy of Hearing” (reprinted in this issue of The Feldenkrais Journal ™).1 In it he explores the significance of hearing in early childhood development as well as the potential for retraining our ears as adults, a possibility I will explore more deeply later in this article. Although Moshe did not design ATM lessons to improve hearing, he recommends a very productive experiment at the conclusion of his essay, which involves moving around the house blindfolded for 30 minutes:

2 Feldenkrais, “On the Primacy of Hearing,” 45–51.

When we pay attention to what we see we cannot help withdrawing our attention from the better part of the space around us. A wild animal that does not have a samurai-like awareness of what is happening around it and above it cannot endure for long. You and I can do what a trained samurai can do: we can retrain and extend our awareness to the Reality all around us. The ears did just this before their information began to be partially ignored and neglected, and before vision became domineering instead of dominant. If you continue this demonstration and rely exclusively on your ears for up to a few hours, you will realize how poorly we use ourselves even when our eyes are open. You will notice not only a change to wider attention but the tonus of your entire being is heightened to buoyancy and freshness.2

Before continuing with this article, you might take a break from reading and try the above activity. Among other things, the experience could prove a worthwhile primer for the exploration of hearing and listening that follows.

The Conscious Ear

3 Alfred A. Tomatis, The Conscious Ear: My Life of Transformation Through Listening (New York: Station Hill Press, 1991).

It was during my training that I first came across another text, this one in the form of a book by Dr. Alfred Tomatis called The Conscious Ear 3 Tomatis was certain that the tonal complexity of the human voice was fundamental to the functional development of hearing, as well as the brain and nervous system more generally. Although his methods are now most commonly associated with improving the abilities of children with learning disorders, during his life he did a great deal of work with singers, and became famous for the dictum that “the voice does not produce what the ear does not hear.”

I realize that all the implications of this idea may not at first be apparent. When we listen to a human voice we generally recognize one clear note at a time; the note that our ears can distinguish is known as the fundamental. In fact each vocal note actually consists of layers of

tones, or overtones (also known as partials, or harmonics), and each human voice has unique qualities, in part due to the way a particular voice highlights or minimizes each of these overtones. Singers learn to adjust their internal resonant structures—i.e the larynx, pharynx, and mouth cavity—in order to emphasize different overtones and thus to enrich and intensify the voice. It is this aspect of a singer’s abilities that Tomatis was interested in working with. He designed a machine— the electronic “ear”—that could directly influence which frequencies the wearer was hearing, which is how he discovered that improving a singer’s ability to hear the higher frequencies improved their ability to produce a richer, more resonant singing voice.

It is possible to learn to adjust these internal resonant structures in order to isolate a specific harmonic overtone. When we learn to produce distinct overtones the fundamental note, which is of a lower frequency, is either still audible, so that the listener hears two notes coming from one voice, or masked, so that the listener hears just the overtone itself.

I first came across this unusual vocal skill as a form of mindfulness meditation, and at the time it seemed to me that the self-healing effects being claimed were probably exaggerated. Overtones are great fun to play with but they are always present in the human voice, so why would focussing on them be more effective for improving our well-being than any other vocal practice? Later I realized that, by making it easy to access high frequency sounds, overtones could be used for training our hearing without the need for an external device.

As my work on my own voice continued I began to improve the range and quality of my high notes, and found that my ears began to better distinguish higher frequency sounds in the world around me.

For the first time I became aware of both the beauty and ubiquity of birdsong. I began to enjoy instruments that I had previously found harsh and unappealing, notably the trumpet, and the banjo. I seemed to be experiencing Tomatis’ dictum in reverse, in that the sounds that I was better able to produce with my voice seemed to become easier to hear in the outside world.

Voice, Emotion, and the Nervous System

As I continued with my research I found more evidence to support the idea that overtone chanting could improve overall health. Dr. Stephen Porges’ book, The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation, took my experience and understanding of singing and listening to the next level. The term “polyvagal” references the multiple functions of the “vagus” nerve, which is the long, wide-ranging cranial nerve that makes up 75% of the parasympathetic nervous system and manages the vital

4 Björn Vickhoff et al., “Music structure determines heart rate variability of singers,” Frontiers in Psychology, 09 July 2013, https:// doi.org/10.3389/ fpsyg.2013.00334

5 Dr. Joe Devlin et al., “Audience members’ hearts beat together at the theatre,” UCL Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London Website, 17 November 2017, https://www.ucl. ac.uk/pals/news/2017/nov/ audience-members-heartsbeat-together-theatre

communication between our internal organs and our brain. When our vagal nerve “tone” is healthy we are better able to return our nervous system to the parasympathetic state of rest, relaxation, and recovery. Dr. Porges has done a great deal of in-depth research into the functioning of the vagus nerve and the way that we, as social animals, have evolved to communicate to fellow humans that we are friendly and safe to approach. He calls the wider polyvagal system (which includes other cranial nerves) our “social engagement system” and suggests that it is for this reason we have mobile, expressive faces, and melodic rhythm and intonation in our speaking voices (a feature known as “prosody”). As a social species we can tune into each other’s emotional states in an “embodied” way, so that, via our breathing, facial expression, and the melodic quality of our voice we can influence the breathing patterns and the heart rates of those around us. There is some interesting research from Sweden on the way the heartbeats of choir singers begin to synchronize as they sing together, while a study from University College London has revealed the same can be true of a live theater audience.4 5 This process is not necessarily consciously perceived, and its influence on us can be both positive and negative. It is well-understood that some of us are better at “reading” our fellow humans than others, and Porges’ research offers evidence for why that might be the case. He developed his theories to explain how this capacity to bring our emotions in sync with those around us may be negatively activated both when we experience stress directly, and also as the result of previous traumatic experiences. But awareness practice and singing can help; as the ease with which we can switch our autonomic nervous system from an aroused “sympathetic” state into a calmer “parasympathetic” state can be improved by lengthening our exhalation, which is something that we do every time we hold a note. Porges has also demonstrated that actively listening to sounds within our distinctive human vocal frequency range can have a self-soothing effect. Porges suggests that early mammals evolved relatively high vocal frequency communication so that it would be easier for them to hear each other over the booming lower frequency vocalizations of larger reptilian predators, and that hearing sounds that suggest we are in the presence of our own kind makes us feel safer and more at ease.

Both Dr. Porges and Dr. Tomatis emphasize the therapeutic effects of focussing our listening attention on higher frequency sounds, and, like Tomatis, Porges has developed his theories into a therapeutic program using modified sound frequencies as a healing tool. Both of these therapeutic systems reference the greater calming effect of female voices, with their higher pitched frequency ranges, and both connect this idea to the importance of early childhood experience. Tomatis designed equipment to reproduce the sounds we could hear from inside our mother’s womb, and Porges speaks very movingly about the importance of the comfort we experienced while being held in our mother’s arms as she sang to us.

Vocalization, Hearing, and Health

So, putting it all together . . .

. . . from Dr. Tomatis I learned that the wider and higher the range of vocal harmonic frequencies our ears can distinguish, the wider the range of vocal sounds we can produce, and that both our hearing and our nervous system can benefit when we train our ears to tune in to higher frequency sounds, which include, for example, the piercing high-pitched sounds we make when we whistle, and the sibilant sounds we make when we whisper, and hiss.

. . . from Dr. Stephen Porges I understood that extending our exhalation and simultaneously listening attentively to the vocal sounds being produced can be an effective way to lower the level of arousal in an over-stimulated nervous system, and [again] that higher frequencies are particularly beneficial for inducing a sense of greater well being.

