2023 The Feldenkrais Journal #33

The

Feldenkrais

Front Cover Gabriel Hartley, Chuo Line, 2023, projected cellphone footage on hemp with pastel and ink and embedded wooden structure, 60x40cm. Video still

Inside Front Cover Gabriel Hartley, From the Studio, 2024, projected cellphone footage on silk with embedded ceramic, 17x30cm. Video stills

Contents

3 Letter from the Editor

5

When the Smallest Is Too Small: Overcoming Learning Difficulties in Math and Music with the Feldenkrais Method Adam Cole

18

First Things First: A Strategic Hierarchy for Successful Functional Integration® (Postworkshop Question and Answer Sessions)

David Zemach-Bersin

38

Horizons of Understanding: Rediscovering a Phenomenological Epoché with Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (A Feldenkrais® Teacher Training)

Katarina Halm

48

Anatomy and Self-Image

Alan S. Questel & Jay Schulkin

56

Alternative Paths to Mindfulness: An Integration of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) with Feldenkrais Method® Awareness Through Movement® (ATM®)

Zoi Dorit Eliou

78

Contributor Bios

Letter from the Editor

In their article “Anatomy and Self-Image,” Alan Questel and Jay Schulkin use the phrase “links and associations” to evoke the role of connection in human movement. The tactile, poetic elaboration is relevant to all five pieces in this issue of The Feldenkrais Journal ™ and without having to think too much, spontaneously, we have our theme.

Adam Cole, our new Assistant Editor, who has served on the Editorial Board for over a decade and written several thoughtful articles of his own, contributes “When the Smallest Is Too Small: Overcoming Learning Difficulties in Math and Music with the Feldenkrais Method®.” Cole makes an eloquent case for connecting relatable stories and movements to teaching math and music notation both for beginners and those who struggle with advanced concepts.

David Zemach-Bersin’s “Postworkshop Question and Answer Sessions” from his “First Things First: A Strategic Hierarchy for Successful Functional Integration®” show how Q&A sessions often reveal the fruit of learning for client and practitioner alike in our online lessons. The accompanying video—sensitively arranged by Juniper Perlis, Managing Producer at Feldenkrais Access®, and Peter Ahl, intrepid designer at Dandelion studio—further illuminates Zemach-Bersin’s vision.

In “Horizons of Understanding: Rediscovering a Phenomenological Epoché with Maxine Sheets-Johnstone” Katarina Halm brings together stories from her studies in the Feldenkrais Method, martial arts, and philosophy, linking memories already marked by the bonds that develop between students. It is a treat to read Halm’s account of studying with philosopher and dancer Sheets-Johnstone, a longtime friend of the Feldenkrais community, who seems to be as sensitive a teacher as she is a thinker.

In “Anatomy and Self-Image,” Questel and Schulkin reflect on the connection between the Feldenkrais Method and whole systems thinking. Questel’s clear, accessible style will be familiar to many from Feldenkrais trainings. Schulkin explored health and well-being through lab research, papers in top-tier journals, and popular books on neuroscience. The essay published here is a testament to Questel and Schulkin’s capacity to communicate the big picture, a talent facilitated, no doubt, by their decades-long friendship.

“Alternative Paths to Mindfulness: an Integration of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) with Feldenkrais Method® Awareness Through Movement® (ATM®)” is an innovative paper by Zoi Dorit Eliou, who joined our Editorial Board this year. Eliou’s detailed account of

the connection between DBT and ATM is a gift for the Feldenkrais community and the field of psychology. What promising connections! May the relationship grow!

Ours is a story that still unfolds. The utility of connecting ideas from diverse disciplines—the bedrock of Moshe’s genius—may also be a pathway to wider recognition and the expression of our work in ways we could never expect. We hope these original, robust connections inspire you to weave your own instincts into the fabric of human movement and the practice of our glorious Method.

—Helen Miller

When the Smallest Is Too Small: Overcoming Learning Difficulties in Math and Music with the Feldenkrais Method®

Adam Cole

As practitioners, we are often content to trust the Method rather than explore why the changes in our clients are so powerful, and why the Method may succeed where other approaches have failed. But how exactly does the Method facilitate learning in our clients? How does that learning assist them in making specific, significant changes to themselves?

1 Tom Dennis, “On seeing atoms,” UND Today (blog). University of North Dakota, Dec 3, 2019. https://blogs.und. edu/und-today/2019/12/ on-seeing-and-movingand-marveling-at-atoms/

2 Jeanne Bamberger and Andrea diSessa, “Music as embodied mathematics: A study of mutually informing affinity,” International Journal of Computers for Mathematical Learning 8, no. 2, (May, 2003): 123-160.

We can’t look at an atom with a regular microscope.1 The atom is too small to disturb the waves of light significantly for us to register them. While there are ways to work around this problem, the dilemma of trying to see an atom creates a great analogy for us as learners.

When we teach little kids math or reading we run into a similar sort of problem. Jeanne Bamberger calls it the conflict between “units of perception” and “units of description.” A unit of description is the smallest division we can make in order to describe something. It may represent a small thing like a “variable” (the x in algebra), a vocable like “ph,” or a “quarter note” in music notation.2

These units of description are the building blocks of any notation system. They give us the opportunity to distinguish one element of

information from another and to state exactly what we mean, promoting clarity and precision. Notation systems made up of these units, the alphabet for example, greatly expand our power to understand and teach what we know.

In music, the expression “quarter-note” refers to a particular duration of sound. In anatomy, the abbreviation “T1” refers to the first thoracic vertebrae. These are both examples of units of description.

The difficulty with units of description for someone new to a subject they are learning, especially a child, is that units of description often have meaning only as a part of a whole. For example, the letters of the alphabet on their own are largely meaningless. Trying to explain the function and uses of these units of description is a little like expecting someone to recognize an image when presented with a sequence of jigsaw puzzle pieces.

Most of us must experience and communicate our knowledge instead through what Bamberger calls “units of perception.” Units of perception are the smallest divisions of information that we can take in while still maintaining our understanding. A unit of perception may contain many units of description.

As an analogy, a dot might be a unit of description, but you’ll need to see a lot of dots to recognize a picture made of dots. The smallest part of the picture you can recognize as something other than a collection of dots will form a unit of perception. Anything less and it’s just dots.

The expression “the back of my hand” refers to a part of the body which has no anatomical definition, but it is still useful. “The House of Representatives” may be as specific as most people need to get when they are discussing political representation. These are both examples of units of perception.

In this paper we’ll explore the difference between these two ways of communicating information. We’ll also make the relationship between the Method and other types of education clearer by exploring this topic in two subjects that challenge many learners, namely music and mathematics. We’ll begin with a typical dilemma that relates to our work as Feldenkrais practitioners.

Weber-Fechner and the learning dilemma

Imagine you are lying on the floor and you feel a lot of tension in your back. It’s hard for you even to be still and think about what’s going on. You squirm and reposition yourself, but you cannot get comfortable. Someone comes over to you and puts their finger on your spine, just below the base of your skull. “That’s your problem,” they say. “If you can get that to move, you’ll feel much better.”

A single vertebra in the neck, held a few centimeters to the left by chronic muscular tension, will impact the carriage of the head, the mobility of the shoulders, and the balance of the weight over the knees and feet. Over a period of years, this may impact a person’s vision, balance, and create damaging wear on the joints and ligaments. Clearly the answer is to move that vertebra a few centimeters to the right. Get it back in alignment. A tiny movement … what could be simpler than that?

And yet the idea of being able to locate a single vertebra in our awareness, much less to isolate its movement, is monstrously difficult, if it is possible at all. Even if the vertebra were to be identified by touch and physically moved, its displacement is connected to a number of other elements of the person—physical, mental, and emotional—and its relocation would not make “sense” to them in a way that they could maintain it without continual conscious effort.

The Weber-Fechner Principle suggests that, in learning, a small stimulus will be more valuable to us than a large one, because the smaller one will have more of an impact on our sensation and intellect. Moving that tiny vertebra should be of more help to us than moving the entire neck. And yet we know as Feldenkrais practitioners that this is not always the case, because the vertebra, the unit of description, may be smaller than we can perceive.

Why is it that we as Feldenkrais practitioners have been trained not to address that frozen vertebra as the problem? Why is it insufficient, even ineffective, to isolate it? To get some clarity, let’s examine subjects that are further removed from the idea of physical sensation, but which reflect on our inability to better ourselves.

What we need in order to learn about math

Children may be able to understand units of description in their own domain: one sock or a mark on a piece of paper may contain a world of meaning. However, in an area that is new to them like mathematics, we may be using units of description to talk about the subject, and those units may be too small for them to perceive.

In fact, due to the precise nature of mathematics, teachers may feel obligated to teach with units of description even while knowing that these concepts are difficult or impossible for the learners to understand without context. As an example, it makes sense to ensure that a student knows every step of the addition algorithm so that they can do it correctly.

1) Write the first two-digit number. 54

2) Write the second two-digit number under it. MAKE SURE THEY LINE UP.

3) Draw a line under the numbers. Add a plus sign just left of the lower number.

54 + 96

4) In the second column, add the 4 and the 6 vertically. Because 4+6 = 10 and having two digits under the line will confuse matters, “carry the 1” by putting it above the first column. 1 54 + 96 0

5) In the first column, add the 5 and the 9 and also the 1 you just carried.

Each step in this relatively simple addition problem deals with a unit of description. Unfortunately, if you teach the process step by step like that, children of a certain age (and some adults) lose track because of the length of time and the number of steps. Left to their own devices, they will forget what they’re doing before they’re done with the operation.

A student that already knows how to add this way might break the operation down into fewer, larger steps like, “Draw the numbers; add them together; don’t forget to carry the 1,” or they may even conceive of the whole thing as a kind of number-dance, relying on spatial aspects of the operation. Fortunate students are able to group these units of description together to perfect their ability to work through the addition algorithm. People whose minds do not naturally gravitate towards mathematical concepts must rely on a good teacher to connect the dots of the procedure for them, and in the absence of this kind of help, they risk never being able to do it.

Since most of us reading this know how to add two numbers, we can’t fully relate to the situation above anymore. So I’ll use another example, from number theory, which will put most of us in a place of unfamiliarity.

3

George F. Simmons, Calculus with Analytic Geometry (United States of America: McGraw Hill, Inc., 1985) 395.

If I add

1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + 1/5 …

on and on forever, you probably wouldn’t be surprised if I told you that the sum of all those numbers is infinity. You add forever, the number you get is “forever big.” Right?

But what if I told you that when I add

1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + …

on and on to infinity, that the sum of all those numbers is “2?” You add forever, and the number you get is just a number, and not even that big a number. Would you believe me?

You might, but if you’re smart, you’d want me to prove it. The result just seems too crazy to take on faith.

“Okay,” I’d say. “So imagine that if p is a positive constant, then the p-series

∞

∑ 1/np = 1 + 1/2p + 1/3p + 1/4p + …

n=1

diverges if p < 1 and converges if p >1.” 3

Unless you have a math degree, none of that means anything to you. I’d love to explain it so you can see what I’m talking about, so I try to show you what the sigma symbol means, what the fractions with the exponents mean, what “diverges” and “converges” mean, but by the time I’m done, you’ve already forgotten the question. Because the elements of this explanation refer to and modify one another, they are very hard to understand on their own without prior experience. A mathematician understands each term and how it relates to the others, so for them the units of description are the units of perception. For you, the smallest idea you can grasp might be how to add fractions. This is your unit of perception, and you may not be able to understand the meaning of enough of the details to decode my sentence and understand why my crazy math fact is true.

Units of description in music

This is equally true in a subject that is supposed to be “fun,” like music. Although the end result of music making is often quite joyous, the

4 Professional pianists are often asked to play music set before them with no opportunity to listen to it first. Music notation, ungainly as it is, provides a powerful tool for learning and reproducing music. Good reading skills are of great benefit to the player.

process of learning the skills required to make joyful music is often less-so. The culprit can be too small a unit of description.

For example, a crescendo is an easy-enough concept—“get louder gradually”—and yet asking children to do so is more difficult than it sounds. Rather than increase volume incrementally, they tend to go from quiet to loud immediately, because the gradations of increasing intensity are too small for them to distinguish. In my work as a piano teacher, I teach many things like this which are not really very difficult once mastered, but which are difficult to master.

For example, in order to play a melody pianists have to execute a kind of a dance with their hand, one with several “dance steps”: Pinky plays A for two counts, thumb plays D for two counts, second finger and third finger play E and F# for one count, second finger plays E for one count, thumb plays D for two counts. It’s tedious to describe an elegant melody this way. Once played, it sounds like a cohesive, sensible whole, but it takes all those words to render it for accurate replication by a beginner.

After students hear the phrase, it’s often easy for them to sing it and sometimes to play it by ear. The phrase is an effective unit of perception in a larger piece of music. But when the melody is written in Western music notation consisting of quarter-notes, eighth-notes, and half-notes on lines and spaces, students have to reckon with each unit of description, deciphering it with their eyes.

Why should they bother? Can’t they just learn it by ear, if that’s easier? Some do.

But if they are to become experienced classical or jazz musicians, they will be in situations where they must learn a new piece of music by deciphering the notation on the page.4 Therefore it is necessary that they learn and understand the use of these little black marks. My job, and the job of all teachers, really, becomes keeping the students engaged while they struggle with all of these units of description that are beneath their perception.

5 Adam Wallis, “Paul McCartney admits he and the Beatles can’t read or write music,” Global News, October 1, 2018, 1:19 PM, https://globalnews. ca/news/4503916/ paul-mccartney-cantread-music/

Some methods of music instruction insist upon “sound before sight,” ensuring that music learners fully integrate musical ideas through movement and vocalization before they approach the written page. While this is a sensible, and depending on the instrument, sometimes necessary way of approaching the problem, it has pitfalls as well. Learners may become complacent with the skill of learning music “by ear” and choose not to pursue their knowledge into reading. In fact, many highly skilled musicians, Paul McCartney, for example, have never learned to read music.5 As adept or even astounding as Paul McCartney is, certain musical problems like composing orchestral music without paying assistants to help write out the music, or being able to look through a book of Chopin Etudes and decide which ones to play without spending an hour listening to them, remain difficult or completely out of reach for him. The benefits of reading music, which are surprisingly vast, will remain inaccessible.

6 Adam Cole, “Eight Minutes with Eric Litwin,” YouTube video, 8:06, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ZZbuke1mcT4

Getting past units of description— stories and analogies

Many students do not gain facility with mathematical ideas. They may be able to do just enough to get by, and will rely on computers, friends, and professionals to do whatever else needs doing. It is common to hear stories of “math anxiety” that began in elementary school and climaxed in high school algebra or calculus with a decision never to do math again.

If students could see the entire picture of a mathematical concept all at once, in the same way that they can listen to a melody, getting a sense of the end-goal and how each piece of a proof or example contributed to it, the units of description would not be an issue. Unfortunately, only experienced mathematicians will experience a math problem like a melody, while the rest of us will see it as a laundry list of baffling tasks, any of which, done incorrectly, invalidate the entire thing. How can students be given the big picture and kept engaged during the description of the smallest units of understanding?

One method to circumvent the problem is to add elements to the problem which do not alter it, but which make it large enough to register on our consciousness, perhaps even at an emotional level. In my interview with original Pete the Cat author Eric Litwin, an expert on the development of literacy in children, he suggests adding story elements to a simple math problem. “So in your math class about subtraction, add a verse … [Pete has] a jacket with ten buttons. Five pop off! What does he sing? My buttons, my buttons, my five groovy buttons! ’’ 6

Turning an abstract problem into a story can have a magical effect on children’s cognition. This, in effect, is expanding units of description into units of perception by adding elements to them that connect viscerally to the student, to their sensation, their sense of expectation, and to their need for resolution. However, unless the story can compel the students to want to solve a problem, they are more likely to remain caught up in the story itself, their imaginations taking them somewhere else, while they wait for the teacher to do the actual work.

7 Dor Abrahamson, “Strawberry feel forever: understanding metaphor as sensorimotor dynamics,” The Senses and Society 15, no. 2, (2020): 216-238. https://doi.org/10.1080/174 58927.2020.1764742

Another means of circumventing units of description is by depicting the big picture via an analogy. In his article “Strawberry Feel Forever,” Dor Abrahamson discusses the effectiveness of the use of analogy on music instruction, giving the example of a cello teacher who wants to explain how the student should touch the neck of the instrument with their left hand to make the best sound.7 Rather than dictate the many individual movements and configurations for the fingers and the palm, the teacher simply suggests the player imagine they are holding a strawberry in that hand. The analogy instantly suggests the correct hand position and successfully ties all the elements of cello performance together so that the student is able to “grasp” a better way of performing with very little trouble.

8 Moshe Feldenkrais, “Part A, ATM #222,” in Awareness Through Movement Lessons from Alexander Yanai—Volume Five, trans. Anat Baniel, ed. Ellen Soloway (Paris, France: International Feldenkrais Federation in cooperation with The Feldenkrais Institute, Tel Aviv, Israel, December 1997), p. 1521. https:// ebin.pub/alexander-yanailessons-volume-5-5.html

The drawback of the analogy is that while the student now knows a way to do it, they don’t know why it worked. We have circumvented the units of description, but we’ve also lost the opportunity to understand and explore them. If we, the student, wanted to teach someone else what we’d learned, we’d be entirely dependent on the analogy to communicate our expertise.

The problem of movement and how Feldenkrais solved it

Let’s go back to our vertebra.

Feldenkrais understood that the chief problem of self-improvement is the inability of a person to differentiate a maladaptive choice in the body in a way that it could be understood, owned as part of the self, and improved. Essentially, he recognized that many of our problems come down to units of description of ourselves that are well below our perception. How could we engage with our sensation at the appropriate level to learn and grow?

