Plantar Fasciitis / Foot Pain Went Away with JKA Solvents and Glue
I went back to a bodyworker after many months of doing this work, and they felt my feet and said, "Wow, you have restructured your feet!"
A student’s experience:
I'm really committing to this JKA (Jeremy Krauss Approach) because it solved this problem I'd had for so long with plantar fasciitis, an extreme pain in my foot.
It's just gone.
How long did it take?
Within a few weeks, actually…
It was just a new normal.
And then I was like, wait a minute, I have a body that doesn't have this kind of pain.
And how long did you have the pain?
Like maybe five months.
I bought expensive shoes.
I did exercises.
I went and got bodywork for it.
I went back to a bodyworker after many months of doing this work, and they felt my feet and said,
"Wow, you have restructured your feet!"
Amazing!
I appreciate the depth of the practice, and it's hopeful in these difficult times.
It really does build.
I appreciate there's worlds within each piece.
It's really a thousand worlds…
Movement Puzzles, Pain, and an Open Mind
Learning how to solve a movement problem is a skill that we use as a learning strategy in Feldenkrais Awareness through Movement®. This skill is very useful for dealing with pain and the skill can be generalized in one’s life.
Puzzles in Movement as Problem Solving Skills
Learning how to solve a movement problem is a skill that we use as a learning strategy in Feldenkrais Awareness through Movement®. This skill is very useful for dealing with pain and the skill can be generalized in one’s life. Problem solving or figuring things out is something one does daily. It can be as simple as learning to use an unfamiliar washing machine or complicated like learning how to play a musical instrument. Creative solutions may come spontaneously when you have practiced problem solving with your whole self.
For example, when faced with a situation where your pain is increasing, or maybe you are worried that there is something you want to do that might increase your pain–you have a problem to be solved.
If you have practiced solving movement puzzles with your body, you can draw on this skill, such as noticing what you are doing, thinking, or feeling. Are you breathing, or holding your breath or using too much effort for the task? Are there ways to use yourself that could make the action easier or less stressful? Are you flexible in your attitude towards accomplishing the task and when and how fast?
Shifting Your Attention and Mode of Action
You can figure out how to move in a different way that doesn't increase pain. For example, if you are sitting in a booth in a restaurant with cramped space, how do you organize yourself to get up and out without triggering more pain. Could you go more slowly, use your arms to help you slide to the edge of the booth’s seat? Do you need part of the table cleared in order to have the space you need to maneuver? Could you do it bit by bit? Are you in a negative self-talk loop? Can you ask for help? Are you okay with taking more time?
Some strategies that are used in ATM lessons that could be helpful to solve movement problems are: shifting your attention to other parts of yourself and looking for other possibilities for moving? Can you relax enough to shift your attention, change your usual mode of action, alter the timing, attend to your breathing, or adjust your attitude?
Embodying Open Mindedness
We all have habits of mind and body. We rely on a set of ways to act in the world, it’s a big part of our self-image. For example, many people will continue doing a task until it's finished, even when they notice it is hurting them. There is often a push back for changing up one’s usual way of acting which can seem to make us freeze up and resist changing a behavior. It can be disorienting to do something differently, to think differently. Can you be okay with this. This is an important part of embodying open mindedness, and it can be practiced in an Awareness Through Movement lesson. For example, pausing, resting, changing your pattern of action, including your thoughts. Then the quality of open mindedness will be more readily accessible and skillfully deployed.
This is an excerpt from a Q & A with Deborah Bowes from her Chanukiah Feldenkrais series.
Students appreciate these kinds of ‘pearls of experience’ that Deborah shares her classes.
New Feldenkrais series with Deborah Bowes: Legs in Action
About Deborah Bowes:
Deborah Bowes is a Feldenkrais® Teacher and Trainer. She initially trained as a physical therapist at Columbia University in New York and later earned a Doctorate in Physical Therapy from Shenandoah University in Virginia. She holds a B.S. in Biology and Physical Education from Rhode Island College.
As a Guild Certified Trainer of the Feldenkrais Method® since 2000, she has taught widely in the United States, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Australia and Colombia in over 35 training programs. Her other related in-depth studies and practices include Tai Chi Chuan, Qigong, yoga, sensory awareness, meditation, and dance.
Deborah had a private practice in San Francisco at the Feldenkrais® Center for Movement & Awareness for over 30 years. She now teaches and consults online. She is an adjunct faculty member at Saybrook University, teaching Movement Modalities for Wellness. Her doctoral research demonstrated the benefit of her Feldenkrais Method program, Pelvic Health & Awareness for Men and Women. Her other courses are on Movementandcreativity.com
ease and strength in motion
The injury that had seemed so permanent now feels fundamentally changed. Something else is here now, and I like the (new) feeling: integrity, strength and ability.
Searching for a solution to an old injury…
A few weeks ago, on a beach in Maine, I watched a woman walking slowly, looking down at the sand and the shells, searching for some ocean treasure.
I remember a year ago walking on the same beach, feeling my feet pressing against the sand and the old familiar pain in my right achilles. The sensation had been with me for years, sometimes subtle and sometimes not, but always present. Back then I had been searching too, for an answer to that unpleasant puzzle.
Curious and hopeful
A four-day JKA workshop of movements done in standing sounded impossible, but I was curious and hopeful, and decided to try. In the workshop I immediately felt I was in the right place. Standing, moving, and meeting the ground moment to moment, I felt my competence in gravity growing. Exploring asymmetries, I found new support. I sensed connections and noticed differences, gradually building strength, endurance, and resilience.
Something else is here now
This year as I walked on the sand, the injury that had seemed so permanent now feels fundamentally changed. In the Feldenkrais world we often say, “life is a process, we are not fixing.” This is true. And at the same time, now I feel something has been ‘fixed’, not gone exactly, but that old familiar sensation and “problem” are not present. Something else is here now, and I like the (new) feeling: integrity, strength and ability.
For me JKA Solvents and Glue® has been a wonderful and rich meeting place on the edge between mindfulness and exercise. It is where learning can be both non-linear and sequential. Where I learn to press and yield, cultivate connections, and disentangling bound places within. It is a study of ease and strength in motion, a layered dance between mobility and stability. The practice is simple and complex, structured but non-corrective, gentle and transformative.