. . . in adapting Feldenkrais lessons for voice teaching I was already using strategies that focussed on guiding my students towards more subtle differentiation of the sensory-motor feedback they were receiving from their respiratory and vocal structures, and the relationship between the movements they were sensing internally and what they were hearing externally.

What did all this nifty information suggest for improving our hearing and, moreover, could a process that improves our hearing also improve our overall health? Learning to generate distinct overtones seemed to be a natural way to produce a captivating vocal sound, one with a frequency pattern complex enough to hold our listening attention. Singing is a natural way to slow down and extend each exhalation so that it is longer than the corresponding inhalation. Therefore, by simply learning to hold long notes we are in effect training our nervous system to shift out of the higher state of arousal associated with the sympathetic nervous system, and into the lowered state associated with the parasympathetic nervous system. Dr. Porges has demonstrated that the state of lowered arousal associated with a feeling of safety and calm also allows for more effective, differentiated sound frequency perception in the bony structures of the middle ear. Thus it seemed reasonable to suppose that whenever we practice vocal exercises with the intention of training our voice, the way we are learning to actively listen to ourselves is both refining our hearing and improving our well-being at the same time.

6 Moshe Feldenkrais, “Self-Fulfillment Through Organic Learning,” Talk at San Diego Mandala Conference, 1981, edited for publication by Mark Reese, reprinted in Embodied Wisdom: The Collected Papers of Moshe Feldenkrais, ed. Elizabeth Beringer (Berkeley: Somatic Resources, 2010), 77–90.

Moshe Feldenkrais and Singing

I was delighted to discover that Moshe Feldenkrais decided to learn to sing in his seventies:

Some people may have a life’s fulfillment in singing. For instance, singing and music were eliminated from my childhood by my Father’s attitude of being a learned man. He thought it was futile to whistle or sing. I should deal with mathematics, with learning— which I did, of course. At the age of seventy I gave myself a birthday present . . . the first present I gave myself was two years of learning to play the piano . . . then I learned singing for three years. Only then, by doing that when I was already seventy-five, did I realize what I had missed all my life. I regret today that I did not start when I was fifteen, or twelve. So you see, it’s in all those things we learn that there is a question of fulfillment.6

When I decided to pursue Feldenkrais training en route to teaching singing, I had no idea how suitable the practice would be. Although I expected there to be more focus on voice in the training than there was, I topped up my understanding of vocal anatomy and function with information from other sources . . . which I had no doubt become more receptive to as a result of my Feldenkrais training. Reading Moshe’s enthusiastic words about his own singing training I feel certain that in time he would have included more voice work directly into his teaching.

Feldenkrais Training and Winging It

Although Moshe had not been singing for long when he made the recordings I encountered in my Feldenkrais training, he taught me a lot that I needed to know in order to perform more effectively as an adult. During my first proper gig for a local jazz festival, nerves overcame me and I forgot the melody of "In a Sentimental Mood" by Duke Ellington. Usually, I would sing the whole song as written, and play around with the melody only after the rest of the band had played the chorus a few times. This time I had no choice but to improvise the very first line, hoping to remember the correct tune by the second verse . . . but it would not come, and I felt hot in the face, more and more embarrassed as I bluffed my way to the end of the song. Masquerading as a much bolder improviser than I had considered myself to be up until that moment, I was relieved when the song came to an end and the audience applauded. But audiences are always kind. It was the supportive comments of a highly respected saxophonist that eased my

embarrassment and showed me that “winging it” could be acceptable, and even successful, in a professional setting.

The discovery that I could improvise while teaching ATM was equally empowering because although I always enjoyed singing I had no such ease when public speaking, and have never been completely comfortable talking to the audience between numbers. Becoming a more confident speaker has given me vital insight into the relationship between performance and Feldenkrais practice. To become confident performers we need to develop the ability to remain present and self-aware in the moment, to free ourselves from the pressure to "try to do well," to tune-in to the impulse to breathe freely, no matter how much tension we are feeling, and to manifest whatever we can of our most integrated self in the moment. For me this is Feldenkrais practice in a nutshell.

Awareness Through Humming, and Listening

I would like to finish by offering you a sample of the sort of lesson I am teaching these days. Since realizing the possibilities, I have been teaching people interested in self-calming as well as vocal training. Whether you are interested in improving your voice, your hearing, or your capacity to self-soothe, these explorations will be most effective if practiced regularly, which may not be the way you would usually approach an ATM lesson. As it is important to me to retain the element of exploration and play fundamental to ATM, I aim to preserve the process of self-discovery in the sequences even as I aim to provide suitable tools for developing professional vocal skills. See how I do.

First I would like to clarify one element of the lesson. Of all Moshe’s creations, I particularly value the "Bell Hand" lessons. Our hands occupy a disproportionately large area of our sensory-motor map. Leveraging this aspect of our neurology, the bell hand involves a slow, continuous opening and closing movement of the whole hand—an easy movement to make, yet complex enough to remain at the forefront of our awareness and not slip into a more automatic, habitual mode. This bell hand motion is maintained while the student simultaneously explores the process of moving from one physical position to another, e.g. from lying to sitting, from sitting to rolling, and from rolling to standing. In my personal experience these gentle hand movements have the calming effect on the whole nervous system that I can also achieve with vocal chanting.

In my potent voice lessons I employ a vocal version of the bell hand strategy, using the sustaining of simple vocal sounds as a substitute for the continuously opening and closing hand motion. Vowel sounds

are sustainable by their very nature, as are humming sounds, and the “fricatives,” which include sounds such as hissing your esses or buzzing your zees. To sustain these sounds we maintain each one for as long as we have breath, then inhale to “refuel,” and then immediately continue making the same (or another) sustainable sound. We roll, sit, stand, and lie down again, humming, droning, chanting, and eventually singing all the while.

The lesson below can be explored in many positions; if you choose to lie on the floor please make sure your neck is in a comfortable position—you may find it easier to have a small support under your head. Each segment can be explored on its own, or combined with any other segment.

An Awareness Through Humming lesson:

1. Bring your lips into an “m” shape: they will close completely; once you add vocal vibration this becomes a sustainable consonant. The “m” sound is one of our nasal "hums." Hums are usually gentle sounds that do not use much breath, so it can be easy to hum for a nice long time, even if you have never done any vocal training before. Spend a little time playing with your hum, listening to the sound both outside and inside your head. It is interesting to gently block and unblock your ears and to notice how the sound reverberates through the bones of your skull. We are preparing to make the continuous sound that is going to be our version of the bell hand movement, and as you make this sound your rib cage and your lungs steadily open and close—as do your vocal folds, albeit at a much faster rate!

2. Next you can begin to explore different vowel shapes by adjusting the shape of your mouth and the position of your tongue. This is very easy to do if you play around with an extended “mee-ow”—so have a go at singing the longest, slowest cat-like sound you can produce. You should be able to hear yourself gradually shift from one vowel to the next, and the next, in a smooth, steady manner. Notice that your tongue is forming different shapes inside your mouth and that each tongue position corresponds to a specific vowel sound. As your auditory awareness develops you may also begin to distinguish some of the different “overtones” blended into the fundamental note you are producing. These overtones are perceptible as much higher pitched vocal notes. They are very subtle and light—they do not become distinct and easily audible to others without a great deal of practice. Your overtones may become easier for you to pick out from the unchanging fundamental note you are making if you focus your listening attention on the shifting tonal soundscape inside your mouth and between your lips.