It might be possible to improve the situation with a story or analogy. Many visualizations like, “You’re walking through a field of tall grass. Do you hear the ocean? Breathe it in and feel a release in your neck,” can bring us to states where we feel better, but then, like the cello student, we don’t know exactly what we did to get there. In the rush to “relief,” we lose the opportunity to discover something about ourselves.

Feldenkrais’ solution was to create a way to differentiate the elements of a function that fully engages the learner. Rather than ask someone to locate a vertebra, he creates a scenario in which the body is contorted in a way that constrains everything except the parts that are to be moved. The act of discovering what kind of movement is possible under these constraints becomes an intense exploration that fills a person’s perceptions and engages them emotionally while still effectively isolating the areas in question.

For instance, in the Alexander Yanai Lesson #221, “Opposing movements of the head and shoulders [part 2]—while standing on the knees,” Feldenkrais asks participants to put their right foot standing on the floor, placing the left hand next to it. Students are then asked to raise their right hand towards the ceiling and look at it. Finally, they are challenged to lengthen their left leg back and lift it off the ground.8 This movement is difficult, and Feldenkrais says so. Nevertheless, he remains engaged with the class, giving them hints about how to make the movement easier, reminding them to go slowly and suggesting areas to focus on—like the extension of the head forward and the maintenance of the eyes on the uplifted arm. The student is fully engaged in what is essentially the isolation of the connection between the lower spine near the pelvis and the cervical vertebrae that carry the head.

9 A variation would keep the learner’s bodily position intact while varying an aspect of the movement: its speed, its direction, its coordination or opposition to another body part. A transformation would change the orientation of the learner while essentially keeping the function the same: lying on the floor and reaching up towards the ceiling, versus standing on the feet and reaching forward. Variations add interest to the task at hand. Transformations disguise it so that the habitual appears novel. Some variations can be transformations—in order to vary the act of turning the head to the left, you can ask the learner to keep the head still and turn the shoulders to the right, which is also a transformation of the movement.

Feldenkrais also provides multiple vantages of a single idea. In any given lesson he provides variations and transformations of the movement to be examined, putting students in different positions and scenarios—on their backs, on their sides—all of which nevertheless keep the focus on the same functional behavior.9 Within the lesson just mentioned, students are asked to side-bend their neck in a completely different orientation from their usual lying-down posture, and to regularly check for improvement by examining the extent to which they can turn their head to look behind them.

On a larger scale, many lessons may share a single idea in common. The aforementioned AY lesson, #221, is one of a series that explores the connection between the cervical and thoracic vertebrae. For us as practitioners, being presented with a series of related AY lessons is similar to providing math students with a series of word problems all dealing with the same mathematical operation. Unlike the word problems, however, which are only of interest to people who like math, the ATM lessons compel us by stimulating our human survival instincts for balance and a sense of safety.

While the ATMs have Moshe’s handwriting all over them, Functional Integration lessons may be much more idiosyncratic to the practitioner. Whether a client finds relief due to a well-thought-out lesson, or to just an effective touch and compassionate intuition, will depend on their interaction and connection with the practitioner. However, the art of FI comes directly out of Feldenkrais’ exploration in the ATMs he created over the years. We are better able to serve our clients if we understand both the big picture of their organization and the details that are in play. With both, we can make clients aware of vital details that may be too small for them to see, but which are absolutely necessary for their improvement.

Potential for the Feldenkrais Method’s impact on generalized learning

Just as in somatic self-improvement, math and music education make important use of units of description. Depending on the learner’s expertise, this is either helpful or a complete hindrance to their learning. Can we borrow from Feldenkrais’ Method to improve the chances of a learner in an academic setting?

10 Adam Cole, “Music and math notation: Improving performance by moving through imaginary spaces” (Presentation, Hebrew University, October 23, 2018).

In a presentation at Hebrew University, I outlined the possibility that math and music notation systems, insofar as we use them as tools, actually extend our body schema in the same way that hand-held tools do, so that we ourselves are physically connected to notation that appears only on paper or in our minds.10 I went on to suggest that our

ability to use a notation system would then be dependent on the quality of “movement” and “functionality” in the interface between that notation and our physical selves. If, in order to grasp a mathematical concept, we must imagine numbers and symbols on the page moving around to transform into other configurations, then it serves us well to examine anything that might improve our ability to make those numbers move in our minds.

If we really are connected physically to notation on a page, then we can enhance our ability to use a notation system by becoming more aware of those parts that connect to it. If we are “stuck” by a particular unit of description, a relationship between two types of variables in math, or a thorny rhythm as depicted in music notation, we may be able to engage with it, not only in an intellectual way, but physically, with our whole selves. In order for this to happen, we would need a new way of teaching inspired by the Method.

Determining units of perception in music notation

When I teach music-reading, I explain to my students that the music notation system they are using is actually movement notation—it tells them how to move at their instrument in order to make certain sounds. That being said, the Western music notation system does not reflect the actual movement it asks us to make. In fact, Western music

notation uses images that are often at odds with both the movement and the sounds they represent. In this way, it can be an impediment to a musician’s ability to play something that sounds and feels easier than it looks!

For instance, two measures which would take the same amount of time may have different widths, and therefore suggest incorrectly that one is actually shorter in duration than the other.

In the example above, the first four notes take exactly as long to play as the 32 notes that follow them. Some of my students have been known to play the first four notes far faster than they should as a result of the way the music appears, then crash and burn when they hit the next 32 notes because they cannot sustain the tempo.

Furthermore, these notes, which translate into an elegant phrase

11 Frank R. Wilson, The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998).

in the hand, resemble a frightening wreck of dots and lines on the page. Their appearance alone is enough to discourage someone from even wanting to play, much less decipher, the phrase. The only way to become adept at reading music notation is to learn to decode this non-representative notation, the symbols cueing us to make the movements which result in the music we want to play, much the way “ph” in the English language cues us to make the sound “f.”

For this reason, I spend a considerable amount of time calling attention to the difference between our physical movements as pianists and what we see on the page, so that students are aware of it. I encourage my students to make marks with a pencil in the music in places where the notation is visually misleading. Their individualized marks represent the movement they need as they envision it, and their personalized symbol added to the notes converts a hard-to-decipher phrase into something big enough for them to comprehend.

I also ask them to count the beats of the meter out loud while they play. Coordinating the eyes while engaging the speaking voice does wonders for tying discrete notes to physical gestures. It turns the problem of reading dots into the more engaging problem of vocalizing at the precise moment the eyes hit a spot on the page.

The act of counting “1, 2, 3, 4” while playing a more complicated rhythm like what you’d tap out for the lyrics, “I’ve been working on the railroad …” engages the students in other ways as well. There are deep neurological connections between the hands and the mouth that may be activated,11 and of course when a student is counting, they are also breathing in time to the music. All of these elements combine to clarify the units of description that are the written-out notes of this folk song.

This is most important because students, especially young beginners, are interacting with a piece of music much more slowly than it is meant to be played. They must learn the music by playing at a speed they can manage. But if you sing “I’ve Been Working On the Railroad” at a quarter of its normal speed, the identity of the song, the melody and rhythm, do not sound like music. The very thing that should compel them to want to learn to play is missing, and counting can serve to keep them connected to what they are doing until they can increase their playing to a speed at which it is recognizable as music.

In both marking and counting scenarios, I teach the students to group the units of description (the individual notation symbols) into units of perception by explaining them as movements they are to do rather than as discrete concepts they are to understand. This is consistent with good sound-before-sight music education philosophies. However, because I can connect reading to movement, I am able to engage in a study of notation while we are learning rather than put it off and risk losing the opportunity, using units of perception (playable phrases) to give us more familiarity with units of description (notes on a page).

Rethinking math instruction

We might take a similar out-of-the-box approach to math to make it both more compelling and more comprehensible to beginning students. Imagine a teacher who discovers that their elementary math students are having difficulty understanding how to “carry the 1.” Instead of writing it on the board and explaining it for the 10th time in a tired but hopeful voice, then asking the students to work out 50 examples on a worksheet, punishing them with a red “x” for each one done wrong … a teacher might create a scenario in which the students are to visualize the number 10, where the 1 is gradually moving away from the 0 and sailing up to the upper left corner. The teacher might find a way to translate this idea into a physical challenge where the eyes are moving in a diagonal while the head and shoulders stay fixed, and then enhance the game by reversing the movement so that the eyes stay fixed and the head and shoulders move.

To make the movement of the 1 large enough to register on the students’ perception, it must be attached to a compelling need. Having them stand on one foot while they move their eyes during the visualization would require them to balance, and the desire to avoid a fall would more completely involve them. Having them switch feet to see which one is easier to balance on would add further interest to the exploration.

If a math teacher wished to argue that this is a lot of fuss for a simple operation, I’d counter that this is exactly the point. That students may be incapable of understanding the tiny act of carrying the 1 unless it is tied to a much bigger unit that engages them as people. And the more potent the engagement can be to the act of “moving the numbers in their minds,” the easier it will be to understand and enact.

Is it possible for us to use these concepts to make clear the infinite series problem I posed at the beginning of the paper? At the very least, it may be helpful for us to understand that we are hindered in our ability to understand why adding one set of fractions forever takes us to infinity, and the other set of fractions takes us to 2, by the very fact that sophisticated mathematical building blocks may be too small to understand in isolation. For us to gain the competence to be able to follow a straightforward explanation we would have to enlarge each of the small concepts into something that is meaningful to us through our curiosity or our instinct for self-preservation, so as to integrate them into our thought process and even our sense of self.

To reach such familiarity with the small concepts, we would have to be in an environment where we could play with them the way a child plays with blocks, perhaps on a website which allows us to change any element to see what the results would be upon the big picture. Potentially more compelling, a teacher could put us in a mutual learning situation that, through collaboration, assists us in feeling a human

12 Paul Lockhart, A Mathematician’s Lament (New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2009).

connection with the other students. If that situation made clear the idea of movement that we could see, or even enact, it would speak to us at the level of the nervous system and perhaps trigger an intuitive connection with these concepts, an experience that I suspect the best mathematicians come upon naturally.

Dr. Paul Lockhart in his famous essay, now the book A Mathematician’s Lament, calls for the elimination of “standard” ways of teaching math, even changing well-worn vocabulary, in favor of creating a classroom environment in which students are given compelling, real, and interesting problems to solve, not on paper alone, but physically, and through conversation with one another.12 In this way he is working to overcome or even avoid the students’ collision with the units of description. Perhaps if his way of thinking were to be adopted, math teachers would no longer consider it sufficient to combine the bare essentials and hope that the students could add them together to get as far as they need to go.

Conclusion

My understanding of why my learning and teaching strategies have been effective has come directly out of my investigation into the Feldenkrais Method. It has allowed me an opportunity to observe myself and my students’ increasing abilities through the lens of somatic engagement, and to overcome barriers to understanding brought about by a wall of impenetrable details. I am fortunate in that I have been able to improve the learning and performance of students who do not have access to regular Feldenkrais lessons.

Feldenkrais taught us that we can take elements that are too small to mean anything by themselves and enlarge them in our imagination and our curiosity. Through ATMs and FIs we differentiate the tiniest, sometimes pointless-seeming tasks out of a larger functional movement so that we, and our clients, can play with them. Once these elements are understood and reintegrated into the larger system, it changes our understanding and our capacity to act.

It’s my hope that by better understanding what we are doing as practitioners, we can use Feldenkrais’ insights in the development of his Method to improve our ability to teach the arts and sciences. Rather than abandoning units of description as being too difficult for the student, or subjecting our students to them and hoping they will somehow absorb them, we must find a way to make the units of description richer and more compelling to the learner. If we succeed, not only will we be better Feldenkrais practitioners, but we may be able to participate in the education of a new generation of mathematicians, musicians, and other learners that currently are lost to us.

First Things First: A Strategic Hierarchy for Successful Functional Integration®

Postworkshop Question

David Zemach-Bersin and Answer Sessions with An Introductory Note

David Zemach-Bersin

In the Fall of 2021, I taught an online advanced training called First Things First: A Strategic Hierarchy for Successful Functional Integration. A month after the workshop, two question and answer sessions were held for the participants. Raz Ori and Anastasi Siotas both assisted me by bringing the questions forward during the first session. Raz assisted during the second session.

What follows is an edited transcript of those two Q&A sessions. To help create a context for this material, here are a few paragraphs from a letter I sent to the participants:

Moshe Feldenkrais would often say, in some form or other, “Improve the person, not their problem. If you improve the person, their difficulty

will improve.” I believe that this dictum speaks to one of the essential reasons he was so successful in improving and transforming human abilities.

Feldenkrais is saying that the vast majority of human musculoskeletal problems are reflections of poor organization and that as a person’s fundamental organization improves, the dynamics that underlie and compound their difficulties will be diminished. He understood that there is a way of being “organized” that is optimal for all human beings; a particular organization between our skeleton, nervous system, and musculature. Approximating this organization, then, gives us our best possible options for pain-free, efficient, easy, and effective movement or action.

Good organization brings us into alignment with the fundamental biological principle of the conservation of energy, i.e., action and adjustments to gravity are realized with the minimum expenditure of energy. Good organization—as defined by Feldenkrais—provides or enables the ability to move from the standing or sitting position in all primary or cardinal directions with a minimum of muscular effort. Hence, effective action is potentiated by good organization. As an added and significant bonus, minimum muscular effort maximizes our ability to make kinesthetic-sensory distinctions, thereby facilitating the creation of useful information.

The neutral neuro-muscular-skeletal state that is synonymous with good organization reduces the attraction and the burden of our past adjustments to culture, trauma, punishment, and anxiety. The neutrality of good organization leaves these habits and adjustments without a muscular and sensate basis. Where we once had compulsion, we now have choice.

As human beings, we are much more alike than different. And, our difficulties are more alike than different. I believe that if we have a clear understanding of the hierarchy of criteria for optimal self-organization, we can better realize Feldenkrais’ dictum to “improve the person and not the difficulty,” and make our practice of Functional Integration more effective.

First Q&A session

David Zemach-Bersin : Hello everyone. I am delighted to be joined today by my colleagues, Raz Ori and Anastasi Siotas. With their help, we’ll have not only my answers to your questions, but also an opportunity for dialogue between the three of us.

Raz Ori: First, we have an interesting question regarding the title of your workshop, First Things First. You mentioned being inspired by the virtual Functional Integration (FI®) lessons that you were giving during the beginning of the Covid pandemic. You talked about how those virtual

lessons clarified and amplified your understanding of what you believe is the first and most important thing for us to direct ourselves toward. Can you share a bit about your experience giving virtual FIs and how it relates to the theme and title of this workshop?

David: With the virtual FIs, because I could not feel with my hands, I was unable to feel the fine, intimate details of a person’s organization. Nearly all information had to be visually inferred. In that vacuum, my lessons became more strategic and general, and the results stunned me. Certain remarkable generalities came forward. Most people, with almost any kind of acute or chronic difficulty, have certain things in common. There is a protective “forwardness” to their bearing and a lack of mobility in their pelvis. I felt that with all the limitations of working on the computer screen, a veil was pulled away, and I realized that I was consistently dealing with something of universal and essential importance. It reminded me of something that Moshe said in Tel Aviv one afternoon, in reference to someone he had asked me to give an FI lesson to. He said, “Just improve the person, not their problem.” We don’t have to dig very far to understand what Moshe meant by this. When I presented the idea of this workshop to Anastasi and Raz, I told them that I wanted to “plant a flag” on this spot. I wanted to say, “If you want to be effective, this is the way to be effective.” You see, Moshe was not speaking metaphorically. He was not being the Zen master that I thought he was when I was 24 years old. He meant literally improve the person. And, this is not an abstract idea. In both the Elusive Obvious and Body and Mature Behavior, Moshe offers us a roadmap for what he believes is the best organization for enabling effective movement and action. And, as long as a person’s center of mass is forward, and their abdominal muscles are over-contracted and “held,” that best organization cannot be achieved or approximated.

Anastasi Siotas: I’d like to connect the idea of improving the person with your observations about working remotely. You’re seeing the student through a two-dimensional medium, yet somehow, your years of experience touching people informed a three-dimensional way of viewing. You saw certain common dynamics, like the forwardness. You felt that the constraints of the situation helped to highlight essential aspects of their organization.

David: Exactly.

Raz: On one hand, you are presenting a very fundamental concept, but on the other hand, the repertoire of Functional Integration lessons that you demonstrated in the workshop were quite sophisticated. In regards to applying these Functional Integration schemas, how do you adapt these lessons to the public? When working with an older population or with people that have more restrictions, how do we adapt these ideas?

David: Let’s set aside the details of the FI demonstrations that were shown in this workshop. There was a consistent idea throughout all of them, which had to do with the mobilization of the lower back, the inhibition of the abdominals, and the extension through the spine growing with the head and neck being able to come up and back. This was a repeating idea in every single one of those FI demonstrations. [Fig 1] So, let’s say that I am working with a student and they are only comfortable lying on their side; how can I use this strategy? Can I bring their pelvis back? Can I bring their head back a little? Can I work with the idea that Moshe explicates in many ATM® lessons, of sticking the tush out and taking the head back as in, for example, AY 524? Can an older person bring their arm back a little bit while lying on their side? Oh, that’s painful? Well, maybe I can put a pillow under their arm. Bringing their arm back—even a little—engages the extensors of the upper back and the mid back, and now, if the arm is back like that, and I bring the pelvis back, well then, now we have the opportunity for a more coherent and unified extension of the entire back. This would be a less extreme way to do what I was doing in the FI demonstrations. Or, lying on the stomach, can we begin to work with the idea of simply lifting the head? Lifting the head might be the beginning of organizing the muscles of the back to act in a uniform, elegant, co-operative way, to create the anti-gravity function. This is what I tried to show in all of the workshop’s ATM lessons. Think of how many lessons you know, where lifting the head is involved. For that to be done easily, and for the head to be light, we must involve the entire back. By eliciting the whole, you are dealing with things that, from an evolutionary point of view, have stood the test of time. Simply taking the head back, provokes the muscles of the lower back to engage. That sounds like a beautiful starting place to me!

