The Feldenkrais Journal #23 Aesthetics

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    THE FELDENKRAIS JOURNAL , no 23, aesthetics     fa ll 2010

The Feldenkrais Journal is published annually for the members of the Feldenkrais Guild of North America (fgna). Inquiries regarding this publication should be directed to: fgna, 5436 North Albina Avenue, Portland, OR 217. Please send any articles, drawings, or letters to the editor electronically to Carla Feinstein, Publications and Communications Coordinator, at: [email protected]. The deadline for submissions is May 15, 2011. The theme of the next issue is Balance. Please save electronic writings in Word or rtf (rich text format).

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The Feldenkrais Journal number 23



Table of Contents

3

Letter from the Editor

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Dedication to Yochanan Rywerant   David Zemach-Bersin

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Yochanan Rywerant Remembrance   Eytan Mandel

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Yochanan Rywerant Remembrance   Ingrid Wilczek

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affect: A Hidden Dimension  Carl Ginsberg & Lucia Schuette-Ginsberg

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What Does It Mean to See Clearly: The Inside View   David Webber

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A Walk in a Temple Garden (Kamakura)   Keith Wilson

28 Awareness through Pictures   Helen Miller  39

The Story of Ren and Mere   Louise Runyon

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Points of View   Gay Sweet Scott

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Balance   Rika Lesser

48 Contributors

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Letter from the Editor

Issue #23 of The Feldenkrais Jounral is dedicated to the memory of Yochanan Rywerant. We are indebted to David Zemach-Bersin, Etyan Mandel and Dr. Ingrid Wilczek for their remembrances of him. Carl Ginsburg, with contributions from Lucia Schuette-Ginsburg, has written a far ranging article addressing the relationship between movement and aesthetics, and David Webber has written a lucid account of a series of lessons with Carl Ginsburg. We are very fortunate to have permission to publish a series of black and white ink drawings by Keith Wilson. They speak eloquently, directly of our experience in the natural world. Helen Miller’s “Awareness through Pictures” bridges issues of teaching art and Feldenkrais, and Louise Runyon’s account of working with an acquaintance in a coma in hospital is notable for her openness in collaborating with others. I have included a suggested reading, and Rika Lesser’s poem, “Balance,” completes the issue.

• This issue is my last as Editor. Many thanks to everyone who has submitted articles to the Journal, past and present—whether published yet or not. Writings often take time to evolve; most articles we publish have had drafts too numerous to mention. And many thanks to the editors, past and present and to everyone who has sustained and encouraged continued publication. Many, many people have kept the endeavor alive by their generosity and thoughtful care. The theme for issue #24 is Balance. The following issue, #25, will be devoted to the theme of Reading. The longer than usual lead time is in recognition of the time it takes to read and ponder the opportunity to write about any aspect of reading—how one reads a walk or situation or provocative text. Always, continue to write. It’s worth the pain, it’s important for our profession and one of the best means to further inquiry and reflection.



Gay Sweet Scott, Editor

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Yochanan Rywerant was a unique and learned man. He was a faithful disciple of Moshe Feldenkrais, and Moshe greatly respected Yochanan’s intelligence and work. In 1973, when Moshe needed someone to assist him with his teaching in Berkeley, he placed a call to Yochanan. And in San Fransciso and Amherst, Yochanan again worked as Moshe’s assistant. At home in Tel-Aviv, every afternoon for many years, Yochanan and Moshe worked side by side in the same room, sharing many of the same students. After Moshe’s passing in 1984, Yochanan transmitted Moshe’s work with true generosity and integrity, and his contribution to our understanding of the Feldenkrais Method will be of enduring value. I am very grateful to have known Yochanan and to have learned from him. May his memory be a blessing to all who were touched by him. —David Zemach-Bersin, Doylestown, Pennsylvania

Yochanan Rywerant, 1922–2010

Courtesy of Eytan Mandel and Ned Dwelle

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Yochanan Rywerant Remembrance Eytan Mandel Yochanan Rywerant passed away in Tel Aviv on May 21, 2010 at the age of 87. Diabetes was the main cause of his death. It was too early for his spirit and his desire to live and teach. Yochanan practiced the Feldenkrais Method for 58 years (1952–2010). What was it that made him and his teaching so unique? Maybe that he lived the Feldenkrais Method till his very last days. “Hold my leg and allow an ‘effort substitution’ for the tired and sore muscles, aching from the state I am in,” he said.