7 Sanjay Kumar et al., "Meditation on OM: Relevance from ancient texts and contemporary science," International Journal of Yoga 3, no. 1 (January–June, 2010): 2–5, https://doi. org/10.4103/09736131.66771

3. If you continue to “meow” and begin to move your lips in a slightly more exaggerated manner, you will find that more sound can escape, which will make the different frequencies easier to pick out. Listening intently to the tonal richness and complexity of your own voice can be very absorbing and allow you to enter a state of mental focus and physical calm. With regular practice the exercise can have similar results to those achieved with other forms of mindfulness practice— and of course there are already ancient forms of mindfulness practice that include toning and chanting, of which the most well-known chanted sound is probably “Om,” first mentioned in Hindu Scripture and defined as the “primordial sound of creation.” 7

4. Just as with the bell hand sequences, you can now experiment with moving from lying to sitting to standing while sustaining these sounds—or indeed any other vocal sounds you can sustain while you are moving. Once you have the hang of the basic idea, combining vocalizing with Awareness Through Movement can be a lovely way to open up your capacity for vocal improvisation.

On the Primacy of Hearing

Moshe Feldenkrais

In the darkness of human fetal existence, there is little likelihood that seeing takes place. But even though there is no seeing, there is hearing. The fetus hears the heartbeats of the mother, the noises of her digestive tract, the noises of her breathing, the bubbling of gases, emphysematic disturbances in the breathing tract, or coughing, sneezing, and other noises connected with the digestive tract. There is little doubt that the fetus is stimulated by these many sounds, but we cannot assert that he "hears" them in the way we do: simple response to organic stimulation is very different from the hearing that takes place after personal experience and growth.

This innervation of the ear is a stimulation coming to the fetus from the "outside," just as it later is the case when the baby "sees" the world. But we know that the neonate does not actually see the outside world when he comes into it. Unlike the ears, the eyes have not had any prior stimulation and learning. Indeed, it is generally understood that there is no seeing at all for the first few weeks, even though there is some response to light. It, then, stands to reason that the function of hearing is prior to seeing in each and every individual, just as it is prior in the development of evolutionary structures.

The function of hearing evolved as a response to mechanical vibrations. The ability to respond to finer vibrations, such as oscillations in the air, became true hearing when all of the structural complexity and finesse of the ear and of the nervous system had evolved—function and structure grow and assist each other in this way all along the path of evolutionary development.

An infant is, then, predominantly a hearing animal; the first experience of the world around us is initially sensory and then auditory, even though this slight priority is likely not significant. The first years of a

The following article was first published in Somatics magazine in 1979 and has been widely distributed in Feldenkrais® trainings.

baby's life are passed, not so much in seeing, but in learning to walk and to speak—i.e., the infant is largely sensory and auditory in orientation. A child's memory, its ability to imitate everything it hears, its ability to learn a first language depend on this orientation; later, however, the possibility of learning a second language reflects a greater role played by seeing.

Many people grow up without directly relating their seeing to the outside world; their internal security is based more on their hearing. Such people are especially sensitive to the inflections of the voice. The emotional content of the heard word means more to them than its meaning. In a similar way, most of us prefer to hear a teacher say something rather than read it. Even though the latter way is more exact, hearing makes seeing more concrete and easier to remember and, therefore, to understand. This is the case with our short-term memory, without which we would not be able to relate the end of a sentence to its beginning.

As a child first begins to be trained in reading and writing, his hearing is gradually withdrawn from most of the space around him. He learns to pay increasing attention, sometimes exclusively, to that sector of space which he sees. In general, it is the case that we see only a small part of the space around us, even though in hearing we hear from all around us.

We see here a particular instance of something very general and fundamental: in learning to direct his attention to what his eyes see, the child withdraws his general watchfulness and becomes oblivious to the greater part of the space around him.

Later he will learn to listen to the information of both his ears and eyes. He may already be capable of handling considerable stimulation in both ears and eyes. But he will have to undergo considerably more learning before he will have an undivided attention which can detect minimal or barely perceptible changes. But here again, he will listen— mostly to his ears, checking the eyes for accuracy and detail.

When we arrive in the outside world we have no inkling of what it is. This is because, at first, the stimulation of the senses carries no information other than the fact that the senses are being stimulated. The beginning of our acquaintance with the outside world is not only sensory but is entirely subjective. For a long time we know only a sensorial subjective reality. We are not, however, alone: always we are in communication with other human beings—parents, teachers, etc. Without ever stopping to think about it, we behave as if all these others share the same subjective reality as we.

There are as many subjective realities as there are subjects. The one thing that is common to all these subjective realities is the one reality we use in communicating with one another: the one "objective" reality for all of us.

But, apart from this, there is obviously a third reality. This is Reality— with a capital R—that is understood to exist whether you and I are alive or whether we know it or ignore it. This is the Reality which must exist and must be there, whether men exist or not. When we use our thinking,

and not only our sensing, we realize that this third Reality is more than likely the first.

This Reality is immensely complex and is only very superficially known, either to science or philosophy or in music or poetry. But our sense of self-importance makes us believe that our subjective reality is just as valid.

The "objective" reality is, finally, that part of our subjective reality which we are willing to concede to our fellow men. I can see that you can see and that you can read, but I can never believe that you can see as I can, or understand what you read as I do, even though logic forces me to recognize I must be wrong and have no grounds for thinking in this way.

My subjective reality is mine entirely and follows all my whims. "Objective" reality is less whimsical: it is the reality experienced by all men. It limits and restricts your and my subjective reality to that upon which all others agree. Subjective reality is anchored in us and is as real as our bodies. Objective reality is the measure of our sanity. But Reality has never as yet been perceived in its entirety. Our belief that we know Reality is an illusion, a maya; it is a measure of our ignorance.

Mind you, I know that our consciousness and awareness can grow. As these functions come to be properly understood and developed, we will be able to bite off, chew, and assimilate a much greater chunk of Reality. This is possible because, from the very start of our lives, our nervous system is not bound by any reality: it is a tabula rasa when we come into the world. On a clean board you can write anything, and to make any new writing on the nervous system meaningful and superior, this new writing must be based on our choice and not upon chance.

Each of us comes into the world with a nervous system complete for all the functions necessary to keep that nervous system growing and learning more and more complex activity: all the digestive functions, breathing, eliminatory mechanisms, restoring equilibrium, regulating temperature, heartbeat, maintaining invariant pressures of liquids such as blood, lymph, cerebrospinal fluid, chemical composition, healing and restoring every excessive change back to an optimal homeostatic condition were there—in short, everything that any animal born has in its nervous system—all organized to function and to rebound from accidental changes in functioning.

Many of my clients bring with them a nervous system with parts of it not organized at all. Only the structure is there with no connections to make it function. We have termed this initial state of neural structure— capable of functioning only after personal experience of reality—a tabula rasa. Reality helps the structure to organize itself to fit the surrounding medium in which it will have to live. Initially we could not speak any language, we could not walk, we could not read, we could not write, we could not sing, we could not whistle, nor could we yodel. We could not see a three-dimensional object on two-dimensional paper, and we could not count. We had only this tabula rasa, capable of being organized to an astonishing facility to accomplish immensely more.

We could, in the beginning, have used our nervous system, the mouth, its muscles, the vocal cords, the feedback from the mouth cavity to the ears and auditory cortex to fit any of the two thousand languages and at least as many dialects with equal facility.