Anastasi: This brings up a secondary concept that you mentioned earlier about the inhibition of the abdominals. How do you take your head back if you cannot let go of those abdominals?

David: Exactly. It is impossible! There must be reciprocal coordination and as long as, or to the extent that there is parasitic effort in the abdominals, the extensors of the lower back and pelvis will be necessarily weakened.

Raz: People are eager to understand how to approximate the specific situations that you were demonstrating. For example, you often worked with people in the position of having their feet standing and knees bent, and lengthening from the knee in order to clarify the elongation along the spine, and also to clarify the relationships between tilting the pelvis forward, and the engagement of the extensors. But, what happens if a person cannot bend their knee? What happens if the person can stand their foot on the table, but their heel is far away from their pelvis?

Video medley for the First Things First Q&A: https://www.feldenkraisaccess.com/first-things-first-q-a

Fig 1 Variations on a theme. Colin Kirts, William Jarett, Ariella Alroy, and Morgan McKenzie Kauffman pictured in Functional Integration (FI) lessons with David Zemach-Bersin. Video stills

David: You can use these ideas in all your Functional Integration lessons, regardless of how many degrees the knees can bend. The essential thing to work with and toward is the engagement of the back and the inhibition of the abdominal muscles in order to allow those big powerful extensor muscles to work in the way that they are capable of, or evolved to. I agree that when I lengthened through the knee, the pelvis was tilting, the abdominals were lengthening, and the muscles of the lower back were contracting. But when the leg or legs are long, and I very carefully pull through, am I pulling the leg? No. I am measuring and sensing. I’m feeling the extent of the lengthening, and how the head of the femur is connecting in the acetabulum and tilting the pelvis. The pelvis can only tilt if the lower back muscles are able to shorten, and contract. The pelvis can only tilt anteriorly if the abdominal muscles are not inhibiting its movement. I don’t need to bend the knees; that’s not what made the lessons effective. It is the effective mobilization of the back, which we are interested in, and we can initiate this from 20 or 30 different places. I would say, let’s not worry about the details. Let’s concern ourselves with the larger ways in which the organization of the person is improving. Then, their problem, or difficulty, will also improve. This is the path toward improving the entire person and everything they do.

Raz: We have a similar question regarding bringing the pelvis to tilt off the table. Let’s say that’s too extreme for someone because of lower back pain, or they’re not prepared for that situation. The idea you demonstrated of using a flat towel as support or rolling it up as a cylinder both approximate tilting the pelvis. They’re both working on clarifying the relationships that you were just describing. [Fig 2]

David: Exactly. You’re bringing the pelvis to a ledge. That ledge can be a roller, or a flat-folded towel. Just as long as it gives the person and their nervous system the experience of their tailbone falling lower than the

Fig 2 Extending the back with the pelvis suspended. Colin Kirts pictured in a Functional Integration (FI) lesson with David Zemach-Bersin. Video still

rest of their spine. It doesn’t have to be an extreme, acrobatic situation of bringing the pelvis entirely off the table. When you think of the idea of successive approximations, then the platform or flat folded towel might be a first approximation, and the rolled up or cylindrical towel—which gives more dynamic oscillation potential—might be a second, or third approximation. I can use the flat towel as a way to raise the pelvis, which is still taking over some of the work of the flexors, i.e., the abdominal muscles which are inhibiting the strong extensors of the pelvis and back from contracting.

Raz: In relation to adapting these situations to people with real problems, let’s consider working with a person who has spondylolisthesis. Or, take another example of someone who has lost their lumbar lordosis and their back is round and perhaps they have spinal stenosis.

David: FI is the art of finding ways to make adaptations for the person on the table. Adaptations that insure the person can feel themselves without their habitual pain or discomfort. We must always remember Moshe’s strategic idea of small, incremental change that is safe and can be accepted by the person. Now, if I have somebody in front of me with stenosis and I see that they’ve lost their lumbar curve, I would hope to support them in a way in which they are comfortable and can begin to experience themselves relaxing their abdomen and engaging their back. But, it has to feel safe to them. There can’t be any discomfort. If there is, they’ll retreat. They’ll withdraw. The adaptation I mentioned a moment ago, of using something flat to elevate the pelvis a little, could be the most comfortable starting position for that person. It may be that you’ll need to have the knees higher, more bent. Let’s say that A is my static position, and that I have difficulty moving to B. If you can help get me to a place where I can move from A to B to A without discomfort, that could be so useful to me. It might be more useful to me than surgery because surgery for stenosis, spondylolisthesis, and sciatica is often ineffective. I’m reminded of one of Moshe’s lectures, I think it’s in Year Two of Amherst, in which he’s talking about correct posture. He says, “In Body and Mature Behavior, I said figure A is the correct posture. It’s better than B and C and D.” Then he says something to the effect of, “If I have Parkinson’s and you try and get me to be upright like A, well, A is incorrect for me.” It’s beautiful how he understood that what is correct for one person can be incorrect for another. What is correct is temporally based. It’s correct for me now, today in this moment, but in a year it might not be.

Raz: I’m thinking, what better way would there be to support the overarched lower back of someone with hyperlordosis than having them lie on their back, feet standing, and having a soft, nice roller behind the lower back? Not to overextend the lower back, but to support it? And, the flat soft padding that you put behind the pelvis can also go behind the lumbar spine.

David: That would be safe and effective. It’s a path that I use a lot: only a thickness of an inch or so, and very soft.

Anastasi: Yes, the muscles that are intensely tight there, have an opportunity to feel proprioceptive feedback and contact and let go. But at the same time, I think there is value to raising the sacrum and allowing the movement of the abdomen—with the pelvis forward—to allow gravity to work on those super tight lumbar extensors.

David: Sometimes the first approximation is to not even think about mechanically changing anything, but simply to provide a kinesthetic experience of lightness and pleasure. Does the person care about matching Moshe’s figure A? No! They care about not being in pain. They want to feel the way they did before their trouble began. They don’t seek to be an archetypal example of an ideal healthy back. They just want to feel good about themselves. As I watched Moshe work, it seemed to me that with his help, people felt that they learned not only a way of being organized, but a way of being in themselves that helped them to move away from pain and the things they did that created the pain.

Raz: What if you are already in the neutral position of your spine, and you’re not excessively bent to the side, or twisted, or turned, or flexed, or extended?

David: It’s important to always remember that what we might call a neutral or ideal spine has two concave curves. Some say, “A straight spine is neutral,” but nothing could be further from the truth. In a healthy spine, a well-organized, or ideal spine, there is a concave curve in the lumbar spine, and there is also a curve in the cervical spine. That means that from the neutral, when you arch the back more, the anterior or front portions of the vertebrae are moving away from one another. There is a lengthening in the front of the spine, produced by the muscles of the back contracting. What happens when a muscle contracts? The two ends of the muscle come together. If we fold or flex ourselves, well then, that’s opening up the back of the spine. The spinous process of one vertebra is moving away from the spinous process of another vertebra. The vertebra below it and the vertebra above it are moving away. But in front, what’s happening is that the anterior portion of the discs are getting acutely compressed. In a well-organized person, when the skeleton is supporting the person, the compressive force of gravity is going down through their skeleton and back up. When I’m well-organized, the distance between my vertebral bodies is maximized because my muscles are doing very little unnecessary work; they are not shortening me.

Anastasi: We’re talking about those lordotic curves, but we have a complementary kyphotic curve in the thoracic spine; an additional element which moves us away from the idea of straight. And there is a complementary, almost like a sine curve. If you think about your sacrum and your pelvis, that’s almost like another backward curve. It’s like a series of complementary curves which, when there is neutrality, work in concert with each other so that those spaces between the vertebral bodies are at some sort of even location, not necessarily folded forward with the vertebral bodies at the front close together and the back more open, nor the other way, where the back is closed and the front is open. As you said, then and only then can the flexors and extensors work in a beautiful rhythm that allows us to maintain length throughout our activities.

David: The synergy between the flexors and the extensors is dependent on the process of inhibition. So much of what we do in Functional Integration is to help and assist the nervous system to sense superfluous efforts, and inhibition is a key ingredient in this learning. There is a reciprocal relationship between the flexors and extensors. When my actions are being organized in the most efficient, easy, fluid way possible for me, there is a constant back and forth. It’s almost like the rhythm of breathing. It is precise and elegant. The entomologist Theodore Schneirla found in his research that the extensors were more involved in the function of going toward, and the flexors were more involved in the ability to withdraw, or move away from. I wonder, at what point did these two strands of muscle arise? Imagine two primitive fibers full of myoblasts, working together in a kind of “give and take” in order to create propulsion, in a liquid medium. It is possible that one muscle evolved first, a single muscle fiber that could contract and relax, contract and relax. But, as soon as you have two strands instead of one, the complexity of movement that becomes possible is extraordinary. You have a primitive nerve or ganglion that regulates those two strands, as they contract and relax in their reciprocal relationship. The essential problem for us, as human beings, is that we regulate this relationship poorly. Most of us live with both our extensors and their agonists, the flexors, contracted at the same time. Moshe understood that this is at the root of most people’s difficulties. Almost all Awareness Through Movement® lessons are based on the idea of improving that reciprocity, that reciprocal relationship between the flexors and the extensors.

Anastasi: What happens when we interrupt that reciprocal relationship?

Let’s take the example of the abdominals being held and unable to let go, preventing the pelvis from oscillating forward and back. How can we work with this inhibition? We might support that inability; that strand on one side that hasn’t been able to let go, and begin to restore the

capacity for that muscle. We support it and suddenly it lets go a little, and then there begins a dance between these two strands that brings us back to this sense of wholeness and we feel capable again.

David: Let’s also mention the biological value of co-contraction, because when there’s pain, we need that co-contraction. Why? Because the co-contraction inhibits movement and it is movement that is provoking the pain. We have to understand that much of what we see is the adaptation that a person may have made to trauma, or pain. Perhaps that co-contraction was valuable and helped to create the conditions for healing.

Raz: As biologically essential as these patterns of co-contraction are for survival and protection, we also know how destructive they are, and how they can become activated in a compulsive, patterned, automatic way.

David: Especially when deep fears or anxiety are involved. We have to end this session now, and I would like to thank Raz and Anastasi for their help.

Second Q&A session

Raz: I’d like to pick up where we left off in the first Q&A, when we were talking about the synergistic, or the reciprocal relationship between the flexors and the extensors. There is a very interesting synergistic relationship between the eyes, the head, and the pelvis. And you were talking about organizing the head and the eyes in order to look towards the horizon, and how tilting of the head downwards can tip our entire self-organization back into our habitual patterns. But what if we need to walk and we do need to look down, such as walking on an uneven trail or walking out in nature?

David: That’s a great question with a logical answer. Yes, we need to look down. Sometimes, you’re walking on a rocky uphill or a downhill path, and you’ve got to look down. If you’re walking on an uneven path that’s more or less flat, you can probably trust your feet more than you think, and you don’t need to actually look down as often as you think you need to look down. When walking on uneven terrain, it’s a good idea to keep your knees soft to that your hip joints can be soft even when your pelvis is not neutral. If you make your knees soft when you’re standing, you will feel that your pelvis drops a little, and there’s a slight flexion of the pelvis. So, if you want to be stealth, and you’re creeping very slowly, you will automatically bend your knees and your pelvis will flex a little bit. And your head is in the neutral looking towards the horizon. Moshe would say that this “ninja like” posture potentiates your being able to move in any direction, and that’s what we ideally want.

Raz: It’s really interesting what you’re saying about walking with soft knees. When walking barefoot, one does not stomp the back of the heel into the floor in the heel strike phase, because that would cause injury to one’s skin. That’s a privilege of walking with shoes on a flat surface. When walking barefoot, one touches the floor before bearing weight on the foot. There’s a very short period of time where the foot acts as a sensor to test the terrain before planting weight, before bearing weight on the foot.

David: I propose that if your knees are soft and you relax your abdominal muscles, and your shoulders and neck, then your foot can begin to act in that way, even with shoes on.

Raz: The next question relates to what you were doing in the lesson with the roller behind the pelvis, when you elongated the knee. The knee was moving away from the head, in the direction of the toes. And we were sensing the elongation through the entire spine, and noticing how it was being transmitted up the entire skeleton. And you emphasized exhaling as we were doing it.

David: Inhaling always “fixes” things in a particular way, especially in the thoracic spine. The spine should be able to move and extend in the lumbar area. If you hold your breath, you create a level of unnecessary difficulty.

Raz: One of the participants made a brilliant observation that when they turned their attention downward, toward the sensation of their feet when standing or walking, they felt that their eyes were being pulled downward. In fact, there is the ability to differentiate between the movement of the eyes, what you’re “seeing” kinesthetically in your mind’s eye, and where your attention is driven. Can you say a little more about that?

David: I would say that the most natural, organic thing is for the eyes to move with our attention. As William James, the father of American psychology highlighted, attention is telling the brain that something is very important. Moshe is concerned with this in many lessons, especially if you think of the primary line lessons, and the scanning lesson in the Esalen Notes. You see in those lessons that he understands that when your eyes move, your whole entire body is moving in response to the movement of the eyes. In other words, your eyes influence your musculature to such an extent that when you look with your eyes to the left, your entire musculature is organized to turn to the left. We can easily measure this with an EMG machine. By the same token, if I’m lying on my back and I look down toward my feet, we would be able to measure how

my abdominal muscles contract, and how my chest depresses. In other words, we’d find that both actions, looking down toward our feet, or up toward the heavens are whole body or whole self actions.

Raz: You were working also with the pecking movements of the head, bringing the chin forward and pecking the head forward. You mentioned that it’s a fundamental and an essential movement. How does that f

fit with the problem of forwardness? Isn’t having the head forward a problem in most people’s organization? [Fig 3]

David: Firstly, in the problem of forwardness the head is forward and down. If you have a stick coming out of that top of the head, it’s not just that it’s going forward of the spine as in pecking, but it’s also going downwards toward the ground. What is it that is essential in those pecking lessons? It’s the ability of the head to slide that little bit that it can on the atlas, and the atlas to move relative to the axis. That pecking movement helps to restore the organization of the cervical spine as it ought to be ideally. That is because when we slide the head forward, the entire cervical spine arches. At the very beginning of the movement, there’s a small movement of the skull relative to the first cervical vertebra. Then, the other vertebrae become engaged, and that movement can help anyone and everyone to begin to restore their cervical arch, and thus the free movement of the head and teleceptors. If the pitch of the head—for most people—is forward and down, even slightly, then their cervical arch is severely diminished. Our task has to be to somehow give the person the sensation of what it’s like to have that cervical arch. The beautiful thing is that the reorganizing properties of that movement are spontaneous. I’ll say that again: The reorganizing properties of that movement are spontaneous. Why? Because your brain and my brain recognize those movements and that organization

Fig 3 Pecking movements—upright extension facilitated by sitting on a roller. Ariella Alroy pictured in a Functional Integration (FI) lesson with David Zemach-Bersin. Video still

of the cervical spine as being what enabled us to stand up in the first place, and to walk in the first place. The linkages to those developmental phases are clear, and the advantage to the system is more than obvious.

Raz: This is also a paragon example of how the reciprocal relationship between the flexors and extensors is interrupted by the forward and down head position, and how the cervical curve is not only compromised, but compressed. When you’re doing the pecking movement, those relationships can recalibrate.

David: Absolutely. I was very lucky to be able to sit at Nachmani Street and watch Moshe work day after day. I would be understating it if I said that in 90% of his lessons, he worked with the head and neck at the end of the lesson. The person would be lying on their back, and Moshe would be supporting their head from behind and lifting it with those pecking movements, forward, right and left. This was probably the most frequent thing I saw him do at the end of a lesson.

Raz: Let’s go back to discussing the lumbar lordosis, but first, let’s have a clear terminology about the different positions of the pelvis; the neutral position of the pelvis, the pelvis being anteriorly tilted, and the pelvis being posteriorly tilted. If the superior part of the pelvis tilts backwards in relation to the pubic bone, that’s a posterior pelvic tilt. If the superior part of the pelvis tilts forward in relation to the pubic bone, that’s an anterior pelvic tilt. You said something interesting about elite athletes; about how their lumbar lordosis is often significant, maybe even pronounced, and that this gives them an advantage in the skills they’re performing. Can you say a little bit more about that?

David: This is very true when the sport involves exerting a great deal of power. Power is derived from the differential between where I am, and where I want to exert force. If I’m already forward, and want to push you backwards; I don’t have far to move myself without becoming unstable. I am able to apply very little power. But if I am further back, over my heels, and want to push you, well, now I have a much greater distance over which to produce that power. In addition, Moshe would say that the power of a muscle—of an individual muscle—is derived from the differential between it being relaxed and contracted. He would say a man with built-up muscles can never be the most powerful man in the room because the distance, or differential, between that muscle being relaxed and contracted is small.

Raz: The differential in length of the muscle?

David: The length of the muscle, that’s right. Moshe stated it as a question in his first or his second judo book: how do you explain how a

small, non-muscle-bound person can be so powerful in doing judo or jujitsu? There must be some secret there about the mechanics of how force is produced. For athletes, power is produced by the pelvis. Not only is it the largest bone, but the most powerful muscles of our body are attached to it; either at both ends, or at one end. The default position of their pelvis already has an anterior tilt to it. Which makes it very easy for them to produce power, and to produce tremendous power from the center of themselves. They don’t have to make a preparatory movement of taking their pelvis back, before applying great force forward.

Raz: You’re saying something very interesting. That the power comes from the ability to transition efficiently from the most power-producing initial position, to the end points. Then, how is having strong, statically contracted abdominal muscles biologically functional?

