The Feldenkrais Journal #21 Open Issue

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THE FELDENKRAIS JOURNAL , NO 21

OPEN ISSUE W IN TER 2009

The Feldenkrais Journal is published annually for the members of The Feldenkr ais Guild® of North America. Inquiries regarding this publication should be directed to: The Feldenkr ais Guild, 5432 North Albina Avenue, Portland, OR 9727. If you have an article, poem, drawing, or letter to the editor to submit to the Journal, please send them directly to the editor. Send one copy to Gay Sweet Scott, Editor, Feldenkrais Journal, 2747 Woolsey Street, Berkeley, CA 94705, and send a second copy to Elaine Yoder, att. Journal, 472 Clifton Street, Oakland CA 9468. The editorial committee is happy to comment on first drafts or works in progress. The deadline for submissions is May , 2008. The next issue will have an open theme. For more information about format, length, computer compatibility, etc., please contact Elaine Yoder at [email protected]. Additional copies of the Journal are available through the Guild office for $6 to Guild members and $0 to non-members (includes postage and handling). Bulk rate fees are available on request. Subscriptions to the Feldenkrais Journal are now available. These are designed for people who are not currently receiving the Journal through their Guild. A three-issue subscription is $25 for North American residents and $35 for overseas subscribers. A five-issue subscription is $40 and $50, respectively. Please send your payment in U.S. dollars directly to the Guild office.

The following marks are associated with the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education: feldenkrais®, feldenkrais method , functional integration® and awareness through movement® are registered servicemarks; guild certified feldenkrais practioner® is a certification mark; and feldenkrais™ and the feldenkrais journal™ are trademarks of the Feldenkrais Guild® of North America. cm

©Copyright 2007 The Feldenkr ais Guild of North America. All rights revert to the authors and artists upon publication

The text face for The Feldenkrais Journal is Utopia, an Adobe Original type family designed by Robert Slimbach. It was formatted in InDesign on a Macintosh. The printing is (as always) well done by Bacchus Press in Emeryville, California.

The Feldenkrais Journal number 2

Table of Contents

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Letter from the Editor

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A Case Study from Three Perspectives: A Life Story Eva Scher The Face Behind the Mask Chava Shelav-Silberbush Eva’s Responses Eva Sher

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Smelling, Standing and Not Skipping—Notes on Functional Integration with Dogs

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Freedom and the Feldenkrais Method

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An Interview with Myriam Pfeffer

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The Risk of Serious Inquiry

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Contributors

Anna Yeatman

Llanna Nevill

Dennis Leri

Cliff Symth

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Letter from the Editor The current Open issue of The Feldenkrais Journal includes articles that could be grouped under a variety of topics including freedom, exploration, and courage. Notable, however, are different interpretations, flavors, of the work we share. Eva Scher and Chava Shelhav-Silberbush present a multifaceted case study with insight regarding the ongoing experience and practice of the Feldenkrais Method in the face of an unusual affliction. Eva gives an account of her childhood with Treacher Collins Syndrome as well as her experience of Feldenkrais and her advice to parents with children with the syndrome. Chava provides an account of her thinking about her fis with Eva. Cliff Smith has written a charming article about working with dogs that includes candid reflection on the questions that accompany working with anyone new. Anna Yeatman presents a discussion of the intellectual climate that Feldenkrais and Hanna Arent shared and their concerns regarding personal and political freedom. We are delighted to include a 2003 interview Illana Nevil conducted with Myriam Pfeffer. Myriam expanded her remarks in 2008 to reflect her current views. And Dennis Leri’s examination of Akrasia challenges us to examine our assumptions about how we think about how we enact ourselves. I would like to thank everyone who ensures continuation of the The Feldenkrais Journal: the authors, the editors, Elaine Yoder the Assistant Editor and Margery Cantor, our designer. Special thanks to Roy Scott who provided drawings of dogs that remind us of the presence of other sentient beings in our lives. Thanks also to Larry Goldfarb, Dennis Leri, Gregory Lewis and John Piazza, a teacher of classics, who were all kind enough to comment on articles for this issue. Our next issue’s theme is Teaching. We welcome articles about teaching fi, atm Training Programs, teaching in other disciplines, teaching children—the possibilities are great considering our work is teaching. The final deadline for articles is May st. We are delighted to have manuscripts as soon as possible . With many thanks to the contributors and to our readers,

Gay Sweet Scott, Editor

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A life story Eva Scher Once upon a time, in December 957, a baby girl was born in Paris, France. Not quite a beautiful princess, but I was born with a heart and soul, a wish to live and grow, a thirst for nourishment and for light and love. Those who looked at me could not identify what was wrong. My eyes were slanted, my ears tiny. My face seemed unfinished with no chin or bone structure. I was a very strange baby indeed, bringing tears of distress to my bewildered mother, a deep disappointment to my confused father, and shame and anger to family and friends. On the other hand, I brought excitement to the hospital medical staff as they searched for a name for this rare disfigurement. It was described as Franceschetti or Treacher Collins Syndrome. In the midst of the confusion, a kindly fairy bent over my crib and whispered in a silent language that only babies can understand, “You are a very special baby, a four leaf clover, a rarity. Your path won’t be easy. Like all living creatures on this earth, you will struggle, suffer and at times wish to give up. To face this challenging journey that will be your life, I chose for you the most deserving parents in all the world. They will be your allies and your strength. They will show you a pathway that shall become your very own. You will be gifted with a heart that captures subtleties of human emotion. You will see through your soul. Many who cross your path will love you and want to be with you. You will learn faith and the ability to trust life, even in the hardest of times. You will desire to learn, grow and make the most out of your stay on Earth and beyond.” So life began. In spite of great difficulty eating and swallowing food, an aspect of the syndrome, I grew. I loved music and the lullabies my father sang to me in Yiddish. I didn’t want him to stop singing to me and cried if he stopped. I learned to trust and love animals. I had no fear of dogs twice my size. For the first four years of my life I was raised by a nanny and spent a lot of time alone. I became aware of my difference at a very early age. I remember vaguely the unkindness of other children and mean comments that I didn’t understand. Slowly, day after day, I created a shell, a protection against an aggressive world. In silent dreams, I imagined a kinder, gentler world in which I was a just, ruling princess. Silence became a refuge. Taunting, teasing boys were waiting for me when I started going to elementary school. Before entering the gate and facing my tormentors, I looked at the statue of an angel with only one arm, who put a finger to its mouth inviting me to be silent, to endure with a smile. This kind angel reminded me of my good fairy and the whispered words, “Endure, smile and keep your head high.” So I did. Neither my parents nor my friends saw what I was going through. Like a beautiful princess, I passed by my tormentors putting all my energy to pretending not to see or hear them. I discovered an inner power to endure the world, although I had no words to express my feelings, my fears, or my hopes. None of the books, stories, and fairy tales matched my experience. Yet I wanted to discover the outcome and the meaning of this very special journey of life. And life went on: a strange face; a growing child; the outside world, demands, expectations and silence. Sounds seemed to come from far away because my hearing was impaired. I juggled with reality, feeling like a funambulist walking on a tight rope, taking one step at a time and not looking down. My face was strange even to myself. I could understand why a little boy hid behind his mother when he saw me. I frightened him. We were both scared. What was the meaning of this strange way of going through life? Fortunately, I was curious and had faith in dreams. I visualized a better world. Somewhere there was my twin soul, an older boy who looked just like me and lived far away—a fearless boy who would protect and console me. School was difficult. Not hearing well, it was a huge effort to be an average student. I feared making mistakes, saying or writing something ridiculous because I didn’t hear correctly. I was constantly on guard for some incoming danger and never dared to take risks that might put me in trouble. I remember the day we read a story of a little girl whose mother and father became sick and died. 3

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I couldn’t imagine how a little girl could suffer so much and have so much misfortune. I was in tears and when it came my turn to read aloud I was unable to utter a word. The class laughed. Malicious classmates said that I used this strategy to avoid reading aloud. Everyone waited for me to begin to cry but I could not stop the tears. There was also difficulty with abstract learning like math. None of the facts we memorized seemed to help me understand my world. It all appeared a bit useless though I tried very hard in order to please my mother and my teachers. Anxiety occupied much of my attention and made it even more difficult to understand abstract calculations. I was functioning to survive. However, I was a sensitive child and I was learning. When I was 6 years old my mother discovered Dr. Tessuier, the forefather of reconstructive surgery. I began the first of ten operations. It was scary to entrust my face to someone; it was a difficult moment this letting go. For my parents it was a dream come true. Changing a face every six months is no picnic: There was the unknown of how I would look, the swelling of the first weeks and, of course, the pain. Bone grafts were taken from my ribs and from my hip to make my nose, my chin, and my cheek bones. I couldn’t walk for weeks. Breathing was also very painful. Results did not appear right away. For months after surgery, I had all the mirrors hidden or covered. I didn’t dare to look at my face. Dreams of inventing the life I would live carried me through—the love, the traveling, the studying, and making friends with people from all over the world. My objective was to live an interesting life and to learn. The surgeries throughout the high school years were a parenthesis in my life. They were like swallowing a big bowl of sour medicine: You take the bowl and close your eyes, stop breathing and hope it is over quickly until the experience becomes a vague remembrance. I never cried before surgery. I had an idea of heroism, of being courageous. I would clench my teeth and have faith that it was all for the best; I believed that my angels were a protection for me and that everything would be all right. Throughout those years of metamorphosis, I kept dreaming and I drew my face. I drew the image again and again on every paper and in all my notebooks. With each drawing I invented a life, a destiny, adventures and romances—ideal lives. Dreams and imagining better times kept me going. A smile from my good fairy assured me that I was doing ok, that in spite of hardship and a feeling of failure, I was creating my life with every passing year, overcoming a lot, doing great, and walking toward a fine path. Changing my named from Evelyne to Eva marked the beginning of another reconstruction, of taking my destiny into my hands. I went to Israel and met an American man who asked me to marry him. This too was the beginning of a new life: changing countries, speaking a foreign language, adjusting to a different culture were all ways of soothing wounds and becoming a new person, living beyond bad memories and the feelings of failure. And just as my face seemed a separate part of myself I rejected the reality of living with tcs. It was taboo, ignored; I would not allow anyone to bring up the subject. I hid all the pictures of myself as a child and teenager. I went so far as not telling my husband about my past. He accepted the story of a car accident. Immersed in a new language and culture I lived my young adult life refusing to address my past, forgetting all the surgeries and the past pain. In the usa I wanted to make up for my difficult school years and take revenge. I enjoyed the American university system and earned a ba in Latin American studies at ucla, and then continued on for a master’s degree in Special Education. I became a teacher and taught elementary school in English and in Spanish while I pursued my Science of Education courses. Then, although I denied my past and never accepted seeing myself as a special person, I became a Special Education teacher working with children with learning disabilities. I never addressed my hearing disability and always used adaptation as camouflage. When I was living in Los Angeles a dance friend and roommate went to Israel for a few months. She enrolled in an Alexander Technique course there. When she came back I was startled to see how much she had changed. Her posture, her way of talking and addressing people were different, much more engaging and easy going. I never imagined that one had the ability to change so much in so little time. I was intrigued by her carriage, her bearing, but never inquired more. 4

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Back to France at age 33, divorced, with a master’s degree and an American passport and way of life. I wanted to live closer to my aging parents. I continued teaching children and adults, but the return to France was difficult. The past was jumping back at me and sticking at me. As part of my quest for understanding I was immersed in the search for my clown. As a theater clown, I sublimated my past. I was the initiator of laughter and no longer its victim. It was in my beginning clown workshop that I discovered the Feldenkrais Method. Heinke Aschemann, my clown professor, was in the second year of her Feldenkrais training program and was eager to share all she was learning with us. I will never forget the first Awareness Through Movement lesson she taught. I was unable to raise my right arm and my left foot or something like that. The most simple movements were incredibly complicated. I was clearly facing a lack of coordination which had always made me clumsy—breaking dishes and whatever was in my way. The difficulty of doing the simplest movements didn’t discourage me. On the contrary, I immediately knew that I had something precious to discover with the Method and I volunteered to be Heinke‘s first pupil. The first Functional Integration (fi) revelations came as miracles—a golden door opening new possibilities, new relationships to myself and to others. I could perceive how one may indeed change and overcome negative and limited feelings of oneself. When I first felt the connection between my head and feet I burst into laughter. That I could feel sound and vibration through my feet or the mobility of my ribs and shoulders was miraculous—I loved all the rocking movements and loved discovering possibilities. Heinke was going back and forth to Germany and so I found other Feldenkrais teachers. I benefited a great deal from Francois Combeau, Jessie Lebovicy, and Anne Marie Berger’s teaching until I felt ready to apply to Myriam Pfeiffer’s practitioner’s program.