Video collaboration: Matty Wilkinson, Tiffany Sankary & Erin HArper / Music credit: Danny Paul Grody
Experience the practice for yourself in our new membership:
“Out beyond all ideas of wrong doing and right doing, there is a field. I will meet you there.” -Rumi
We know, through the teachings of Moshe Feldenkrais, that difference is what makes us human. We already live in a world where this is true, so now the challenge is to really live as if this is true, to move beyond our personal limitations which were inflicted on us in a range of ways to make us conform to parental and societal expectations. These limitations enable us to form the habit of discounting our own sensations and our vowed and unavowed dreams.
My intention
It is my intention in writing this piece to make my contribution to lasting change, to justice, to a world where equality is not an intellectual concept or even something that could ever be merely talked about.
Equality is lived, breathed and experienced by everyone in this world. This equality is consistently evident in our thoughts, words, acture, sensations, activity and in our interactions with each other. There is a real, deeply known, sensed and experienced knowledge, as Moshe Feldenkrais frequently states in a variety of ways, that difference is the norm, that no two people – no two nervous systems, can ever be the same.
We know, through the teachings of Moshe Feldenkrais, that difference is what makes us human. We already live in a world where this is true, so now the challenge is to really live as if this is true, to move beyond our personal limitations which were inflicted on us in a range of ways to make us conform to parental and societal expectations. These limitations enable us to form the habit of discounting our own sensations and our vowed and unavowed dreams, which in turn makes it easy for us to form the habit of discounting other people’s dreams, to conform, to hide, blame others for our own inability to be true to ourselves, and ultimately completely discount another person’s life.
Opportunities to move beyond fear-based, habitual patterns, to inhabit ourselves fully
Moshe demonstrated how you could meet another person in a fully engaged, curious and authentic way. He devised a method which provides within it numerous opportunities to move beyond, to inhabit ourselves fully, to be mature, letting go of fear-based, habitual patterns, and opening up to a way of being that feels out of reach, until through the course of the lesson we touch it, we attain that mobility which eluded us, we feel, sense and experience ourselves as whole and have integrated this wholeness, on some level, into the fabric of our being. It is this that I speak of, when I talk about my vision for equality: what we might perceive as too big, too much to do, too difficult, is possible.
What is required is for us to be with the discomfort, to notice but not get stuck in the discomfort, or the frustration, the helplessness, the anger, ignorance, guilt or shame, but to move beyond to individual, societal and world healing and transformation. This is what is required of us, as individuals and teachers of the Feldenkrais Method, to end the systemic racism which makes it acceptable to kill yet another Black man, George Floyd.
Do we stay within our comfort zone on this life or death issue?
Initially my answer to this question was a resounding No. On reflection, I believe it is both a yes and a no. No, I do not believe it is acceptable to not speak out about systemic racism. I have first-hand experience of what it is like to be around white people who are silent about racism.
I am of African Caribbean descent, born in the UK to Jamaican parents. Growing up in London, I experienced racism at the hand of teachers, schoolchildren and wider society. The National Front was the racist party of the day. There were NF graffiti on the walls with threatening messages to black and brown people. I remember walking home from school in groups of black people for safety, the older among us looking out for the younger, which was me at the time. As we walked past these graffitied walls into NF territory, as it was on our route home, we had people on the lookout ready to give us the signal to run. On many occasions we ran for our lives while skinheads chased us. I was eleven or twelve years old. One time I took a wrong turn and somehow got separated from my group. I was terrified. I knew that these skinheads hated black people and could beat me up or kill me. Fortunately, I was able to find my way home.
At this age, I had heard of friends of friends getting beaten up by racist people. I heard of attacks by police and had a vague sense of the police not being for black people. Alex Hayley’s "Roots" was on the TV but nowhere was this discussed in school. This silence left black children feeling abandoned with intense feelings of confusion, of not belonging anywhere, of grief and anger. The silence conveyed to us a sense of implicit agreement with racist ideology. It communicated to us that we were considered inferior and that attacks on us were justified.
As I got older, I became more aware of police brutality, attacks, deaths in custody and racist attackers not being bought to justice in the UK, USA and many other countries. There are some that are vivid in my memory but whose names I do not recall. I googled the situations, so as to honour them by mentioning their names, but I had to stop reading as it was too distressing for me to revisit the circumstances of their deaths at this point in time.
Out beyond all ideas of wrong doing and right doing, there is a field. I will meet you there.
I re-write Rumi’s words to give me the impetus to continue with this article – to push through the pain and know that this is worth it – that meeting you in the field is worth it.
I recently had the experience of being in a Feldenkrais lesson among people who I know love and care deeply for me. I was in pain. The particular way in which George Floyd’s life was taken, this particular time of lockdown, Floyd’s last words, my despair of witnessing yet another Black man brutally murdered and the response of the state in attacking peaceful protestors, caused me to feel pain, raw, deep pain. Nothing was said about George Floyd’s murder until I could bear it no more and had to speak out. As painful as it was to endure the silence, I am glad that it happened. It clarified something for me.
Silence vs Speaking Out
In the past, because I was used to white people staying silent on issues of racism or accusing me of having “a chip on my shoulder” if I spoke out, or because I was afraid of risking being deeply hurt or disappointed if my white friends didn’t get it or minimized my experience, or made it all about them getting stuck in guilt or shame, or because of risking our friendship ending or irrevocably changing, my habit was to only go to my black friends / any person of colour to discuss systemic racism and acts of violence. The white friends I could include were few and exceptional. I made the decision some time ago that I would not continue this habit. However, this situation that I was in, brought my reasons for this decision acutely to the fore and gave me a deeper understanding of why it is necessary for me.
In this lesson I could barely manage to stay present. Feldenkrais lessons are designed to enable me to learn, to go beyond some or other perceived limitation, make some discoveries and integrate these into my life, but I was finding it incredibly difficult to keep my attention on the teacher’s instructions because my mind and my nervous system were super active. I was thinking:
What are they thinking? Do they care? Are they going to disappoint me? Are these people who I thought they were? Why isn’t anyone saying anything?
Then I would breathe, say to myself come on you can do this. You know them. Something will be said. I would manage a moment or two of following the instruction. I would manage not to cry. Then my thoughts would come back and the shakiness inside. I was in full-blown flight or fight mode.
What I have learnt about Feldenkrais is that whilst there are frequently tangible shifts in one lesson, if I stay open to learning more, the learning becomes clearer or sharper in the following days. Following that lesson, I spoke up about my experience of the silence regarding George Floyd’s murder. The relief I felt was profound. There was relief in hearing open, honest, equally raw exchanges from people and in particular to hear spoken empathic words of support. Only after this, could I be present enough to learn. However, it was a few days later when I really got clear about why it is necessary to speak up and particularly to have conversations with white friends and colleagues.