David: You have to look at the distinction between the cultural norm or aesthetic and what is functional. What is ideal from a functional point of view, and what is ideal from a cultural aesthetic point of view. And I think that something like core strengthening is linked to the idea of what’s culturally perceived as ideal, which is very different from what facilitates movement.

Raz: A workshop participant is interested in what happens when there is a loss of the lumbar curve and how it relates to peripheral nerve problems.

David: As Feldenkrais® practitioners it is important for us to understand the effect of the loss of the lumbar curve or lumbar lordosis. It causes excessive pressure on the anterior portion of the discs that are between the vertebrae. When we are young, these discs are very thick, so for a while, we can get away with this compression. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that the discs are semi-viscous, and they have a structure that keeps everything contained. When there’s anterior pressure over a long period of time, the disc gets pushed backwards and deformed. And what happens to be there, behind the vertebra, are nerve roots coming out of the spinal cord. These lumbar plexi that come out of the spinal cord feed the legs. And when they are irritated by pressure, the person can experience neuropathy. There are different causes for loss of sensation. You can have a lack of sensation for vascular reasons or because of diabetes. You can have a neuropathy in your feet because of long standing disc problems, which you might not even experience in your lower back. The discs do not need to herniate for there to be a problem. Herniation means there’s a break in the disc, and that discal matter exudes. That’s a very serious situation. More often, 90% of the time, the disc is being pushed back, causing inter-tissue pressure on the nerve root. I think this is what causes most “sciatica” or referred pain. I studied for a while with Dr. James Cyraix,

an orthopedic surgeon, from whom I gained a lot of insights. He said, and I agree, that when we experience referred pain, where we feel the discomfort is not necessarily related to where the problem is, it has to do with the extent of irritation of the tissue; the way in which the nerve root is being inflamed. The more inflamed or irritated the nerve root is, the more likely you’re going to feel the discomfort far from the actual site of the problem, for example, as far as the foot. When the lumbar curve is diminished, there is a greater likelihood of the disc being pushed back and irritating the nerve root. As a Feldenkrais practitioner, you have effective tools and can help those people. It may not be immediate relief, but you have the tools to help them recover. It’s the same issue in the cervical spine, with exactly the same biomechanical dynamics. One of my students was experiencing intense referred pain in her neck and arm. Her cervical curve was gone; her neck was completely straight. Is this somebody who might benefit from those pecking movements? I suggested that she lie on her back, and do certain things arching her neck, and moving her head and neck in such a way as to integrate it with the congruent movements of the spine and her pelvis. She sat up and her pain was almost completely diminished.

Raz: What about someone who has a difficulty in rounding their back. There are types of scoliosis in which there is an exaggerated lumbar curve and a restriction in being able to tilt the pelvis backwards. Sometimes those exaggerated curves are being stabilized by a Harrington rod, so then of course, there’s no movement between the vertebrae.

David: Or, cerebral palsy. I have worked with people for whom the posterior tilting was difficult. But, I’ve never seen anyone whose pain was connected to their inability to tilt their pelvis posteriorly. The nerve roots which get perturbed are behind, not in front. I’m not making a case that the only movement that matters is to be able to anteriorly tilt our pelvis. We need to be able to round our back in order to come up. We need to be able to shorten our spine, in order to lengthen it. In tai chi, it is said, “If you want to go to the left, you have to go to the right first.” And that’s so brilliant. If you want to go up, you need to go down first. That’s such a fundamental understanding. When a person’s spinal mobility is limited by major surgical intervention, like a Harrington rod, you can help them maintain the mobility and length that is possible, without challenging the fusions or attachments.

Raz: Going back to the orientation of the head in your FI demonstrations; in addition to the pecking movement that came at the end, we had rolling the head versus lateral bending of the head. You were connecting it to the general organization of shifting weight. And you talked about how turning the head to one side tonifies or organizes the entire organization in relation to the shifting of weight. One of the questions was, is it

accurate to say that when I’m sitting and turning to look to the left, or turning to look to the right, that this action is tonifying the musculature on the side to which I’m looking?

David: A well-organized person, with their head in the middle, and their torso and legs square to the ground, will experience global change in their tonus upon turning the head. Now, the extraordinary thing is, if I turn my head to the right, it’s the right side of my neck that is de-tonifying in the front. The left side of my neck tonifies in order to control the turning. Control of the turning is happening through the sternocleidomastoid and related muscles on the left side, on the opposite side, which is counter intuitive. A well-organized person doesn’t turn their head independently. A person who turns effectively, turns their spine, chest, shoulders; their whole self. With C6 on top of C7, there’s a lot of differentiation in the movement of the head, a lot of differentiation possible relative to the torso. The precision and delicacy of the movements of the head and neck are a hallmark of human development. Moshe uses this in many ATM lessons. You’ll see that there are many lessons where you’re being asked to fix much of yourself in one position, while keeping your head and neck free to move.

Raz: Here is a new question. We watched a video of you giving an interesting lesson to your daughter, Ariella. I’m referring to the one where you had her lie on many rollers that were gradually wider in diameter from the sacrum, up to the upper back, and the head. Two questions related to that situation: Why did you create the width gradation of the rollers? And why didn’t you take many rollers of the same diameter, so that her spine would be parallel to the table?

David: Because with that gradation, I’m able to have the pelvis lower, or behind the torso. And ultimately, I can have the head arched and behind the thoracic spine, the torso. If the person can conform to the shape of this environment, it allows for an effective arching of the whole self, from the hands and arms all the way down to the pelvis and legs.

Raz: Someone asks: Is there a way to tell—before putting someone in that position—whether they would be able to conform to this situation, or not? Do you have a way to assess if their back is kyphotic, or if this way of working would be too much?

David: I think of it as a series of graded lessons. If you watch the video of the workshop, you’ll see that is how I was working. I believe in the second or third lesson with Morgan, I did something where I left the roller behind her pelvis, and then I put a very large six inch roller behind her upper back. [Fig 4] That requires the thoracic spine to come toward concavity, which contradicts the normal convexity of the thoracic spine.

So, over a period of six to eight FI lessons, we have gone—in many small steps—from simplicity to complexity.

Raz: We have some questions about the general structure of a Functional Integration lesson. You made a distinction between the classic strategy of joining the person and their pattern, versus some of what you were doing in this workshop, where you were leading the person more actively into unfamiliar patterns. How do you create a coherent picture from your explorations? Because you were doing this at the same time as you were raising different hypotheses and trying to disprove them.

David: This is an enormous question. Firstly, I would like to dissuade any notion of contradictions between going with and going against a person’s patterns. The great French phenomenologist, MerleauPonty, said that the most rudimentary way to think is dichotomously. That was his phrase, dichotomous thinking. It’s this way or it’s that way or binary thinking. It’s yes or it’s no. He felt that dichotomous thinking is by definition reductionist. In other words, it’s the idea that the living world can be divided into either/or, this way or that way categories. Of course, as an intelligent person, you know that that’s not true, and that the real world has very little to do with the simple categories that language provides for us. Language is a rudimentary way of organizing perception. Moshe understood that language does not describe reality, rather it gives us a very deficient representation of reality. The point for us, as practitioners, is that it is not a question of going with or going against. In fact, the more information I extract about a person’s tendencies, inclinations, preferences, and biases, the more I am actually using that sensory information. This is especially true when I’m creating an environment that may be challenging for them. Why? Because even

Fig 4 Bringing the sternum forward and up with a roller behind the back. Morgan McKenzie Kauffman pictured in a Functional Integration (FI) lesson with David Zemach-Bersin. Video still

in a challenging situation, I must be able to always remind their nervous system of the easy, pleasurable way. But, we must make a very important distinction here, my own sensory impressions are not information, not until I have tried to disprove them. I’m using this tentative information or conjectures to advantage learning, to make the new more likely to be integrated and accepted. The filmed lessons with Morgan were an exemplar of that. When I upped the challenge for her, each time there was a regression and this is very common. More common than not, in fact. We observed this by seeing that the gains that had been made or accrued in her ability to bend, suddenly were 90% gone. So, it was a matter of going back and non-verbally interacting with her in a way that reminded her brain, “oh yeah, I can still do that.” Her breathing had to become easy, simple and diaphragmatic. She needed to feel safe. Learning is very difficult if a person doesn’t feel safe. Learning is very difficult if their breathing is not simple and diaphragmatic.

Raz: Someone asks if being able to verbalize one’s sensations at the end of a Functional Integration lesson provides an advantage to the integration of the lesson, to the awareness of what one senses at the end of the lesson? Or, does it interfere and inhibit the ability to sense kinesthetically, to be able to just be with a sensory experience? How do we know when to guide our students towards staying with just a sensorial experience, or to somehow back it up and reinforce it with verbal communication?

David: From the point of view of a practitioner, this is an extremely fundamental question. And I think it’s a place where many practitioners disturb a lesson and reduce the potency of the learning, by interjecting language. Most research shows us that learning is not mediated by the language centers of our brain. In fact, involving the verbal centers of our brain in general interferes with learning, slows the process down. These language centers and the meaning of speech, are linked mostly to the neocortex, the higher and slower parts of our brain, the power of learning is lower down. The more we can allow these unconscious processes to be engaged, the more likely the learning will have good stickiness value. I would refer you to the work of Ellen Langer from Harvard University. She has one study after another showing the inefficiency of what we would call declarative learning. If you can, at the end of a lesson, ask someone to feel certain things that require them to turn their attention toward their sensory kinesthetic sensation, that can be useful. Something that you feel pretty certain is new, and you would like to highlight. But, I would urge you to not engage your student in conversation of any other sort after the lesson. If your interest is in your student and not in your social comfort, then I would severely limit the talking that happens post lesson. Of course, every lesson and every

student is different and unique, and sometimes making what is new or needed, verbally explicit, can be useful.

Raz: A participant writes: What you’re proposing is a little bit similar to what we do in ATM, where we provide questions, or we propose paying attention to different sensorial aspects that are happening within the lesson, inside the movement. Is that a legitimate tool to use, not only as an integration, but also during the Functional Integration lesson where you might feel that your student is not engaged with the situation? Where your student is passively lying there, waiting for you to treat their pain or their discomfort?

David: Only rarely. Very rarely. I think that what you’re describing is a style. A style of working, a way of working, a methodology of working that does not advantage learning. I would go so far as to say that you can only make the assertion that they are not paying attention in the most superficial way, and that we can’t know the way that their sensory and proprioceptively oriented lower brain is processing.

Raz: Should I just trust those lower parts of the brain, assuming that they are involved in the sensorial experience?

David: I think you can trust them infinitely more, than the net effect of verbal interactions, which inadvertently feed into the person’s thinking that there is something performatory here; that something is being required of them, that something is wrong with them. In Awareness Through Movement, something is being required, but the person has a choice to move or not move, to sense themselves or not sense themselves. That’s the beautiful thing in Awareness Through Movement. You’re not compelled to do anything. I often found myself having to reform my own tendency. Having to inhibit my own tendency to ask more and more detailed questions while teaching ATM. I realized at some point that a lot of those questions are keeping the students from simply sensing, simply feeling themselves. It’s a periodic thing. I have to remind myself and inhibit that compulsion of mine.

Thank you to everyone who submitted questions. And thank you, Raz, for facilitating our second Q&A session.

Horizons of Understanding: Rediscovering a Phenomenological Epoché with Sheets-Johnstone Maxine A

Feldenkrais® Teacher Training

Katarina Halm

1 S. M. Laverty, “Hermeneutic Phenomenology and Phenomenology: A Comparison of Historical and Methodological Considerations,” International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 2(3) (2003). http://doi. org/10.1177/16094069030

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In January 2014, Feldenkrais® trainers Roger Russell, Ulla Schläfke, and Jeff Haller collaborated with dancer and academic Maxine Sheets-Johnstone to develop a seminar on the Feldenkrais Method® and philosophy. The seminar took place in Yachats on the Oregon coast. I was fortunate to attend, and I am delighted to share my personal and professional reflections in this article.

Prior to the seminar, email correspondence among participants paved the way to our study of phenomenology with Sheets-Johnstone. Phenomenology is a philosophical approach to consciousness with an emphasis on perception. Freedom is also important; according to phenomenologist S. M. Laverty, the key is the “moment in which we abandon the acceptedness of the world that holds us captive.” 1 Laverty and other philosophers refer to this moment as an “epoché.”

In preparing us for this workshop, Russell also shared Hans-Georg Gadamer’s ideas regarding “the necessity of recognizing each

2 Roger Russell, personal communication, November 17, 2013.

3 H.G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (2nd ed), trans. Sheed & Ward (London: Sheed & Ward, 1979).

individual’s limited horizon of understanding.” 2 I was intrigued to learn about the relationship of an individual’s perspective and their understanding.

Upon reading the introductory email from Russell, I tiptoed up the ladder to reach the top shelf of my studio library and brought down the pale green hardcover Truth and Method by Gadamer.3 The book brought vivid memories of Gadamer as a treasured teacher, his grounded stature and presence. I had been an inspired student along with phenomenologists from London, New York, and across the world who had gathered to hear Gadamer’s elegant commentary at the big round table in the spacious seminar room of the Goethe-Institut in London in April of 1986.

During the London discussion, Gadamer showed us how people bring a limited or expanded horizon of understanding to their general outlook on life. One may have tunnel vision or, conversely, see as if out on a vast open seascape. Upon first landing on a project with others, one may perceive the details as very close with few choices to engage—a limited horizon. Then, after some time, when we have learned more about the people and how we might navigate the project, we discover new opportunities or restore forgotten abilities—an expanded horizon. Expanded horizons of understanding allow for greater connectedness, creativity, and peace, while limited horizons may lead to strife, conflict, and even war.

Phenomenology and hermeneutics

Phenomenology and hermeneutics are philosophical fields with different emphasis. Phenomenology describes the pre-reflective human experience whereas hermeneutics describes reflective reasoning and expression. The study of phenomenology and hermeneutics often overlap just like experience and reflection in life.

4 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy), trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968).

5 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a pioneer in the field of phenomenology, wrote about the “visible and the invisible.”4 As Feldenkrais teachers, we are familiar with how visible movement can be inspired by invisible thinking. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty defines phenomenology as the study of essences, including perception and consciousness.5 I think of perception as the guide of action and communication and phenomenology as the background of hermeneutics.

These philosophical methods informed the seminar at Yachats and continue to enhance my understanding and practice of the Feldenkrais Method. People from many walks of life arrive at my studio. I ponder each individual’s perspective and stage of learning. I consider various phenomena as they arise during a lesson, including movement patterns, gestures, and indications of comfort. I am equally attuned to

6 George Theodore, “Hermeneutics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition) https://plato. stanford.edu/entries/ hermeneutics/#ArtInte.

the questions my clients ask, the appreciation they express, and the reflections they communicate at the end of the lesson or the following week.

Learning from mistakes—limited horizons may include possibilities

Within a limited horizon of understanding, there may be possibilities for learning from mistakes. In the study of hermeneutics, the art of interpretation is not to avoid misunderstanding; rather, “our interpretive experience begins in misunderstanding.” 6 Feldenkrais teachers are aware that misunderstanding and mistakes can be cornerstones of learning! Learning occurs with constant self-organization and reorganization during and following a Feldenkrais lesson. This learning shapes and develops our self-image, including physical, cognitive, and intuitive faculties.

Hermeneutical circle

7 Lawrence Berger, The Politics of Attention and the Promise of Mindfulness (Rowman & Littlefield, October 2023), 41-42.

An important aspect of horizons and hermeneutics is that our attention is placed (in ideas in the world, in developing projects). In Feldenkrais lessons, our attention is placed on the movement, the imagined movement, and the initiation of movement. Lawrence Berger’s version of the hermeneutic circle provides a way of envisioning this placemnthe different kinds of individual and collective attention. “Sustained and acute attentiveness (steadfastness) enables a deeper, more profound manifestation and relation with encountered beings,” writes Berger. “This can be seen in terms of the hermeneutical circle.” 7

It’s natural for a Feldenkrais practitioner to conceive of

Fig 1 This visual representation of the hermeneutical circle is based on an image from Lawrence Berger, The Politics of Attention and the Promise of Mindfulness (Rowman & Littlefield, October 2023).

8 Moshé Feldenkrais, The Potent Self: A study of spontaneity and compulsion (Berkeley: Frog LTC / North Atlantic Books, 1985), 114.

9 Carl Rabke, “Tai Chi principles in everyday life: Tasting the Fruits of Practice,” Catalyst Magazine, June 7, 2010. https://catalystmagazine. net/tai-chi-principles-ineveryday-life/

10 Michael Krugman, “Moshé Feldenkrais and the Reversibility of Sleep,” 2009. https:// thinkinginmovement. ca/wp-content/ uploads/2023/07/ Moshe-Feldenkrais-andthe-Reversibility-of-SleepBy-Michael-Krugman.Copyright-%C2%A9-2009. pdf

11 Following are links to two recordings courtesy of On Site Recording Productions (www.onsiterecording. net). They can be played by anyone at no charge: Michael Krugman, “Too Strange to be Believed: The Foundations of Reversibility,” 2012, FGNA Conference San Mateo, CA. https:// tinyurl.com/4ydpp7yx; Michael Krugman, “Neural Moonlighting,” 2009, FGNA Conference Forest Grove, OR. https://tinyurl.com/ yem7s9sh

understanding, experience, and communication moving in many directions. We can appreciate practicing the elements of the hermeneutical circle clockwise, counterclockwise, or crossing through the middle. Where attention is placed initially may influence how understanding develops.