The Face Behind the Mask Chava Shelhav-Silberbush A young woman of average height, a pleasant build, and fair curly hair that covered her forehead and part of her face was at the door. She was smiling. Her face was scarred and asymmetrical. As I look back at the first fis I gave Eva, I ask myself, “ Why did I touch her face right away?” During our preliminary interview she complained about limited movement in her chest and a tingling sensation in the shoulder. This was her reason for coming to me. I asked her to take a few steps around the room. I noticed stiffness in the chest and hesitancy in walking, as if she was walking on an unstable surface. I asked her to lie on her side, thinking that this position would allow me to easily check the movement of the ribs and give her a more complete picture of them. I could then make the connection between the ribs, the pelvis, and the legs. It became apparent that she had an implanted conductive hearing aid. I considered the likelihood she had undergone complicated surgery to rehabilitate her hearing. If so, the area would have been traumatized by the cutting of tissue and muscle, which would lead to a lessening of sensation there. So gentle, present touch was required. Although I noticed her facial scars and asymmetry on our first meeting, I thought she might have been burnt and I didn’t relate to Eva’s face as a “problem.” Instead, I addressed her face as part of her whole self, like any other part of the self that needs to be touched in order to develop sensations. Through touching, I first clarified each part of Eva’s face in relation to the whole. I asked myself, “Why do people tend to keep their hand on their painful area?” Indeed, there is an instinctive reaction we also see in dogs and cats who constantly lick at their wounded paw. The real problems appear when one suppresses this instinctive reaction and wipes out the injured part from the body 5

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image and self-awareness. In the Feldenkrais Method, we purposely don’t directly address the painful or delicate area. We work around it or far away from it; if the pain is distal, we work proximally and vice versa. But since Eva had no recognition of her face and skull, only a direct touch could allow her to become aware of their presence, and only this direct approach allowed her such an amazing change. The face is a primary focus of recognition. In infancy it is a source of discovery, enjoyment, games, and security. Babies learn to read the faces of their parents and others. They react and act in response to facial expressions; a smiling face is encouraging, a sad face can cause an infant to cry. An infant’s facial expression is actually reflected in the entire self. Just picture how a baby’s broad smile is expressed by a full body wriggle. An infant plays with his hands, bringing them to his mouth, using them to explore his face, touching objects. This is the way he connects with his environment and also differentiates the internal and external world. This experience was a void for Eva and affected many layers of her life. To integrate her face into her self image it was necessary to take her through all the developmental stages she had not experienced . When working with babies, I will provide proprioceptive information if parts of themselves do not respond properly. For example, when a baby does not support himself with his hand, I will put his hand on the floor so that he can feel the support. By doing so I allow for the “mapping” of his hand into his body image. However, with babies and in Eva’s case, I came to look at this strategy from a different perspective. I acquired insight about the importance of addressing the delicate area first instead of avoiding it and thereby reinforcing the inhibition. In order to overcome a dramatic pain situation, there is a necessity to connect the painful spot not only through the interaction between all aspects of the body but also to connect it with a new movement behaviour, posture, stability, a new scheme. The pain or inhibited part then becomes a stepping stone. Babies play with their hands and mouth, explore their face with their toys. They bring a toy to their face and the face becomes a primary focus of recognition, a source of games, discovery and enjoyment. In Eva’s case, her face was cut off from her awareness. As a baby she sensed it was stigmatised. She slept on her belly, the pelvis high up, her face hidden in the pillows. Her face was not a source of happy new contacts and discoveries. As a consequence, she did not bring surrounding objects close to her face, touch them and bring them to her mouth. Her eyes were not accustomed to seeing objects clearly, to scrutinize and investigate them . Eva told me she felt awkward eating, that it was difficult to bring food to her mouth without dropping it and making a mess on the table. Even today she still feels a bit nervous and self conscious when eating around people in a new environment. She pays close attention to every gesture so as not to spill. Thus proving when an inhibited part becomes clear it is a pathway to overcome inhibition. Each of our facial orifices has a specific function such as seeing, eating, smelling, but are not primarily designed for making faces. As I worked with Eva, and clarified the global facial picture, the kinaesthetic sense was available and she was ready to apprehend her face in a different way. In child development the senses come first, and only later orientation is connected to the movement. In my work with Eva, I differentiated separate development of her facial kinaesthetic sense, her skull and then brought her to feel rotation—to feel how the front is oriented in opposition to the back. At the end of the lesson she reported a new sense of stability. She began to tell me her story. She talked and she cried. I listened. I let her cry. The spontaneous crying that took her by surprise was a great relief. When a person feels more physically stable, she can then take the risk of exposing her feelings, sharing her sadness or anxiety. Until now her head and face were not part of her self image In the past, her movement lessons concentrated on her body and her face remained out of bounds, like a mask. The question was how to include her face in the body sensation. I gently touched all the facial bones to communicate the location of body parts to her nervous system, connecting the areas touched to others to map the part

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in the self image. I lingered over each area of her skull and face, and I verbally named each bone. I continued using different types of touch paying attention to all the details of her skull. I also touched her neck and shoulder, on one side only. Concentration on one side at a time allows a clearer sense of the differences between the sides. This new relation of the face and skull resembles the way babies learn about their bodies and create their self image. Babies begin their developmental journey through proprioceptive touch and when the proprioceptive picture is clear, they are ready to move. So in a subsequent fi lesson, I added movement to the proprioceptive content of the lessons. She stood, turned to one side, and remained in the twisted position. Then I asked her to tell me to which side her face is facing and to which side is the back of her head. She could not answer these questions. There was no differentiation between her face and skull in her self image. Her orientation was clearer in other parts of her body. Therefore, I turned to clarifying the sensation in these places: abdomen versus back, pubic bone versus sacrum, the sternum versus between shoulder blades, throat versus the back of neck. Through these explorations and clarifications we arrived at her face—nose, jaw, eyes, until the location of the front and the back became clear and coherent. The idea was to present a functional introduction to parts of herself that were absent from her body image. It was a long and emotional process. This brought me to ponder anew the importance of the whole self image Feldenkrais often talked about. I used verbal questions to help internalize an additional perspective of self-image. The lessons became a dialog between non-verbal and verbal questions, asked by touch and utterance. The way she answered clarified for both of us where she was. Over the last few years, the importance of verbal dialog and sensitive, probing questions has become clearer to me. The questions must be without an agenda, questions that don’t lead in a particular direction, questions that leave a wide range of choice, questions that allow a person to search for an answer. There is a great importance to the words that are chosen. As a child, Eva could sense that her face was taboo. It was a face that was never actually touched. Her childhood memory was of a lowered head. The mouth, eyes, ears, nostrils were used only for survival. Her eyes never became accustomed to examining objects at close range. Our journey started as an fi for a shoulder complaint. An unanticipated process unfolded. When a repression becomes clear the repertoire of everyday life opens to permit discovery of the collaboration of movement, feeling and thought. It was much more important to leave myself available to the as yet undiscovered than to respond to the original complaint. When I meet a person it is hard to guess what is hiding under the skin.

Eva’s Response to Two Lessons with Chava Thank you for yesterday’s fi. For a moment I could actually feel my face breathe. It was an extraordinarily new and unexpected feeling for me. I went home feeling complete— like a child who has a new toy. For the very first time I started touching my face, feeling curious and playful. Can the skull be as mobile as the other parts of the skeleton? Can indeed the nose, the cheeks, the eyebrows, the jaw be differentiated one from another and move in opposite directions just as Myriam taught us to do with our toes? How does breathing affect the mobility of the face? What is the amplitude of this mobility? Besides the jaw, is there such a thing as distal and proximal movements of the nose, ear, etc.? I am looking forward to continue this exploration with you next Tuesday. I know that this work will enable me to bring significant guidance to my fellow friends with tcs.

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The last fi was amazingly important and structuring for me. It took me a few days to be able to verbalize what happened. I felt for the first time the relationship between my face and my ribs, my torso. Throughout my training, I had integrated the relationship between the head the torso, the pelvis. But as I now know the head is not dissociated from the face. Up until your lesson, Chava, I had the perception of the head and face being like a Nô theater mask: mask - A face covering. Usually it is something worn on the face, with openings for the eyes,

to conceal one’s identity, either for partying (as at a masquerade ball), to frighten or amuse (as at Halloween), for ritual, or for perfomance (as by dancers, or by actors in Greek, Roman, and Japanese theatre.) It may be worn principally to protect the face (as a gas mask, or a hockey mask, or a physician’s mask, etc.) It may also be any two- or three-dimensional representation of a face — as in the covering of an Egyptian mummy’s face depicting the face of the deceased. A mask can be a mold of a person’s face — a death mask if made after death, a life mask if made before it. It may be used as a verb: to cover in order to conceal, protect, or disguise. Japan, Nô mask of a young woman, 8th-9th century, carved and painted wood. The white paint composed of crushed egg-shells in a binder, British Museum, London. Nô (also called Noh) is the classical drama of Japan, with music and dance performed in a highly stylized manner by masked and elaborately dressed performers on an almost bare stage. A skilfully carved mask will appear to have subtle changes of expression depending on the way in which the wearer turns his head and the angle at which it is held. This is one of several variations of a young-woman mask based on an original design by Zeami, known as Zô-onna.¹ How can I describe the surprise when I could feel my cheeks, my eye sockets, different parts of my forehead and my chin rubbing the towel under my head as you were twisting my ribs. The sensation was so deep that I feel that I was like a potter artfully molding my own face, deciding on the pressure, the heat I wanted from the supporting table. I was becoming the creator of my face. As I write a new association clarifies. Most of my facial bones do indeed come from my floating ribs and hip joint grafts so it’s no wonder this movement had such an extraordinary impact. It freed me, it liberated me. My face was born. At home I explored the movement of turning the hips and feeling the face following the movement many times as well as the opposite movement of the face inviting the vertebra and ribs, pelvis and hips to turn. I practiced many times to recapture the amazing sensation when you did it. I felt sad and destabilized at the end of the first summer training. I had learned to feel the movements of the ribs, the hips. I could feel each of my vertebrae and how each one was related to my breathing and yet, this new awareness made my face even more of a mystery and more isolated from the rest of the body. Since this fi, my face is present to me at every moment. I can feel my smile, my eyebrows, my cheeks, my breathing, the wind and the sun, the state of my muscles. My face is becoming three dimensional with different volumes, just like my ribs. I have always had difficulty recognizing and remembering people’s facial features Since the fi, I pay more attention to people’s faces. As I feel the volumes of my own face I can also pay attention to other faces. I can see more than just two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and hair color and length.

. Appears in a 92 book, The No Plays of Japan, Arthur Waley.http://commons.wilimedia.org/wiki/ Image: young_woman’s_mask.jpeg.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Masque-no-p000705.jpg (this is the image that I picked up)

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The last but not the least effect is how clearly I can now distinguish between, the front and the back of myself. Before it was an intellectual abstraction but not kinesthetically integrated. As I can now differentiate between the back of my head and my face and pay attention to every bone, muscle and feel the skin of my face, I can finally clearly distinguish between my back and my front. It gives me a new stability and sense of direction in my life. This lesson is a turning point in my evolution and as a future practitioner. I can see how each lesson has built up to the next. I felt you were genuinely interested in my situation and in enabling me to discover and feel my face. It felt an echo to my questions and it was reassuring. I knew that I could let go of my fears, to let go of the walls and unnecessary barriers, to accept and express all the sadness. All this was necessary to awaken my attention, my readiness to learn, to feel and to discover my face.

x65x6x5x6x5x6x5x6x5x6x5x6x5x6x5x6x5x6x5x6x5x6x5x6x5x6x5x6x5x6x5x6x5x6x5x6x5x6x5x6x5x6x5x In 2006 I was invited to participate in a tcs panel for families and others concerned with this rare genetic disease. A geneticist from Necker Hospital in Paris explained in allegoric terms the genetic origins of tcs. He compared the gene causing tcs to a spelling mistake in a single word from a book of the dna library. I was the final speaker. I placed my notes on the table and took a big breath in order to speak in a clear voice. The spelling mistake wishes to speak and to be heard. A spelling mistake cannot be erased and corrected without leaving a smudge or a scar. A child that is born with TCS carries scars that cannot be erased. They leave a smudge that will never entirely disappear. I am asking all participants in this conference to become aware of the words they use to talk about us; because words will determine how we accept and perceive our self, our difference. Words can sooth and help us grow and overcome our difficulties but words can also harm, cause everlasting scars, and destroy our self-esteem. A single copy of a unique book with a “default” is called a rare book and is worth a fortune. In a green meadow a four-leave clover is considered as a lucky talisman. I therefore invite all of you to perceive us with tcs as invaluable rare books, as unique as four leaf clovers in a green meadow. You will see this brings new perspectives and possibilities to our lives. During this panel I have heard about fixing, repairing and operating as early as possible. I have benefited greatly from science, but I believe there are more simple and efficient ways of making meaningful improvement in your child’s life. It is called enhancing self esteem and self image. Self image will endure despite all the surgeries in the world. How many gorgeous people feel ugly and unworthy of love, while the not so pretty women will feel confident. I am sure that some famous movie stars have never been loved the way that some women who I met this week with tcs are cherished by their companions. Here are some thoughts based on my experience and my training as a Special Education teacher to meditate on and to apply without moderation. I promise this will not cost you a dime and will foster growth and joy in the whole family. Parents, accept your child as he or she is. If it is difficult to do so, work on your self, seek professional help to overcome the feeling of guilt and a sense that you must repair your mistakes. You may be concerned that your child will suffer. This enhances guilt and uneasiness with your child’s difference. Think of it in this way: Who doesn’t suffer on this earth? Don’t we all learn from our sufferings and hardships? Think of all the children on earth who suffer from poverty, racial discrimination and wars. The idea of happiness is a modern concept. In former centuries children were forced to work under horrible conditions. We should therefore rejoice at the freedom and happiness of our daily lives. A child with a difference will learn to adapt to his or her handicap; compensating for the difficulty. Observing and talking to children, teens and young adults who have difficulties I see that we devel9

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oped better social skills and find ways to compensate for our facial difference. I saw little kids developing survival skills at a very young age. The more you overprotect your child; the less he or she will be able to develop his or her own survival device. That is a much more severe handicap ensuring it Make your child an actor in the surgical process. Explain to him or her what will be done. Don’t do anything against his or her will. After all it is you child’s body you are talking about. You child must feel the owner of his or her body. Even deciding on the day of the surgery is important. I suffered a lot from being deprived of that decision power. Your child’s sense of time is not the same as yours. As parents you are projecting years ahead, how your child will be able to work, study, marry, have normal children: all of these are pertinent questions and valid concerns but your child’s preoccupation lies in the present—in facing a group of tough kids who will certainly laugh, or tease, starting a new school year with a new teacher and new classmates; wondering about how painful the dentist session will, be or worrying about not being about to hear the teacher well enough to understand the assignment. Parents should be attentive to what their child is facing in everyday life. It is not easy to develop a happy balance between overprotecting your child and letting him or her battle without your emotional support. Communication is a key factor in accompanying your child in a helpful way. Listen to what they are saying, his body language, his expression of stress and fear. Bear in mind that your child is doing the best he can, given the circumstances. Do not ask him to compete with kids his age, to obtain the same school results. Your child with tcs will need twice as much effort to obtain the same results of average kids. They will need to face hearing impairment, and a higher level of stress when the relationships with the classmates or the teachers is difficult. The psychologist Maslow demonstrated that in order to learn and reach a higher level of thinking and development one must have the basic needs fulfilled: food, a dwelling and basic security and group belonging. When suffering from a facial difference one often feels in a state of imminent danger, which slows the learning process. Another factor that parents tend to forget in their rush to fix things is how much the child is helping you. My parents had no idea how much I kept to myself so as not to worry them, not to burden them further. If you accept the child as an actor in the process, it will become a lot easier to find solutions. If the child is regarded as a thing to be manipulated the child will feel like a victim instead of a participant.”