This is what I learnt from this situation
It is important that something is spoken about George Floyd’s murder in classes we teach, because if nothing is said I am left feeling unsure if people believe that my life matters. If nothing is said, I am left in a place of doing deep, expansive, opening and learning in an environment where I do not feel that I can fully trust the people who surround me to care enough to do something if it were my life on the line. This causes me stress and distress and impedes my learning. Whereas even a brief acknowledgement of what's going on and a word of support allows my nervous system to quieten and for me to feel safe and able to learn.
A very close friend of mine recently lost her mother. She died at the height of the Covid 19 pandemic. My friend was unable to visit her mother when she was in hospital and was further isolated from her family due to lockdown restrictions. She is one of my closest friends and I was there for her albeit remotely. I felt clumsy, awkward and helpless. At times I was unsure if I was saying the right things, giving enough space or too much space, but I chose to keep trying, knowing that some of what I was doing and saying would miss the mark and not necessarily feel or be helpful. It was important that I risked getting it wrong and continued to show up for my friend.
Do we stay within our comfort zones on the issue of systemic racism?
Here is where I also say yes. It has taken me five days to write this article. I have needed to take rests and look after myself in writing it. I believe that we need to do this. No one is unaffected by systemic racism. The issues will be different for people whether you are a white person or a person of colour: conscious or unconscious racism, conscious or unconscious internalized racism – guilt and shame around speaking up or not speaking up or being complicit in any way. All these issues and more are emerging.
I do believe that real lasting change is going to come from taking an honest look at this, feeling whatever we feel, engaging in personal reflection, doing the work to heal and forgive ourselves, and moving on with making concrete changes.
I do believe that lasting change takes place in the small incremental steps we take, just as we do in Feldenkrais lessons. I feel heartened and slightly nervous of this huge display of national and global support for Black Lives Matter. I need for bold and even for huge change to happen now and I also need for it to be sustainable. So, for me, that does mean taking care of ourselves, educating ourselves, reaching out, risking messing up, remembering that no two people are the same – which also means that I speak for myself here and not for everyone who experiences racism. It also means taking personal and professional responsibility for playing our part in ending systemic racism, in making it clear that Black Lives Matter because ultimately Black Lives Matter is about how we treat all human beings.
- Neruma Ankti, Student Teacher of Awareness through Movement®
About Neruma Ankti
Neruma Ankti is a Student Teacher, currently in the fourth year of her Feldenkrais Practitioner Training in Sussex, UK. She is a self-taught writer and artist – a creative person is more how she would describe herself, with a passion for art, learning and teaching. Prior to spending the last decade working at the National Portrait Gallery, London, she spent the best part of 20 years working for various National and local organisations working with children, young people, adults, volunteers and community groups. She facilitated groups and provided training, amongst other things, in these various, enriching roles. She is excited about merging her passion for art and Feldenkrais by joining the Movement and Creativity team. Her contributions will be in the form of blogs, podcast collaborations and community practice sessions in Movement and Creativity Library with the intention of joining the vision to create a world of equity and inclusivity.
This article was originally published by the Feldenkrais UK Guild, June 2020, in the members journal, Functional Information. The Functional Information journal is edited by Dianne Hancock.
Why do Feldenkrais?
Age gracefully I’m so inspired by my Feldenkrais teachers in their 80s. They continue to improve their movement habits even as they age – just as others their age seem to keep declining…
Feel More. Update your habits. Learn to slow down. Improve your brain’s map of your body. Discover the gifts inside pain. Grow your attentional flexibility. Be mindful and spontaneous. Become yourself…
Age gracefully
I’m so inspired by my Feldenkrais teachers in their 80s.
They continue to improve their movement habits even as they age – just as others their age seem to keep declining. Several years ago, one 80-year-old teacher of ours fell off his mountain bike and fractured his hip. He asked the doctors not to do surgery but to allow him to work on his own for a month and see if it improved. With gentle movements, curiosity, and continual fine-tuning, he was able to avoid surgery and his hip recovered beautifully. He had learned how to work with himself in such an effective way through years of Feldenkrais lessons. As Ruthy Alon (one of those inspiring octogenarians) wrote:
“Improvement of specific movements in the process of learning becomes merely a bonus, the real gain being that your life takes on a new, positive direction. This means that with the passing of each day and each year you are able to perform every act in an increasingly better way – more efficiently, more wisely, more precisely and economically – provided that you have not relinquished your determination to seek these qualities.”
Once you learn how to learn from your own movement, you can keep giving yourself finer and finer quality movement, even as you age, as long as you stay interested in doing so!
Feel more.
Tension and feeling have an inverse relationship. The more tension we carry the less we feel.
photo by Erin Geesaman Rabke
This can be useful! It can also feel awful and exhausting when it becomes a habit.
In general, the stronger a physical stimulus is the less sensitivity we have.
Imagine the subtlety of sensation you’d notice if a 15-pound kettlebell were resting on your abdomen. Mostly you’d just feel “ugh, that’s heavy.” Now imagine the sensations as someone stroked your abdomen lightly with a feather. Oooooo la la! A subtler stimulus = far greater sensitivity.
Why would we want to feel more details of sensation? Besides the fact that it helps us feel ALIVE (!) it’s also true that when we feel more, our smart sensory-motor cortex can take in the information and adjust our response accordingly. A personal story: When I slowed down my movements while doing Feldenkrais lessons and pushed myself only 10% as hard as I was habituated to doing in my yoga practice, I discovered, for example, that I didn’t have a “bad back” or “unstable S.I. joints.” I discovered I had a habit of moving in a way that injured my back every time I did it. Wow! Once I knew that at a bodily level – I could make a different choice. I’ve never had the kind of terrible back pain I’d suffered for years since making this discovery. Slowing down and doing less let me feel more so I could update my habits and make more intelligent movement choices. How empowering is that?!
Update your habits.
Habits are useful. And dangerous.
They allow us to not have to think about brushing our teeth or stepping into our pants – but just to do it. They may also allow us not to think about eating a quart of chocolate ice cream or downing 4 glasses of wine before bed, but just do it because that’s just what we do. In Awareness Through Movement lessons, we intentionally explore non-habitual actions and movements. It’s fun! And weird.