Gently, with a lot of patience and respect I followed his instructions. “Pay attention! I will hold and raise my knee three mm high, just high enough for you to slide the bandage under it. And don’t forget! The bed mattress is soft, it is not a floor, push it.”

Another time we made an exact plan to move his pelvis so that it would find the chair next to the bed. He raised his voice, “Pay attention: touch me here! Very slowly! Now! Accompany my movement so that I will feel safe.” We had to have a few pauses before the task was complete, so sharp was the pain. “You are ok,” he said smiling, gratefully holding both my hands. This moment brings tears to my eyes even today. Yochanan taught anyone who wanted to learn without preferences or liking or disliking, paid as well as free of charge. His Awareness Through Movement lessons with the famous “Meta Comments” and his Functional Integration sessions with the famous “gentle & communicative touch” were open for those who wished to learn more. His three books and dvds are still open for those who wish to learn more about the method he loved, invented by Moshe whom he loved and admired. Yochanan’s books show us the path he followed in his development and a path for us to follow. Moshe Feldenkrais said in his foreword to The Feldenkrais Method: Teaching by Handling, 1983: “The book in front of you should be re-read several times. That way you are likely to get the most of the goodness of the book. Good luck!” His other publications include Acquiring the Feldenkrais Profession, 2000, The Corollary Discharge: The Forgotten Link, and Remarks on the Body-mind Problem, 2008 with forward by Eleanor Criswell Hanna, Ed.D. The books show us the path he followed in his development and maybe a path for each and every one of us to follow. Courtesy of Eytan Mandel and Ned Dwelle

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Yochanan Rywerant Remembrance Ingrid Wilczek When I was asked to write in remembrance of Yochanan Rywerant the task seemed easy. I would take out my notes, write down a story, and be finished. But what I can tell now is less a story about Yochanan than a story of a fundamental personal development by means of him. I had a presentiment of his impact on me—through writing I am stunned how strongly he has affected me. Yochanan was one of my first teachers. I met him 1983 in Munich in one of the early training programs that followed the training in Amherst, Masachusetts. As a very innocent student I experienced Yochanan teaching Awareness Through Movement and Functional Integration (fi) lessons, and honestly, I was not impressed. Even worse, I thought I knew better, better! At the time I was convinced that to feel good, to sense fluidity, to move easily, to float through space and smile and feel happy was the goal. To talk about my wonderful relief from trauma and hurt was it, was my, was the Feldenkrais Method! I felt disturbed when Yochanan upset my paradise with questions:“What is your intention?” While practising some sort of fi, he disturbed me by asking:“What are you doing? What for?” I was annoyed by his way of thinking, reflecting, intending. I was smilingly levitating through a wonderful, light universe. Why should I think, question my intention and action, why awareness, why act in accordance to my surrounding and demands of reality. I performed in my private heaven. That was my Feldenkrais Method . . . and, certainly, it and I felt wonderfully, really, good. Then I had my first fi with Yochanan. I remember the situation as if it were yesterday. While lying on the table I sensed myself clearly, moving effortlessly, easy in distinct directions without any hesitation or apparent limit. Feeling, thinking, intending and acting was one fluid act. Of course I knew that it was Yochanan touching, directing and moving me. Yet, at the same time I felt not him but only me, a paradoxical sensation. I sensed myself exclusively, while at the same time I was conscious that Yochanan was mediator of the experience. At the end, standing, the world and I had changed. I understood what it means to live towards unavowed dreams, to be aware and to use movement for awareness. I understood that thinking, real thinking, is the means for action. I knew because I felt my self within the gravitational field, senses alert, awake. I had learned by experience, orientation, direction, intention. After Yochanan’s fi my desire to learn intensified. I changed from floating and flying through space to thinking, understanding and acting towards a colorful, interesting, vital, life and reality, now a real paradise. Several visits in Yochanan´s Tel Aviv home and practice were of extraordinary richness. In several series of fi lessons I learned intensively about myself, and about the potential of the work. Learning internally meant growing towards a mature external capacity—again a paradox. It was a gift to study with Yochanan. To be served tea and sweets from Yardena, his first wife, was an additional highlight. They generously shared their knowledge, no matter how innocent or ignorant the student. Yochanan was never easy: He demanded attention and a desire to learn. His way of asking clear, seemingly easy, almost simple, yet very refined questions was unique. His thinking and acting was light, elegant and challenging, as was his teaching . He indicated ways for personal and professional improvement, and ideas to further better teaching and better living. His gift to all of us is the means to think and act.