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Smelling, Standing and Not Skipping: Notes on Functional Integration with Dogs Cliff Smyth

It is impossible for a human to know a dog’s experience. But there is a great pleasure in the sensing, moving, and feeling that can happen between species—especially ones that may have co-evolved for tens of thousands of years. Estimates vary between 2,000 and 00,000 years of “domestication” of dogs by humans or “co-evolution” of dogs and humans—depending on the theory to which you subscribe.¹ Although working with dogs is a small part of my practice, it provides a great learning opportunity for my understanding of the art and science of practicing the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education. Because working with dogs is not taught in Feldenkrais basic training programs or advanced trainings, I was faced with the challenge of making it up on my own, of adapting what I had learned from my training and experience to this new situation. However, working with dogs is a bit like being “A Feldenkrais Practitioner on Mars.”² For example, as I come up the stairs to meet Sophie, a new client, she barks loudly and growls deeply. I gently lower my hand. She takes my invitation, suspiciously at first, and sniffs my fingers. Then she takes the initiative. She sniffs my jeans, my shoes, and again my hands. We are introduced—at least enough for her to let me into her home. Dogs have over 4 times the olfactory mucous membrane area of humans.³ Smell is a vital part of their sensory universe informing social behaviors such as greeting humans and other dogs, not to mention their hunting and foraging activities.⁴ If Moshe Feldenkrais had worked with dogs, he might have written an article titled, “The Primacy of Smelling.” The challenges of working with another species are not just in the realm of sensory preferences and capabilities. When starting to work with dogs I was confronted by many issues including what constitutes a function for a dog: their eating, sitting, standing, and walking; and communication with ears, tail and their whole body. Then there are the differences between dog and human anatomy that represent their different lives and evolution. Important differences associated with four-legged locomotion include a horizontal spine and pelvis, and an evolutionary history of hunting, scavenging, and pack behaviors. Then there is the additional challenge of working almost completely on a non-verbal level. Humans in the dog’s social system can provide some information about their history of injuries, observed behaviors, and preferences. A verbal dialogue with the client, however, is not an option. Ruby was my first canine client. Her humans were students in my Awareness Through Movement classes and they were desperate to find someone who could help her run and climb stairs again. Ruby walked with a pronounced limp. She had fallen off a 45-foot cliff onto concrete and a piece of

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rebar had pierced her chest, badly injuring her pectoral muscles. I agreed to visit Ruby and see if there was anything I could do. No guarantees. Ruby’s owners asked me if I wanted to see her X-rays, because she had also broken a sternebra. A sternebra? It was time for some research. It turns out a dog’s sternum is made up of several sternebrae, segments connected by sternebral cartilage, so the sternenbra is neither fully articulated by synovial joints, nor fully fused as is a human sternum. Sternebrae can be displaced or broken in an accident. I also thought of Linda Tellington-Jones and her TTouch® work with animals. I re read her book⁵ and watched her video⁶ on working with dogs. She has developed a wonderful body of practice for working with animals, especially with behavioral issues. Her work was a timely reminder that dogs live in a highly complex social world. When working with any new canine client, I often recall Yochanon Rywerant’s reminder at the 994 fgna Conference about how important it is to reassure the limbic system, associated with the sense of safety and flight-or-fight responses, before we can successfully communicate with the supra-limbic parts of the brain. Thus my first strategy is to visit the dog in his or her own home. The one dog who came to my office interrupted our session every two minutes to sniff around the perimeter of the room in which we were working. The second strategy is to establish contact through touch. The Tellington TTouch®,7 using repeated circular touches all over the animal’s skin, is very useful for calming a dog client. Other strategies include pacing the dog’s breath and touching the dog’s ears, something I also learned from Linda Tellington-Jones’s work. Probably reflecting the importance of hearing for dogs, their ears have more muscular development than humans. Indeed there are at least 2 muscles of a dog’s head involved in the movement of their ears.8 Touching a dog’s ears can produce a deepening of breath and a reduction in tonus in the whole system. The process of establishing contact and calming is a necessary aspect of Functional Integration lessons with dogs. When we reflect on canine evolution (despite their different breeds all dogs are the same species, Canis familiaris), we observe a very alert and quick, highly responsive nervous system. A nervous system that evolved and adapted to survival, mostly in hierarchical social groups, where other animals competed for food resources, and where they were threatened by larger predators. Subsequent breeding by humans has emphasized many of the attributes and behaviors of undomesticated canids. These include acute olfactory and auditory (but sometimes not visual) abilities associated with the defense of group members or territory; and identifying, stalking, rounding up, attacking, killing, and carrying game. Dogs also have the ability to understand many communicative behaviors—originally in the pack, and now also from humans. They are highly attuned to a myriad of subtle canine and human gestures—including many unintentional ones from humans! Individual dogs have been observed to respond to over 50 distinct commands from humans conveyed by movement, posture, hand signals, and voice.9 Dog clients can be downright jumpy—their nervous systems are like that. They often display survival behaviors of “alertness and quick response to stress.”0 I avoid sudden and unexpected sounds or gestures. Often sessions are interrupted as the dog investigates the arrival of someone to the home, a strange noise, or interesting smell. But, on the other hand, we have bred dogs that can tolerate the anxiety of interspecies contact, providing an easy opening for us to establish relationship. Indeed, most dogs are now kept for human companionship. In my experience, an important part of the first few Functional Integration lessons is to establish a sense of calm contact. Given time and attention, most dogs are able to enter into this calmer state. I have found that it is often not possible to work hands-on with a dog for even 45 minutes. They

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appear to often need a break—not just a pause—from being touched every 5, 0, or 20 minutes or so. Eventually, over a series of lessons, some dogs will stay still for longer lessons. Ruby stood with one of her front legs out to the side at about 30 degrees from the vertical. When she walked, the injured leg came under her chest to some extent, but was still out to the side. When she tried to run or climb stairs the paw frequently slipped out from under her. I knew from my research that dogs have virtually no clavicle. There are no bony connections or synovial joints between the forelimb and the axial skeleton. To stand, walk, and run the strong pectoral muscles function to adduct the limb. Having no clavicle allows them to move freely, to swing their forelimb forward and back for rapid locomotion.2 After establishing rapport and helping Ruby feel safe, I began to explore if I could help her regain some options for comfortable and efficient movement. Thinking about evoking the functions of standing, walking, and running while the dog is at rest, I work a lot of the time with the dog lying on its side. The approaches to Functional Integration are similar to work with humans. For example, I outlined the bones of Ruby’s leg and shoulder, touching around and clarifying the outside edge and spine of the scapula where many of the muscles from the spine and the upper forelimb attach. Lifting the leg that is on top (sometimes the uninjured leg, sometimes the injured one) to a height approximating standing I pushed through her radius and ulna (from the end of the bones or the carpal pad) and humerus (from the elbow). As I lightly pushed—slightly changing the height, the turn, the angle through the joints with each push—I felt for Ruby’s response, for the way the muscles of her leg and shoulder began to re-organize . . . until I was able to see a tiny movement in her spine and feel that I was connecting to her spine from her leg. Rather than just sliding up the scapula or bunching up the muscles, I found, without force, a functional pathway for weight bearing. I watched her breath to see how she responded. If the breathing was steady, I continued to explore. Several times as we worked with the injured leg, she took a deep sigh. Having found what I hope is a comfortable angle to push as for standing, I could use my hands to suggest the angles of force for sitting with the front legs long, as well as her need to be able to swing her paw forward in walking and running. It is difficult to push through the pads of a dog’s feet, the phalanges manis and phalanges pedis. This would be equivalent to pushing through the fingers and toes of a human. They are important for walking, and seem to have a similar function to human toes of providing grip for the completion of each stride. In dog locomotion it is the metacarpal and metatarsal pads that make contact before the digital pads.2 Many dogs dislike having their pads and feet touched or manipulated. When I gain their trust, some dogs let me touch their feet. Then it has been possible to push through their pads—to push back at an angle to the leg while moving the leg in a stepping motion. Dogs cannot “lock” their knee joints, unlike some animals such as horses, elephants, and humans. Those animals can “stack” the upper and lower leg bones with little or no muscular activity to stabilize the joint. This is how horses can sleep while standing. But if a dog does not have adequate neuromuscular organization of their hind legs then standing and walking quickly becomes impossible. After a few sessions Ruby was sitting and standing with her front legs at the same angle. She was running and climbing the stairs with ease. Mason was a 6-year-old Great Dane—getting quite old for his breed. He had a spinal stenosis that was causing diffuse neurological problems. The veterinary hospital diagnosed it as inoperable. He had stopped walking and his owners were considering euthanasia, as carrying him downstairs to urinate and defecate was becoming difficult. Using similar ideas that had worked with Ruby, and

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focusing initially on movement with his hind legs, I found that ways of directing force through Mason’s femur from near the stifle (or knee) initially helped the most. Later I was able, while stabilizing the knee, to push through his tibia and fibula (from the ends of the bones and near the tarsal pads) into his hip joints. Again, I was thinking of the angles needed for standing and walking. Initially this pushing caused a clonic reaction, but through using less force sometimes and at other times maintaining a steady pressure, the shaking stopped. I also touched his pelvis and greater trochanters to clarify the relationships between his axial skeleton and legs. For example, holding his pelvis still with one hand, while pushing though his leg with my other hand, increased compression, and presumably sensation in and of the hip joint. Then I let the pelvis move with the push through the leg. After the first lesson, Mason got up of his own accord and walked. Once Mason was willing to stand again he had trouble flexing his forepaws and transferring weight onto the back of those paws (onto the carpal pads). Even as he stood, it was as if he was leaning back toward sitting—making it difficult to stand on his hind limbs. On investigation, I found that one of Mason’s shoulders was restricted. It felt tight and heavy. He seemed reluctant to let me move it. I had noticed already that it appeared that the spinal stenosis was triggering small, rapid fasciculations in the muscles of this shoulder. By taking time, by moving the shoulder with the movements of the ribs (for example, I put my hand between his forelimb and ribs and was pacing the breath), by supporting his leg in a “standing” position and by simulating gentle walking movements with his whole forelimb, I found Mason able to move this shoulder more easily and his ability to flex this forepaw improved. After this, I was able to push alternately into each leg (on the same side) to suggest the feeling of weight shift in walking. I saw Mason once every week or two for more than a year and he continued to walk. On one trip to the country he walked over half a mile. He lived for more than a year longer with his littermate and constant companion, Dixon, before the progression of the stenosis again stopped him from walking. In the literature on gait, I learned that dogs with injuries to their rear legs, pelvis, or spine often alter their gait when running. They adopt a skipping motion with their two hind limbs, both legs moving together. Teddy was a Corgi who had been skipping instead of running for some time. One rear paw was sensitive to touch, maybe painful to use. When I first worked with him, he was also losing his footing as he turned while running, his hind legs sliding out from under him. Functional Integration with Teddy focused on pushing through his legs and also clarifying the relationship of the bones of the legs with the pelvis. Thinking of the function of running, I realized it was important that he could sense the strong forward push from his hind legs. Much of the power for running comes from the pelvis and some flexion and extension of the dog’s spine. Therefore, my lessons with Teddy also focused on pushing through his spine from the sitting bones toward his head to simulate pushing off with his hind limbs. This can be done first by slowly pushing into the actual curve of the spine, and sensing the vertebral linkages—imagining the movement traveling vertebra by vertebra—to establish the bony connection. Then, thinking of the pure line of force from the sit bone to the skull, pushing more lightly and quickly. Finally, alternating pushing through each sitting bone to simulate the pushing off with alternate hind legs. Next, I swung both fore- and hind legs (on the same side) forward and back together (simulating trotting) and moved them opposite (simulating a full run or galloping).3 In dogs, movements of walking or running are initiated with the forelimbs4 and so good co-ordination of front and back limbs is imperative. After our lessons together, Teddy was able to reduce the amount of skipping and was more able to run with differentiated movement of his hind legs. His hindquarters no longer slid out from under him as he took corners dashing around his apartment. Diagonal gait patterns are very important for dogs. Often if one paw is injured, the dog does not use the diagonally opposite paw and leg as strongly, or in the same alignment, as the limbs on the 4

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opposite diagonal. One way of giving a dog the sense of the need and possibility to use all four legs equally as possible is by having the dog stand, then bending and lifting the limb that is least functional. This seems to reinforce the experience of the “extra” work being done by the other three limbs, and the dog may begin to use the injured limb more. This seems to suggest to the dog the possibility of using the injured, painful, or underutilized limb again without initially having to put full weight on it. One approach to this I have used—also shown by Linda Tellington-Jones in her video—is to support the dog in standing. For example, using a towel under its torso, and then lifting the limbs—often starting with the limb diagonally opposite the injured limb. Working with active young dogs, like Sophie the Pit Bull, also requires creative thinking. Sophie had a hard life. She was a rescue dog. Her left front paw had been run over by a car, her rear right had been cut on glass on the street. Sophie had little tolerance for standing for minutes on end on three legs. To help her, I was able to adapt one of her favorite activities: wrestling for her ball. I pulled on the ball in her mouth from different angles and heights with Sophie pulling back. At first I encouraged her to use her favored diagonal and then the diagonal where she had injured both paws, and then straight backward. In this way, I was able to get her to pull backward, and therefore push forward, more effectively with all her legs. Soon her gait became more even. Dogs do not have the lumbar lordosis that is characteristic of humans (because of our upright organization). In activities such as running a dog needs some flexion and extension along the spine, along with lengthening and shortening of their abdominal muscles and fascia. This is particularly clear when they are running fast, and climbing uphill or upstairs. Lucky was a Borzoi who lived in a house on a hill. She stopped being able to climb stairs. The first thing I noticed about Lucky was the strong flexion through the whole length of her spine and how her tail was tucked strongly up under her abdomen. I touched her ribs and paced her breath, noticing she shuddered as I approached the lower border of her ribcage. I asked her owners about this. They said that Lucky had undergone abdominal surgery to remove a bowel obstruction. I began by working slowly with the movements of her breath; clarifying the bony borders of her abdominal cavity; and working gently with her hip joints, pelvis, and spine. I also worked with her tail over several lessons. Starting proximally, I gently flexed the joints, then made small circles with each vertebra in relation to ones next to it. Gradually she was able to start to extend her tail. Lucky began to rest and stand with her pelvis less flexed and her tail not tucked under. Walking up stairs became easier for Lucky. When I was finally able to touch her abdominal muscles she had tremendous peristalsis along with many deep breaths. Dogs, like most humans, have preferences for how they lie, such as preferring one side, or to lean on one elbow. Sometimes the preference can be seen in the organization of the spine: for example, in standing; in the direction the dog will turn spontaneously to look behind itself or turn while backing up, or by observing the side to which the dog wags its tail more. I often work with dogs in side lying simply reinforcing their preference by bringing their ribs closer together on the side of the torso not on the floor; and by moving the ribs and bones of the sternum more into the direction of the curve of the spine. Or I push through the sitting bones or from the transverse processes of the more cranial vertebrae into the shape of the curve. Or, for example, if the dog rests on its left elbow (forelimb), I can lift the right forelimb from the elbow to bring the dog’s spine more into its curved shape. The same can be done with one forelimb if the dog is sitting with its pelvis down and leaning on its forelimbs. Frequently, it seems, dogs prefer to lie on the side with an injured limb. With many dogs it is not easy to ever get them to lie on their nonhabitual side. Sometimes reinforcing the side-lying preference can stimulate the dog to switch to the opposite side. In almost all my lessons with dogs, as with humans, I spend some time working the movement of the ribs with breathing. At rest, dogs breathe at about 5 to 40 breaths per minute 5