The human species did not start out by being anything but an animal, but ended up becoming the animal, Homo sapiens. All the other animals come into the world with their structures much more organized to function in almost rigid patterns. Their nervous systems are more complete, and the patterns of connections directing activity are almost set and unalterable but are fit for early action. The Homo sapiens animal has a tremendous part of his nervous system left unpatterned, not connected, so that each individual, depending on the environment in which he happens to be born, can organize his brain to fit the surrounding demands. This his brain learns to do. The animal part ready at birth can do only what other animals do. His brain can learn what others can do in only one way, but it can also learn more ways of doing it.

The freedom to learn is a great liability; initially, it also is a restriction. There is no freedom of choice or free will when there is only one way of acting. Learning makes it possible to have alternative ways of performing anything. The ability to learn is synonymous with free choice and free will. But once learned the choice is made, the die is cast, and the tabula rasa is no more. Herein lie the liabilities as well as the restriction.

Even as the awareness of being a Homo sapiens evolved only gradually, so also the traditional human ways of learning grew gradually and, so to speak, naturally. Traditionally, the process of education was never thought out and the methods which came naturally when dealing with an infant have substantially remained the same. Considering that at the age of two our nervous system attains four-fifths of its ultimate size and weight, everything is basically set and learning will continue on these pre-set lines, in most cases restricting the freedom of learning and choice. Most persons with neural malfunctions are not aware that the functions they have lost were originally learned and were not inherited as were their digestion or temperature regulation. Were these latter lost, then life would come to an abrupt end. But these unfortunates have lost learned organization and, like everyone else, they see no difference between the Homo sapiens part of themselves and the animal part. They cannot help themselves and neither can anyone else who is not aware of this difference. Many of the evils from which we suffer are rooted in our false understanding that human education is the training of a completed being to do this or that, as if we were making a computer perform a desired activity.

In spite of the apparent darkness of the human future, I believe we have not yet reached our Homo sapiens capacities for learning; it is

still too early to condemn man on the strength of the small awareness he has acquired by chance and not by his outstanding ability to reduce great complexity to familiar simplicity—in other words, to learn. We have never yet really used our essential freedom of choice and we have barely learned to learn.

It is difficult to choose a suitable example to illustrate the above, but here is a simple one that will show how very much a liability and restriction is our achieved level of learning and how we do not benefit from what our awareness allows us: while in your home or some familiar surrounding, blindfold yourself and live by your ears only. To begin with, do it for only half an hour. You will quickly realize how your awareness is mostly limited to what you can see. Any creature who had to guarantee his individual safety and security could not survive if two-thirds of the space around him was ignored and did not reach awareness.

When we pay attention to what we see we cannot help withdrawing our attention from the better part of the space around us. A wild animal that does not have a samurai-like awareness of what is happening around it and above it cannot endure for long. You and I can do what a trained samurai can do: we can retrain and extend our awareness to the Reality all around us. The ears did just this before their information began to be partially ignored and neglected, and before vision became domineering instead of dominant.

If you continue this demonstration and rely exclusively on your ears for up to a few hours, you will realize how poorly we use ourselves even when our eyes are open. You will notice not only a change toward wider attention but the tonus of your entire being is heightened to buoyancy and freshness. Some esoteric disciplines believe that in such a change the entire consciousness is raised to a higher level. At this level your memory will resemble more what it was during your early childhood before you learned to read. Moreover, your ability to learn and retain will equally improve.

The Nature of Singing Kwan Wong

Stephen Paparo Robert Sussuma Drew Minter Karen Clark Richard Corbeil Deborah Bowes

Introduction

Kwan Wong , GCFPCM and organizer of The Nature of Singing workshop series and Daily Improvement Collective

The first breath we take and the cry that announces our arrival into the world lay the foundation for all our future vocal expressions and verbal communication. Infant babbles, casual conversations around the dinner table, a speech that moves a nation, and a passionate aria all find their origin in these primary acts.

While they may be novice vocalizers, newborn babies are also expert listeners. They have been listening to the symphony of their mother’s heartbeat, her breathing and digestion, and the world around her. Through mechanoreceptors in their skin, they have registered and adjusted to their mother’s every move.

Listening is not limited to the processing of physical vibrations but includes a wide range of sensory and kinesthetic inputs. Think of listening in a Feldenkrais® lesson for how the spine is contacting the floor. We listen to the ease of an action as we perform it and the echoes throughout our body as we rest and reflect.

Our ability to listen is also a form of dialogue—a feedback loop of listening and acting. We make finer and finer distinctions and integrate them into our movement vocabulary. As other Feldenkrais principles,

embodied listening is useful for self-inquiry as well as connecting with our environment and community.

In organizing The Nature of Singing, a series of six workshops exploring the Feldenkrais Method® and voice, I observed an arc from introspective to socially engaged take shape. Workshop teachers Stephen Paparo, Drew Minter, Karen Clark, Richard Corbeil, and Deborah Bowes have been generous to participate in a conversation about our collaborative process. Responding to questions put forth by editors of The Feldenkrais Journal ™, they have also contributed reflections on how Feldenkrais practice and singing first babbled forth in their lives. Sketches by workshop participants in response to a lesson taught by Robert Sussuma, another wonderful teacher in The Nature of Singing series, appear alongside their words. How lucky we are to have such colorful, candid accounts of lessons learned and shared.

The Nature of Singing: A Conversation

Stephen Paparo, GCFPCM , Associate Professor of Music Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and conductor of the University Chorale

Moshe Feldenkrais described learning as a process that grows until it dawns on you. I was only 19 when I first came across the Method. At that time, my habitual way of playing the piano was causing me significant pain. I had seemingly run out of options when I had the good fortune to work with Carol McAmis, GCFPCM and Professor Emerita of Music at Ithaca College. Although it took me years to fully integrate those sessions, I was back playing the piano almost immediately. I went on to train with David Zemach-Bersin and Deborah Bowes in New York, sharing what I learned with my high-school choral singers and other instrumentalists, conductors, and inservice music educators.

Participating in The Nature of Singing workshops, I have been struck by our collective knowledge of the Feldenkrais Method and surprised at our very different yet complementary applications of the work. My own presentation emerged as a result of listening to my fellow presenters. For the 2020 series, I agreed in advance to lead the final workshop, threading together the previous five. Since my perspective as a choral conductor focuses more on group singing as opposed to one-on-one voice teaching, it seemed to fit well at the end. This order was also in keeping with Kwan’s vision for the overall workshop to move from internally-focused to more social and externally-focused.

My intention both years that the series has run was to demonstrate

Fig 1 Drawing made by Audra Wolowiec before listening to Robert Sussuma’s lesson, Do You Hear What You Hear?

how one might implement Feldenkrais practice into rehearsals and singing lessons. Though I prepared aspects of my presentations beforehand, my task during the workshops themselves was to attend, synthesize, and offer an appropriate conclusion. For example, during one of my colleagues’ sessions, we had a request for clarity about the principles of the work. As a way of responding to that question, my session included a summary of the principles and processes I observed come up over the course of the weekend. In addition, I had always enjoyed how, in my training program, Zemach-Bersin often finished a long weekend of training with an Awareness Through Movement® (ATM®) lesson that seemed to bring all of the pieces together into a coherent whole. So the ATM lesson I offered revisited the themes of the workshop in a novel, relational way.

Kwan: I think we can all relate to those culminating lessons during Feldenkrais® training! Drew, how did your Feldenkrais journey begin?