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AFFECT: A Hidden Dimension: The example of music, dance, and painting Excerpts from The Intelligence of Moving Bodies: A Somatic View of Life and its Consequences, Carl Gingburg, Lucia Schuette-Ginsburg, AWAREing Press, 2010 Carl Ginsburg with contributions from Lucia Schuette-Ginsburg Moshe Feldenkrais famously said, “Movement is the key to life.” While this can be taken as a catchy statement, Feldenkrais meant something more profound. He observed through his life’s work that what is basic in living, including self-movement, self-maintenance, self-reproduction, self-protection—everything involved in staying alive and passing one’s genes along through biological history—requires the ability to move. Further, he sensed that movement was fundamental to many of the higher functions for humans, including perception, cognition and the ability to think. We took this theme as the inspiration of our book. In Part II of The Intelligence of Moving Bodies: A Somatic View of Life and its Consequences, we investigated the question of affect, in its relation to action, thinking, learning, and expressing. The notion of vitality affects as a more general human experience attracted us, as it seemed to relate to movement and interaction. Daniel Stern1 observed these forms of affect through his investigation of how mother and infant communicate before the infant develops language. They are different than those affects we label as emotions, but are similarly embodied in our action. Stern has suggested that these forms are a key for observing how movement becomes a power driving the arts, music, dance, painting, etc. in adult life. The important observation is that affect in general is communicated through interaction involving movement as the medium. Manfred Clynes2, for example, has shown how specific labeled emotions are conveyed in the arts through the form of movement as a direct expression of the feeling involved. Thus the form of an emotion of love is distinct from reverence; and hate is distinct from anger, etc. The specific form is conveyed in many modalities. It could be through direct touch, or through music, or in the form of brush stroke in a painting, or a physical expression of bodily movement in dance, as well as in an interaction with another person. Vitality affects are similarly conveyed, only such affects are below the specificity of emotion, but equally potent in creating feeling. Affects of all varieties are not simply mental feelings. The freedom of affect expression depends on how capable we are to move ourselves without interference and self-censoring, which then allows the so-called mental experience. The excerpts that follow are taken from the last chapter in Part II of the book, in which we explicate this different view of affect and art.

glenn gould plays beethoven: piano sonata number 13 I am watching the film “Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.” I reach the fifth film, entitled “Hamburg,” which is set in a hotel room in that city. The actor playing Mr. Gould is on the phone relaying a telegram back to Canada about his bronchitis. A maid is cleaning the room. A knock on the door and a package is delivered. He opens the package as he finishes his phone conversation. Inside is a recording. The maid is still cleaning the room, but he sits her down, places the recording on the phonograph, and puts the phonograph arm at the start of the second, allegro movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 13. From the 7