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depending on age and other factors, but when panting to cool themselves they can breathe at 200 breaths per minute. Sometimes dogs seem to take breaths in a number of stops or sips, which may have something to do with panting or smelling. It can take some time to find, pace, and calm the breath of a dog client. Teddy, the dominant Corgi, once reminded me of the significance of body position. In one of my less aware moments, I put both my hands underneath instead of on top of his ribcage while Teddy was lying on his side. Responding, I can guess, as if I were intending to roll him onto his back into a submissive position, he growled and snapped at me. Not a mistake I will make again. On the other hand, very submissive dogs may roll onto their backs as soon as I start working with them, therefore requiring reassurance that is acceptable to lie on their side. When working with dogs I think about helping the dog stand, walk, trot and gallop, sit, lie, and breathe more efficiently and comfortably. I work on clarifying the shape, position, and relationships of parts of its skeleton in relationship to gravity and movement. I consider the dog’s tendencies and preferences for pressure, pacing, level of arousal, and about how through touch I can communicate while respecting these preferences. I reflect on the relationship between function and struc-ture: what dogs need to be able to do and how a dog’s sensory apparatus, skeleton, and muscles are an expression of this; and how I can interact with their decidedly non-human structure to help improve their functioning. While we can’t know a dog’s experience, I think for a Feldenkrais practitioner there is much value in working with another species: to study comparative anatomy, to develop one’s appreciation of whole-body non-verbal communication, to reflect on how the key ideas and practices of our Method are highlighted in this utterly new context. Working with dogs has also been a lot of fun for me. I value the small pleasures of having a jumpy dog fall deeply asleep as I pace its breath. And I cherish the overall enjoyment of being part of that spontaneity and undivided being-inthe-world that dogs seem to take into doing their essentially doggy activities—running, smelling, chasing, being with their dog and human companions. Like Sophie: I was delighted to see her again leaping in and out of the old truck that her owner uses for her dog-walking business, sitting up front, smiling—with her cheeks and ears gently drawn back—ready for the next adventure.

a note on reading: If you are not an experienced dog owner or trainer—or even if you are—I highly recommend reading a book or two on canine behavior and canine-human communication before beginning to work with dogs. Stanley Coran’s How to Speak Dog and Particia McConnell’s The Other End of the Leash are excellent. Most books on canine anatomy tend to present static anatomy for veterinary purposes (such as Evans or Goody7) but I was able to find one book that contained useful information on dog biomechanics (such as Adams) and others aimed at dog breeders with descriptions of the various dog gaits (such as Elliot3). Her book introduced me, for example, to differences between single and dual tracking in dog locomotion. Again, some study of canine anatomy and movement will benefit any practitioner thinking of working with dogs. 6

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references . Newby, Jonica. The Animal Attraction: Humans and their Animal Companions. Sydney: ABC Books, 999, Chapter , pp. –32. 2. In An Anthropololgist on Mars, New York: Vintage/Random House, 995, Oliver Sacks provides a number of fascinating case studies for people with uniquely different neurological conditions that lead them to encounter the world in ways very different than most of us. 3. Newby, p. 25. 4. McConnell, Patricia. The Other End of the Leash: Why We Do What We Do Around Dogs, New York: Ballantine Books, 2002, pp. 65–83. 5. Tellington-Jones, Linda, with Sybil Taylor, The Tellington Ttouch. New York: Penguin, 992. 6. Tellington-Jones, Linda. TTouch for Dogs and Puppies. Video. LaQuinta, California: 993. 7. Evans, Howard E. Miller’s Anatomy of the Dog, Third edition. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company/ Harcourt Brace, 993, pp. 269–274. See also: Peter C. Goody. Dog Anatomy: A Pictorial Approach to Canine Structure. London: J.A. Allen, 997. 8. Coren, Stanley. The Intelligence of Dogs. New York: Free Press/Simon and Schuster, 994, 2006, pp. 97–24; and How to Speak Dog. New York: Free Press/Simon and Schuster, 2000. Also McConnell, Chapters  and 2, pp. –37. 9. Newby, p. 35. 0. Newby, Chapter 2, pp. 33–6. . Adams, Donald R. Canine Anatomy: A systemic study. The Iowa State University Press/AMES, 998, p. 86. (4th edition, Blackwell Publishing Limited, 2003.) 2. Adams, p. 8. 3. Elliot, Rachael Page. The New Dog Steps, New York: Howell Book House Inc., 984. 4. Adams, p. 8

Thanks to Jaclyn Boone, Deborah Bowes, Elizabeth Beringer, Judy Windt and Gay Sweet Scott for their editorial suggestions.

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Freedom and the Feldenkrais Method¹ Anna Yeatman When a Feldenkrais practitioner facilitates someone’s capacity to move more easily and functionally, to have a more complete self image, to engage more fully in living her life, to learn and become more resilient, and above all to release herself from habitual patterns of action, surely this person’s freedom is enhanced. There is a case to be made for thinking about the relationship of the Feldenkrais Method to freedom. Perhaps Moshe Feldenkrais is best understood as a practical philosopher of freedom. He is not unlike other practical philosophers of freedom and shares common ground with the political philosopher, Hannah Arendt. The Feldenkrais Method invites persons to explore their possibilities of being in the world in such a way that they may live more freely. Freedom refers to the quality of their functioning in an everchanging environment: A person who moves freely moves easily and fluently; she is aware of herself, open to options, and able to fit her actions to her intentions. Feldenkrais did [or, The Feldenkrais Method does, which seems awkward] not consider movement to be the only modality of action. Action also includes feeling, sensing, and thinking. It is, however, through movement that a particular human being engages in a vital as well as dynamic relationship to her environment. Through self movement, a person positions herself in the world: As Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (999, xxi) proposes, through self positioning, a human being acquires a sense of “I” that provides the “foundation of our conceptual life, that is, the foundation of an ever-growing store of corporeal concepts, concepts such as ‘inside’, ‘heavy’, ‘light’, ‘open’, ‘close’, concepts having to do with consequential relationships, and so on.” In developing a method of facilitating awareness through movement, Moshe Feldenkrais invites one to be aware of oneself as a center of animation (Sheets-Johnstone’s phrase 999, xv), and on the basis of this self-valuing, to learn to trust and explore her experience of engagement with her environment. As Feldenkrais writes, “It is important to understand that if a man wishes to improve his self-image, he must first of all learn to value himself as an individual, even if his faults as a member of society appear to him to outweigh his qualities” (Feldenkrais 990: 9). And: “I use the movements only to improve the process of self organization” (Amherst Training, June 5 980). Thus for Feldenkrais, the human being is free to develop or improve his or her ability, “that is, to expand the boundaries of the possible” (990: 57). In what follows, I bring Feldenkrais’s conception of freedom into dialogue with that of Hannah Arendt. I begin with a description of some of the intellectual currents of their time and then consider two additional themes in their work: the relation of effort or will to action and their insistence that freedom requires interaction with others.

I. Both of these extraordinary twentieth-century thinkers were born around the same time—Moshe Feldenkrais (904-984), Hannah Arendt (906-975)—in the part of Europe associated with large Jewish communities—Feldenkrais in Ukraine; Arendt in Germany. They no doubt shared the legacies of Eastern European Jewish intellectual culture during the period before World War, a period still shaped by hope for revolutionary change of the kind that would make European society more just, inclusive, and egalitarian. Revolutionary social movements included the Jewish Bund. (Arendt (970: 35) dates the end of this era with the murder of Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish Jew, in 99 by ‘members of the ultra-nationalist and officially illegal Freicorps’, an act of complicity between the Social Democratic government of the Weimar Republic and an historically new kind of ultra nationalist populism.) Feldenkrais and Arendt also shared an intellectual climate that involved a critique of the Western metaphysical dualism of subject and object. Many associate this critique with Heidegger’s attempt

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to offer an account of philosophy outside the framework of metaphysics (see Bambach 995, Dreyfus 2006) and, elsewhere, with the development of systems theory. The critique of subject-object dualism corresponds to several ideas familiar both to Feldenkrais practitioners and to readers of Arendt. First, the critique challenges philosophies of “human nature” that presuppose a separation of the human subject from its world (subject-object dualism); the human being is, rather, positioned in a dynamic relationship to its environment. In this connection, consider Feldenkrais’s statement: “Man’s life is a continuous process, and the improvement is needed in the quality of the process, not in his properties or disposition” (990: 33). It follows that “individuality” does not denote a set of essential attributes belonging to a particular human subject or person, but refers to the dynamic patterning of the way of being that is the person in relation to her environment. Feldenkrais (990: 20) makes this point: “A man tends to regard his self-image as something bestowed upon him by nature, although it is, in fact, the result of his own experience. His appearance, voice, way of thinking, environment, his relationship to space and time—to choose at random—are all taken for granted as realities born with him, whereas every important element in the individual’s relationship to other people and to society in general is the result of extensive training.” Furthermore, the instinctual bases for human conduct in relation to its environment are less important than the open horizon of possibilities for human being-in-the-world that are offered by the human capacities to think about reality and to use speech to explore and convey meaning. The automatic process of the life cycle is interrupted, according to Arendt, by the distinctively human capacity for bringing about something new through speech and action (Arendt 958: 76, and Arendt 977: 68-7). Insofar as particular human beings always live in an environment with others, their specific temporal-spatial positioning is articulated in relation to a wider shared temporal-spatial positioning (what Heidegger calls facticity or historicity). The horizon of one’s experience always implicates others, both in their presence as the normative force of society (das Man for Heidegger) and, as Arendt emphasized, as persons whose capacity to ‘illuminate’ human possibilities calls forth our own possi-bilities. In honoring the philosopher Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt speaks of “the realm of humanitas which everyone can come to out of his own origins.” She (970a: 80) continues: “Those who enter it [this realm] recognize one another, for then they are ‘like sparks, brightening to a more luminous glow, dwindling to invisibility, alternating and in constant motion. The sparks see one another, and each flames more brightly because it sees others’ and can hope to be seen by them.” The historicity of lived experience—whether singular, plural, or collective—frames human awareness. We shape our relationship both to our present and to our past through the ways we take up (or fail to take up) the open horizon of future possibility. Bambach (995: 220) presents Heidegger’s phenomenological conception of temporality as one that is centered in experience and that must therefore be opposed to an implicitly theological conception of “narrative, developmental time” as a sequence of stages: “Because historical science was organized around the theme of narrative, developmental time, it tended to conceal the genuine meaning of temporality as a unity of what Heidegger termed three temporal ecstasies: ‘the phenomenon of the future as a ‘coming-toward’ [Zukunft], the past as a ‘having been’ [Gewesenheit] and the present as a ‘waiting-toward’ [Gegenwart].” For Arendt, freedom of action can occur only in what she calls the gap that opens up “between past and future.” Peg Birmingham comments of this idea of the gap between past and future in a way that not only illuminates Arendt’s thought but Feldenkrais’s idea that we can do something other than be caught in past habitual patterns of action: . . . The gap between the past and the future is a “moment of deflection” that produces a third force. This is the force of the present. The present is neither a complete break with the past (a kind of rupture) nor is it a moment of transition to the future. Instead, the force of the past, rather than being originary, is deflected, thereby projecting something aberrant or other into the present. The future, the “not-yet”

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emerges in the deflective force of the past. There will have been movement back . . . to the future, another way to think the future anterior. . . . The past is an anteriority that constantly introduces an aberration or difference into the future through this deflective or disjunctive present. The deflective present, therefore does not simply repeat the past but also initiates the new (Birmingham 2006: 6).

Finally, intentionality is the kind of agency that is involved in directing one’s movement towards something; it is kinetic in nature and entails a “movement of meaning.” Bambach’s (995: 23) discussion of Heidegger’s notion of intentionality resonates with Feldenkrais work: “ ‘Every lived experience’, Heidegger argued, ‘directs itself toward something’; that is, it is not an intra mentem coordination of the physical and the psychical but a kinetic, dynamic center, a movement of meaning (Sinn) which breaks with the Cartesian, objectless subject who first must proceed outward toward the object.”