Drew Minter, GCFPCM , opera director, and Senior Music Lecturer at Vassar College, where he teaches voice, choir, opera and the Feldenkrais Method ® to musicians

Pain also led me to the Feldenkrais Method—something else I’m sure many practitioners can relate to. I was a young performer in New York City when I sustained an injury during rehearsal. The piece was quite complex, requiring me to lift my partner at extreme angles. Trying to make sense of the task, I broke several ribs in my back and dislocated others in my chest. I have always been a singer first, and the slippages in the front of my ribcage wreaked havoc on my ability to compress the air I needed to breathe and support my voice.

That week I went for a singing lesson with Marcy Lindheimer, my voice teacher at the time, who was already heavily involved in her training to become a Guild Certified Feldenkrais PractitionerCM . She suggested I take Feldenkrais Integration (FI)® sessions with her teacher, Anat Baniel. I followed up with Awareness Through Movement (ATM)® sessions, making cassette recordings I have cherished ever since.

More recently, I have been singing without incident and letting my Feldenkrais practice lapse, until, that is, a summer opera workshop in Chicago a few years ago. When designing the curriculum, my co-director Craig Trompeter, a Feldenkrais practitioner and head of the Haymarket Opera Company hosting the workshop, suggested we begin each day with an ATM® session. The results were remarkable! The general profile of participants in these workshops is graduate level singing students and young professionals. They were much more awake mentally and physically following their morning ATMs, responding to the day’s stage and musical direction so quickly and precisely I found myself adding

material just to keep them busy! I had never before added material to a workshop; au contraire, I usually found myself running for the scissors. In addition, the students responded with great sensitivity in ensemble work, opening up and cohering as a community.

After only three days of this opera workshop, I realized that I needed more ATM in my singing teacher toolbox. So the next summer I began training with David Zemach-Bersin in New York. I had been bringing elements of Feldenkrais ATM into my singing lessons for years, working with students on the floor or in sitting to experiment with movements of the pelvis, ribs, shoulders, head, and neck. Sometimes we explored these other orientations prior to our work in standing, sometimes intermittently with our more accustomed singing posture. Singers have to learn how to exhale efficiently, launching the proper amount of air with the necessary speed against tensed vocal cords. But they must also learn how to do this in a balanced way. Too little air flow can result in a lax sound and breathiness while too much force can result in pushing and a harsh or inflexible sound lacking resonance. In the world of classical singing, we call a balanced use of tension in the vocal cords “supporting the voice.” A singer whose voice is well-supported will seem to be singing in an effortless way, lending their performance an enviable naturalness, even though the balance has been learned through much trial and error. There is effort involved, of course, but if the singing is well-coordinated a singer will not injure themselves. Professional singers must also be able to sing over long periods of time; an opera or concert career can require hours of rehearsal every day. Learning how to rest, one of the favorite directives of Feldenkrais lessons, is essential to a singer’s longevity!

“Supporting the voice” involves inhaling in a way that matches the intention of what you plan to sing. If you take a slow, low breath, you will not be able to sing brilliant high notes, fast coloratura notes, or a sprightly upbeat popular song; your body simply won’t be prepared for the task at hand. You have to have a certain amount of lift in the intercostals and sternum and a fast action of the air. Likewise, a breath that is too high and too compressed will not serve a low lying, sustained phrase such as you might have in a legato art song or a languid torch song.

All this takes imagination. As a teacher of movement specializing in 17th and 18th century acting and gestural performance I have been thinking for years about dynamic posture. Nothing is more inexpressive and flat onstage than a singer who specializes in "Park and Bark" (i.e., standing stock-still and belting it out). As a director I have on occasion resorted to positioning such singers in the shadows while their flexible colleagues found themselves in the more rewarding onstage light. Upon seeing herself televised in the 1970s, when the first live performances were regularly broadcast on TV, one Metropolitan Opera singer was so shocked at the static quality of her acting that she lost weight, took

Fig 2 Drawing made by Audra Wolowiec after listening to Robert Sussuma’s lesson, Do You Hear What You Hear?

acting lessons, and became the dynamic performer of great fame beloved of that institution for two decades. In order for gestures to be expressive, and powerful, they must be active, hence “acture” as Moshe Feldenkrais called it.

Kwan : That resonates a lot with me. The idea that action follows intention—not giving more or less but just enough. It reminds me of how Moshe would say there are no good habits or bad habits. When you are acting without awareness, unaware of how your habits were formed, the underlying habit is ignorance. Once you become more aware of your choices, the system knows how to find the best action to match your intention. Karen, how did you come to realize your avowed and unavowed singing voice?

Karen Clark , GCFPCM , concert singer, ensemble director, and singing teacher

When I first heard of the Feldenkrais Method I’d already completed bachelor and masters degrees in the opera program at Indiana University, Bloomington and was singing professionally. It was circa 1988 at an early music festival in Holland at lunch with colleagues when Stephen Grant enthusiastically encouraged me to check out the Feldenkrais Method. I had been working with a voice coach and Alexander teacher in Hartford, CT and felt I needed to explore more about how to listen to myself in all kinds of ways.

In my first Awareness Through Movement (ATM) class in Princeton, NJ—maybe it was the pelvic clock?—I clearly recall the teacher, Michal Ben-Reuven, instructing “listen to your thinking”. What was my inner dialogue, my self-talk commentary? Wow! That was a lightbulb moment for me. What I heard was self-denigration to beat the bands. Thoughts like: ‘you must look so stupid’, ‘you’re probably the only one in the class who doesn’t get it!’, and, ‘who do you think you are?’

This realization that I could observe myself and my thinking was completely new to me. I had to wonder, then, with such a mean internal dialogue, how did I ever dare to stand on a stage and open my mouth to sing in front of hundreds of people?

In psychology, they sometimes refer to the true self and the false self. To me, the false self is the face we put on to go along to get along. Behavior strategies that make us fit into certain circles, or so we think. The true self is who we really are. How do I really feel? Who am I regardless of the environment or situation?

After I began Functional Integration (FI) lessons I could not understand how it happened that I would walk into the lesson feeling so-so, pretty good, just fine. And then, after the lesson, I’d walk out to a vibrant world feeling optimistic, almost giddy with possibility and the first

Fig 3 (Following

Drawings

inklings of self-confidence. Eventually, I did need and chose to engage a psychotherapist. For me, the combination of the Feldenkrais Method® and psychotherapy was a win-win.

Up to this point, I had plenty of mental tricks. I could think my way into or out of anything. But, you see, in the arts and humanities, thinking is only a small part. In the arts—like singing—you meet yourself. The vocal exercises of scales and arpeggios, like the repetitions in Awareness Through Movement, are created for you to discover your true voice, your true person.

Without slowing down to notice thoughts, movements, breathing I would have continued to repeat the old self-defeating patterns, expecting things to improve. The way I describe it now is that formerly in singing, I would whack at the notes and phrases. Like trying to beat them into submission. At the first note I was already in some anxious state knowing it would NOT be alright but hoping against all hope.

What we call parasitic movement in Feldenkrais practice does not begin to describe what I experienced as a huge, almost impenetrable wall of learned fear, horror, and self-disdain. What I thought was performance anxiety turned out to be a more intensified version of my daily state of PTSD. This is not an exaggeration. I had learned well the strategy of disassociation—physical and mental—which made it impossible to function much less sing. And yet, I did. I count myself very fortunate that with psychotherapy and the Feldenkrais Method, I have been able to learn about myself and improve without drugs. No beta-blockers for me. I’ll just lie down here on the floor . . . .