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first notes I am transfixed. I have no thoughts; I am carried by the music to a certain, hardto-define ecstasy. I feel it as movement. I feel it as flow, as dance, as a sensation of lightness, joy—yes, ecstasy. There is something else, for I am experiencing this performance in a way that I have never before experienced Beethoven. There is a precision in timing, in the dynamics of the attack on the piano keys, in the expression of this performance that exhilarates in a unique way. This experience is without content or meaning. Above all it is embodied, and enjoyed not abstractly, but concretely as movement in time. The maid at first sits not knowing what to expect or what is expected of her. As she listens, she also becomes transfixed by the sounds, and begins to move her head in time to the music. Her smile reveals her enjoyment. She arises to look at the album cover. The camera shifts to a view out the window overlooking the Binnenalster, the smaller lake in the center of Hamburg, and a train on the opposite embankment. The music carries the tone and feeling. One could say that there is something mysterious, ineffable, happening here. And yet the experience is common. A communication is happening, nervous system to nervous system, or better yet person to person. Beethoven’s written music (basically an instruction as to the performance of his composition) is transformed through Glenn Gould, is transformed again in the nervous system of the listener. It is a peculiarly human kind of communication. Neither my cat nor my dog show any sign with their movement or other behavior to indicate that something happens to them. It is not like listening to ordinary speech. At the same time the experience is something comprehensive. It is not just hearing, for one experiences being compelled to move in some relation to the movement of the sounds. There are subtle, but definite bodily feelings involved, kinesthetic, emotional, which undoubtedly relate to changes in many parts of the nervous system, including the autonomic nervous system. The experience cannot be reduced to these changes. It stands on its own. In some sense it is also a communion. Unlike communications that happen through symbolic representations as in ordinary speech, this communication is direct and analogical. It takes on a transcendent quality. And what can we say of Beethoven and Glenn Gould? We call them geniuses. They had refined their nervous systems to a very high level. Through the development of their action and perception, they became capable of very fine discriminations and sensing of organized sound. Otherwise what they created could not have the observed effect. For Glenn Gould this refining was a refining of his ability to move his fingers and himself in relation to his instrument. He did this in a particularly idiosyncratic way that looks impossible when you see films of him at the piano. Sitting on a stool that appears to be far too low he reached upward a little for the keyboard. His head was forward and erect, yet there are many times he threw his head back in a gesture indicating complete involvement, or dropped it forward in a gesture of intense listening. We know from his mastery that this strange positioning worked for him in the sense that through this way of acting, he could make the music that he intended. It was not ideal from the point of view of comfort. In later life he developed pain in his wrists. Nevertheless, in his playing he learned to inhibit actions of himself that did not serve his purpose. It means that he spent many years refining his ability in this way by listening to the production of his sound in relation to how he wanted to hear what he produced, in relation to how he felt himself at the keyboard. The two acts for him went together, that of listening and that of playing. One would think, considering the speed of his finger motion that he could not play consciously. Yet he could not play unconsciously. He must nevertheless have gone directly from feeling the instrument to taking the musical thought into the action of his movement. 8