Reversibility and degrees of freedom

We may consider expanded and limited horizons of understanding as they relate to our Feldenkrais practice of reversibility and the potential to change direction and move in whatever way appropriate in each moment. As Moshé Feldenkrais writes:

Reversibility is a feature of all correct action, even sleep. Thus, the well-coordinated mature person, such as found among people who have succeeded in making their occupation their pleasure, can go off to sleep when he feels like it and wake up when necessary. Moreover, all healthy animals and humans do not object to being awakened, as they can stop sleeping and resume sleeping without trouble. The ability to stop an action, a process, restart it, reverse it, or drop it all together is one of the finer criteria of proper acture.8

Describing the element of reversibility in the martial arts, instructor Carl Rabke writes, “we always step with an ‘empty step.’ In this way of moving, there is no momentum [within the shifting of a stance]. This could also be described as a quality of reversibility in movement; we could change direction.” 9

Feldenkrais practitioner Michael Krugman explored the connection Feldenkrais established between reversibility and sleep.10 In “Too Strange To Be Believed: The Foundations of Reversibility,” his title for an FGNA conference presentation in 2012, Krugman emphasized the unexpected relevance of reversibility to sleep.11 Krugman and others believe that our ancestors slept in stages because it was necessary to wake from time to time to tend the fire through the night. Even to this day, many people can sleep naturally and wake peacefully in several stages throughout the night. For some, this realization could be considered an expanded horizon of understanding. A limited horizon of understanding might involve anxiety about these natural wakings and concern about being unable to immediately return to sleep each time we wake.

12 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Primacy of Movement (expanded 2nd edition) (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2011). “Thinking in Movement” is the title of Chapter 12.

Hermeneutics and reversibility, London, 1983

When first studying hermeneutics in London in 1983, I furthered my understanding of the principle of reversibility, which is central to both the Feldenkrais Method® and taiji, a martial art from China, commonly referred to as tai chi, which I practice daily.

One day I was on the ground floor of Harrods, the well-known department store in Knightsbridge, London. While admiring warm winter gloves, I suddenly felt an impulse to see the department store library and books. I recognized in myself an intuition, a familiar somatic listening to non-verbal cues in the environment. Without needing to put my sense into words, I heeded my impulse to pause and turn around, to reverse my trajectory without questioning or hesitation.

In that instance of reversibility, I found myself dashing from the glove department to the library on the top floor. Why had I moved so quickly, so suddenly? Later I realized that my arrival at the library, moments before a bomb exploded in the glove department downstairs, saved my life. It was Christmas 1983 and an Irish Republican Army bomb had exploded moments after I left.

There, in the library, I remained with the others for a long afternoon. Eventually, we were given permission to leave the building. During that time in the library, a camaraderie began to form among the dozen of us who were required to wait. I listened to stories from survivors of the earlier war years. The resilience and courage they portrayed were profound examples of reversibility; many had learned how to turn in the right direction during their experience surviving the wartime challenges.

When given permission to leave, each person walked slowly, steadily, and with consideration for the others. We descended Harrods’ wide, spiraling staircase to the outside. That grand staircase and our exit together heightened the unified sense of the group. The resonance of our shared experience was felt in our movements. In the midst of our long delay in Harrods, a gentle trust had grown among us. Each person made their way with an agile awareness of the others, turning or waiting as appropriate as we departed. It was an instance of reversibility and also “thinking in movement.” 12

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone— “thinking in movement”

13 Sheets-Johnstone, Primacy of Movement (expanded 2nd edition), 229.

Sheets-Johnstone has explored “thinking in movement” throughout her work. Thinking in movement is, of course, familiar to Feldenkrais practitioners. Early in their development, all humans begin to “forge a sense of themselves as animate forms” through the use of movement.13

14 Sheets-Johnstone, Primacy of Movement (expanded 2nd edition), 229.

“What is it like to think in movement? What is it like to build up knowledge of the world by moving and touching one’s way through it, apprenticing oneself by way of one’s body, rather than by way of information, language, or any kind of formal instruction?” 14 What is it like to learn through curiosity and ability rather than externally dictated instructions? Exploring patterns of movement rather than achieving a formalistic end goal is a basic premise of Feldenkrais’ work and an impactful point of overlap with daily living. Thinking in movement not only allows us to learn about ourselves as we move through the world, but we also attune to other people in our environment:

15 Sheets-Johnstone, Primacy of Movement (expanded 2nd edition), 229.

16 Maxine Sheets-Johstone, “Movement and the sense of self,” 2004, FGNA Conference Seattle, WA.

Consider, for example, how keenly and astutely attuned we are to the slightest movements of others—a flickering of eyes, a pulling in of lips, a waywardness of gaze, a twitching in the neck, a tremoring of hands, a sudden laxity in knees, a momentary grimace, a fleeting constriction in the torso, a sudden intake of breath, a softly beating foot. We are kinetically attuned to each other. No one teaches us how to be attuned. We teach ourselves—nonverbally…. Our kinetic inter-attunement is grounded in a natural sensitivity to the movement of others, and in a correlative natural sensitivity to kinetic meaning.15

I first met Sheets-Johnstone at the 2004 Feldenkrais Method annual conference in Seattle. However fleeting our encounter, I recall the glow of the sun. At the pre-conference research symposium, Movement and the Sense of Self, Sheets-Johnstone received a standing ovation.16 Her book, The Primacy of Movement, became a pivotal reference for my own Feldenkrais practice over the following years.

Meeting Maxine Sheets-Johnstone again—“movement is our mother tongue”

Three decades later, I found myself thinking in movement and reversibility with Sheets-Johnstone and my Feldenkrais colleagues at Yachats.

Sheets-Johnstone walked into the room, a tiny person she was. She placed her hand in the hand of the person nearest her. Her gesture was accompanied by the crackling sound of wild, fresh ocean waves rushing onto the shore behind the adjacent building. Sheets-Johnstone placed her other hand in the hand of the next person. There was a hush of excitement from participants. Sheets-Johnstone swayed a little this way and that way, her long braid tossing from side to side down her slender back. Slowly, she welcomed each of us with a smile, one by one, gesturing that we were to take the hand of someone nearby. Soon

17 Serge Prengel & Maxine Sheets-Johnstone.

“Conversation: Serge Prengel with Maxine Sheets-Johnstone,” May 2010, in Active Pause, podcast, MP3 audio, 37:15, https:// somaticperspectives. com/2010/05/ sheets-johnstone

we were weaving along in a slowly moving chain, our hands linking us together around the room’s circumference. We moved like a shiny satin ribbon.

Later Sheets-Johnstone began to talk with us. Drawing us into a dance both kinetic and verbal, she showed us how we are aware of our bodies: “Mindful bodies are the way in which we come into the world. It ties into the fact that movement is our mother tongue.” 17

Sheets-Johnstone fostered our camaraderie in subtle ways, bringing an ethic to how we moved in the group. Moving without speaking that first morning encouraged each of us to find our own momentum, our individual pace and trajectory within the group as a whole. Throughout the weekend, Sheets-Johnstone showed us how to attend more and more closely to our ever-changing experience. She encouraged our autonomy, giving us a sequence of exercises through which to gradually discover new possibilities in our movement. Working together and then on our own, each of us developed a measure of self-determination, independence, and freedom.

Wind at my back

18 “Cloud hands” and “grasp bird’s tail” are titles given to specific movements within the taiji practice.

19 Feldenkrais, The Potent Self (1985).

I was surprised by my newly developed autonomy early one morning by the ocean. The rising sun found me at the edge of a magnificent cliff above the turbulent Oregon coast. The waves were roaring below, and the wind was strong at my back. Sinking into my martial arts practice of the Peking Yang style 24 form, absorbed in the nuances of balancing in the wind amongst the big rocks, the taiji began to unfold. Stepping out with a line of “cloud hands” curving towards a “grasp bird’s tail” I was able to continue my practice that cold morning hour.18 Brushstrokes of air enlivened my senses as I leaned into the edge of the wind and widened my physical gestures. My awareness grew. Steady on my feet and meeting each moment as it appeared, I found my potent self, a term used by Feldenkrais to identify a mature and responsible being.19 A potent self would be in tune with expanding horizons of understanding, reversibility, and thinking in movement.

20 Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement (expanded 2nd edition), 424.

A kinetic intelligence is forging its way in the world, shaping and being shaped by the developing dynamic patterns in which it is living. Thus again we see that possibilities at any given moment do not stand out as so many recourses of action; possibilities are adumbrated in the immediacy of the evolving situation itself, a situation that moment by moment opens up a certain world and certain kinetic ways of being in that world.20

21 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement (1st edition), (Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1999), 143.

22 Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement (1st edition), 143.

“Discovering

what is invariantly there” and expanding our horizons of understanding

The second morning Sheets-Johnstone invited us to sneeze in a variety of ways: loud, soft, steady, staccato, muffled, free, restrained, tentative, hearty. Bringing awareness to ourselves moving as we sneezed fostered the “possibility of discovering what is invariantly there in any felt experience of movement.”21

Sheets-Johnstone’s study of the sneeze included the Feldenkrais element of non-habitual movement. Sneezing as an exercise in itself was initially an odd experience: “Just such oddness jars us into an awareness of what we qualitatively marginalize in our habitual ways of doing things. By making the familiar strange, we familiarize ourselves anew with the familiar.” 22 During this exploration, sneezing became an animated group activity with pauses of quieter investigation.

The purpose was to observe four qualitative aspects inherent in movement: (1) tensional (sense of effort), (2) linear (the line of movement), (3) areal or altitudinal (spatial), and (4) projectional (expressive). Attending to these four qualitative aspects of movement, we discovered a refined awareness within all our movements, one by one and also as a group.

During the afternoon while practicing a Feldenkrais lesson with colleagues, we studied the tensional, linear, areal, and projectional aspects in each phase of the lesson. We discussed how bringing awareness to these four qualities could be instrumental in encouraging our students to learn for and about themselves, just as the exploration of the sneeze had fostered a personal, unique investigation for each of us.

“Entrance into an imperturbable listening”—a practice from Jeff Haller

23 Jeff Haller, personal communication, November 2013–January 2014.

24 Laverty, “Hermeneutic Phenomenology and Phenomenology: A Comparison of Historical and Methodological Considerations,” 2(3).

Jeff Haller brought to the seminar what he called “entrance into an imperturbable listening.” 23 This form of finely tuned listening complemented Sheets-Johnstone’s lessons on intelligence and autonomy by “suspending our natural attitude,” a phrase she used repeatedly throughout the weekend to describe the “phenomenological epoché” or our “suspension of judgment.” 24 When Haller spoke of an entrance into imperturbable listening, he referred to a quality that occurred repeatedly amongst us when we closely attended to

developing a movement sequence and discussed its kinetic subtleties during the weekend at Yachats. I was inspired to integrate this practice with “close the gate to push at the moon,” another taiji gesture.

Imperturbable listening was centering for me. I could pause and then move into interactions as appropriate. I experienced imperturbable listening as a coming down to the ground of my being, where the hustle and bustle of worldly concerns could be set aside. I landed in the present, allowing things to emerge in their own way, but not as a disruption. I found myself transparent, flowing, the usual thoughts fading. What I experienced as an entrance occurred while listening to a speaker, or welcoming the next words to write themselves on the page of my notebook, or simply resting and then moving in silence.

This entrance into imperturbable listening continued to grow into our last day on the Oregon coast. During the seminar at Yachats, Sheets-Johnstone demonstrated the great nuance of suspending our natural attitude and receiving the world anew. Together, we listened. And all too soon came that closing morning, with one more exercise by Sheets-Johnstone to enchant us.

Phenomenological epoché—

resting in the pool of each other’s eyes

On the last morning, Sheets-Johnstone asked us to close our eyes while she read to us from a book. To this day, I wonder about its title and the author—perhaps a fairy tale or a children’s story. Although I could decipher only a few words, I sensed a poetic story of an enchanted journey through a beautiful place in nature. At the beginning of the exercise, I struggled with wanting to keep my eyes open to see her so that I could fully hear what she was saying. Of course, I realized that for us to have our eyes closed was an important aspect of the process Sheets-Johnstone was composing for us. The struggle to see and hear grew in me. I paused, and there came a feeling that the struggle was a familiar pattern from my everyday life, a relentless wanting to find a way to listen so that I could hear better. Amidst my spellbound colleagues, I turned this way and that and even took a tiny step backward for a bird’s eye view from my partially closed eyes. I watched from unusual angles, sensing an opening to understand her words, wondering all the while if my hearing might magically be restored.

Slowly it dawned on me that I might say something quietly to myself or even to Sheets-Johnstone. Even though my aim was to remain silent, I found myself suddenly turning to Sheets-Johnstone, saying I wanted to watch her speaking and moving so I could hear each word she was

25 Gadamer, Truth and Method, xxiii.

saying. Sheets-Johnstone nodded, smiled, and emphasized that closed eyes were essential to the exercise. The struggle in me softened just a little. For a few more moments, my inner dialogue continued to race along with thoughts from Sheets-Johnstone’s writings, bits and pieces that resonated with what she was reading, and my wanting to catch each and every word. Gradually, awareness of our group as a whole became enough to keep me focused on the exercise and the inner struggle to hear every word subsided. I listened to Sheets-Johnstone in a lighter, more expansive way, with an expanded horizon of understanding, and thus understood more of the meaning in what she was saying without hearing every word.

As Sheets-Johnstone read from the book, she welcomed us to immerse ourselves in a story that reached out to all of us and brought a widening of our environment, a new kind of awareness. To me, it felt like a stillness, a complete rest, while awake. At the end of the story, Sheets-Johnstone asked us to open our eyes very slowly as we turned to greet the person next to us, looking into the deep pool of the other’s eyes. We were looking into what one might call our partner’s soul, also the sinews and bones and breathing, along with the widening environment of everyone there in the room.

26 Gadamer, Truth and Method, xxiii.

27 LaoMa, “Lìu hé bā fă quán: LaoMa translation of Posture names.”

At this closing exercise, “an effective moment of my own being” arose when I stood still inside myself and was about to open my eyes to gaze at my partner.25 There was a delicate transition from resting in the imaginative narrative of the story and my soul to the pivotal step of recognizing the otherness of my partner. It was such a quiet moment when I opened my eyes, seeing my colleague whom I had come to know in many ways. Just the two of us now in this exercise, resting in each other’s eyes, brought an echo of the “Thou” as articulated by Gadamer: “The experience of the ‘Thou’ also manifested the paradoxical element that something standing over against me asserts its own rights and requires absolute recognition, and in that very process is ‘understood.’” 26 Participants departing from the workshop would continue to develop autonomy and the experience of the “Thou.” In this juxtaposition, or relation, of self and other, our horizons of understanding continued to expand.27

With a gesture of the taijii “ever flowing river,” I marked a full circle in my learning with Sheets-Johnstone at Yachats in January 2014, heralding back to Gadamer’s work in hermeneutics, his dedication to a better world, and his kindness to each speaker during that seminar at the Goethe-Institut in London back in April 1986.

Anatomy and Self-Image

Alan S. Questel & Jay Schulkin

When we say self-image, anatomy isn’t typically the first thing that comes to mind. Yet our anatomy has a significant impact on who we are and how we think of ourselves. In this article, we explore functional anatomy as a way to expand a person’s self-image. We discuss anatomy in terms of the big picture and the little picture we have of ourselves; the foreground and background of the actions we perform; and the patterns and linkages of our movements. Consideration of these components clarifies the “how” of what we do and deepens our understanding of the meaning of “connection” for our sense of ourselves and our relation to others.

The topic of connection is particularly significant in the writing of this article as we, Alan and Jay, have been good friends for nearly 50 years. We often spoke about writing something together one day. At the time of writing this article, Jay is dying. So we have come together to compose this small piece. Writing at this time is a gift for us both.

Experience as inquiry

When we say “inquiry” we are referring to an intentional act of discovery as opposed to passive experience. In terms of learning new information, we are interested in its application at every step, which can bring functional, biological aspects of anatomy into movement. Just observe the way infants develop through inquiry into how their anatomy works.

Through his practice in the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education, Alan has discovered that most people have lost this fundamental understanding of the integrated system of who they are, regardless of whether the people come to him for help in diminishing their pain or for help improving an ability. Their tendency is to think and feel in parts; they have not grasped the concept of themselves as a system.

1 Jay Schulkin is an American scholar who has written widely on neuroscience, philosophy, and medicine. He passed away at age 70 in March 2023.

Too often we are taught to experience ourselves in two separate ways—as a body and as a mind. Language further confuses the matter. For example, in Japanese and Hebrew the distinction between “foot” and “leg” is unclear (while in other languages this particular difference is quite clear).

Jay’s research has shown that every person is made up of a number of co-existing systems continually interacting as a whole.1 Each one of these systems—muscular, skeletal, vascular, neurological, etc.—contains

a potential doorway leading to an understanding of who we are. Without recognizing the relationships between the different systems and how they co-regulate we maintain a vastly incomplete self-image. We come up with interpretations and make assumptions that take us away from our biological self, constructing a disconnected sense of who we are.

As an example, let’s look at a child with cerebral palsy. This particular child cannot place their heels on the floor. For our discussion, this child has had the experience of going through a surgical procedure in which their Achilles tendon was cut and their ankle fused. While the surgery initially appeared to solve the problem, the change was only cosmetic; physically, it further reduced the chance that the child would be able to walk. If the child had been viewed as a whole system, and, in turn, a whole person, a person made up of many interrelated systems, one could have seen that their heel not touching the ground was the result of various muscular and neurological activities. Viewed as a whole, complex system, these issues could have been addressed in a variety of other ways.

The question we need to continually ask is, “What will make a positive difference in someone’s life?” It is worth acknowledging the value of information, on the one hand, and experience on the other. Knowing what happens neurologically in a given action may be interesting; yet what happens neurologically is of most value when it can be intentionally applied to enhance an individual’s abilities and further their learning.

Biological viability

It is impossible to act as a collection of separate parts. We are an integrated whole. Integration requires a process of differentiating the parts, which is the foundation for bringing them back together in a better way. Biological viability is differentiation and integration in action. Biological viability is the ability to grow and function in the world from the point of view of how we actually develop rather than from some idea of how we should be.