Try going through the day opening doors with your non-dominant hand. Try using your computer’s mouse with the non-habitual hand. When you approach a set of stairs, notice the foot you always step on the first stair with. What happens if you use the other one? Brushing teeth with your non-dominant hand? It’s good for your brain and can bring a freshness and presence to your day. What if no posture or movement is inherently bad for you, but rather it’s the compulsion behind the habit that can be harmful? For example, I believe keeping slouching in your repertoire is a great idea. But if you compulsively slouch all the time, you’ll end up with back and neck pain. What if it’s not about getting to the “right way” and then rigidly maintaining it? (Have you tried that as a life-tactic? It sucks, doesn’t it?) As Feldenkrais said, “Why would you want to get to “right?” You can’t improve on “right.” But if you’re present in your body, curious and engaged, you can keep refining your movement as long as you live. This kind of curiosity and creativity can’t help but spill over into your work life, your relationships, your parenting, your ways of exercise. How wonderful!
Learn to slow down.
Praise slowness!
photo by Erin Geesaman Rabke
As Bayo Akomolafe recently said to a group of us in a class, “The times are very urgent. We must slow down. The times are very urgent. We must slow down. The times are very urgent. We must slow down.” Why? When we go at our habitual speed, we can only do what we already know how to do. This is true neuro-muscularly, personally, and culturally. When we slow down, there’s a chance for something new and unprecedented (and perhaps far more wise) to emerge. When we slow down, we’re moving at a speed where we can evolve, not just charge forward in known patterns of behavior. To be honest, when you slow down you’ll end up discovering those sensations you’re busy avoiding all day long. This can be a challenging but worthy process which can allow you to return to a richly felt life. It’s also true that all good things are experienced at the speed of life – not just on the speed train of thinking mind or high-speed internet. Savoring a delicious bite of butter-slathered bread or sipping a perfect latte. Making eye-contact with a soul friend. Singing a favorite song at the top of your lungs in the shower. Embracing a beloved. Feeling your chest expand as you look up into a pink sky at dawn. Engaging in somatic practices like Feldenkrais lessons can help us recalibrate ourselves to the actual speed of life, feeling the richness of sensation, texture, temperature, nuance, and the shimmering beauty of real life, all present right here when we enter the living moment through our embodied experience.
Embody sustainability.
Imagine having an energy auditor come to your home to examine the efficiency and sustainability of your energy usage.
Your old fridge, your uninsulated hot-water pipes, your old windows – they may be wasting a lot of energy. Once you know, you can make smarter choices. The kinds of somatic investigations we engage in invite you to do a similar energy audit with your movement habits.
Are you working harder than you need to be? Are you clenching your shoulders and jaw to “help” you do a movement that is in fact not helped by those exhausting actions at all? Are you squeezing your butt when you bend over and so overtaxing your lower back? Are you walking in a way that is wearing out your knee joints?
When you learn to weed out what Moshe Feldenkrais called “parasitic actions” – your movement and your life become more coherent. No longer working against yourself, you become more free to actualize your intentions in a streamlined and sustainable way. And your joints last longer too!
Become authentically intelligent
Our friend, the writer, Philip Shepherd, has created what I think is a brilliant definition of intelligence: He defines intelligence as “grounded sensitivity.”
Not groundedness without sensitivity. (Have you ever met heavy, dense, insensitive people?) Not hypersensitivity without the groundedness to bear it. (Have you known people who are deeply sensitive, but blown out and overwhelmed by their life?)
I love this working definition so much. It seems we have unlimited capacity to grow in both directions simultaneously. More grounded (in the body, in the moment, on this spot on the earth) and more sensitive (to any number of things: our ability to appreciate music, to move our body with greater efficiency, to make smarter choices with our money, to register the impact we’re having on our planet.) Awareness Through Movement practice helps us to grow both: More groundedness and more sensitivity. The harvest from such cultivation is infinite! We need more human beings with this kind of embodied intelligence.
Improve your brain’s map of your body.
(from wikipedia)
Have you ever seen a sculpture of a homunculus? It’s a representation of the brain’s map of the body, where the sensitive lips and hands are huge, and the not-so-sensitive legs and back are tiny by comparison. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_homunculus
Many of us don’t have very clear brain-maps of our bodies. Most students and clients I’ve met have misguided images of where their hip joints are located, and sometimes only a vague sense of their spine’s shape and movement potential. They may have no sense of the size, location and movement potential of the structures that support breathing – the respiratory diaphragm, the location of the lungs, the shape and mobility of their ribs.
The more clearly you experience your body, the more effectively and efficiently you use it.
Doing movement lessons with inquisitive awareness that help you experience your own anatomy from the inside can massively improve your brain’s map of your body, and so your capacity to use your body in better ways for the rest of your life.
Discover the gifts inside pain
Learning to relate to pain in a new and creative way can be profoundly liberating.
This past week I had the pleasure of teaching at the U of U’s School of Dance as part of their Wellness Week. My co-presenter was a Body-Talk practitioner and dancer from New York City. We bonded as we discovered we share a passionate perspective that our injuries have been some of the most profound gifts in our lives, offering the re-orientation of non-optimal life trajectories and inviting deep learning we wouldn’t have found in other ways. I know this can sound annoying as hell when you’re in pain. However, learning to relate to pain in a new and creative way can be profoundly liberating.
I think of one client who, after we worked together for a year, said to me, “I am SO grateful for my back pain! It led me to you, and then to changing my life in such amazing ways.” She has not only greatly reduced her back pain, she has blossomed in such an inspiring way and her life is so much bigger and more creative than when I met her.
I’m thinking of another client whose chronic neck troubles evaporated when he accepted his body’s message that he needed to break up with a partner who wasn’t a fit for him. It’s not always easy to delve into our pain as a creative learning process. Healing doesn’t always look healthy. But through the kind of curious, slowed-down, and infinitely kind investigation of ourselves we learn to do through Awareness Through Movement explorations, we can uncover the treasure buried under physical pain. (See above – Feel more.)
Grow your attentional flexibility.
How and what you pay attention to has a HUGE impact on your experience of your self, your body, your life, your world.
Most of us come with some well-established and not-so-life-giving neural grooves – we pay attention in ways that don’t support our capacity for freedom and well-being. I laughed out loud when I heard a mentor say last week that research shows that 80-90% of the thoughts you thought today are the same thoughts you had yesterday. And the day before. What a loop!
Our habits of attention powerfully impact our experience of pain, our relationships, our very experience of the world we live in.