II. Feldenkrais and Arendt share a conception of freedom that belongs to the intellectual climate described above. First, both Feldenkrais and Arendt refuse to accept an account of freedom in terms of will; indeed both argue that will-power (the will-to-power) not only interferes with, but profoundly undermines a person’s capacity for free action. Feldenkrais and Arendt both think of freedom, not as willing, but as the opening of new and, thus, unknown or unpredictable possibilities of action. For this opening to happen, a person cannot be subject to force, not even the supposedly “internal” force of the will. Second, both Feldenkrais and Arendt take for granted that one’s conduct is deeply shaped by one’s environment. Feldenkrais implies that the most significant aspect of the individual’s environment in this respect is her parents in the first instance, and the normative force of society in the second (mediated usually by means of the first of these two forces). Feldenkrais (August 4, 980) declares: “None of us want to do what our parents did—none of us!” Arendt may not have identified with this statement. She was brought up by a mother who proudly identified as Jewish and produced, of course, a sense of being outside “society.” Arendt did not have an agonistic relationship with a parent (as Feldenkrais did with his father). In her portrayal of Rosa Luxemburg’s Polish-Jewish background—Arendt’s mother was a great admirer of Rosa Luxemburg—Arendt speaks of a distinctive milieu which “has now completely disappeared.” It is hard not to think she is also thinking of her mother’s milieu: “Its nucleus consisted of assimilated Jews from middle-class families whose cultural background was German . . . whose political formation was Russian, and whose moral standards in both private and public life were uniquely their own. These Jews, an extremely small minority in the East, an even smaller percentage of assimilated Jewry in the West, stood outside all social ranks, Jewish or non-Jewish, hence had no conventional prejudices whatsoever, and had developed, in this truly splendid isolation, their own code of honor” (Arendt 970b: 40-4). She goes onto say of this code of honor: “The hidden equalizer of those who always treated one another as equals—and hardly anybody else—was the essentially simple experience of a childhood world in which mutual respect and unconditional trust, a universal humanity and a genuine, almost naïve contempt for social and ethnic distinctions were taken for granted” (Arendt 970b: 4). Both Feldenkrais and Arendt recognize that freedom does not reside in or result from willful flight from others. Both are interested in how one’s relations to others can be practically approached and thought about so as to invite and facilitate freedom. Let me take the issues of the relation of freedom to the will and to a world with others in turn. In Feldenkrais’s own Awareness Through Movement (atm) classes, he often says something like this: If you use effort, it is because you do not think you can do the movement. In atm classes, teachers continually remind students to find ways of doing a movement without making effort. In encouraging students to do a lesson without effort, the teacher is engaging in a complex mode of facilitation of individual learning, one that is oriented to bringing a student into relationship with possibilities of

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movement that lie beyond her habitual patterns of movement in the world. Habitual patterns are all too likely to have been shaped by will-power, by the student’s compulsion to act in ways that society (as mediated by her parents) think she ought to. When a student shapes her conduct according to norms that she imposes through will on herself, she loses her connection with what she has “naturally” the ability to do—to sense, feel, think, and move. “Natural” is a tricky word here. For Feldenkrais it refers to a cultural-social-evolutionary heritage of being human that is expressed in a repertoire of ability—how a group uses language, moves, makes artifacts, and so forth—that is passed on from one generation to another. This does not mean that this repertoire of ability does not change or develop over time, or that it is in any way “simple” (Feldenkrais 990: 25). In using the term “natural” for this kind of acquired ability, Feldenkrais is distinguishing it from ability that is either mediated by individual engagement in self-education or by the professionalization of ability. (Here I am working with Feldenkrais’s (990: 40-49) conception of what he calls “strata of development.”) When an activity is professionalized, the process itself is subject to method, systematization, and reflective specification. The paradox of such professionalization is that, while it may improve how things are done, it can also displace a person’s confidence in her own capacity to learn how to be a human being in the world (or more specifically to judge for herself ): “We may observe how natural practices have gradually given away to acquired methods, to ‘professional’ methods, and that society in general refuses to allow the individual the right to employ the natural method, forcing him instead to learn the accepted way before it will permit him to work” (Feldenkrais 990: 27). Feldenkrais seems to suggest that scientism—the conception of science as the only true kind of knowledge—leads to the displacement of experience as the basis of learning and development.2 Of course, by “natural” Feldenkrais did not mean that learning is automatic; it demands of a person work, attention, and a desire to learn from her experience—factors other than schooled comportment. Feldenkrais work invites a student to discover her own experience of movement and to use her experience of her own skeletal connection with the ground, for instance, as a touchstone for judging the guidance she receives from a teacher. A well-taught lesson invites the student to put aside habitual patterns of will or effort (or command) and to open up a space for exploring and listening to what may be entirely new possibilities for action. Only in the absence of force can one explore, improve, and develop one’s own abilities. Through sensing and becoming aware of ourselves moving, we each develop capacities for having experiences that are our own and that express our unique being in the world, which are no longer confused with or displaced by how others seem to want us to be. When we free ourselves to become open to, and thus, in a very real sense, free ourselves to “have” our own experiences, we learn to distinguish our experience from what it is we may feel we “ought” to feel, sense, or do. On the basis of this knowledge, one learns to trust one’s experience and to use it as a touchstone for what is functional for oneself. Moshe Feldenkrais’s (977: 57) puts the points this way: These lessons are designed to improve ability, that is, to expand the boundaries of the possible: to turn the impossible into the possible, the difficult into the easy, and the easy into the pleasant. For only those activities that are easy and pleasant will become part of a man’s habitual life and will serve him at all times. Actions that are hard to carry out, for which man must force himself to overcome his inner opposition, will never become part of his normal daily life; as he gets older he will lose his ability to carry them out at all.

Feldenkrais, always a respecter of reality, did not think we could get rid of our attachment to will; indeed, he valued enormously the use of will to engage in self-improvement. He (August 4, 980) offered the paradoxical insight that the more intelligent an individual is, the more likely she is to be aware of her inferiority—or what others can do that she cannot.3 A person driven by a sense of inferiority may engage in the most remarkable and creative processes of self-improvement. In

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Awareness Through Movement, Feldenkrais distinguishes between use of will for self-education and use of will for self-compulsion: . . . We are speaking of the training of will power and self-control, but not for the purpose of gaining control over ourselves or over other people (Feldenkrais 977: 5). . . . We should differentiate clearly between improvement of ability and sheer effort for its own sake. We shall do better to direct our will power to improving our ability so that in the end our actions will be carried out easily and with understanding (Feldenkrais 977: 57).

Arendt, like Feldenkrais, sees each human being as unique; the birth of each new human is the beginning of something new. Arendt conceives of freedom as the principle of beginning. It interrupts automatic processes and habitual patterns of life. The human being is free not insofar as she wills, but because s/he is a beginning, capable of and having a faculty of beginning (Arendt 977: 67). As Arendt puts it, each human’s being in the world follows from having his “own opening to the world” (Arendt 2005: 5). Whether a human being risks exploring and articulating her uniqueness is another matter. Arendt emphasizes the fragility of this aspect of human beings. She argues that for the capacity of freedom to flourish—for the person to feel valued as a person—a particular kind of space has to open up for articulations and explorations of oneself. She calls this space “the political” and she is as aware that corruption and domination may shut down this space as she is that societal conformity to norms may displace it entirely. Moreover, even when the space of the political offers a worldly space within which freedom can appear, persons may still refuse to risk disclosing themselves through actions or speech (Arendt 958: 80). Arendt’s conception of freedom as both beginning and articulation of oneself contravenes the established Western (and as she sees it, Christian) account of freedom in terms of the will. She offers an account of how the I-will paralyzes the I-can, very similar to the one we find embedded in the Feldenkrais method: “Historically, men first discovered the will when they experienced its impotence and not its power, when they said with [Saint] Paul: ‘For to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not’ (Arendt 977: 6).” She emphasizes how the impotence of the will readily encourages tyranny both over self and over others: “Tyranny at any rate, the only form of government which arises directly out of the I-will, owes its greedy cruelty to an egotism utterly absent from the utopian tyrannies of reason with which the philosophers wished to coerce men and which they conceived on the model of the I-think” (Arendt 977: 63). While Feldenkrais emphasises a freedom that nurtures one’s sense of options about how to live, Arendt emphasizes the freedom of politics. The two converge in understanding freedom as the disclosure of previously-unrecognized possibilities. Both Feldenkrais and Arendt structure such dis-closure as an intersection or encounter between a person’s reality and the reality one shares with others. The disclosure of possibility that emerges in someone’s action is both idiosyncratic and illuminative of human possibility.

Both Arendt and Feldenkrais think that if individuals are to practice freedom—and the emphasis should be on practicing freedom—they have to develop a capacity to think that does not lead them to seek to transcend their conditions but, instead, leads them to engage concretely with these conditions—testing limits, expanding boundaries of the possible, engaging with new beginnings, making new meaning. Thinking of this kind is a worldly activity and for this reason can be practiced only in relation to and in the presence of others. In other words, one engages in the kind of thinking that creates an open horizon for one’s being in the world only by exploring the world one shares with others in such a way that one’s own way of practicing freedom discloses possibilities not just to oneself but to one’s fellows. For this to occur, these others must be present in several capacities: inviting

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a person to disclose her own possibilities; facilitating such disclosure; witnessing it; and communicating what they witness in a way that enables the person to know the truth about herself. The relational space here is shared. Both Arendt and Feldenkrais have difficulty reconciling the inter-personal space that is the essential condition of freedom with “society.” They nevertheless offer a conception of a sociality shared between human beings who are invited to stand forth and present themselves to one another as persons, that is, as unique beings who each have a distinct way of being in the world. Arendt insists that freedom requires the interpersonal space of politics. She associates freedom with the “plural” condition of humankind, rejecting views that celebrate ‘inner freedom’ or that align freedom with self-sufficiency: Hence, in spite of the great influence the concept of an inner, nonpolitical freedom has exerted . . . it seems safe to say that man would know nothing of inner freedom if he had not first experienced a con-dition of being free as a worldly tangible reality. We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves (Arendt 977: 48).

“Plurality” names for Arendt the inter-individual sociality needed to make freedom possible: “Human plurality is the paradoxical plurality of unique beings” (Arendt 958: 76). Like Feldenkrais, Arendt accepts that all organic life manifests “variations and distinctions” (Arendt 958: 76). Only members of the human species though express their distinctiveness and show themselves and their uniqueness as worldly reality, she claims. Only human speech and action disclose uniqueness: Speech and action reveal this unique distinctness. Through them, men distinguish themselves instead of being merely distinct; they are the modes in which human beings appear to each other, not indeed as physical objects, but qua men. This appearance, as distinguished from mere [she means automatic] bodily existence, rests on initiative, but it is an initiative from which no human being can refrain and still be human (Arendt 958: 76).

Socrates illuminates the nature of freedom for Arendt: To Socrates, as to his fellow citizens, doxa was the formulation in speech of what dokei moi, that is, “of what appears to me.” … The assumption was that the world opens up differently to every man according to his position in I; and that the “sameness” of the world, its commonness (koinon, as the Greeks would say, “common to all”) or “objectivity” (as we would say from the subjective viewpoint of modern philosophy), resides in the fact that the same world opens up to everyone and that despite all differences between men and their positions in the world—and consequently their doxai (opinions)—“both you and I are human” (Arendt 2005: 8).

Today’s citizen cannot articulate her opinion without being facilitated in this process by others; she cannot know what it is that she has said or disclosed by way of truth except in the hearing of others who listen to it. Socrates himself saw an even more active role for such facilitation: He saw himself as practicing the art of midwifery or maieutic (and see Fiumara 990, chapter 0 ),“He wanted to help others give birth to what they themselves thought . . . , to find the truth in their doxa” (Arendt 2005: 9). There seems little explicit exploration of the distinctive sociality that makes freedom in the Feldenkrais sense possible in the Feldenkrais world of practice. Yet it is clear from the practice of the method that something like an Arendtian conception of the distinctive sociality of plurality or inter-individuality is at work. It is evident in one-on-one Functional Integration lessons where the practitioner engages in a Socratic form of midwifery : the facilitation of the disclosure of the truth of the being of the other. For Arendt, “Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial and specifically human act must at the same time contain the answer to the question

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asked of every newcomer: ‘Who are you?’” (Arendt 958: 78). The Feldenkrais practitioner who uses her hands in Functional Integration to explore through touch the question of her student as she presents herself today, likewise asks, “Who are you, and what possibilities of being are you ready to explore today?” Both Functional Integration and Awareness Through Movement lessons can be thought of as the art of midwifery in relation to the disclosure of a person’s capacities and possibilities. Practitioners use hands, voice and attention to guide students in the exploration of their possibilities of movement. If this maieutic feature of Feldenkrais practice is easy to recognize, it is less easy to see that another enabling condition of this practice resides in the place for such disclosure. Here I am not referring to the chronic difficulties practitioners have in finding physical space for lessons—although this is surely a connected issue—but to the intangible political space that has to be on offer. Arendt offered her account of freedom after she had both experienced and written about twentieth-century totalitarianism (both Nazism and Stalinism). Feldenkrais lessons would not make sense in a concentration camp or in any situation of oppression, domination, or severe deprivation. My reasoning here is as follows: In any situation that threatens someone’s survival, the person is on alert and must put all her energy into combating the risks and threats to her life. 4 She cannot use her attention for purposes of self awareness. Moshe Feldenkrais was also deeply aware of this: Human beings cannot explore their possibilities for self-improvement if they are reduced to the conditions of bare survival. Both Feldenkrais and Arendt suggest that the issue of survival touches our current condition. They both consider us to have reached a point of reckoning: Either we develop our ability to think or we risk using technological mastery to destroy both ourselves and our world. Feldenkrais helps us to learn about freedom. But it is to Arendt that we must look for the claim that freedom and politics, understood as the secure opening of a public space in which human action and speech can appear, are two sides of the same coin (Arendt 977: 49).

references Arendt, H. (958). The Human Condition, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Arendt, H. (970a). “Karl Jaspers: a Laudatio” in Men in Dark Times, London: Jonathan Cape, 7-94. Arendt, H. (970b). “Rosa Luxemburg: 87-99” in Men in Dark Times, London: Jonathan Cape, pp. 33-57. Arendt, H. (977). “What is Freedom?” in Between Past and Present: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, Penguin Books, 43-73. Arendt, H. (2005). “”in J. Kohn ed. The Promise of Politics, New York: Schocken Books. Bambach, C. (995). Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Birmingham, P. (2006) Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dreyfus, H. (2006). “Heidegger on the connection between nihilism, art, technology, and politics” in C. Guignon ed. The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 345-373. Feldenkrais, M. (June 5, 980). Videotape  43 “Habit Formation and Invariance”, (Amherst Training)— my notes. Feldenkrais, M. (August 4, 980). Videotape 68 “A Sense of Inferiority”, Amherst Training—my notes. Feldenkrais, M. (990). Awareness through Movement: Health Exercises for Personal Growth, Arkana Penguin Books. Fiumara, C. (990). The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening, London and New York: Routledge. Sheets-Johnstone, M. (999). The Primacy of Movement, Amsterdam/Philadephia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

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Winnicott, D. W. (960). “The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship” in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, London: Karnac Books: 37-56.

notes . This is a revised version of an article that appeared in the Feldenkrais Research Journal (2007). Thanks are owed to Gay Sweet Scott for editorial advice. 2. “Scientism means science’s belief in itself: that is, the conviction that we can no longer understand science as one form of possible knowledge, but rather identify knowledge with science,” Habermas cited by Bambach (995:27). 3. My notes on what he said in this talk at this juncture read: It (a sense of inferiority) is an experience which is absolutely justified—if one looks at it, one is really inferior in this or that (so the most intelligent people have the strongest sense of inferiority)—someone will always be better at something than you are. 4. Winnicott made a similar point in relation to the baby: The baby whose environment of care is unreliable and inadequate has difficulty in stabilizing a sense of its own distinct being in the world because it has to interrupt its sense of being in reacting to, and attempting to fend off, these external threats to its being. Here is Winnicott’s own words on the matter: “ . . . it is when things do not go well that the infant becomes aware, not of the failure of maternal care, but of the results, whatever they may be, of that failure; that is to say, the infant becomes aware of reacting to some impingement. As a result of success in maternal care there is built up in the infant a continuity of being which is the basis of ego-strength; whereas the result of each failure in maternal care is that the continuity of being is interrupted by reactions to the consequences of that failure, with resultant ego-weakening. Such interruptions constitute annihilation . . . ” (Winnicott 990:52).