We are limited in the extent to which we can talk about this process, or even use language to bring it about. In language, we can name different parts and systems, but in action, the different parts and systems always coexist. Language is linear, one word follows another word. Systems interacting are not. Even in writing this paragraph it is nearly impossible to convey how systems work. While we can use language as a tool to describe something, we must not mistake a description or representation for the totality of an event.

There is great value in synthesizing our parts into a relationship with the whole. The use of a hand needs to be seen in relation to the shoulder, torso, etc., but also relative to the whole self, the specific intention that is being fulfilled, and the environment. This connection will

vary greatly depending on someone’s intention, as one can see in the difference between an individual playing the piano or a person wielding an ax.

The study of models and cadavers affords us a great deal of understanding about anatomy, yet we have been hampered by the idea that this study can teach us most of what we need to know about the human body and mind. The distinctions made when examining a cadaver are often different from those made when viewing a person enacting their intention in their environment. When we study the parts outside the context of everyday life, we risk forgetting the connections. This can be exacerbated by training in which the focus is only on a particular muscle or group of muscles. In such a setting, existing muscular imbalances can be made worse, resulting in poorer use of the self.

Take for example popular ideas about core strengthening. Core strengthening is not new; years ago, it was achieved through doing sit-ups. And it’s important to recognize the benefit of core strength, which gives us a greater sense of stability. At the same time, it is important to understand that with increased stability, an individual has less mobility. You can easily feel this if you stand and swing your arms around yourself, to the left and right. You will feel a certain degree of mobility. If you continue doing this and tighten your belly, your core, you will feel a smaller range of movement in the arms. In this case, you are more stable but less mobile. Depending on the context, one or the other way might be better. But if one way is presented as the “more correct way,” then we are eliminating a choice, one that might be preferable in certain contexts.

Take a moment to think of the connection between your shoulder and pelvis on one side of your body. As an experiment, stand and bring your right shoulder forward, and listen to the connection you feel to the right side of your pelvis. In performing this action, you can sense the relationship between the two parts of yourself; from there, you can begin to sense the movement between these points throughout your ribs and spine. Now, if you invert the relationship and move the right side of your pelvis back, while sensing the connection to your right shoulder, then once again, you can feel the movement of your ribs in your spine. These actions may seem like totally different movements, and yet both create the same experience of rotation through the ribs and spine, initiating them from different points. This relationship between parts is where our understanding of ourselves can become more dynamic. Through this process we create more choices and in the “doing” help ourselves to understand the parts in relation to the whole.

2 Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company, 1933.

Big picture/little picture and foreground/background

Overall, we can learn a prodigious amount about our anatomy by working with a cadaver, but consider an adjunct: in addition to the static perspective, include an internally oriented perspective connected to context, intentions, and the environment. Adding internal, sensory-based ways of perceiving ourselves through examining ourselves from the point of view of what we feel through movement brings us into the wider world. When we take this last point of view further, we can follow it through the existing connections, and then begin to understand how this added perspective can be understood and felt through movement.

The map is not the territory, as Alfred Korzybski, the mathematician and philosopher, told us nearly a century ago now.2 This statement can still help us to see the distinction between an abstract understanding and the experience of something. When combined with an awareness of our internal experience, such an image may provide valuable additional perspective about what we seek to describe. When we rely solely on language to represent a place or a part of the body, however, we risk conceiving of it as inherently separate. Take for example the term “arm.” We all have a representation in our minds of this particular body part; we know what it means, where it begins, where it ends. We use a single word to name it. The child’s naming game is well known: Where is your nose? Where is your eye? Where is your ear? Referring to body parts is an early identification of “who I am.”

These distinctions are important; they help a young child describe where they hurt versus vocalizing, “I hurt.” “I hurt” indicates a generalized sense of pain; therefore, it’s difficult for an adult to pinpoint the area of pain to better help the child. In another well-known game, the game Simon Says, the use of language can actually get in the way. The intention is to identify different body parts, but if a person says, “Simon says put your hands on your shoulders,” people place their hands in different places along the arm, back, and shoulder. They place their hand on the side of the shoulder, the top, or the back. Most limbs and parts of the body can be understood beyond what Simon Says teaches us. For example, to the average person, the arm begins at the fingers and ends at the shoulder. Anatomists, who are able to see below the surface, understand how skeletally the clavicle and scapula are also “the arm.” Alan used to joke how he reacted when he learned this new information: There was a change in my self-image. Not because I felt myself in this way, but because I now knew something; now I was more of an expert. When someone would talk about their arm, I’d explain how their arm actually begins at the sternoclavicular joint, includes the clavicle and scapula, and blah blah blah.

Seeing from the perspective of how we use an arm in action can change what we call “arm.” We may still see the arm as a distinct part

but if we look at the gestalt, the whole image of the action, we can learn another way of understanding what an arm is. Consider how a child uses their arm. When we watch a young child reaching, the distinction of an arm ending at the shoulder makes no sense; neither does it make sense that it begins at the sternoclavicular joint. A child reaching is an action that initiates in their pelvis, from their hip joints. A skillful observer may notice that their pelvis is moving their arm. From the point of view of a proportional distribution of muscular effort, this idea makes sense; when our larger muscles do more of the heavy lifting, this then leaves the smaller muscles free for direction or greater finesse. Of course we can all use ourselves in this way, yet most often movements initiated from the pelvis will be the exception.

We can look at the leg in a similar way. Rather than seeing it beginning at the foot and ending at the hip joint, in action we can discover a different understanding in which the leg begins in the sternum. Here the hip joint would be closer to the center of the leg. This now invites the hip joint into a different source of power and support in walking and other actions. If you watch the great soccer player Lionel Messi, or the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, you can see their use of a leg is clearly connected through them in a way in which stopping at the hip joint wouldn’t allow them to do what they do. One attraction of watching professional sports, dance, or martial arts at a high level of excellence is that it gives the viewer an aesthetic appreciation of the process of integration. We often talk about watching ballet and acrobatics for the aesthetic difference from our own movements and experience of moving—”look what she can do!” But since aesthetics exist in our everyday movement, there is the potential to appreciate these great feats through our own felt experience.

The neck can also be viewed in this manner. While a large degree of the turning of the neck occurs through the movement in the atlas and in the axis, most people think of it further down, through C7. In fact, movement of the neck can be observed even lower down. The act of turning to look over one’s shoulder around a central axis can be understood to occur through the motion of the thoracic spine, down to the hip joints, and continuing even further as an action against the ground. Most actions have a fundamental connection with the ground, although this connection is not often recognized. When we permit force and power to transmit through us, it is done as a skeletal relationship with a surface, invoking ground forces.

These examples demonstrate a very different image of how we usually think of an arm, a leg, or a neck. Often people want to know the “correct” way of doing a movement. However, the correct way will depend on the context in which the movement is done. The correct use of an arm when one is fanning oneself in the heat is not the same as the correct use of the arm in a tennis serve. We also need to view an action from the point of view of how well we fulfill our intention, the outcome of what we intend to do. It’s necessary to take into

consideration not only context and outcome, but also the efficiency and comfort with which an action is executed. An embodied sense of ourselves goes beyond anatomy. Observing and participating in sports, playing music, and performing surgery, to name just a few actions involving high levels of skill, can extend and expand how we carry out basic actions in everyday life.

Noticing a movement in relation to how other parts or places move will enhance our understanding. For example, the knee, although a complex joint, is simple in what it does: it flexes and extends. Many knee injuries are the result of the knee being asked to move in a way it doesn’t move, i.e. when the knee is asked to side bend or to rotate. Again, if we expand our perspective beyond the knee, to places that can side bend or rotate, it is likely the adjacent joints (and even places beyond that) are constrained in how they perform those bending and rotating actions. If these places beyond the knee function better in how they move, doing what they can do, side bending and rotating, there is less pressure on the knee to do these actions. An expanded view, beyond the knee, utilizes the kinematic linkage of our skeleton and how movement occurs through our whole selves. This knowledge and its application can clarify connections and improve function, thereby reducing injury and pain.

The inclusion of the foot and toes may be significant for a tennis serve and yet may prove insignificant when fanning oneself. The degree of inclusivity relevant or beneficial to each action will vary; all the same, inclusivity is fundamental to a better understanding of who we are. Although the above examples are described from a skeletal orientation, they are not exclusive of the muscular or nervous system— they can’t be. Since this understanding is sensory based, it is implicitly inclusive of these other systems, which includes the muscular and neurological systems in conjunction with yet other related systems. The skeleton of an arm doesn’t move by itself; we need our muscles to move it and to feel its position. The skeletal arm is part of and in relation to everything it needs in order to make it a living viable entity. It is part of, and relates to, the complexity of other systems, including our intentions, the ground, the environment, and how these systems integrate to realize our desired actions.

Connection and regulation

This whole systems perspective is far from simple. We have before us a broad range of possible choices in how we can do things; there are nearly infinite ways to do all the things we do. Connection can simplify our understanding. Understanding the connections through ourselves can provide us with a concrete appreciation that things connect. Connection is made up of links and associations that provide an expanded sensory experience of what we do, leading to better understanding and a clearer self-image. This connection, the path to find

greater power in the tennis serve or to discover more finesse in fanning oneself, begins from the ground and continues through our skeleton. It is the vehicle to changing how we do what we do. Utilizing connection is pivotal to providing the necessary felt distinctions to help us move away from an authority driven, “correct” way of doing something; and towards the personal, felt ways of how we do things that work better for the individual. For instance, one can look at the different styles of skiing. All the styles are emerging from various great athletes. Each athlete’s style is idiosyncratic to that person. Some of us can benefit from learning a new style from another person. Yet, for others, learning someone’s particular style doesn’t work at all.

On the flip side, a brilliant dancer or athlete may be able to execute an action, yet it doesn’t necessarily mean they have the ability to explain it or teach it to another person. The facility to do this requires they are able to both convey knowledge and to create an environment in which students can learn through their own individual experience. The effective teacher must have the ability to guide someone in discovering their individual sense of connection and new understanding of an action.

Part of understanding connection involves the regulation between the connections. The context of meaning, usefulness, and application that we need to improve our functionality resides here. For example, connecting the image of an arm to the sternoclavicular joint has a specific logic to it. If we connect it instead to hip joints, there is another logic, which makes a different kind of sense, and yet one more logic exists if it’s connected to the ground. An argument can be made that the arm could be seen as being connected to a specific rib or the eyes, which it can. Yet these connections do not necessarily bring more power to the use of the arm. Nor do they necessarily give the arm an ability to more easily and accurately fulfill an intention. Connection and its regulation are key to new perceptions and new ways of doing things. Connection and its regulation are the necessary inclusivity that loops back to understanding who we are, what we do, and how we do it. Connection and its regulation connect to and form our self-image. We can break connection and its regulation down into the distinctions of timing, orientation, and the parts involved in an action. The timing of when an arm moves in relation to how it is oriented can make or break the fulfillment of any action whether one is fanning oneself or improving one’s tennis serve.

Now when you watch a child reach for something you will see the action differently—from there you may also discover a difference in how you reach and do things. Seeing how a child moves and understanding how we too can move in a more connected fashion is possible for all of us, whether one is an expert in a particular domain or a participant in it. This way of connecting with our bodies is always going on and always available in all of us. This phenomenon pervades us through bodily sensibility, shared intention, and human contact. While it’s

beyond the scope of this paper, it includes the conflict of different and deceptive intentions as well. It is part of our social way of being. Is it possible to bring a greater awareness and sense of intention to our bodily connections? Can we use our awareness of these connections to comprehend and know ourselves both in feeling and in results?

We all know this way of being. This is the way we were as infants and children and is how we moved then in order to grow. We have lost touch with this fundamental way of being; yet, it is readily accessible through our attention. We can regain it when we choose to embrace a broader, more inclusive way of perceiving ourselves in the world. What if we came to know ourselves and others as a system of connections that all worked together to fulfill an intention? What would that mean for us and for the world?

On March 17, 2023, my dear friend Jay passed … he had a smile on his face and a tear in his eye … he was completely at peace … sending us all waves of love. I miss him.

Alternative Paths to Mindfulness: An Integration of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)

Method® with Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement® (ATM®)

Zoi Dorit Eliou

Key words

Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), awareness through movement (ATM), Feldenkrais method, self-image, borderline personality disorder, trauma, mindfulness, self-regulation, emotion regulation, distress tolerance.

Objective

This paper presents a theoretical model integrating Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) with Awareness Through Movement (ATM) to promote an encompassing treatment model combining cognitive, behavioral, and emotional processes with kinesthetic awareness to improve mindfulness, emotion regulation, and distress tolerance.

Method

The paper reviews the principles of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) skills training as they overlap in goals and diverge in contribution with Awareness Through Movement (ATM), advancing forward an integrated mind-body treatment model for psychiatric conditions, and in particular trauma treatment. The paper first reviews the principles of DBT, particularly as they relate to the physiological aspects of emotion regulation; it then reviews the principles of ATM and how they relate to DBT skills training and their relevance to trauma treatment. Finally, it discusses the integration of the methods and the benefits ATM can bring to the process of healing.

Introduction

I propose that Awareness Through Movement, a comprehensive somatic education approach that shares principles with Dialectical Behavior Therapy, can deepen and ease DBT skills training and acquisition when practiced parallel to DBT training.

There is now clarity from evidence based research that mind-body therapies can be effective and contribute to symptom reduction in a variety of psychiatric and medical conditions (Astin, 2004; Brower, 2006; Sunder, 2015). We often refer our patients as an adjunct to psychotherapy and DBT skills-training, to mindfulness stress reduction programs, meditation groups, and yoga. Nevertheless, we have yet to develop a robust and sophisticated treatment integrating cognitive behavioral therapies (CBT) with psycho-physiological mind-body tools, nor have we developed refined criteria regarding which mind-body adjunct therapies fit particular populations.

In addition, while mindfulness meditation as a stand-alone mind-body treatment is correlated with multiple positive health outcomes, evidence from recent research suggests that for a subset of patients, mindfulness meditation has negative effects, in particular increased fear, anxiety, anger, flooding, and dissociation (Britton, et al., 2019; Lustyk, et al., 2009; Schlosser, et al., 2019; Wilson, et al., 2019). Therefore it is imperative to develop and integrate mindfulness practices that do

not elicit these negative effects for this vulnerable subset of patients. Awareness Through Movement offers such an option.

DBT and Mindfulness

One of the most important goals of DBT is to help patients regulate emotions and cope with distress by increasing awareness to allow a perceptual shift and to interrupt a habitual reaction to internal or external stimuli. To do so, it is necessary, over time, to acquire the tools to quiet the mind, step back, and reassess options of response.

DBT was first geared towards chronically suicidal patients that met borderline personality disorder (BPD) criteria. DBT is a sophisticated cognitive behavioral therapy method with mindfulness training at its core (Linehan, 1993). Currently the model is applied, with adjusted protocols, to many other psychiatric disorders such as depression, addiction, and eating disorders (Linehan, 2015).

Mindfulness, or conscious awareness, is at the core of DBT philosophy and design and is probably the most powerful tool patients learn as they move through DBT’s four treatment modules: Mindfulness, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotion Regulation, and Distress Tolerance. In fact, because the Mindfulness module is crucial to the therapeutic process, it is repeated at the end of each module before the skills training group advances to the next one.

Parenthetically, mindfulness in DBT is not to be equated with mindfulness sitting meditation training. While the latter can enhance awareness, awareness can be achieved utilizing other practices as well. Furthermore, mindfulness sitting meditation does not necessarily carry the same benefits across populations (Linehan, 2015; Schlosser, 2019).

The wise mind

In DBT protocol, mindfulness or conscious awareness is labeled as wise mind, rooted in cognitive-affective theory, and described as the ability to integrate emotion mind and reasonable mind information toward effective response or action. [Fig 1] Effective action is differentiated from impulsive habit, and wise mind perspective over time is internalized as a recourse to provide response choices when contending with challenges. From a soaring bird’s point of view, a patient can begin to imagine and ultimately arrive more effortlessly and intuitively at an un-blending between the self and their reaction to stimuli, and may observe that thoughts, feelings, and actions are malleable and adaptive. As the treatment progresses, this creation of a contemplative space avails the opportunity to respond effectively, as opposed to react impulsively or rigidly (Linehan, 2015).

To create these dialectic shifts between emotion mind and reasonable mind, into a wise mind integration, it is necessary to slow

Fig 1 From DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, Second Edition by Marsha M. Linehan, p. 50.

Copyright 2015 by Marsha M. Linehan. Reprinted with permission of Guilford Press.

down and help the patient to observe and describe their internal experience while being fully present in it (labeled as participate). The quality of these observations are encouraged to be considered with focused attention (labeled as one-mindfully one thing at a time), with non-judgement and ultimately result in effective response.

Mindful cognition or wise mind, enhances a patient’s agency and inner authority, and leads over time to intuitive and spontaneous effective choices (Linehan, 2015). Working with patients on adopting and internalizing a non-judgment attitude offers patients an opportunity to examine response choices without being caught in feelings of inadequacy or shame.

Similarly, teaching patients radical acceptance of reality can prepare a patient to address a challenging situation with a willing response. Willingness is defined as the ability to tune into wise mind, leading to effective action. Contrary, a stance of willfulness, or refusal to accept reality as is, perpetuates habitual, forceful problematic responses opposite to “what works” (Linehan, 2015, p. 342).

While these skills may seem straightforward, they present significant challenges for many BPD patients. Often patients lack the ability or skill to express their full experience and self-validate. Stressful situations and difficult environments inhibit and paralyze patients in communication with others. Vulnerability, shame, lack of trust, varied degrees of dissociation or unawareness of one’s physical and emotional experience become barriers to communication (Linehan, 2015; van Der Kolk, 2015).