While the somatic practices we offer are rooted in the practice of moving our bodies, the largest and most significant movements are those of your attention. Learning to pay attention to different aspects of yourself and in different ways is life-changing. How much information and experience are we missing due to our habits of attention? What aspects of self, world, body, and possibility might light up if we learn to pay attention in new ways? Growing your attentional flexibility is good for your brain, your body, your relationships, and your world.
Be mindful and spontaneous.
To sense, feel, think, and act all at once is integrated experiencing.
Years ago, talking to a friend, when I used the phrase “mindful spontaneity” (inspired by Ruthy Alon’s wonderful book of the same name) he said, “Wait – you can be one or the other but not both at the same time.” In fact, he’s wrong! You can be mindful and present and simultaneously be spontaneous. The training in being present in and through your body, noticing subtle details of what you’re doing and how you’re doing it while also listening and paying attention to the world around you is powerful learning. To sense, feel, think, and act all at once is integrated experiencing. It’s mindful and spontaneous.
One of my dear clients used the phrase, “I’m becoming habitually spontaneous” for the quality that is growing in her. Life can be so fresh when we show up to it with mindfulness and spontaneity! Taking a different route home, eating at a new restaurant, offering someone a sincere compliment hot off the press, noticing the birds we usually ignore. Moshe Feldenkrais said,
“If you can come to a state where you can register improvement every time you do an action, there is no end to what you can achieve.”
Feldenkrais lessons help you come into that ripe, ongoing learning state which is infinitely generative and healing.
Become yourself.
I love Michael Meade’s essential question to reflect on at the end of life: “Did you become yourself?”
The learning that happens through Feldenkrais lessons can empower you and free you to do just that: Become your unique self. Our approach to movement and embodiment is not prescriptive. Let me repeat: It does not tell you how to do things nor what to do. (Some people find this disappointing. I find it respectful and liberating!)
The practice is invitational. It’s an opportunity for you to come into intimate relationship with yourself, with your body-mind, with your subjective sense of satisfaction, with your habits, and to do what your own guidance (which is ever changing!) deems is right for you right now.
Disclaimer: Once you learn how to learn in this way, you’ll be ruined as far as blindly following other people’s directions for you. You may, like me, become allergic to it!
This is not about resisting authority or ignoring information from outside, but rather is about honoring your own living, embodied intelligence and allowing that to be your most trusted guide. Freeing yourself from prescribed living and living YOUR unique life is a gift not only to you but to the world. As the Gospel of Thomas says, ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” Might as well become yourself! Learning through Feldenkrais can empower you to do so.
Embody mindfulness.
I’ve been surprised in conversations with friends recently to hear that for many people, they think mindfulness is a mental practice.
Perhaps the word itself is misleading. An open mind, (not a full one), available to experience the living moment with full presence is the essence of mindfulness. If you’re not present in a bodily way, I’d argue that your mindfulness is missing any real ground or roots. It’s ignoring the very foundation of your experience of life!
Mindfulness is not a conceptual practice. It’s a practice of being in this moment of life with presence and awareness, rather than lost in concept. When you learn to practice being present to the nuances of sensation in and through your moving body, while also being open to the moment around you, your mindfulness is far more rich and rewarding. The Buddha himself said,
“There is one thing that when cultivated and regularly practiced, leads to deep spiritual intention, to peace, to mindfulness and clear comprehension, to vision and knowledge, to a happy life here and now and to the culmination of wisdom and awakening. And what is that one thing? It is mindfulness centered on the body.”
Elsewhere, Buddha said, “If the body is not cultivated, the mind cannot be cultivated. If the body is cultivated then the mind can be cultivated.” Growing a deeper relationship with your own body is a profound ground for authentic mindfulness.
Cultivate less effort and more pleasure.
“How can I make this less effortful and more pleasurable?”
People who take our classes hear this refrain like a broken record. It soon becomes repeated in their own inner life. “How can I make this less effortful and more pleasurable?” Please don’t misunderstand. This is not about becoming precious and avoiding any challenge. Quite the opposite. It’s about bringing our attentive presence to all our actions, however simple or challenging – whether bending over to load the dishwasher, running a marathon, skiing down a mountainside, or typing on a computer. How could you make it less effortful and more pleasurable? This intelligent impulse is inherent in babies learning to walk. They are learning sponges, continually noticing how to grow their skill through following what works, adopting the actions that have less effort and more pleasure. Asking this question frequently activates our innate bodily intelligence and our embodied presence. It’s a question to live into again and again. And one that can powerfully transform your life.
Decolonize your body-mind. Removing outer authority from your inner life –
Quote from Moshe Feldenkrais. Image from Feldenkrais Illustrated: The Art of Learning
There are so many invisible rules we follow, often unbeknownst to us.
This was one of Moshe Feldenkrais’s stated aims of this work, and one that is so dear to my heart as a teacher and student. There are so many invisible rules we follow, often unbeknownst to us. Whether it’s an instruction your father gave you in childhood about sitting up straight, or someone scolding you about holding your knees together as an expression of modesty, or a yoga teacher’s advice to pull your shoulders in a certain way they thought was “right” once upon a time – often we are walking around carrying loads of conscious or unconscious instructions about how to be in a human body. I believe in liberating us from these.
Choosing how we inhabit and move our own bodies from a place of conscious sovereignty and not because an “authority” told us to do it like this 30 years ago… I believe this is an essential facet of adult development. One definition of decolonization includes the “complete removal of the domination of non-indigenous forces.” This is important on a macro scale for indigenous peoples. I believe it’s also important on the micro-level of your own inner life. Regardless of your genetic and cultural history, one place you are indigenous to is your very own body. The slow, gentle, inquiry-based practices of Awareness Through Movement help you to remove the often invisible domination of non-indigenous forces in your own body, mind, and life. It doesn’t mean all advice from others is harmful. It means we get to choose, from our own embodied sovereignty, what is actually life-giving for us and set aside the rest. You can trust your naturalness.
Do what you want
As Feldenkrais famously said, “You can’t do what you want until you know what you’re doing. Once you know what you’re doing, you can do what you want.”
He also mused on the humbling fact that it’s much easier to do what someone tells you to do than to actually notice what you’re doing. Awareness Through Movement offers a powerful process for helping us to know what we’re doing so we can do what we want. This can be as simple as knowing that we’re clenching our jaw so we can choose to unclench it, or noticing that we’re holding tension in our shoulders, which we could choose to drop once we know what we’re doing. It can then translate into noticing we’re being an emotionally reactive jerk in our relationship and then choosing to do something different, rather than just indulging the not-so-conscious impulse. Many people would rather someone just tell them what to do than enter the long and exacting (and deeply rewarding!) process of knowing what they’re doing so they can do what they want. Feldenkrais can help you become much more free. As Victor Frankl famously said, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.” This is exactly the territory we explore in Feldenkrais lessons.