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Interview with Myriam Pfeffer The following interview was conducted and transcribed by Ilanna Nevill in Paris in March 2003. Myriam revised and expanded her comments October 2008. Myriam, could you say something about Moshe’s definition of awareness and how he actually taught it when you were his student? Moshe said, “Awareness is that part of the thinking mechanism which listens to the self while acting.” Another tentative definition was “Awareness is knowledge of what is going on while it is happening and of what you are doing while you are doing it. It is a generalized alertness to present events.” Moshe never actually “taught” us awareness. Through his lessons Moshe allowed us to develop for ourselves the tools for awareness and for learning how to learn. His leitmotiv was “If you know what you are doing you can do what you want.” I don’t know if I can do everything that I want, but at any rate without awareness the automatic performance cannot be changed. When asked whether it was better to do wrong knowingly or unknowingly, Socrates shocked his listeners by replying that it was better to do it knowingly. If you know that it was wrong, he explained, you can change. As Adam knew Eve, in the Hebrew sense, knowing or awareness refers to a relationship. This sense was very present in Moshe’s work. Awareness meant relating—a dynamic relationship with our senses, our emotions, and our surroundings. This knowing happens without mediation, without distraction, in a non-verbal way. One senses oneself absolutely in action, one is in complete relationship with oneself. Simultaneously, we are in resonance with our fellows and with the entire environment. There are no escapes, no doubts. There is no good and bad, there are no faults. The act of awareness is a success in itself. The unity of man, a “unity that embraces all that surrounds him” is recreated. So how do you do this? Moshe guided us in his lessons to sense subtle differences as a young child does through our kinesthetic sense. Perception of what is happening within and around us develops the quality of our attention, listening, discernment, imagining. It is the way in which we can reach true cognition. The way the lesson unfolds invites us to be constantly awake, vigilant to what we are doing, to what we are living. That was one of the ways in which he invited us to develop and deepen our awareness. When I first came to Moshe, I didn’t understand the sense of the lessons, and I worked too hard. It took me time to grasp things. He made a symphony with one, two, or three movements like Mozart with three notes. The lectures by Krishnamurti helped me to understand. The thinking was not the same, but it was a way of thinking very close to Moshe’s. I believe that through Moshe I understood Krishnamurti better, and through Krishnamurti I understood Moshe better. Moshe understood the obstacles and barriers to sensing. We live among people who are “sensorymotor amnesic,” they have lost touch with their own selves. He knew how to create the attitude and the conditions for restoring receptivity for sensing. So would you say the essence of the Method is a particular way of thinking? No, I wouldn’t say that. It’s the attitude, it’s the thinking, feeling, sensing, and acting within the environment—all together as one unity. Aristotle defined the soul through its functions. He characterized life through the sensory centre and through movement. From this perspective, transposed to our domain, change and healing are nothing but becoming more alive, reviving the self. It’s about sensing the dams that restrain life and the sluices that allow life to flow. By reactivating the movement through sensing, the practitioner and the student simulate other forms of life, let go old patterns by finding new ones. We reinvent life from the multitude of possibilities by exploration as a baby does. 26

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When the Method is taught in the way Moshe thought, and probably most Feldenkrais practitioners think, the learning process involves the whole human being and the environment. That requires the necessary time for maturation—first to reduce effort, to practice slowness, to listen, to be delicate. Once we do less we can be receptive and sense; our attention can be free. It is important to differentiate between awareness, attention, and concentration. When I was teaching yoga I could do the postures well, I demonstrated them to the students, and told them what to do. Yet I sensed that there was something missing. I wouldn’t say that Yoga didn’t help me in some ways—after all it was through Yoga I came to Moshe—but in the beginning it also created some difficulties. When I began introducing Feldenkrais into my Yoga lessons the students would tell me, “Tell us what to do and stop asking questions!” Later I understood that telling people what to do disconnects them from their own process. Once a person knows what he has to do, he becomes closed. During ten years of taking Alexander Yanai Awareness Through Movement (atm) Lessons, I brought my Yoga students closer and closer to the Feldenkrais Method. Some people left me, some people stayed, new people came and also slowly adopted this way of thinking. They came to understand that they could learn only from themselves. Many people came to Alexander Yanai because they had problems. They knew it was important for them; after the atm lesson they felt better and came back regularly. Some people probably understood it, and some less. Not everybody grasped the spirit of the lesson. Friday classes were for professionals, for dance teachers, teachers of all kinds of movement, therapists, and so on. These were more challenging for Moshe because the students could understand more of what he meant—these are the lessons Moshe recorded. I went to all the classes three times a week because I was fascinated. I could see how important and meaningful this way of “teaching” is for the human brain. Today, biologists have shown that the brain is activated in the same way by imagination as it is by the movement itself. This is what Moshe achieved. He would turn Functional Integration (fi) lessons into atm sessions. He wanted to bring the work to all humanity.

Did you notice a difference between the way Moshe taught the general public, people with backaches and so on, and how he taught professionals? There was no difference. Every lesson carried the germ of the thought, and that was what made an impact. Later the lessons taped for the professionals were given to everybody. On the basis of your experience how did you define—at that time and for those people— what one is really looking for in awareness? First, it is essential to reduce effort. This is first because—whether you want to or not—when you do something with unnecessary effort you cannot sense. That is the Weber-Fechner Law. It took me some time to understand that the less you do, the more you are attentive and listen, the more you sense, and the clearer the representation is of what you are doing. You are thus able to simulate and anticipate the movement. Once you can imagine the movement, you can do it. It is like shining a light through your self. Where are the impediments to transmission of strength? Is the vivifying sap going through, or does it stop some where? I don’t think such insight comes suddenly. When someone understands depends on their level of maturation. Understanding cannot be achieved by will power; the more you want the less it happens. It’s an emergent capacity. It came to me gradually. I learned the most when I began to teach atm and fi. So what does a person ideally need to “get it”? The closer you get, the further the horizon. It isn’t easy. It really demands that you call everything into question. That is the difficulty. It has to be a free experience, without dogmatism, without presuppositions, free of attachments, free of imprisonment in certain biases. It needs a shift in the way of thinking, sensing, feeling, acting, and therefore a general change of attitude and values. It is 27

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a metamorphosis. When asked what he is doing Moshe answered, “I help people to feel, sense what they would sense if they could do what they can’t.”

Which demands considerable maturity. Absolutely. Most of us are conditioned and full of fixed beliefs and presuppositions. Someone who knows already can’t go beyond his known horizon. To go further we need to go towards the unknown. What counts is experiencing—the experience taking you where it leads instead of directing it towards some prearranged goal. That’s it more than anything else. It takes me somewhere, but not because I want to heal my back or stop being depressed or something like that. How do you see what is required for a person with whom you are working? A flower wants to be a flower. And we? Most of the time we remain in bud. There are so many parts of us that are not fully alive, so many parts that do not flow in relation to other parts. We are not open. Suffering is precisely that. We have been given everything, we have enormous possibilities, but we are imprisoned, we are stuck in all kinds of ways. We repeat the same mistakes, the same problems, over and over again; we make the same gestures, express the same emotions, and meet the same frustrations. It is as if we were aeroplanes without a pilot. Moshe said, “I have only one principle and that is not to have any principles.” I have found a principle for myself: Not knowing beforehand especially when I give a fi lesson, but even in everyday life. We must be available for whatever arises. That is the direction in which to go. Man is made to innovate, to go out from fixed repetitions. It is innovate or die, you understand—it is to be creative, which is what life is all about. We have no other choice. If everything is already known to me, and I keep returning to the same patterns, there is no adaptability, creativity, and no evolution. That takes us to the question what is the environment we have to create, what are the conditions for really helping people become aware, understand? There are many methods, many paths that can be helpful. Moshe thought that the best way was through the methods he devised: Awareness Through Movement and Functional Integration. There are practitioners who make an amalgam of all kinds of methods, but it is important to deepen one method and not to dissipate oneself. Is it better to dig down 0 metres in one place to find a source of water than to dig one metre in 0 different places? But sometimes one has to first dig in ten different places in order to find the place where to dig profoundly. How did Moshe create the appropriate learning conditions—especially when you began studying FI work with him? He was never judgemental. We worked with partners—mine was Yochanan, but Moshe would also touch us, and we reciprocated. I can still feel his touch, his hands, full of presence, attentiveness and care. He always said: “Ok, very good,” “good,” and so on. He never said that you don’t know, or similar negative statements. While teaching fi, he was never in a hurry or stressed. He was very patient. I remember a student asked what he thinks about when he gives an fi lesson, and Moshe answered that was he thinking about the mathematical equation of the ideal function he works with. Another time he spoke about low grade energy and high grade energy, and I had no idea what he was talking about. I asked him once more and he answered me very patiently. The next day I went to his house and again asked the same question: “What does it mean?” He explained everything once more very patiently in a different way. What’s important is that he didn’t give the feeling you were an idiot if you didn’t know. He understood the information needed to germinate, so he was very patient and very kind with me. Nevertheless, he was seldom content with what people did to or for him. Usually it was not done in a way he would appreciate. It was difficult to satisfy him because he was on another level. His

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sensing, his perception was very clear. Sometimes I thought that the person to whom he gave fi lessons was transparent to him. He was extraordinarily precise in what he was doing.

Did Moshe sometimes actually talk about awareness to get people to understand what he really meant? He gave lectures at the university of Tel-Aviv and often to us too. He explained all kinds of things that were not so easy to explain. He had to understand people “where they were.” There were 3 students in the training (later called “the Israelis”), but we had very different backgrounds, histories, and ages, so it was not easy. We need to have consideration for the other person, to go together with that person, to walk, live, breath together, so that each respects the other’s rhythm. That is very important in our work. Yesterday, I saw a woman in the street. She was going very quickly pushing a pram, and with the other hand she was dragging a child. The child cried and the woman dragged, and I thought, “Even a mother goes at her own rhythm, and not the rhythm of her child.” We need to allow students to be comfortable with their own rhythm of learning. That is a necessity in our work and in every relationship—not to weigh on the other, and especially in the family. Barthes called that “delicacy.” When and how did you begin to notice this delicacy in your self ? Do you remember noticing that suddenly something was different so you knew you were really learning what you had come to learn? I wouldn’t say it’s sudden, but rather that this “suddenly or spontaneously” happens after a long time. Suddenly, you know that you know—that you have understood something, that something has emerged, that you sense differently, think differently, walk differently, touch differently. It’s like a baby who suddenly stands and begins to walk. Suddenly you know, but there is a long preparation for this “suddenly.” Suddenly there is a new leaf, a flower opened in the garden. It took some time for the seed to get there. The philosopher Koyré wrote about the organisational theory, “One can say that the germ is what it is not. It is already what it will become but is not yet. It is because otherwise it would not become. The germ is at once the matter that evolves and the force that makes it evolve. The germ acts upon itself. It is a causa sui; if not that of its actual being, at least that of its development.” The potential is within us, waiting for fulfilment. We are the sculptor and the sculpture. Can you give an example? Once you are on the path, something is growing every day in your brain like yeast. As you go along you realize something real is being uncovered: the light emerges from the darkness. This is the greatest joy. Often it happens after one has some problem. I learned a lot when I broke the neck of my femur. I understood more deeply the difference between having and being—I saw I could think from the perspective of the femur neck, the femur head, and the acetabulum in relation to the other parts of the body. This was a very important message for me, and I learned a lot. I was lying for three weeks in a hospital bed rigged up in the sitting room. I was astonished that I had the courage not to have an operation even though people told me I was crazy as did most doctors who looked at the x-rays. But there was one who said it was possible to heal without surgery, and that was enough for me. Where did you get the courage? Did you “know,” have the intuition, that it would be all right, or did you say, “I’m just going to risk it”? The risk would have been too great. I thought it would be possible to heal since the bone was not completely in two parts. I knew it was still connected. When I arrived at the clinic the doctor was ready to operate immediately, but I said, “Let’s wait. We shall see.” Even if I wanted surgery I would

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like to choose my doctor. I wouldn’t advise anybody to do this without years of experience in the Feldenkrais Method—and without having a clear representation of the hip joint and how it functions. While lying, I was “gluing,” simulating the movement and walking in my imagination in a holistic way, with all the other parts. What people don’t understand is that before they do something everything in themselves is already prepared for the action. You are anticipating; you simulate the movements before starting to move. As I see it, a lesson is an imaginary journey towards “verticalisation,” towards rising up and getting taller, connected with the actual feeling of growing lighter. We are learning how to imagine dynamically, which is the most important psycho-physiological function. Today there are a lot of people who want to cure themselves by visualization and all kinds of things. We need to have a clear distinction between visualization and kinaesthetic imagination, which is dynamic. Also, you have to know how the parts function in relation to the whole in order to be able to imagine clearly. Then you can use imagined movements instead of unnecessary muscular effort. We need to have a lot of strategies, and strategies develop through real learning from yourself; you don’t learn from somebody else. You are your own master or guru. A movement learned by imitation or following instructions under critical supervision obstructs imagination. The strategy we use is to go into a particular detail of our functioning, and then to return to the whole of the person; then we work on another detail, and return once again to the whole. In this manner our self-image is completed; we are aware of the details, but we are a unified organism. We are the violin and the violinist. Who would suspect that we are our own theatre?!