As we have plenty of opportunities to do in The Nature of Singing workshops. Clarifying anatomical function—its structure and design— with respect to use and intention, has helped me go behind the scenes of vocal technique and into the primitive function. There is a primitive function in any vocal utterance. For instance, the primal movement possibilities for the larynx—way up for a screech or scream to sound an alarm; or way down to lull or coo for mating. In the art of singing western classical music, however, these abrupt, extreme laryngal movements must be brought under control. Known as the break—the junctures where the larynx needs to make micro-adjustments for the vocal folds to adduct—these must be managed such that the vocal instrument sounds seamless. Western classical singing developed a vocal technique to create specific culturally preferred, aesthetically pleasing ways of uttering sounds, vowels, consonants, phrases. Singing! Crying out, comforting, sounding an alarm, scolding, warning, soothing, enticing. The opera singer does all of this and must learn to calibrate her instrument to retain flexibility, strength, and spontaneity.

We sing through the cultivation of sensations and imagination, which change by the millisecond. You cannot control every outcome but you can learn to create the desirable, optimal conditions within and without. Imagination and sensation work hand in hand. This is what you practice.

For the first workshop I taught as part of The Nature of Singing

Spread)

made by Grace Sinclair after listening to Robert Sussuma’s lesson, Do You Hear What You Hear?

workshop series, I was inspired to offer a flexion lesson–bringing the elbows and the knees toward and away from one another—call it a breathing lesson. And, by softening the chest, sensing the softening possible behind the sternum, the movement of the diaphragm as in laughing or crying and imagining the vagus nerve begin to coo and then vocalize on one tone or a simple two-note pattern. The object is to become more physically aware of how our intention and imagination inform the vocal expression, the resonance and the sound that is emitted. In the same way that lifting a hand can feel so very different depending on intention. Is the hand lifted with an intention of caressing a pet or a partner? Or, is the hand lifting to swat a mosquito?

In speaking or singing, the tone and resonance of the voice can vary widely depending on intention, as Drew was saying. The emotion is never just “sad” or “angry”. By getting in touch with the physical sensations that arise from intention and imagination, the singer or speaker can begin to practice toward the outcome he/she/they choose. Just as the inflection and emphasis in our speaking rises and falls, increasing and decreasing in volume with regard to intention, so does the singer’s. And, in fact, by working with awareness, by locating an intention and making it their own, the singer can embody and deliver a song from the 12th or 21st century as assuredly and genuinely as if she’d written it herself.

I developed the approach to this particular lesson when I was recovering my own voice after a serious lower abdominal surgery (there she is again, that great teacher, Pain). I learned that by softening my chest and looking to sense the diaphragmatic attachment at the xiphoid process (cartilage at the end of the sternum)—like moaning or weeping— my voice became vulnerable and strong depending on my intention. I refer to it as the “starfish”—the connections between the attachment of the diaphragm to the pelvic floor, the hips, legs, ankles. With head bowed, neck soft, gently rocking, I experienced singing—literally—from head to toe.

Kwan : Your reflections are so vivid, lyrical, and emotional! Sometimes I think of psychology as the frontier of the Feldenkrais Method. There is so much yet to be explored. Moshe’s first book, Body and Mature Behavior, is in some ways a direct response to Freud. I wonder how Richard conceives of the role of the ego—or the self—in music and Feldenkrais practice.

Richard Corbeil , GCFPCM , singer, and singing teacher

After completing two years of college in science of education, I realized through my studies of different educational systems how much my sense of myself and my orientation in life were a result of my socio-cultural environment. As a result of this insight, I decided to take a “sabbatical”

during which time I intended to find my “authentic self” and my true calling.

I eventually decided to follow my interest in music. I loved traditional music of all kinds, and although I played several instruments, I realized that I always felt more connected to the songs. Yet, I had always resisted taking any kind of singing lessons, believing at the time that voice training would force a style on me that would betray the aesthetic of the music I was interested in. Only when Early Music performance with original instruments became popular did I hear voices with qualities that fit my artistic inclinations.

I consequently enrolled in a new program at Concordia University that focused on Early Music Performance. I soon ended up dividing my time between co-directing a medieval music ensemble, teaching, and working as a freelance early music singer in North America and Europe. Along the way, I became enthralled by the chanting traditions of different parts of the medieval world. In particular, I became fascinated by the striking differences of vocal qualities and esthetics in these musical traditions, many of them transmitted to this day. This realization started a new inquiry: What is the vocal quality of a human being making sounds in the most efficient way, denuded of any cultural style or musical influence?

Looking for ways to answer this question led me to experiment with several somatic approaches. Although I could appreciate their value, I often ended up walking away a bit dispirited by their prescriptive or corrective nature, so I kept searching. One day, I was lucky enough to come across the Feldenkrais Method.

From the very first Awareness Through Movement (ATM) lesson that I attended, I knew that I had found what I had been looking for all along—a method from which I could learn from my own experience without following an external model or adopting someone else’s vision. Soon after, I enrolled in a Feldenkrais professional training.

After graduating from my training, I was fascinated by the possibilities of applying the Feldenkrais Method to voice training. Following the principles of the method, I created original group lessons (ATMs) that emulate and elaborate the motor patterns that become the building blocks of our vocal functioning. I have been presenting these lessons in the form of constantly fluctuating, constantly evolving workshops for nearly three decades now. The outcome ended up being more and more about the use of the voice as a human function, which of course includes singing, but not exclusively singing. For instance, over time, many participants attended these workshops to improve or recover their ability to speak after neurological damage or injury, with remarkable success. The magic of the method is such that everyone can benefit from it according to what they need.

In one-on-one lessons (Functional Integration [FI] lessons), I additionally use the language of touch to expand the vocal potential of a person’s voice by investigating the relationship between their emotions, facial expressions, self-image, postural organization, and breathing, all of

which impact not only their performance level, but also their appreciation of themselves and their quality of life. In artistic performance as well as in our daily actions, a lack of differentiation and choice is dreadful. It is a life without liberty. On the other hand, if we find that as we proceed with our actions, we sense the spontaneous emergence of more and more possibilities, with the freedom to choose between more and more options, we experience true inspiration. We can then spontaneously discover ways to express the full spectrum and multidimensionality of our human condition.

Kwan: I love your idea of a most efficient sound denuded of cultural and musical influence. In some way it is the opposite of Karen’s idea of “the impulse to sing,” which is tied to images as well as sensations. It is also very “Feldenkraisian” to investigate in a novel context so that when we link the learning back to the function, it’s more efficient, less bogged down. Deborah, you’ve opened The Nature of Singing worshop series on both occasions. What was that like, to set the intention and provide a context in which workshop participants could really explore?

When you invited me to participate in The Nature of Singing by introducing the Feldenkrais Method and use of the pelvic floor, I initially felt insecure. I am not a professional singer and wondered what my work would add to the amazing lineup you had gathered for this specialized audience.

Fortunately, I found inspiration in Cole Porter’s song " Experiment," which I later decided to share with students in the workshop. This song speaks to a principle fundamental to both Awareness Through Movement (ATM) and Functional Integration (FI). In my moment of indecision, Porter’s message to be open-minded gave me confidence. I played a recording of Kevin Kline singing " Experiment" in the 2004 biopic De-Lovely to supplement my introductory lesson about learning, the Feldenkrais Method, and the pelvic floor.