Learn to trust something other than your thinking mind.
There’s an intelligence in every cell in your body which reveals itself when we simply slow down and pay attention to it and through it.
A profound benefit of delving into this kind of somatic exploration comes when you make the powerful discovery that there’s something trustworthy and reliable and it’s not your thinking mind – it’s your feeling body when inhabited with awareness. What a relief to learn you don’t need to use your thinking mind to manage all aspects of reality! What a blessing to discover there’s an intelligence in every cell in your body which reveals itself when we simply slow down and pay attention to it and through it. Feldenkrais teaches us how to do this. It’s not about haranguing yourself with instructions of how to be and move. It’s about freeing yourself from that habit, and trusting your intelligent feeling body. No matter how long you’ve ignored it, the resilient body-intelligence is there, humming beneath the surface of awareness, waiting to welcome you home. Wahoooo!
End the culture of domination.
The practice of Awareness Through Movement offers a profound invitation into a radically new and non-objectified relationship with your own body-mind. It’s not only good for you, but good for the world at large.
When there are so many things deeply awry in the world – misogyny, racism, climate change, environmental degradation, sexual abuse, and more – could it really make sense to spend time slowly rolling around on the ground, moving your body with gentleness and precision? I would argue YES. Unequivocally. The kind of relationship you’re invited to cultivate with and through your body via practices like these is one of non-domination. It’s not about doing movements to your body but as yourself.
Kyriarchy and its philosophical underpinnings lives in our relationship with ourselves as well as the world at large. We can begin to end the culture of domination by ending the habit of being a mind dominating a body. Treating one’s own body and life as an object is at the root of all objectification, which is at the root of every problem I listed above.
Surprisingly, most fitness, exercise, yoga, and other modern physical practices serve to deepen this sense of domination rather than liberate us from it. It’s invisible and pervasive. Until it becomes visible, and we liberate ourselves from it. The practice of Awareness Through Movement offers a profound invitation into a radically new and non-objectified relationship with your own body-mind. It’s not only good for you, but good for the world at large.
Befriend yourself and embody lovingkindness.
Is it worth taking the time to slow down and learn from what poet Hafiz calls “the most insignificant movements of your own holy body?” I believe it is.
Loving-kindness is a lovely ideal. It’s even more potent when it’s embodied. Poet David Whyte says “start close in.”
What closer or truer place to start than your own body?
In any moment, in this crazy world, one thing you DO have control over is the quality with which you move your own body, whether you’re reaching for the salt, carrying the groceries in from the car, or busting a move on the dance floor. You can treat your body like a workhorse or choose to act in a more sustainable manner – moving today in such a way you’ll feel good tomorrow and beyond. How hard you push, how much you’re willing to sacrifice your moment-to-moment bodily well being to accomplish an action is not only a reflection of your relationship with yourself, it’s a way to influence and improve it. Can I just say? Martyrdom is so not sexy. Embodied self-respect is.
You can embody self-respect and lovingkindness in the way you move all day long. (See “less effort, more pleasure above!) Why not? You’re worth it. Feldenkrais can help you learn to do just this.
In closure, I must include this favorite quote from T.H.White’s The Once and Future King:
“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
About Erin Geesaman Rabke
photo by Carl Rabke
Erin Geesaman Rabke has been in deep study of awareness and embodiment for more than 20 years. She is a Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner and Embodied Life Teacher. In the past she's also been a yoga instructor and teacher trainer, a tai chi teacher, and a health writer. Her work is about sharing potent practices to not only heal and befriend the body, but to enter into a radically new, non-dual, and liberating relationship with embodiment. Erin is a meditator and spiritual practitioner, blessed by many years of study in the Tibetan Buddhist traditions of Dzogchen, Lojong, and Somatic Meditation. She considers it her work to grow maitri – what Chogyam Trungpa translates as brave, unconditional friendliness toward what is – and to support her clients and students to do the same. This kind of brave lovingkindness is an embodied wisdom that can transform all that it touches – body, mind, soul and world.
This writing was originally published on www.embodimentmatters.com, where you can learn more about Erin and her husband Carl Rabke and all the amazing things they are up to!
ALL THE IMAGES ON THIS PAGE WITHOUT CREDITS are drawings and photos by Tiffany Sankary
20 LESSON SERIES
In 2018, Erin Geesaman Rabke wrote a widely read and translated article, Why Do Feldenkrais? exploring many fresh ideas about why the Feldenkrais Method® is important personally and even culturally. This fall Erin will explore these 20 potent themes in a series of enlivening 30 minute Feldenkrais lessons. The first 4 lessons are free. Sign up here:
Save $40 when you register by Oct 28th
Feldenkrais at home
Movement and Creativity Library is a collection of 400+ Feldenkrais lessons and creative resources to help you reduce pain and stress, regulate your nervous system, awaken creativity and expand your capacity to enjoy life.
The importance of doing ATM in a consistent way at home
Learn to respect your physical sensations as intelligent signals. By doing Awareness Through Movement, you will begin to learn to identify the sensations that precede your pain or discomfort. Then, you will be able to take the radical, proactive step of stopping whatever you are doing, and with a few minutes of ATM, interrupt the cycle of habitual stress and pain. This is what learning to take care of yourself means.
Most people's difficulties are almost characterlogical, in other words, the root causes lie deep within their organization and has been a part of their every action for a very long time. Between one Feldenkrais lesson and the next there are 24 hours x 7 days less 1 hour of time, and a lot of life and stress.
One lesson a week is, as Moshe would say, "like throwing sugar in the ocean to sweeten it."
In an ideal world I think students would come for Functional Integration (FI) lessons four or five times a week, or even twice a day in some cases. With that kind of frequency, we would be able to make a difference that would make a difference. The lessons could interrupt their tendency to fall back on old habitual patterns, and build upon and sustain their learning and improvement. But in today's world, who can afford to be able to see a practitioner in this way? Not many people.
Functional Integration is wonderful, but I believe that if people are to get better, if they are to truly improve and heal, they probably need to do Awareness Through Movement. Occasional ATM classes and one-day workshops are good, but I believe there is no substitute for doing ATM at home.