Borderline Personality Disorder—A spectrum of symptoms and underlying trauma

BPD patients frequently present with a spectrum of symptoms depending upon the type of BPD they have. Briefly, these symptoms as delineated in the literature include severe emotional dysregulation (i.e., rapid shifts of mood states from anger outbursts to deep despair and depression), impulsivity, self-harm, a distorted sense of self and identity, feelings of chronic emptiness, disrupted and chaotic relationships (idealization and devaluation), chronic suicidal ideation, and a sense of the world as a threatening place in which one cannot feel safe, in which there is no one to trust, and where one is likely to be abandoned, rejected, or harmed.

Patients are often dissociative and cut off from themselves and their body, the body being a vessel carrying memories of abuse into one’s present life. Further, the body becomes a battleground of self-harm, neglect, hate, ambivalence, a container of pain. The genesis of the disorder, besides biological predisposition, is often traced to traumatic early childhood experiences and subsequent compounded trauma.

BPD patients often develop or already have related disorders both physical (autoimmune or pain disorders) and psychiatric (e.g. chronic depression, anxiety, and dissociation). Patients turn impulsively and habitually to using unhealthy coping skills that in the past provided some measure of immediate subjective relief, but which are not adaptive in the present (Linehan, 2015; van Der Kolk, 2015).

Many BPD patients arrive to therapy with high adverse childhood events (ACE) scores. The correlation between ACE score and the likelihood later in life to develop medical problems such as autoimmune or pain disorders is high. In turn, such medical problems influence patients’ daily living not only physically but also psychologically (Cattane, et al., 2017; Chang, et al., 2019; Chapman, et al., 2007; Porter, et al., 2019).

DBT and physiological regulation of emotion

Learning to name and regulate emotions

Tuning into the information the body provides is akin to having a compass in the ocean and a direction to sail towards. Linehan (2015) educates patients to the physiological aspects of each emotion, thereby increasing physical awareness and improving a patient’s ability to identify an emotion often presenting physically before it presents verbally. In providing patients with the language necessary to physically describe an emotional state, along with the cognition attached to it, the possibility of self-regulation and use of self-care skills is enhanced.

Linehan describes how each emotion corresponds to biological changes and experience, body and facial language, and physical sensations (Linehan, 2015, pp. 232–240). For example, in describing anger, biological changes and expression involve muscle tightening, teeth clamping together, hands clenching, feeling a flush face, etc. In describing fear or anxiety, biological changes and expressions are breathlessness, fast heartbeat, choking sensation, muscles tensing, clenching teeth, feeling clammy, freezing, shaking, etc. Multiple skills are offered on how to regulate emotions physiologically. For example, the “opposite action to emotion” skill, used when feelings don’t fit the facts or when acting on your emotions is not effective, the patient is invited to defuse an emotional response through the use of imagination, changes in posture, and changes in body chemistry.

Linehan’s (1993; 2015) model of the cognitive-affective processes as taught to patients demonstrates the relationship between vulnerability factors, triggering events, subsequent interpretations, and physiological changes, resulting in action and emotion state which in turn impact

Fig 2 From DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, Second Edition by Marsha M. Linehan, p. 213. Copyright 2015 by Marsha M. Linehan. Reprinted with permission of Guilford Press.

subsequent events and elicit secondary emotions and aftereffects of emotions. [Fig 2] Patients are invited to consider emotional and cognitive states as influenced by distorted perceptions that have been reinforced over time (also known as automatic or distorted thoughts and core beliefs, or myths).

The patient is offered a vast array of options on how to process and respond to internal-external stimuli and is encouraged to practice non habitual behaviors and alternative cognitions as well as options for how to self-regulate physiologically.

Rooting emotions in the body and learning to tolerate distress

Many of the DBT skills involve attention and mastery of physical sensations which can contribute to self-regulation. In DBT Mindfulness practice and in DBT Mindfulness of Emotion skills, observing and describing physical experiences is essential, particularly since BPD patients have a distraught relationship to their bodies, a vessel that carries painful memories of abuse by others, and by the patient themselves. Awareness of the physical experience of an emotion as described in the emotion regulation module opens the door to self-regulation by focusing attention and employing physiological skills such as relaxation to ultimately allow better cognitive processing.

DBT skills-training places emphasis on the physical care of one’s body to decrease vulnerability to negative emotions and habitual impulsive and destructive action. Examples include addressing physical illness, exercise, and sleep hygiene, while avoiding harmful substances, addressing disordered eating, and so forth. Further, significant time is spent teaching various relaxation and meditation methods and specific tools to deal with nightmares.

In the Distress Tolerance Module, which focuses on crisis survival skills for tense situations or those that cannot be changed immediately, physiological processes are emphasized in defusing powerful emotions and facilitating effective responses. The practice of half-smile for example, involving the relaxation of the facial muscles, letting the jaw drop and attempting a small half smile is often applied to defuse anger, thereby opening the door to tolerate powerful negative emotions and disallow them to lead to problematic reactions. In practicing half-smile a feedback loop to the parasympathetic nervous system defuses physical tension and softens the emotional experience (Linehan, 2015, pp. 347–349).

Similarly, willing hands which involves relaxing one’s arms, hands and fingers, diffuses tension and facilitates entrance into a willing state that is vital for effective action (Linehan, 2015, pp. 347–349). In addition, patients are encouraged to practice distress-tolerance with imagery,

using visualization tools to create a safe space, opposite emotions, dissolving negative emotions, and so forth (Linehan, 2015).

Other physiological skills in the Distress Tolerance module involve self-soothing through stimulation of the five senses to reduce the intensity of a negative emotion: listening to music, lighting a candle, buying flowers, tasting a new or favorite old flavor, caressing a pet or wearing soft clothing. Physical awareness when self-soothing with pleasurable activities increases positive emotions and reduces vulnerability to negative emotions and self-harm, or, at the very least, postpones such harm and avails the possibility of new thoughts/ feelings/behaviors to emerge.

Another set of physiological skills in DBT aims to interrupt urges of self-harm by creating experiences of pain that are not harmful, such as holding an ice cube, using a rubber band on one’s wrist, or taking a very hot/cold shower (Linehan, 2015). It can be a challenge to engage patients with psychiatric suffering in conscious and positive behavioral activation. The suffering becomes the central focus of a patient’s life, consuming most of their attention, and the tendency is to turn against the body.

I believe that while DBT is geared towards shifts in cognitionemotion-behavior-physiology, the way it addresses the body is incomplete. The experience of being in the body is damaged in patients with BPD due to past abuse and/or disrupted attachment, and given that the disorder often involves physical self-harm behaviors, direct therapeutic intervention needs to be added to the DBT paradigm in order to shift and heal the person’s connection and relationship to their body.

As such, I believe that a movement method which parallels but is independent of DBT skills training, structured, nuanced, and delivered under safe and non-judgmental conditions, a method that enhances awareness and mastery of physiological processes, will allow a smoother learning of DBT skills. Furthermore it will allow a process of change in how patients regard themselves in totality, in other words a change in self-image.

Awareness Through Movement

Awareness Through Movement lessons constitute a sophisticated movement language grounded in cognitive-affective theory as it relates to perception and self-image. Through the choreography of each lesson the student learns new ways to self-organize, solve problems, and self-regulate. The teacher guides the students in a process of kinesthetic and cognitive self-inquiry and instruction throughout each lesson. During this process specific principles and strategies are emphasized with the intention of improving one’s self-image and learning how to self-regulate (Feldenkrais, 1980; Feldenkrais, 1990).

Principles and strategies of ATM

Bringing in the whole self, inside and out, body, brain, and cognition. Learn how to sense yourself.

Harnessing your attention to what you do, think, feel, and sense within yourself.

Learn something new moment to moment—observe, be curious, experiment. Notice your experience, look with fresh eyes and a beginner’s mind.

Adopt a perception of choice and discover new possibilities and options. Notice your habits, keep some and also create new ones.

Become effective by learning to reduce effort. Slow down. Learning to reduce effort and go slow will help you to make finer distinctions and observations of your experience.

Learn how to relax musculature. Reducing effort, breathing, and slowing down will assist you in the process.

Learn without self-judgment, with self-acceptance and self-compassion.

Choose easy, slow, and pleasurable movement. Notice what feels pleasant. Adopt a mindset of learning through progressive approximation to your goals. Find your flow and groove.

Rest. Learn when you need to rest. Observe how rest improves your learning, your mood and your ability to feel stronger during the lesson and beyond.

Learn self-care by taking breaks, slowing down, making small movements, staying away from ambition and perfection, or using imagination when movement is not available.

Use imagination to inspire you and propel you to experiment with new possibilities.

Create a new story about who you are, a new narrative and perception of yourself. Become comfortable in your own skin.

The Method’s overarching goal is to improve a person’s self-image by using movement. According to Moshe Feldenkrais (1904-1984), the originator of the Method, “we act in accordance to our self-image” (Feldenkrais, 1990, p. 3) and thus, improving the self-image is paramount

to behavioral change and improvement in global well-being. Self-image, in Dr. Feldenkrais’ language, consists of our body image, what we sense physiologically and kinesthetically, how we feel and think, and how we act. It impacts our view of ourselves and the world. Self-image forms through formal and self-education, childhood experiences, cultural background, heritage, historical events a person has experienced, biology and genetics (Feldenkrais, 1990; Feldenkrais, 2002; Feldenkrais, 2010; Feldenkrais, 2019).

There is no need for fitness or high levels of physical coordination in order to participate in ATM lessons. People as young as teenagers and as old as nonagenarians may often attend the same class, each with a wide range of medical limitations and motor issues.

Where ATM and DBT intersect

The cornerstone of ATM lessons, similar to DBT, is to enhance awareness rather than focus on the “right or wrong” way to move. There are no prescriptive expectations of how one’s body should be organized. Correction and judgment are taken out of the equation, whether it comes from the teacher or the student, and emphasis is placed on radical acceptance of the self kinesthetically, emotionally, and cognitively. The lessons offer instruction in movement possibilities which are often unfamiliar to students, aimed at sharpening the acuity of global awareness and the ability to sense one’s self, which result in experimentation with new movement and thinking options that are potentially more fluid, flexible, and effortless (Feldenkrais, 1990).

ATM lessons follow an anatomical mapping allowing students to track and become aware of how they are organized, how their spine, joints, and musculature relate to one another, how they move together, and what the barriers are for moving with ease and fluidity (Doidge, 2016; Feldenkrais, 1990). While lying mostly on their backs, neither observing the teacher nor the other students, participants are invited to carefully observe their physical response to the instructions. As such, the participants develop in the moment and over time, an awareness of their body and how it moves, learn their particular anatomy, and learn what options they have to ease into effortless, fluid thinking and moving. There is a graceful choreographic structure to the lessons which is particularly apparent if they are done slowly and with ease. Within each set of instructions the students learn the spatial elements of the body in action in space, level, direction, energy, and time (such as tempo or rhythm). Being able to differentiate between a spectrum of options in movement, such as how to go from slow to fast, from forced and strained to soft or relaxed effort, or from small to large movement, between resting and moving, ultimately affords options and choices in regulating one’s body during the lesson and beyond. The lessons aim to introduce non-habitual ways of thinking and moving by increasing

participants’ awareness of ineffective habits and introducing alternative options. Between each set of instructions there is an opportunity for participants to rest and internally compare results, thus further increasing the possibility of awareness through sensing.

I propose that Feldenkrais can complement and enhance DBT skills training in providing patients with a movement language that allows both a front and a back door to emotion regulation and distress tolerance. The two methods aim to achieve similar goals: quiet the mind, increase physiological and mental awareness, offer alternative responses of action, shift thinking and movement habits, promote self-acceptance and non-judgment, and improve self-image.

DBT skills training and ATM

integration

As mental health clinicians and as Feldenkrais practitioners, one of the things we hope for is that our clients over time feel more comfortable in their own skin. In the case of the integration I propose, this is literally the aim.

The integration of DBT with Awareness Through Movement lessons addresses a person on all levels of experience in an un-fractured way. The “body” treatment is not divorced from psychotherapy or skills training, but rather provides patients with an embodied language that offers additional skills to promote emotion regulation and distress tolerance.

DBT skills training and ATM: Common goals

Improve awareness and quiet the mind.

Harness attention and slow the process down in order to observe and describe physical, cognitive, and emotional states. Learn how to shift attention and focus.

Connect sensing to emotion and emotion to sensing. Learn to identify and interrupt physiological patterns of emotion. Learn how to relax musculature.

Attitude of non-judgment and self-acceptance, expanding loving compassion to the self.

Cultivate a stance of curiosity and experimentation.

Learn to work with constraints.

Learn how to develop an internal pace of progress.

Use imagination and visualization to initiate skill activation.

Engage the five senses and develop awareness acuity to the kinesthetic and proprioceptive sense.

Break movement and process of change into small steps.

Learn grounding skills and improve sensing.

Instill positive emotions psycho-physiologically. Learn how to manage emotional and physical pain.

Engage and bring in the whole self to self-regulate emotionally, cognitively, physiologically.

Learn the relationship between mind-body-cognition for self-regulation. Balance and differentiate between resting action and action and between being and doing.

Learn to differentiate between forceful and strained action vs. open and willing action.

Move the whole self effortlessly, efficiently, and skillfully.

Identify maladaptive habits in behavior, movement, and cognition. Offer abundant alternatives to experiment and cultivate new habits. Learn how to learn to facilitate change.

How ATM complements DBT

ATM provides a concrete cognitive and physiological grounding through sensing, a process imperative for dissociative patients, or patients with hyperarousal, constriction, and immobility symptomatology, which are typical physiological responses to traumatic events. ATM lessons can provide an essential physiological and cognitive infrastructure, as well as the vocabulary and the grammar of interoception and kinesthetic sensing. It has the potential to create a space to expand and revise a self narrative particularly as it relates to one’s perception of their physical self, central to patients who suffer from BPD.

Through ATM lessons, students learn how to harness attention, slow down, breathe, and relax their musculature, all of which progressively result in “quieting the mind.” ATM lessons involve short anatomical instructions usually delivered in a calm, neutral voice.

The lessons are interesting and the movements are non-habitual and

novel enough to attract and hold one’s curiosity, so that the possibility of drifting away or dissociating is minimized. Thus, patients in ATM lessons hone the skills of shifting and focusing attention, a crucial skill in mindfulness. They learn to move with intention, using breath to facilitate and ease complex and difficult movements; they learn how to relax musculature to ease skeletal movement; and throughout they gain appreciation of their unique body organization and its innate ability to expand and ease movement. Participants learn the preparatory stages that precede an action such as thinking, imagining, or visualizing an action before it is being performed, thus improving self-regulation before and during action.

Many of the above benefits mirror the skills taught in DBT mindfulness instruction. Thus, moving between ATM lessons and DBT skills training is fitting and, I believe, more effective. As a person becomes more capable of sensing themselves, they will become, over time, better able to internalize and intuitively apply skills to change how they respond or react to internal or external stimuli. Further, being able to self-regulate physiological and mental experiences can only increase one’s sense of mastery, inner authority, and ultimately one’s self-efficacy.

ATM blends very well with teaching mindfulness, emotion regulation and distress tolerance skills, and it provides concrete sensing experience of the skills. For example, in teaching willfulness vs. willingness in distress tolerance, sensing the difference between the two approaches in movement, and sensing what impact a forceful and willful movement has on the body is a tangible learning. Being able to identify when one is trapped in that pattern is both freeing and functional.

Integrating ATM into a DBT training program

The delivery of care utilizing this integration can take many forms. For example, an eight-week ATM series with an addition of one workshop day, the same length as in an initial mindfulness stress reduction training program, can be taught while patients are also attending DBT skills training. Alternatively, full or brief ATM lessons can be combined with DBT skills training and delivered in two hour segments in either group or individual settings.

Workshop series with specific learning goals are common in the Feldenkrais Method and mesh well with DBT skills training. For example, one can teach a thematic series or workshop on “sensing, grounding, and expanding,” on “softening the shoulders,” on how to “quiet the mind,” on “how to change habits,” and so forth. Examples of such workshops can be found in the work of David Zemach-Bersin (Zemach-Bersin, 2023) and Carol Kress (Kress, 2023).

It is also important to spend time on the manner of how the class opens and to give time at its end to process the sensing experiences to refer back to therapy. Finally, the scan in each lesson and the resting period between each set of instructions to process, compare sides, and

observe changes, as well as integrate the movements, are vital and part of teaching self-care and self-regulation. I believe that the majority of the basic ATM lessons are appropriate to teach, as long as the overall pedagogy and language of the Feldenkrais Method is maintained throughout the instruction.

ATM and trauma

There are important potential benefits of using ATM for patients with BPD and trauma. The following discussion also strengthens the impetus for integrating it with DBT skills training.

There is increasing consensus about the limitations of traditional psychotherapies for addressing the profound physiological aspects of trauma (Levine, 1997; van Der Kolk, 2006). Finding a method that can heal how the body reacts to internal or external sensory input is an important aspect of healing trauma.

When traumatized individuals meditate “they report of feeling disgusted with themselves, helpless, panicked, or experiencing traumarelated images and physical sensations. Trauma victims tend to have a negative body-image—as far as they are concerned, the less attention they pay of their bodies, and thereby, their internal sensations, the better” (van Der Kolk, 2015, pp. 11 –12). A number of authors in the mental health field have focused on researching yoga and its positive impact on patients with trauma, depression, and suicidal ideation (van Der Kolk, et al., 2014; Nyer, et al., 2018; Streeter, et al., 2017; Streeter, et al., 2020). The studies utilized “trauma informed yoga,” Iyengar yoga and coherent breathing. Adverse effects, not surprisingly, were musculoskeletal pain (Nyer, et al., 2018).

Currently, one of the only studies available on ATM lessons for a psychiatric population was focused on eating disorders (Laumer, et al., 1997). The results indicated “increased contentment with regard to problematic zones of patients’ body, and acceptance of their body” (Hillier, et al., 2015). Further comparative studies of ATM with other mind-body studies are needed.