EXPERIMENT by Cole Porter

Before you leave these portals

To meet less fortunate mortals

There’s just one final message I would give to you You all have learned reliance On the sacred teachings of science

Deborah Bowes , GCFPCM , Feldenkrais Method ® trainer, and amateur musician

So I hope, through life you never will decline In spite of philistine Defiance

To do what all good scientists do Experiment Make it your motto day and night Experiment

And it will lead you to the light The apple on the top of the tree Is never too high to achieve So take an example from Eve Experiment

Be curious

Though interfering friends may frown, Get furious

At each attempt to hold you down If this advice you’ll only employ The future can offer you infinite joy And merriment Experiment

And you’ll see

I discovered from this collaboration just how applicable Feldenkrais pedagogy is for singers and voice teachers. I have been surrounded by Feldenkrais teachings since I was in my 20s, for more than 40 years, and sometimes take for granted the skills and techniques I use every day, not only in my Feldenkrais practice, but for improving anything I am doing. The principles embedded in the method, such as using curiosity, finding options, making distinctions, and having choices seem so obvious to me now; I assume that everyone must already know about these approaches to moving and being in the world. I was reminded, as I listened to my colleagues answer student questions, that the way we orchestrate the learning experience in the Feldenkrais Method is quite unique, if universally relevant, and immediately useful.

I taught an Awareness Through Movement lesson that developed awareness of the skeleton for support in sitting and standing, and, more specifically, the pelvic floor as the bottom of the “container” of the torso. The “container” of the torso responds to changes in intra-abdominal pressure, such as happens in singing. The healthy pelvic floor functions within a coordinated system of muscular action; it does not act alone, it is synergistic with the diaphragm, the abdominals, and deep muscles of the spine, as well as muscles of the hip. The lesson was designed to help each person sense this coordination, and improve the use of the system by improving the quality of the movement of the whole self. I included humming and singing at the beginning and end of the lesson so that each participant could hear and appreciate how the quality of the voice improved when the pelvic floor system was activated appropriately.

Fig 4 Drawing by Grace Sinclair made before listening to Robert Sussuma’s lesson, Do You Hear What You Hear?

I happily participated in all the workshops. There was continuity, with each person adding a dimension of singing and an approach to teaching. For the first time, I became aware of what it feels like to relax and widen my throat, to organize my whole body in order to change a sound. I sing every day, play my ukulele, and hear the improvement in my voice. There are times that singing feels wonderful and easy. I have not had any discomfort in my throat since the first summit.

The first workshop with Karen Clark got me thinking about self-image and singing. Why do I sing better when I am alone? Is there a possibility of singing like that when I am with my uke group? Why the self-consciousness? I have had thoughts like this before and could ignore them. Since Karen’s workshop I cannot seem to ignore these questions. Her discussion of the emotional experience, the impulse to sing, allowed me to discover a more differentiated and nuanced, felt sense of singing.

I wonder if collaboration comes naturally for singers or if this was a skillful bunch. My colleagues, Kwan, Robert, Karen, Drew, Richard, and Stephen, were so relaxed and yet engaged through our online planning discussions and emails. The joyful quality of the collaboration was also notable. There may be other reasons for the ease of communication, but I do think the nature of making music with others is conducive to good feeling and playfulness. It reminded me of playing music with others, listening to find the place to add my voice, to blend the sound, and to have everyone succeed.

My big takeaway is that singers need and can immediately use the Feldenkrais Method®. There is valuable learning for improving the felt sense, for developing pedagogy, for gaining more self-awareness, and for improving the skill to organize the body to do what you want to do.

Contributor Bios

Alice Friedman , MA, Feldenkrais® Practitioner since 1987, Assistant Trainer, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, Registered Psychologist, and former professional dancer, has explored the intersection of motion and emotion her entire life. She organized two Victoria Feldenkrais® Teacher Training Programs and is now part of the Kelowna Feldenkrais™ Teacher Training team in British Columbia, Canada. She maintains a private practice on Salt Spring Island. feldenkraislearningmatters.com

D. Graham Burnett is based in New York City. He writes and makes work as Yara Flores, Nachtborg Haam, Eigil zu Tage-Ravn, and others. He is associated with the collective ESTAR(SER), and contributes to “The Friends of Attention.” Recent projects include In Search of the Third Bird (London: Strange Attractor, 2021), and “Vigils and Vigilance” at the 2021 Glasgow International. Burnett did a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University and teaches at Princeton. dgrahamburnett.net

Maggy Burrowes graduated from the first UK training program in London in 1990. She has been teaching privately and at universities ever since, in the UK and abroad. Burrowes remains involved in UK training programs as an experienced practitioner, giving individual lessons to teachers for trainer Garet Newell. Her Feldenkrais-based Potent Voice system is the culmination of years of experience performing, teaching, and researching state-of-the-art voice training science. maggyburrowes.com

Deborah Bowes’ doctoral research investigated the use of the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education to improve awareness and functioning of the pelvic floor. In San Francisco in 1988, Bowes co-founded the Feldenkrais Center for Movement and Awareness (FCMA) with Julie Casson Rubin, which moved online in 2020 due to the pandemic. Bowes now teaches virtually and continues with a small in-person private practice. She is interested in how the Feldenkrais Method improves overall health and well-being in both the client and the practitioner. feldenkraissf.com

Karen Clark (contralto) enjoys a varied career in teaching and performing medieval to modern music. Her studies in opera at Indiana University led her to cross paths with early music pioneers Thomas Binkley and Andrea von Ramm who taught Karen the value of sitting with an ancient manuscript and trying to understand how it was meant to sound. This sparked Karen’s curiosity in the declamatory art forms;

and, prompted her success in interpreting the 12th century music of Hildegard von Bingen, and in premieres of new music. Karen teaches how to embody and sustain vocal utterances stimulated by imagination— also known as singing—in Petaluma and Oakland, CA. Her recordings with Boston Camerata, the Galax Quartet, Microfest, Sequentia, and Vajra Voices are on most online listening sources. karenclark.studio

As a singer and Feldenkrais® Trainer, Richard Corbeil has been contributing his unique understanding of the Feldenkrais Method® to the fields of personal development, health, and the performing arts for over 30 years. vocalintegration.bandcamp.com

Mercedes von Deck , MD, GCFPCM , began studying the Feldenkrais Method® while competing internationally in ballroom dance in the 1980s. Her love of science and learning led her to medical school where her love of movement and dance convinced her to specialize in orthopedic surgery. Von Deck teaches yoga and Feldenkrais Functional Integration (FI)® sessions and Awareness Through Movement (ATM)® classes in the Boston area and practices orthopedics at the Cambridge Health Alliance. mercedesvondeckmd.com

Fariya Doctor, B.Sc., RMT, GCFPCM , is a graduate of the 2004 Toronto training. She has a degree in Biology and a diploma in Massage Therapy, and continues her studies in the Buteyko Breathing Method and respiratory sciences. Doctor volunteers on the Board of Directors of the Feldenkrais Guild® of North America. fariyadoctor.com

Alan Fraser is the author of several books applying the Feldenkrais Method® to piano technique including, most recently, Pianimals (Novi Beograd: Piano Somatics Press, 2021), the first piano method based on Feldenkrais® teachings. A concert pianist and professor for several decades, Fraser graduated from the Hawaii 1992 Feldenkrais training and has studied with trainers Phil Cohen in Montreal and Kemal Gekic in Serbia, where he still lives and teaches. Fraser directs The Institute of Piano Somatics internationally. alanfraserinstitute.com

David Hall is a somatic adventurer from Australia practicing the Feldenkrais Method® and Alexander Technique for more than 30 years. He is an Assistant Trainer in the Feldenkrais Method®, has a background in theater, and ran a Salsa dancing school for 15 years. Hall currently lives and practices in Sydney’s Northern Beaches. His online group classes are attended by people from all over the world. bodylogic.net.au

David Kaetz has devoted himself to developing and teaching a non-technical, integrative approach to the improvement of hearing, known as Listening with Your Whole Body™. The method is informed by

Feldenkrais® pedagogy, ancient and modern acoustic research, and many years as a professional musician and teacher. David is the author of Making Connections (Hornby Island, B.C.: River Centre, 2007), and The Ezekiel Code (River Centre, 2014). His most recent book is Listening with Your Whole Body (River Centre, 2017), which describes the philosophical premises and scientific grounding of his work with the auditory sense.