When students have the skills to do ATM confidently on their own, they will almost certainly develop the tools for getting themselves out of trouble, and eventually, for staying trouble free. I am not suggesting ATM instead of FI, but I want to underscore the value of doing ATM in addition to FI.
Personally, I don't talk with my clients about ATM when they come for their very first FI lesson. Between the interview and the lesson, a new student is usually with me for 90 minutes during their first appointment. At the end of the first lesson my goal is to not to engage the student in conversation, but rather to have them take a walk so that they can feel the differences that have taken place. So, I usually wait to introduce the idea of doing ATM till the second or third session.
A practitioner can offer a plan, roadmap or schedule. Some people simply do not want to do ATM. Maybe they decide not to do ATM today, but in a month or two or three, something may change and they will be ready to give it a try.
Everyone has, in his or her own way, learned how to not pay attention to themselves, and to their own kinesthetic sensations. This is probably part of what got them into trouble in the first place.
Learn to respect your physical sensations as intelligent signals.
By doing Awareness Through Movement, you will begin to learn to identify the sensations that precede your pain or discomfort. Then, you will be able to take the radical, proactive step of stopping whatever you are doing, and with a few minutes of ATM, interrupt the cycle of habitual stress and pain.
This is what learning to take care of yourself means.
The Feldenkrais Method helps you learn how to pay attention to yourself, to honor and respect your sensations, learn how to interpret them, and act on them. The Method will also help you to appreciate and like yourself more, and to learn to respect your physical sensations as intelligent signals.
I strongly believe that the Feldenkrais Method can help every person to make their life a little easier and a little more comfortable. My personal belief is that Awareness Through Movement, used intelligently and consistently has the potential to alleviate much suffering.
Awareness Through Movement can help people recover lost function, find pain free ways of moving, know themselves a little better, and be able to stand on their own two feet, sustaining themselves in healthy action.
Original article:
This is an excerpt from an article originally written for Feldenkrais practitioners in training: “How We Can Be More Effective Agents of Transformation and the Importance of Awareness Through Movement” by David Zemach-Bersin. With permission, the text was edited and adapted for students of the Feldenkrais Method by Tiffany Sankary.
About David Zemach Bersin:
David Zemach-Bersin is one of Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais’ original American students. He studied closely with Dr. Feldenkrais from 1973-1984 in the U.S., England, and at the Feldenkrais Institute in Tel-Aviv, Israel. For over 30 years he has been an international leader in the practice and development of the Feldenkrais Method. In 1983, David Zemach-Bersin co-founded Feldenkrais Resources, the primary publisher of Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais’ books and audio programs. He is the co-author of Relaxercise (HarperCollins), an introduction to The Feldenkrais Method. Check out David’s new online resource for Feldenkrais practitioners and the public: Feldenkrais Access. (this is an affiliate link)
Creating Neurological Balance and Ease
6 week self-paced online Feldenkrais® Series with David Zemach-Bersin
A set of empowering tools that you can use to support healthy neurological balance in stressful times.
David Zemach-Bersin is a contributor to Movement and Creativity Library, an online resource/ community with 400+ Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lessons, Organic Intelligence practices and creative resources. Learn more here.
Improve chronic pain though improving the functioning of your nervous system
Create new metaphors to counter the "war on pain"→ movement towards curiosity as an approach, rather than self-violence. Deborah Bowes shares her thinking behind her self-paced Feldenkrais Series: Curiosity, Self Image and Pain
Deborah Bowes shares her thinking behind her self paced online Feldenkrais Series: Curiosity, Self Image and Pain
Enlarge Curiosity and Develop Self Knowledge (5 min)
Create new metaphors to counter the "war on pain"→ movement towards curiosity as an approach, rather than self-violence.
If Winnie the Pooh and Friends came for a Feldenkrais lesson (1 min)
Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement and Self Respect (1 min)
Online Feldenkrais series w/ Deborah Bowes: Curiosity, Self Image and Pain
The experience of chronic pain changes your self-image which is made up of how you move, think, feel, and sense yourself. Feldenkrais lessons help you to discover how to move more, sense more, think and feel in new ways that don't increase pain.
One if the main tools of the Feldenkrais Method is curiosity. Curiosity can be trained so that you can notice how you move and discover how to move differently, without pain, without judgement, starting right where you are. With awareness and learning to notice differences, you can change self-image and go from the limitations of thinking 'I can't' to the freedom of 'I can'.
Self-paced online series
This series designed for anyone who has an interest in chronic pain, such as, someone who has pain, or loves someone with pain, or works with clients with pain.
Deborah Bowes is a Feldenkrais® Teacher and Trainer. She initially trained as a physical therapist at Columbia University in New York and later earned a Doctorate in Physical Therapy from Shenandoah University in Virginia. She holds a B.S. in Biology and Physical Education from Rhode Island College.
As a Guild Certified Trainer of the Feldenkrais Method® since 2000, she has taught widely in the United States, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Australia and Colombia for 14 different training organizations and in over 32 training programs. Her other related in-depth studies and practices include Tai Chi Chuan, Qigong, yoga, sensory awareness, meditation, and dance.
Deborah co-founded the San Francisco Feldenkrais® Center for Movement and Awareness in 1988, and for the past 30 years, has provided Feldenkrais lessons, classes, and workshops to adults and children. She has made many presentations and trainings to professional organizations, university programs, hospitals, and other professional groups. She is an adjunct faculty member at Saybrook University, teaching Movement Modalities and Wellness. Her doctoral research demonstrated the benefit of her original Feldenkrais Method program, Pelvic Health and Awareness for men and women, for improving pelvic floor health.
Curiosity, Compassion and Pain
Feldenkrais Podcast #4 with Deborah Bowes
We talk about:
• How Feldenkrais reassures the limbic system
• The relationship between pain and self image
• The phenomena of pain
• Feldenkrais is a bio-psycho-social model and pain is a bio-psycho-social experience
• The importance of empathy and compassion in changing neural pathways
Feldenkrais Podcast #4 with Deborah Bowes
We talk about:
• How Feldenkrais reassures the limbic system
• The relationship between pain and self image
• The phenomena of pain
• Feldenkrais is a bio-psycho-social model and pain is a bio-psycho-social experience
• The importance of empathy and compassion in changing neural pathways
Listen here:
6:13 Feldenkrais reassures the Lymbic System
6:44 How we can make everything really safe with people with pain?