So would you say that one aspect of the learning environment we have to create as Feldenkrais teachers is to give people opportunities to discover for themselves that there are many different strategies for doing something and not just one way? This is also a good question. Some teachers let students explore, explore, explore, and nothing happens. The practitioner has to see what is clear for the person—knowing that he/she does not yet have the representation of the function. It is very important to give some clues for the exploration. You also have to propose auxiliary movements, constraints, proximal, distal, the neutral where the potential energy is stored, reversibility of the action. At the same time you develop the tools for sensing, discerning. Then the person can learn how to differentiate, how to find the “neutral.” For instance, bending the leg while lying on the back. When I say “Explore how you bend the leg,” some people are bending it straight. Then I say “Do it in different ways, as easily as possible. Bring the knee outward, inside,” etc. For them the easiest way often involves a lot of effort; some for instance lift the opposite hip in order to compensate for lack of mobility in the hip joint and ankle. So they need more other lessons. To draw attention to a part that is not present in the person’s awareness? That is not enough. If a part is not present, the practitioner has to offer ways of bringing it into the student’s awareness in relation with other parts. You have to give another lesson. For instance about how to bend the ankle, because if the foot does not invert or evert or the hip is not differentiated, how do you bring the heel up to the “appropriate” place? And then you come back to the knee, and also to the back, and the pelvis, and then you differentiate the leg from the head, or clarify different relationships, and the missing part will fall into place in the three dimensional puzzle. And there is something important here: It’s not to give stereotype lessons but to go with the group. It is crucial to sense the group field, to open a dynamic dialogue, to be aware of the students’ needs. We also have to realize that the students learn more from our way of being and acting than from our teaching. The practitioner’s organization and clarity are essential for the student’s learning. You cannot transmit what you don’t live in everyday life. We are always beginners, every day we know more and more what we don’t know. We discover that this part isn’t integrated, that it isn’t clear, that there is no light in this place, and so on. 30

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How do you see that in your students? In the way they move, the way they speak, the way they look, how they shake hands, how they take off and place their shoes when they enter the room. You can see if they are awake, attentive, what their intention is. There is a Zen saying: “Learn to see the emptiness in the cup.” Often, there is too much noise in the brain for new ideas to be absorbed. That’s the importance of being open to the student’s individual needs and being comfortable with not knowing. That addresses a basic problem: People want certainty, people want security. How can you transmit that to students? Yesterday an assistant told me that one of his friends had a slipped disk. He brought some x-rays: “What do you think? He doesn’t want to have an operation, but the doctors say he needs one.” I told him “We don’t take that responsibility. We are not doctors.” Personally, I would do anything not to have to undergo an operation. Even if the operation is successful, his basic functioning (he is a musician) will remain the same, so he may have other problems afterwards. But this is another way of thinking. We do not seek to alleviate disturbing symptoms by focusing on a specific area; we strive for personal growth, which includes the whole person, and which effectively transcends the problem. While giving a fi lesson we create a secure environment, but we don’t take responsibility. The decision whether to have an operation or not is up to the person concerned. How can you communicate to students that they have to live with the knowledge that they can’t have or give security, that they have to live with not knowing and learn to be comfortable with that? It is a difficult task. Life is never stable, and neither is the environment. Movement is always a process of reinventing. In order to grow, you have to take some risks, to try to find security in insecurity. It is the same as the skill of balance. Paradoxically, most of the people who say they have no balance are too stable. They look for stability in contact with the ground, and their support-base gets stuck, rigid, allowing them very little mobility. The foundation of stability is changing on the move, flexibility. You have to take a risk in order to walk. The same is true in a mental sense: One must be flexible, mobile, dynamic. During the four years of training, I try to help the students develop a feeling and a comprehension that everything flows—that in one second everything can be different; that there can be no definite security because there is an ongoing process that never stands still. Circumstance of life change every moment; you have to pedal the bicycle, otherwise you fall. We are looking at the trajectory of the flow and we can see where it doesn’t go through. The moment the flow stops somewhere, life stops, there is a problem. I call it arrêt sur image. Then you are stuck and don’t let anything new emerge. The Feldenkrais Method, as I understand it, brings neglected parts back to life. It points out possibilities of unblocking. It offers ways of starting the process through new sensations and new feelings, by sensing different relationships, and by dynamic creative imagination, particularly through awareness of the skeleton with regard to verticality. Does this sense of security have anything to do with the degree of presence in the moment, in the situation one is in? Of course. There is no awareness without presence here and now. We are only aware when we are aware that we are aware. Knowing and being are the two faces of the same reality. But one can also close oneself up in presence. It’s être et advenir, being and becoming, it’s an ongoing process. Once you walk, le chemin, the way, the path is important. You are walking, and sometimes there is a stone, or something else gets in the way, and you are not the same twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes the sun shines, and sometimes it rains, but if you keep walking, being in touch with yourself, things are so dramatic, and you know better how to cope with problems. We find the source of our joy. 3

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Do you find that has an impact on your emotional life? Very much. Every thought and every emotion has its expression in tonus, in breathing, in volume, in our sense of being heavy or light. (I often say that we are “weight watchers”!) Kinesthesia is the basis of emotions. Sensing these relationships you master more of your emotional life. Awareness of the skeleton can lift us out of a past that may drag us down. Truly sensing the skeletal support gives access to another perception of oneself and the world and can change a person’s character, as the muscle become free for movement, they don’t need to hold the skeleton and the emotions inscribed in the muscles. Would you say that relating the skeleton to gravity is the essence of security? It is one of the most important parts because we are growing up in a gravitational field and a big part of the nervous system is occupied with this. Being allied with gravity instead of fighting it also allows an upward movement for spiritual life. Verticalisation is a profound necessity. Lao-Tzu writes, “Gravity is the root of all grace.” Do you think Moshe had something like that at the back of his mind? Maybe you should say something about his Hassidic roots. His way of thinking is a Hassidic way of thinking. Some practitioners talk so much about the body, body, body. It’s not awareness of the body, it’s awareness through movement. And what isn’t movement? Movement is life, in all its expressions. So basically it’s awareness of life? Yes, if you want to put it that way. Like his forefathers, Moshe was devoted not only to his students but to humanity as a whole. He once told me that he could have married and raised a family. [Moshe and Yona separated early.] I asked him if he had regrets. “None whatsoever,” he answered. “The world has plenty of children, but who will ensure their life and quality of life?” Moshe thought about the survival of our species and how to support that process. He had a humanitarian message like his great grandfather. His noble and sincere aim was to restore lost dignity to humanity. And did Moshe’s Hassidic background find outer expression in his teaching? He was embedded in it as I said before. It was evidenced in all his work. At the same time he was a scientific man and he wanted to make a convergence between theory and practice. His strength was putting abstract ideas into practice. That was his genius. He understood that experiencing is essential for us. You can have the best explanation about anything, say about music, but you will never be a musician. It’s not to have an experience, but experiencing, which is important: to live it fully without looking for something, to be in the neutral place where thought and movement are fully available. How would you say that in your teaching, you get people to the point where they start experiencing? You cannot get them there. I hope they will get there and I think people are coming to me because of that. How do I know? They come back, and they bring friends, and also come to do the training. Even if it is not easy for many reasons, they sense that this is very important for themselves, and for all humanity. I see a lot of them are flourishing. To sum up: How would you define awareness after all we have talked about? I would define awareness as perceiving oneself and knowing what one is doing, or knowing what is going on while it is happening. In other words, knowing what you are doing while you are doing it. I don’t remember who said, “The eye sees the eye.”

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We create conditions and facilitate the process of developing proprioceptive sensation through movement. If he follows the lesson, the student is called on to be vigilant, to be attentive to what he is sensing, to what he is living. This leads to more and more refined perception of the self and of the situation. We become more differentiated. As I understand it, atm is an organic learning and a reflection of how we are built. It applies to everyone and in all kinds of situations and it differentiates between awareness, attention, and concentration, which is very important for advancement. The lesson is about creating conditions in order to listen, to sense, to taste, to have a flavor, to feel a process so as to learn new ways of functional thinking and moving—to have more choices, and to feel grace and power. It is similar to a child’s learning before he knows how to explain and label experience, or perform as he/she “should.” The child has no purpose, he is just playing and thus in tune with his inner and outer substantial nature. He becomes aware of the power within himself, the higher grade of energy that develops inner transformation, of becoming human. The Feldenkrais Method amplifies the process of awareness, a learning that makes growth and evolution possible. It can act as a kind of launching pad for a new life, for a new society.

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The Risk of Serious Enquiry Akrasia: Two Steps Backwards © 2008 Dennis Leri When water chokes, what is one to wash it down with? —aristotle

“Know Thyself”, the injunction that drives Socratic enquiry, has deep correspondences to the method and practices of Moshe Feldenkrais. In the previous Serious Enquiry article we saw that on the way to self knowledge one arrives at the aporia or the unendurable passage, the passage that is not passable, that is, an impasse. To go on we must not go on the way we have gone. To truly arrive at such an impasse one must sincerely quest. The impasse is the point at which our enquiry becomes authentic. From there on it is our path. At the end of the article we said that the Delphic Oracle’s dictum “Know Thyself” was but the first part of the Oracle’s advice. The second part is the more general injunction “Nothing too much.” There is in all rigorous thought and every disciplined practice a vital reciprocal relationship to be found in the double movement General Specific. That double movement is resonant with whole-to-parts and parts-to-whole descriptions and definitions of biological and other systems. We are dealing with particulars and universals, generals and individuals, classes and members, categories and instances whenever we organize our thinking. Feldenkrais and I discussed in depth working from the specific to the general and from the general to the specific during my time in Israel. He felt that is was essential to understand the kinds of thinking one uses and could use. Understanding how to rigorously organize our thoughts, he said, allows one to add substantively not only to our “Feldenkrais” knowledge but also to both scientific and common knowledge. As a scientist and a seeker Feldenkrais demanded of himself a critical intellectual rigor that must be played out to the end. But end it must. After one frees one’s self from the conventions of knowledge one can find and tread one’s own path. As it’s stated in the Zen text Uji, “To know the self is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self.” But herein we continue with the heritage of Greek thought and the internal movements therein that were true for them then and remain true for us today. And so, we will examine our work and its relation to self enquiry as developed by the Ancient Greeks. When we say an injunction is more general, we mean it constrains a broad range of specific injunctions. In Feldenkrais work, for example, we employ specific injunctions, so called “movement” instructions. Specific injunctions, the what, are constrained by more general and more pervasive injunctions conveying the how. The what specifies the action and the how determines the mode of action. The general is the learning how in the phrase “learning how to learn.” For the Greeks “Nothing too much” governed how one was to know one’s self. It governed, or sought to govern, all modes of conduct. Whatever practice or practices one engaged in were all governed by the constraints of “Nothing too much.” Self understanding, it was maintained, would be one of the more important consequences of avoiding extremes in the conduct of one’s life. “Nothing too much” implores us to care for the self and prescribes the mode of that care: Temperance. The Ancient Greeks by deciding to exercise Temperance to examine and eliminate self-defeating extremes of behavior established the “how” of coming to know one’s self. And so, to know how, one finds that in Antiquity there were teachers, mentors, masters and guides aplenty who gave advice on how to eat, exercise, meditate, live, die and know the self. There was no shortage of means delineating how one was to care for, and thereby know, the self. Temperance was the overarching principle. It takes very little research to realize that, ironically, the Greeks by and large lacked temperance. To adhere to Temperance was for the Greeks a radical choice. But, with the right guide and guidance, Temperance was an accessible ideal

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for the intemperate Greeks. Pursuing Temperance, it was assumed, might lead one to the achievement of the ultimate good: an examined life. With Temperance as our guide, we have the means toward the ends of knowing how to care for and how to know the self. Before I can explicate as practices, caring-for and knowing-how, I need to draw attention to the actions, the seeming reactions, that undermine the resolutions to lead a better life, that thwart a life of enquiry and self discovery. Let’s allow that our goal is not only self-knowledge but also that we can act in the world consonant with that knowing. Those actions that thwart or defeat that goal can be deemed self defeating. Most human failings fit nicely into the category of self defeating behaviors listed by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the Ancients. One self defeating behavior in particular seems relevant to understand how it is one fails to learn to practice the Feldenkrais Method. In this and the next article I will turn my attention to the breakdown of will, to the loss of conviction, to the loss of self control, to the incontinence which the Ancient Greeks called akrasia. In seeing how the will breaks down we will be afforded a way to understand and exercise will. It’s not, as they say, “what you think.” There are phrases so generic, so commonly uttered by many Feldenkrais students that we scarcely ever really hear them. They’re all variations on the statement, “I knew better, but . . . ” They might begin “I knew I shouldn’t have, but . . . ” and then conclude “done too much or done too little or ?” Or, one might hear “I knew I should have, but . . . ” and conclude with “Stopped sooner, done less, done more, or ?” They are in the same family as, “I knew I shouldn’t have had that drink . . . eaten that dessert . . . called him . . . refused to called her . . . said what I said . . . stayed up so late . . . gotten up so late . . . worn those shoes . . . maxed out my credit card . . . asked that question . . . given that answer . . . lied . . . told the truth . . . ” I knew better but I did it anyway. I knew better but I didn’t act on it. What is this knowing better, but? Is it a knowing that allows me to go against my best intentions, to break my rules or to break the rules of others that I subscribe to, to do myself harm? Is this loss of self control an action? Is it a reaction or a non-action? It is, I will contend, a perverse form of self denial. In asceticism self denial is a path that provisionally accepts the self in order to move beyond it. It’s not so with akrasia. With the akratic individual the self is never accepted or rejected but the self’s conflicts are used as an excuse to avoid engaging in self examination. We do what we know to be wrong or we don’t do what we know to be right. To reiterate, the doing less-than/more-than, the doing other-than we intend is called the break down of the will, the weakness of will, moral incontinence, loss of self control and it has an ancient name: akrasia. Akrasia means “bad mixture” and from the beginning of Western Philosophy there have been attempts to define it, to explain it and most importantly to cure it. Socrates maintained that akrasia is impossible. Why? Because if one really knows, one doesn’t and, in fact can not, act against true self knowledge. Now we may ask how a man who judges rightly can behave incontinently. That he should behave so when he has knowledge, some say is impossible; for it would be strange—so Socrates thought—if when knowledge was in a man something else could master it and drag it about like a slave. For Socrates was entirely opposed to the view in question, holding that there is no such thing as incontinence; no one, he said, when he judges acts against what he judges best-people act so only by reason of ignorance. ¹