Drew Minter sang leading roles in the opera houses of Brussels, Toulouse, Boston, Washington, Santa Fe, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Wolf Trap, Glimmerglass, Nice, Marseilles as a countertenor for four decades, performing with many of the world’s foremost baroque orchestras, and making over 70 recordings. Minter is Senior Music Lecturer at Vassar College, where he teaches voice, choir, opera and the Feldenkrais Method® to musicians; he is an opera director and teaches frequent singing and acting workshops incorporating somatic methods such as Feldenkrais Method, Alexander Technique, and Viewpoints. His additional training is in Polarity, Jin shin jyutsu, Kahuna work and Body Electric.

Stephen Paparo is an Associate Professor of Music Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and conductor of the University Chorale. He holds degrees from Michigan State University (PhD), Syracuse University (MM), and Ithaca College (BM). A Guild Certified Feldenkrais PractitionerCM since 2006, Paparo has taught the Feldenkrais Method® in the US and internationally. He is active as a guest conductor and regularly presents at international, national, and state conferences. Paparo’s research interests include the application of the Feldenkrais Method® to singing instruction, non-traditional choral ensembles, and LGBTQ studies in music education.

Fritha Pengelly, MFA, GCFPCM , and Certified Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) Practitioner, currently lives and works in Northampton, Massachusetts. Pengelly was a member of the Doug Elkins Dance Company from 1994-2001 and continued to dance, choreograph, and teach at various colleges and universities after leaving New York City. Her current practice includes Functional Intergration (FI)® lessons, Awareness Through Movement (ATM)® classes, Dance for Parkinson’s, and online workshops focusing on pelvic health. feldenkraisandmovementarts.com

Michal Ritter, MA, MSci, is an experienced teacher and assistant trainer of the Feldenkrais Method® with over 30 years experience researching the human body in motion. She is lecturer of Applied Anatomy and developed an organic learning method for understanding the structure and function of the body and brain. Ritter teaches both group and one-on-one lessons, holds in-depth Feldenkrais® and Organic

Movement workshops and advanced training for teachers. In Israel and internationally, Ritter facilitates workshops for practitioners of dance, pilates, yoga, martial arts and capoeira, as well as nurses and school teachers. organicmovementacademy.com

Daniela Schellenberg holds a Master in Human Movement Science, Exercise Physiology, and Sports Teaching from the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She graduated from the Basel II training in 2004. Schellenberg has over 31 years of experience teaching movement and sports at the college level as well as 17 years in private practice. She has worked with PGA Tour golf professionals and currently serves the Greater Palm Springs area in California, specializing in Golf, Tennis, Pickleball, and movement rehabilitation. Schellenberg is the developer of SWISSFIT GOLF, a movement analysis and training system. She teaches Functional Intergration (FI)® sessions in person and Awareness Through Movement (ATM)® classes online. swissfitgolf.com

Mark Snyder is an independent scholar, writer, and editor living in Easton, PA. He has a BA in physics from Lafayette College and an MFA in Electronic Music from Mills. Snyder started his career in rocket science, switched to massage therapy and Trager Psycho-physical Integration® in 1985, and returned to science as a technical writer in the 1990s. Snyder’s work has been published by the Trager Institute, the US Department of Energy, and the ABC-CLIO Encyclopedia of Climate Change. Presently, Snyder is a Merchandising Associate for the Home Depot.

Robert Sussuma , originally from New York City, is a life-long learner and connoisseur of connections: movement, speaking, singing, voice science, emotions, music, motor learning, neurology-in-action, and deep personal development. His formal education is in Vocal Performance and he has performed professionally as a countertenor; he has a BM in Voice Performance and MM in Early Music Voice Performance in addition to being a Guild Certified Feldenkrais PractitionerCM . Sussuma has been a faculty member at Naropa University, Haverford College, and PACE University, and a guest lecturer at Harvard, the University of Michigan, and Barcelona University. He recently launched The Singing Self, an online program designed to update the vocal system from the inside out. thesingingself.com

Kwan Wong , GCFPCM , lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. He organizes online Feldenkrais® classes through the Daily Improvement Collective and The Nature of Singing workshop series. Wong is passionate about helping students to establish a regular Feldenkrais Method® practice to transform both physical and mental limitations and lead a more fulfilling life. dailyimprovement.org

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 guidelinres on formatting.

The final deadline for all submissions including images is April 1, 2023.

Back Issues

Journal 1 General Issue

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 Journal 31 General Issue

Editor

Assistant Editor

Editorial Board

Adam Cole

Mercedes von Deck

Dana Fitzgibbons

Belinda He Jacki Katzman Elin Lobel

Helen Miller

Special Thanks Lavinia Plonka

Image Credits

Front and back cover images from Marina Rosenfeld, Deathstar, 2017 Back Cover: Photo: Marina Rosenfeld © 2017 Page 9: Photos by Daniela Schellenberg Pages 20, 21: Photos by Wendy Twibill Pages 22, 23: Images by Fritha Pengelly Page 24: Image by Fariya Doctor Pages 45–64: Photos and illustrations by Sonya Ardan and Igor Peyovitch, copyright Alan Fraser Page 66: J. Bernardo Arcos Mijailidis; CC BY-SA 3.0; File:AnnaFedorova.jpg; Uploaded: 12 October 2011 (Wikipedia)

Page 72: Photo by Lila Hurwitz / Doolittle+Bird published with permission of Jeff Haller / Inside Moves Feldenkrais® Training Academy Page 76: Photo by Giorgio Deganello / Archive of the Messenger of Saint Anthony Pages 79–85: Images used with permission of D. Graham Burnett and Cabinet magazine Pages 104, 105: Drawings by Audra Wolowiec Pages 112–116: Drawings by Grace Sinclair

The following are service marks, trademarks, collective, or certification marks of the Feldenkrais Guild® of North America in the US: Feldenkrais Guild®, Feldenkrais®, Feldenkrais Method®, Functional Integration®, FI®, Awareness Through Movement®, ATM®, Guild Certified Feldenkrais Teacher®, GCFTCM, Guild Certified Feldenkrais PractitionerCM, GCFPCM, Certified Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement TeacherCM, CFATMTCM, Feldenkrais JournalTM, Friends of FeldenkraisSM, and FGNA Feldenkrais Method Logo. The following are service marks, trademarks, or certification marks of the Feldenkrais Guild® of North America in Canada: Feldenkrais GuildTM, Feldenkrais®, Feldenkrais® Method or Feldenkrais MethodTM, Awareness Through Movement®, ATMTM, Prise de conscience par le mouvementMD, Functional Integration®, FITM, L'intégration fonctionnelleMD, Guild Certified Feldenkrais TeacherTM, GCFTTM, Guild Certified Feldenkrais PractitionerTM, GCFPTM, Certified Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement TeacherTM, CFATMTTM, Friends of FeldenkraisSM, Feldenkrais JournalTM, and FGNA Feldenkrais Method Logo.

Helen Miller

Elin Lobel

Anita Noone Jessica Pink Margot Schaal Design Dandelion

Back Cover Marina Rosenfeld, Deathstar under construction. Photo: Marina Rosenfeld © 2017