7:28 How pain brings your attention inward
7:48 The Language of Pain: Finding Words, Compassion, and Relief by David Biro
8:52 Pain threatens to really alienate you, to exile us from the world.
9:12 Feldenkrais can move people from the phenomena of pain of “I can’t” towards “ I can”
9:58 The self image is enlarged rather than continually shrinking and being limited
10:42 As Dennis Leri likes to say, “There’s only 2 things we can notice: More or less, same or different?”…If I can help them make small distinctions, that can carry over as a process they can use for learning how to move.
12:07 The Five Questions
14:27 That ability to shift our attention is the ability to move from one neural pattern to another one
16:17 The importance of the word “support” inspired by Tor Norretranders idea of “exformation” from The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size
17:38 Deborah’s history with pain
19:27 Developing a sense of agency through Awareness Through Movement
20:54 Feldenkrais is a bio-psycho-social model and pain is a bio-psycho-social experience.
21:35 Pain research
21:52 Four characteristics of very effective practitioners: empathy, compassion, support and provided education
Empathy: The ability to feel and sense the other person’s experience
Compassion: The recognition that someone has special needs
25:19 Feldenkrais series at Stanford
27:27 Poster about the class presented at the International association for the study pain in Japan
27:47 Program at Kaiser / Discover Easy Movement and Pain Relief
28:52 What’s the relationship between pain and creativity?
29:04 Pain and curiosity. Feldenkrais said that the nervous system does 3 things:
1) It gives us information about our body
2) information about the environment
3) and the curiosity to do that.
“If any one of those functions becomes so small then life itself is threatened.”
30:12 The Painting Experience Michelle Cassou
32:57 “Pain brings you to the doorway of meaning” from The Culture of Pain by David Morris
33:57 Mind Body Skills program
34:52 Pelvic Floor Feldenkrais Series: Pelvic Health and Awareness
44:26 You can improve anything. That is the natural state of the nervous system. The natural state is to be able to move towards greater function and more health.
45:12 Change is inevitable, so we can direct the change in a way that’s very positive.
Self paced online Feldenkrais series with Deborah Bowes: Curiosity, Self Image & Pain
The experience of chronic pain changes your self-image which is made up of how you move, think, feel, and sense yourself. Feldenkrais lessons help you to discover how to move more, sense more, think and feel in new ways that don't increase pain.
One if the main tools of the Feldenkrais Method is curiosity. Curiosity can be trained so that you can notice how you move and discover how to move differently, without pain, without judgement, starting right where you are. With awareness and learning to notice differences, you can change self-image and go from the limitations of thinking 'I can't' to the freedom of 'I can'.
This series designed for anyone who has an interest in chronic pain, such as, someone who has pain, or loves someone with pain, or works with clients with pain.
Deborah Bowes is a Feldenkrais® Teacher and Trainer. She initially trained as a physical therapist at Columbia University in New York and later earned a Doctorate in Physical Therapy from Shenandoah University in Virginia. She holds a B.S. in Biology and Physical Education from Rhode Island College.
As a Guild Certified Trainer of the Feldenkrais Method® since 2000, she has taught widely in the United States, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Australia and Colombia for 14 different training organizations and in over 32 training programs. Her other related in-depth studies and practices include Tai Chi Chuan, Qigong, yoga, sensory awareness, meditation, and dance.
Deborah co-founded the San Francisco Feldenkrais® Center for Movement and Awareness in 1988, and for the past 30 years, has provided Feldenkrais lessons, classes, and workshops to adults and children. She has made many presentations and trainings to professional organizations, university programs, hospitals, and other professional groups. She is an adjunct faculty member at Saybrook University, teaching Movement Modalities and Wellness. Her doctoral research demonstrated the benefit of her original Feldenkrais Method program, Pelvic Health and Awareness for men and women, for improving pelvic floor health.
Feldenkrais in the NY Times Filled my Private Practice
The people who are coming to me via the NY Times article are intelligent, curious, fascinating people--therapists, professors, lawyers, artists, writers---open and eager to learn. It has been an honor to work with them. PAIN is the reason they all came to the method and they are finding that the same process which helps reduce their pain also supports overall well being, and for many, more vibrant creativity. It is a paradigm shift from our pain-no-gain culture.
Image by: Paul Rogers
Last month's NY Times article about how the Feldenkrais Method helps with chronic pain filled my private practice and watered a seed of a project I've had in mind for a while:
Movement & Creativity Library
A multimedia library of hundreds Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lessons and resources to help you reduce pain & anxiety and increase ease, pleasure & creative power.
It will be a way for me to support people all over the world to learn from the comfort of their own homes.
The people who are coming to me via the NY Times article are intelligent, curious, fascinating people--therapists, professors, lawyers, artists, writers---open and eager to learn. It has been an honor to work with them.
Pain is the reason they all came to the method. Through our work in the Feldenkrais Method they are finding that the same process which helps reduce pain also supports overall well being, and for many, more vibrant creativity. It is a paradigm shift from our pain-no-gain culture.
Recently a client said to me that The Feldenkrais Method changed her relationship to her pain and that is what changed her pain.
How do we change our relationship to pain? Here are a few of my colleagues answer this question in very different ways in response to the NY Times article:
What’s Missing From The New York Times’ Feldenkrais Article? The Elusive Obvious
by Ilona Fried
"I wish Jane Brody's article had cited Dr. Feldenkrais’ books and the “elusive obvious” rationale for his method: to free people from the shackles of conditioned thinking and behavior that might bring about pain in the first place. A cultural emphasis on achievement, rather than learning and growth, along with perfectionism, often contribute to emotional and physical distress. If we push too hard to prove ourselves, or to keep up with or get ahead of the pack, those beliefs and behaviors can create or exacerbate discomfort and lead to injury. Often it’s pain that finally tells us that we’re overusing, or poorly using, ourselves.
Contrary to the dicta of the culture at large, Feldenkrais teachers guide their students to move less, often far less than their full range in order to feel more and improve the quality of their experience. The ultimate goal? Not just to be free from pain, but to be free from another’s authority over one’s inner life.
Feldenkrais Method and Chronic Pain: How does it work? by Cynthia Allen
How the Nervous System Senses Differences by David Zemach-Bersin
And lastly I wanted to end this blog post with a lecture from 2013 by one of my teachers, David Zemach-Bersin. He says:
"Most of us are not aware of what we're doing. We're even less aware of how we do what what we do...
How do you create the conditions in which we can sense and feel ourselves?"