Aristotle says, well yeah, but . . . Now this view plainly contradicts the observed facts, and we must inquire about what happens to such a man; if he acts by reason of ignorance, what is the manner of his ignorance? For that the man who behaves incontinently does not, before he gets into this state, think he ought to act so, is evident. But there are some who concede certain of Socrates’ contentions but not others; that nothing is stronger than knowledge they admit, but not that on one acts contrary to what has seemed to him the better course, and therefore they say that the incontinent man has not knowledge when he is mastered by his pleasures, but opinion. But if it is opinion and not knowledge, if it is not a strong conviction that

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resists but a weak one, as in men who hesitate, we sympathize with their failure to stand by such convictions against strong appetites; but we do not sympathize with wickedness, nor with any of the other blameworthy states. Is it then practical wisdom whose resistance is mastered? That is the strongest of all states. But this is absurd; the same man will be at once practically wise and incontinent, but no one would say that it is the part of a practically wise man to do willingly the basest acts. Besides, it has been shown before that the man of practical wisdom is one who will act (for he is a man concerned with the individual facts) and who has the other virtues. ²

How to comprehend a self in conflict? Well, one can redefine the self, posit that a self is composed of parts. The later Plato did so as did Aristotle as did Freud. Moshe Feldenkrais likewise invoked parts of the self—movement, thought, emotion and sensing—that could work together or not. For Aristotle, when a part of the self rules or prevails, it implies that at one time or another some subset of the self predominates. The parts for Aristotle were: the appetites – thirst, hunger, sexuality; the passions, what we would broadly call emotions; and, reason in its various forms. In a self where passions, appetites and reasons are competing rather than cooperating we have conflict. And so it happens sometimes that we act against our own best interests. Aristotle maintains that akrasia is more complex than saying the passions or appetites overrule reason. He did not hold that reason is or should reign supreme. He said a singular and rigid reliance or fixation on reason can be shown to lead to conflict. Really serious conflict. It’s because the appetites, the passions and reason have not been properly integrated into our actions that our will fails us. Aristotle’s position is commonly misunderstood and is misstated like this: () A continent person (the enkrate) is a person who acts in accord with his rational calculations while the incontinent person (the akrate) abandons their rationality and acts irrationally. (2) The akrate giving in to his feelings or appetites commits base actions while the enkrate both knows them to be base and does not give in because he follows his reason. The underlying assumptions here are that the appetites and the passions are uncontrollable and they are distinct from reason which alone can be disciplined. That’s not what Aristotle really held or for that matter Plato in his later work. It’s a joy to read and to attempt to follow Aristotle’s exposition of the distinction between what’s continent and incontinent behavior. Something comes alive in his examples and his reasoning. By laying bare the contradictions inherent in the holding of certain positions Aristotle sounds a bit like Feldenkrais. Aristotle in his own words: (2) Further, if continence involves having strong and bad appetites, the temperate man will not be continent nor the continent man temperate; for a temperate man will have neither excessive nor bad appetites. But the continent man must; for if the appetites are good, the state of character that restrains us from following them is bad, so that not all continence will be good; while if they are weak and not bad, there is nothing admirable in resisting them, and if they are weak and bad, there is nothing great in resisting these either.3

Self control, if it means intentionally acting on strong desires or doing destructive actions, is not the same as temperance. Given a good desire, only bad character would restrain it. There’s nothing admirable in resisting weak desires whether good or bad. To not smoke, to not eat sugar, to not harm others based upon principle is no great achievement. What awareness adds to action is both actual and virtual. One knows that no matter what one does it could have been done differently. I carry myself forward not only in what I do but also in what I could have done. I therefore act to expand choice. Actually, there’s more to the act than meets the I. (3) Further, if continence makes a man ready to stand by any and every opinion, it is bad, i.e. if it makes him stand even by a false opinion; and if incontinence makes a man apt to abandon any and every opinion, there will be a good incontinence, of which Sophocles’ Neoptolemus in the Philoctetes will be an instance; for he is to be praised for not standing by what Odysseus persuaded him to do, because he is pained at telling a lie.4

If I do the right thing for the wrong reasons do I act with full self control? What kind of character am I? do I have? do I want? Aristotle and Feldenkrais emphasized developing strong as distinct from weak character. 36

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It’s within an individual’s control. Feldenkrais designated the potent state as the source of real health. And in Higher Judo he said “. . . it is bad in Judo to try for anything with such determination as not to be able to change your mind if necessary. . .” 5 Let’s say I promise to vote for a candidate based upon statements he’s made. Let’s also say that I come to find out he’s lying to me either directly or through his surrogates. When it’s time to vote will I still actually vote for him based upon my promise to keep my promise? I might idealize myself and say “When I give my promise I won’t renege.” Is it admirable for me to vote for the liar? There are fictions, useful and not useful, and we make our choices. In the practice of Awareness Through Movement a student listens as lesson “speaks” in a voice often distinct from the instructor’s voice. The student’s own inner voice offers a translation. Who’s voice do I vote for? It’s a character issue. (5) Further, he who on conviction does and pursues and chooses what is pleasant would be thought to be better than one who does so as a result not of calculation but of incontinence; for he is easier to cure since he may be persuaded to change his mind. But to the incontinent man may be applied the proverb ‘when water chokes, what is one towash it down with?’ If he had been persuaded of the rightness of what he does, he would have desisted when he was persuaded to change his mind; but now he acts in spite of his being persuaded of something quite different. ⁶

Although I lack self control I don’t do so by deliberation. I don’t plan to hurt my self or others. I can learn to do better, differently or other than I do. That I can intend. I can be persuaded by my learning to take a new measure of myself and my choices. If I act out of touch with my self I can learn make new distinctions, to erase old distinctions, to act with a composure. I am not one who knowing better takes leave of my senses and simply moves. Motion without a who comes to nothing from no one. No, I act not to deny others, not to follow the Leader, not to be a slave to fad and fashion. I act so that there will be others. Recent philosophical approaches to the vexing question of akrasia are multitudinous. They include arguing that the incontinent person’s character is not fixed on one desire but allows for contrary desires. These contrary desires are sufficiently strong to disrupt practical deliberation. The solution to akrasia so formulated is to love our true nature, a variant form of non-narcissistic selflove. Other approaches either label the question of akrasia a non-problem because as formulated it’s ill stated, ill defined, or irrelevant (because it’s solved by answering “bigger” questions that subsume those of resolving akrasia). Or, it’s reframed in terms of sin. Either we obey God’s will (Father knows best) or our own (which no doubt is weakened by Satan.) Contemporary cognitive science essentially redefines the problem in terms of brain functions, uses “brain” jargon to impute agency to brain regions and so gives “brain” names that redraw behavioral boundaries only slightly differing functionally from the parts of the self delineated by Aristotle. They consider the problem solved by renaming it and invoking scientific jargon. Frankly, it’s largely flim flam. The finished product doesn’t only rename the problem, it also greatly impoverishes Aristotle’s version by disconnecting it from individual responsibility. No where in academic philosophy or cognitive science can we find how to know one’s self in a way that that self knowing equals acting with all parts of our selves in an harmonious way. Aristotle maintained that one acts in various ways towards various ends. If one acts in accord with one’s nature it is pleasurable. One does not act or intend to act with pleasure as an end as in hedonism. No, pleasure accompanies an integrating act well done. And what acts give the greatest pleasure? Aristotle maintains that the greatest of all pleasures is to be found in learning. Learning harmonizes and integrates our appetites, our passions, and our reasoning. When we learn we move towards knowing our selves and in that movement, that pull as the Greeks would say, there is no greater pleasure. To integrate means to learn. And what do we learn from akrasia? Nothing. There’s no pleasure in it for us or those who must bear up under our tired excuses for failure. Academic philosophical and cognitive approaches want to characterize the question of akrasia as an object of and for knowledge, the kind of knowledge Socrates called “knowing about.” Situating 37

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akrasia as a philosophical problem or a kind of scientific problem removes it from an individual’s everyday concerns. We dull the vibrancy of enquiry when we put it into staid academic discourse. In our daily lives akrasia is a profound impediment to self understanding. Knowing about the loss of will is of no practical use to the individual. Socrates’ “knowing how” is so poignant, so pertinent to our lives but when considered academically it slides into a dim “knowing about.” We get endless interpretation and reinterpretation instead of a path we can tread or blaze. There are regions of theology concerned with a kind of “knowing how.” With Christianity akrasia enters into an amalgam with sin and Christian virtue. The theological stance, except in the rarest of instances, e.g., Meister Eckhart, rely on deferring to external authority. Cowing to authority blocks self-enquiry. Western and Eastern approaches to salvation, if at some point they abandon external earthly authority, can and do have practical value in enquiry. But there is the danger that the voice of authority supplants the seeker’s listening to the inner voice. Western traditions from Pythagoras and Parmenides4 to segments within the major religions require an individual test and critically apply the whisperings of the inner voice. It must not be delusional but truly authentic. For the individual intent on self-knowledge, Temperance is a radical even extreme approach for those held in the grip of passions, appetites or rigid attitudes of mind. Temperance implies commitment to enquiry and to practical engagement with every situation. If we desire more than a second hand existence nothing must block enquiry. Akrasia is either no way out or an easy way to lose out. Finally, Akrasia is also the name of a Goddess who’s nickname is the Thief of Time.7 She steals, devours our life bit by bit through every moment lost in the story of why I didn’t do this or that, why I did do that or this. Each and every turning of our attention away from engaging in our life of enquiry eats up a little time. Your time, my time, but as we will see in a future article not Time itself. But here and now, my failure to exercise will kills me a small amount physically, psychologically and spiritually. Akrasia’s victory is no victory at all. So how does Delphic “Nothing too much” concern us in the context of a Feldenkrais lesson? Feldenkrais gave guidelines for participating in a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lesson, “Despite its many varied themes, Awareness Through Movement is pervaded by two general injunctions: First, move only in your comfort zone. The idea is to work smarter rather than harder. The lessons take us beyond our limits by finding new combinations of ways to move. Second, carry out the instruction only as long as you can pay attention to what you’re doing.” 8 I’d be a rich man if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard a student say, “I knew I shouldn’t have done so much.” It’s said in relation to carrying out a specific lesson injunction too many times or doing too large of a movement or doing the action mechanically and mindlessly. We have the admission of a failure to act while professing to know better. Knowing the stakes we gamble by playing it safe. Due to the complexities of the training context it’s not easy to characterize all such statements as akrasia. Later, upon reflection, we know that we failed in fusing what and how into our intended action. Even if we succeed in the what we often fail in the how. We don’t know how. We fail to reach that impasse, that aporia discussed in the last article. We have not really entered the lesson, made it our lesson. Enquiry is deferred, delayed, made thick and frozen. Regret takes hold, excuses hold sway. We waste time. A Feldenkrais lesson can address akrasia directly if the context of the lesson sufficiently addresses who is doing the lesson. We learn by using a what, a specific injunction, combined with and constrained by how, the mode of doing, and having in mind a who that will emerge by integrating how and what. To coin a phrase, “who’s learning how to learn?” We’ve all heard about the Fechner-Weber Principle and it’s relation to learning in a Feldenkrais context. In the next article I will update what’s now known about the Fechner-Weber Principle with a few surprising new twists that will surely deepen our understanding of how to think of it in relation to our work, the problem of akrasia, pain, compulsion, addiction and self enquiry.

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notes . Nicomachean Ethics, Book vii section 2 2. Ibid 3. Ibid. Book vii section 2 subsection (2) 4. Ibid. Book vii section 2 subsection (3) 5. Higher Judo, M. Feldenkrais, pg. 94) 6. Nicomachean Ethics Book VII section 2 subsection 7. Learning How to Learn, Dennis Leri 998 8. Akrasia, Thief of Time: A vignette sourcebook, David Chart, 2006 Eden Studios Notable quote, “Akrasia is the goddess of not completing your work.”

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Contributors Anna Yeatman is director of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney. An interdisciplinary theorist, her current research indcludes the idea of the state in relation to human rights, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism. Publications include Individualization and the Delivery of Welfare Services, Palgrave Press, 2008. She is a Feldenkrais practitioner. Dr. Chava Shelhav was one of Moshe Feldenkrais first students. and worked with him for many years as an assistant in programs worldwide. She developed and conducts Child’Space training programs—a method of developmental coaching based on the Feldenkrais Method to work with babies and their care givers—in Israel, Europe and the United States. Cliff Smyth practices Feldenkrais with humans, and sometimes dogs, in San Francisco, and assists in Feldenkrais training programs. He likes to read poetry, philosophy, neuroscience and the sociology of the body. He misses his family dog Utah, to whom this article is dedicated.

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Roy Scott is a painter. He lives in Berkeley with his family and two collies, Ryushi and Raven. Dennis Leri lives in San Rafael, California. Myriam Pfeffer was one of Moshe Feldenkrais’s early students in Israel. She organized the first Training in France; her tenth Paris Training is soon to be complete. She is a beloved teacher for many students. Eva Scher earned her ba in Latin American Studies ucla and ma in Special Education, Cal State la. She has taught elementary school and special education, designed adult training programs in Paris and studied to be a clown. She is in the 4th year of Myriam Pfeffer’s Feldenkrais Training. Eva lives and teaches atm in Netanya, Israel. Ilana Nevill (London 990, Assistant Trainer since 996) practiced in Bath until 2006. She lives in the French Pyrenees, giving classes and holiday courses there. Also—by invitation—advanced workshops on “Working with Air,” fostering awareness by reducing effort. Voluntary work and research with disabled Palestinian children.

Editor:

Gay Sweet Scott

Editorial Advisor:

Elizabeth Beringer

Editorial Assistant:

Elaine Yoder

Editorial Board:

Jandy Bergmann, Marianne Constable, Isabel Ginot, Carl Ginsburg, Carol Kress, Gay Sweet Scott

Design:

Margery Cantor

Proofreading & copyediting:

Jan Hetherington, Judy Windt, Elaine Yoder

Cover & interior art:

Roy Scott

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General Issue (xerox copy) Martial Arts Special Interest Groups Emotions The Arts Stories Conceptual Models General Issue Parallel Developments Children More Children General Issue The Self-Image Performing Arts Awareness Though Movement Performing Arts General Issue Parenting Awareness Awareness

All back issues are available through the fgna office. Price to Guild members is $6, to non-members $0 per copy.

THE FELDENKRAIS JOURNAL , NO 21

OPEN ISSUE W IN TER 2009