Trauma in the body

The physiological responses to trauma vary from individual to individual and broadly fall under fight, flight, or freeze responses. If an injury is overwhelming and sustained, as opposed to fleeting and relatively benign, the cascade of physiological experience will correspond in intensity (Levine, 2008; Yehuda, 2000).

Physiologically, the symptoms fall under the categories of hyperarousal, constriction, dissociation and denial, helplessness, immobility, and freezing (Levine, 2008, pp. 14 –16). These responses are normal in that they are expected and protective to an individual under

threat or attack; nevertheless, the longer they persist when the threat or attack is removed or the situation is no longer acute, the more restrictive they become to everyday life and to one’s self-image.

Furthermore, in unresolved trauma, a persistent symptom involves the compulsive repetition of the same habitual reactions mentioned above when they are no longer necessary. Thus, finding a way to help patients regulate physiological responses to sensory input, post injury, is vital. Van der Kolk (van der Kolk, 2006) discusses at length how patients, particularly those with interpersonal PTSD, are stuck in arousal and “experience the present with physical sensations and emotions associated with the past. This, in turn, informs how they react in the present “ (p. 13). Being “stuck” in hyperarousal, hypervigilance, constriction, dissociation or immobility, maintains and worsens one’s overall health (Levine, 2008).

ATM—an antidote to “stuckness” and an overactive mind

Moshe Feldenkrais’ ultimate goal in creating ATM was to help people improve their self-image through movement, as it is held in the body, and ultimately as it is held in the brain and mind; it was not intended as exercise. ATM offers an antidote to being “stuck” in hyperarousal, constriction, freezing, helplessness, immobility, and dissociation by increasingly providing grounding, inviting curiosity and experimentation, all the while emphasizing acceptance of one’s self, mind and body.

Frequently, participants walk away from ATM lessons with multiple insights into how a lesson brought awareness to a memory embedded in the body and in a particular movement habit, or an insight between a habitual and painful physical posture to painful childhood or adulthood event. When integrated with DBT these insights, both movementrelated and cognitive-affective in nature, can have a powerful effect in addressing the psycho-physiological process of self-regulation and self-care (Doidge, 2016; Feldenkrais, 1990).

By increasing awareness through kinesthetic sensing, students discover that habits are malleable over time while respecting inherent structural constraints they may have, allowing them to continuously work towards self-acceptance. Furthermore, learning how to relax and soften musculature while in movement, both in the lessons and in the world, provides an exceptional life skill in dealing with challenges. Softening allows for neuro-skeletal processes to take place without holding and interfering with the fluidity of movement both in the lesson and beyond.

Slow, soft, small movements, and attention to breathing while moving result in quieting the nervous system, affording better learning and self-regulation, restoring the neuro-balance between the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. The latter is consistently a challenge with psychiatric patients, when often the degree and intensity of arousal, such as in rage or anxiety, becomes a functional hindrance to self-regulation and skills training. Engaging the body and developing

non-verbal skills to self-regulate and self-care physically provides concrete tools, more easily performed and used in everyday life, not just in the lessons, but also generalizable to everyday life challenges.

Learning occurs under safe conditions, in slow motion and through slow approximation of desired shifts, while respecting a participant’s limits and constraints. The movements are small and the slow pace allows time to observe and hone the skill of observing. Similar to DBT in which chain behavioral analysis offers an almost painstaking invitation to observe the minutiae of reactions to events, unrushed and non-judging, ATM emphasizes an invitation to move softly (as opposed to harshly), gently, with small and progressively differentiated movements. Feldenkrais emphasizes non-judgement in moving, as well as moving away from normative criteria of posture or physiological organization. Learning begins and remains in a student’s present organization of their body without a prescriptive end point.

Students who have difficulty with a particular set of physical instructions in a lesson are encouraged to visualize and imagine the movements in their mind’s eye instead, which can enable them to achieve some, if not all, of the movements. This skill is also fundamental in multiple psychotherapy practices which use visualization as a powerful tool to varied ends.

Creating safe spaces within the self and with others through ATM

Throughout an ATM lesson self-care and self-regulation to avoid harm is consistently emphasized. Students are instructed to rest when they need to. Sometimes these pauses actually provide the student the opportunity to learn to allow themselves to rest.

Participants are encouraged to approach the lessons without forcing a movement that might result in injury in mind and body. Many of the lessons are on the floor for this reason, affording greater ease of movement without forcing a participant to contend with gravitational forces while providing sensory feedback from the ground. In this way, the lesson enhances awareness of one’s body in the front, the back, as well as the internal mapping of what is in between, creating a three dimensional richer awareness of one’s self.

The lessons, when conducted within a community of other students, offer a fertile ground for affiliation and since students do not observe each other and the lessons are interoceptive in nature, comparisons and competition are not part of the equation. This is particularly important in trauma, as trust and individual boundaries have frequently been violated.

Often in psychiatry or medical treatment, patients (and providers at times) expect immediate and lasting results and achievement of goals as fast as possible. Without fast results, patients often walk away with either self-blame or blame of others, and a sense that they cannot be helped (Yehuda, 2000). Being able to create safe conditions for learning and developing self-trust mitigates the latter responses.

This is very true for ATM lessons, with the added advantage that each and every lesson concretely offers a non-verbal nurturing experience of mastery and control and, most importantly, of joy. As participants discover in each lesson a new precious tidbit about themselves, they come to realize how much they underestimated their own innate ability to move more fluidly and flexibly. Taking this message into their world is exceptionally powerful, invigorating, and empowering.

ATM, DBT, trauma and neuroplasticity

It is instructive and informative to revisit Moshe Feldenkrais’ principles of cognitive and mind-body science as they relate to movement and his overarching goal to help a student to a better self-image. Some of the core principles, revisited by Doidge (2016), remain fresh to today’s development of cognitive science theories and research: A brain cannot think without a body; differentiation improves brain maps and function recovery; awareness is a result of slow and minute observations; awareness and differentiation are key to learning; use of forceful movement inhibits learning; strained conditions do not allow learning; there is no right or wrong way to move—rather people can improve how to better move to restore ease in functionality; movement in one part of the body involves the entire self; nonfunctional habits can be unlearned and new habits can be formed (pp. 168-176).

Doidge (2016), in discussing the neuroplastic ability of the brain to heal itself post trauma, disputes the theories of localization, as did Feldenkrais. In the localization view, there is no direct correspondence between mentalization (thoughts, memories, skills) and localized specific brain regions. According to Doidge, mentalization activates much broader circuits, distributed across a “coalition of neurons.” Healing involves a learning process that can address both dead neurons from brain injury and re-training surviving neurons (Doidge, pp. 105 –108).

This process of correction of general functions and glia in post-trauma uses the neuroplastic capacities of the brain and involves four stages: Neuro-stimulation of neurons through, for example, movement or sound or mentalization which help activate dormant neurons, as well as quieting misfiring neurons in a “noisy brain”; Neuro-modulation, which restores the homeostasis between excitation and inhibition by activating the parasympathetic system; Neuro-relaxation, which can avail energy to recover, such as recovering sleep; and Neuro-differentiation and learning. Once the brain excitation is quieted, attention can be shifted to learning (Doidge, 2016, pp.108 –113).

Doidge (2016) addresses the impact of ATM on the brain’s neuroplasticity: ATM involves neuro-stimulation by introducing novel non-habitual movements, engaging all five senses in addition to the kinesthetic sense; further, as the lesson progresses, with small and gentle movements engaging the breath, the musculature becomes less tense and forceful, leading to relaxing the sympathetic nervous system.

This neuro-modulation is essential in learning awareness, self-regulation, and the inhibition of the flight or fight response. Further, the conscious use of breath in movement, for example, can allow for neuro-relaxation, which avails brain energy to restore function. The lessons emphasize activation and rest, the latter availing a person, among other benefits, better sleep, an important factor mediating brain health. This overall physical rest frees psycho-physical energy to bring attention and awareness required for neuro-differentiation, which is essential to the learning process. In the neuro-differentiation stage “the brain is rested” and therefore “the patient is able to pay attention again and is ready for learning, which involves the brain doing what it does best: making fine distinctions, or differentiating” (Doidge, 2016, p. 112). In ATM lessons, clients are consistently encouraged to begin making distinctions in movement, cognitive processes, and emotion.

Conclusion

The integration of DBT and ATM in one block of time or as a concurrent series offers multiple benefits. By incorporating direct experiential somatic intervention, ATM can reduce the physiological hyperarousal and discomfort of being in one’s body, a typical experience of patients with BPD and trauma histories. The decrease in sympathetic nervous system arousal can then facilitate patients’ ability to access wise mind in their DBT work, among other DBT skills.

Further, it can provide patients a space to create alternative richer narratives of themselves and others to improve self-image and function. The ability to sense and identify the physical manifestations of an emotional state and realize the cognitive narrative that goes along with it can open doors to change. In addition, the ability to tolerate, learn to shift, and self-regulate sensations offers a path to emotional freedom. Addressing a patient, on all levels of their being (i.e. somatic, emotional, cognitive, and social) can facilitate robust health outcomes.

ATM principles and strategies align well with DBT, one of the most effective treatment modalities in psychiatry, and ATM is physiologically more tolerable than yoga and potentially less provoking of anxiety and dissociative processes than meditation. However, future studies comparing mind-body modalities for patients with BPD and trauma are needed to establish effectiveness.

ATM adds to psychotherapy and DBT skills training a more concrete, grounding and encompassing treatment with kinesthetic benefits. It offers an opportunity to explore a deeper understanding of one’s self, how one is organized psycho-physiologically, what triggers one has to contend with, and how to facilitate a mindful process of self-regulation and self-awareness. Finally, it has the potential to introduce experiences of joy, playfulness, awe, curiosity, and pleasure being in one’s body, as well as opportunities to connect with others.

And thus our patients can move forward in their lives, feeling more comfortable in their own skin.

Acknowledgments

I am thankful to Nelly Alia-Klein, Ph.D, Rita Goldstein, Ph.D, and Laurie Fields, Ph.D, for taking the time to read, comment, and edit this paper. Their support has been invaluable to this project. I am also thankful to my teachers Arlyn Zones, Carol Kress, Elizabeth Beringer, Paul Rubin, Julie Casson Rubin, and Dorit Landes for opening the magical world of ATM to me. Finally, I am grateful to my editors at The Feldenkrais Journal and the support and advice of Randy H. Katz, Ph.D, for helping me bring this paper to fruition.

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Contributor Bios

Adam Cole is a performance and confidence coach living and working in the Atlanta area. A graduate of Carl Ginsburg’s 2000 Gainesville, GA Feldenkrais® training, Adam has incorporated the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education into his piano instruction as well as his nonfiction and fiction work on music, learning, and growth. He has served as an editor for The Feldenkrais Journal for over a decade and has recently moved into the role of Assistant Editor. Adam is the Director of Willow Music and the creator of the YouTube channel TruerMu. To read or listen to Adam’s work, visit acole.net

Zoi Dorit Eliou is a psychologist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She began her career in mental health as a dance and art therapist and graduated with a degree in psychology in 1994. Her orientation is cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy (CBT) and dialectical behavior informed therapy (DBT). Zoi began her studies in the Feldenkrais Method in 2019 at the Institute for the Study of Somatic Education (ISSE) in San Francisco with Paul and Julie Rubin and graduated from the ATM pilot program in San Diego under the directorship of Arlyn Zones in 2022. During the Covid pandemic she taught ATM to a group of her therapy patients to address stress, social isolation, emotion regulation, and distress tolerance. For more details on her background and current practice please visit dreliou.com.

Katarina Halm , CFT, GCFP™, has an M.A. degree from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology where she did her thesis on resonance and dissonance in the learning process. She is a Focusing teacher and Feldenkrais® practitioner with a deep interest in how language emerges in our movement, dreams, and daily living. Katarina integrates practical applications of Feldenkrais’ “Learn to Learn” with Eugene Gendlin’s Philosophy of the Implicit. She graduated from Jeff Haller’s Victoria Feldenkrais training in 2007. Katarina’s website is thinkinginmovement.ca She is also active with Feldenkrais Legacy Forum (FLF) working groups and has co-developed the Feldenkrais® Inclusion Initiative with other practitioners and support from the FLF Committee.

The dynamic practice of Sandrine Harris weaves together somatic inquiry, creativity, meditation, community connection, and the neurobiological healing of trauma. Sandrine is certified in Somatic Experiencing® (SEP) and the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education (GCFP). A member of the US Association of Body Psychotherapy, she is also trained in somatic healing (RSMT/E) and educated in neuroplastic pain syndromes. Sandrine incorporates trauma-sensitive mindfulness meditation into her practice. She is a former professional dancer and draws from several movement orientations. Emergent Nature is the name of her collective process, through which she offers international workshops alongside her private practice online & in person in MA and NYC. To learn more: sandrineharris.com

Gabriel Hartley ’s art is not about reporting or documenting an idea, rather it is the sensation of looking that is the real subject matter. While the imagery can be perceived as buildings, space, flora, and fauna, the same forms can quickly be seen as something else. The mode of “landscape” is presupposed by the canvas format and scale, within which there’s freedom and pleasure for the viewer in interpretation and reinterpretation. Recent shows include Mosslight at Hagiwara Projects, Tokyo; Skies at Seventeen gallery, London and Weatherland at Foxy Production, New York. Hartley holds a postgraduate diploma from The Royal Academy Schools, London and lives and works in Tokyo.

Jay Schulkin , PhD is known for his engagement of a wide range of disciplines and interests. He is the author of 40 books on neuroscience, philosophy, and public policy and over 500 peer reviewed articles. Jay was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and Foundation Grant. He lectured at Cambridge University in addition to doing research and teaching at numerous universities worldwide. Jay is survived by his wife of 33 years, April Oliver, and their two children.

Alan S. Questel , GCFT™ is known for his clarity, creativity, and down-to-earth style of teaching. He brings a depth of understanding, humor, and a gentle human perspective while creating lively conditions for learning. Alan has taught thousands of people in over 20 countries on five continents. Trained by Dr. Feldenkrais (Amherst 1983) he has created numerous Feldenkrais® programs on varied topics including one for pregnant women (Pregnant Pauses). He is author of Creating Creativity—Embodying the Creative Process, Practice Intentional Acts of Kindness, and Like Yourself More.

Senior Feldenkrais Trainer David Zemach-Bersin met Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais in 1973 and studied with him for over ten years in the U.S., England, and Israel. He also studied extensively in Israel and the U.S. with Gaby Yaron and Yochanon Rywerant, both of whom graduated from Dr. Feldenkrais’ first training program. Other influences on his work include Yang form tai chi, aikido, meditation, systems biology, and phenomenology. He has maintained a private Functional Integration practice since 1977 and is recognized for his contribution to strengthening Dr. Feldenkrais’ legacy. A graduate of UC Berkeley with two years of postgraduate work in physiological psychology, David has created numerous audio and video programs for both Feldenkrais Practitioners and the general public and is the co-author of Relaxercise (HarperCollins). He is a past President of the Feldenkrais Guild® of North America and a co-founder of Feldenkrais Resources and the Feldenkrais Institute of New York. David has directed seventeen Feldenkrais professional training programs and teaches advanced trainings around the globe. Since 2020, he has been teaching primarily online and has worked to synthesize his thinking and the profound benefits of Dr. Feldenkrais’ ideas in programs for both Feldenkrais teachers and the public, most of which can be found at FeldenkraisAccess.com. David would like to acknowledge his debt to Mark Reese and Dennis Leri, whose intellect and friendship he greatly misses. David and his life-partner, Kaethe, live in the Farmington Valley area of Connecticut.

Skeletal Self, Sandrine Harris, 2023

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 guidelines.

The deadline for all submissions is April 1, 2024.

Back Issues

Journal 1 General Issue (photocopy)

Journal 2 Martial Arts

Journal 3 Special Interest Groups

Journal 4 Emotions

Journal 5 The Arts

Journal 6 Stories

Journal 7 Conceptual Models

Journal 8 General Issue

Journal 9 Parallel Developments

Journal 10 Children

Journal 11 More Children

Journal 12 General Issue

Journal 13 The Self-Image

Journal 14 Performing Arts

Journal 15 Awareness Through Movement

Journal 16 Performing Arts

Journal 17 General Issue

Journal 18 Parenting

Journal 19 Awareness

Journal 20 Awareness

Journal 21 Open Issue

Journal 22 Teaching

Journal 23 Aesthetics

Journal 24 General Issue

Journal 25 Let’s Play

Journal 26 Science

Journal 27 Improvisation

Journal 28 General Issue

Journal 29 Aesthetic Experience

Journal 30 General Issue

Journal 31 General Issue

Journal 32 Listening

Editor

Helen Miller

Assistant Editor

Adam Cole

Editorial Board

Eve Boltax

Adam Cole

Mercedes von Deck

Zoi Dorit Eliou

Belinda He

Jacki Katzman

Helen Miller

Jessica Pink

Design

Dandelion

Image Credits

Front and back covers

Videos and paintings

courtesy Gabriel Hartley

Pages 2, 81

Feldenkrais® Autoportrait, © 2023 Sandrine Harris, Emergent Nature Skeletal Self, Photo by Richard Wanderman

© 2023 Sandrine Harris, Emergent Nature

Pages 22—35

FIG 1 Video by Raz Ori and Juniper Perlis; editing by Juniper Perlis and Ori Ben Ezra.

FIG 2 Video by Raz Ori.

FIG 3 Video by Raz Ori.

FIG 4 Video by Raz Ori.

Pages 59, 62

From DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, Second Edition by Marsha M. Linehan, p. 50 and 213. © 2015 by Marsha M. Linehan. Reprinted with permission of Guilford Press.

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.

Inside Back Cover Gabriel Hartley, Aquarium, projected cellphone footage on silk stuffed with ceramics, 2023. Video still

Back Cover Gabriel Hartley, Train, 2023, projected cellphone footage on silk with ink and embedded ceramic, 20x30cm. Video stills