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I am emphasizing that the organization of movement is the essential factor in both developing the skill and developing the listening, i.e., the musical perception. You could say that he knew what he was doing with the piano. Affect, however, is essential. It determines what we call the quality. As a listener, myself for example, I must have experiences in listening and in learning to listen in order to perceive the music. I do not mean a technical or cognitive learning about the structure of music. I mean the kind of learning that comes about in listening, enjoying, and beginning to make more and more discernments and differentiations. One becomes sensitized. One gains dexterity in learning in a parallel way to how Gould gained dexterity in playing. I am curious about my process, but even more so about how Gould gained his mastery. We know that it cannot be through mere exposure and repetition. Although Gould is gone, luckily we have some recorded testimony on his part about how he developed his skill. One story (reported in Payzant)3 concerns some piano trouble that Gould was having before giving a concert in Israel. The piano available for the concert had a good tone but a difficult action, one that Gould felt played him rather than he playing it. Gould went out into the desert to be alone and rehearse in his head the concerto he was to play. Now he did something that fits beautifully with what I would call a Feldenkrais approach. He rehearsed, “not upon the mental image he had of the Tel Aviv piano, but upon his mental image of the familiar old Chickering back home at the cottage in Uptergrove, Ontario. Every note was rehearsed mentally as if upon the Chickering with its characteristic feel, sound and surroundings.” Payzant goes on to describe how Gould desperately held on to the image at the beginning of the concert, even finding at first that it was hard to move the keys, but then discovering that he was enjoying the sensation of “distance” from the Tel Aviv piano. Gould left the stage in a state of “exaltation and wonder.” Later many in the audience commented on the quality of his performance. Gould took these reactions as evidence of the possibility of communication “of total spirit” between performer and audience. In a more bizarre instance Gould reported (as quoted in Payzant) preparing a concert in which he began by learning the score without the piano, and then only a week ahead began to practice it. He became blocked about the piece as a consequence of trying to work out a fingering system for a variation in the piece. Gould began a process of getting out of his bind by trying his “last resort.” He placed some radios near the piano, and turned them up loud so that when he practiced, “. . . while I could feel what I was doing, I was primarily hearing what was coming off the radio speaker. . . .” He discovered that he had to do more but commented, “The fact that you couldn’t hear yourself, that there wasn’t audible evidence of your failure, was already a step in the right direction.” He anticipated an unrecognized aspect of learning, that we often cannot learn when there is anxiety about the outcome. Another form of affect dominates the process. In the next step Gould focused on the left hand and played the notes “as unmusically as possible. In fact the more unmusical the better, because it took more concentration to produce unmusical sounds, and I must say I was extremely successful in that endeavor. In any event, during this time my concentration was exclusively on the left hand—I’d virtually forgotten about the right—and I did this at varying tempi and kept the radios going. . . .” He reported then that the block was gone. Payzant comments, “This is a kind of squinting to bring the peripheral vision into action, or an averting of the gaze while dealing with a distasteful situation, or a stepping back in order to the better to leap. But the centipedal interpretation covers it best. The 9

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pianist while actually playing the piano no more thinks in terms of fingers following other fingers than does the centipede of his feet while walking.” This leaves us with a number of seeming mysteries. They are the same mysteries of practicing any skill or developing dexterity in any endeavor. What was Gould’s process to begin with? How do we develop skill in listening as opposed to hearing? How do we become cognitively proficient? To give the obvious answer, we must practice in some sort of way. By itself this statement is meaningless. The implication, however, is that action and interaction in the world is essential, which also implies that the organization of action and movement is at the heart of everything else. Later we will approach what it means to practice and emphasize again that mere repetition accomplishes nothing. Repetition as merely mechanically acting deadens affect. Affect provides the value. I would like to return to the question of ecstasy. It turns out to be a central theme of Gould’s, although I did not know this when I experienced ecstasy in hearing Gould’s playing of Beethoven. “Gould says that ecstasy is the only proper quest of the artist.” (I am quoting Payzant again.) Gould distinguished between simulated and genuine ecstasy, and it strikes me that what I experienced would clearly come under the category of the genuine. The question is, how do we get there? Experientially, my ecstasy was not a spontaneous event. I believe it was communicated directly through Gould’s playing. Listening to other performances I find that I am not moved in the same way by romantic interpretations of this same music of Beethoven. It means that Gould must know on some level what he is doing and must experience the state in order to be capable of communicating it to others. What he controls is the precision of his timing and the attack on the keys, based on his tactile and kinesthetic movement experience. To do this he must have a highly evolved sense of kinesthetic and musical awareness. A particular affect we call ecstasy infects the listener. It is one of my points that the two awarenesses are interlinked. Ecstasy, for example, can be evoked through dance and ceremony. The experience is not simply a mental state, whatever that might be, but involves the entire self. One has to appreciate that even from a biological systems viewpoint the nervous system does not create such a state without the active participation of the musculature, the chemical communications systems, the neurotransmitters, the flow of vital fluids, etc., and that all of this feeds back through the nervous system. In fact a person cannot know affect except through the provocation of the internal senses. In this sensing there is no disembodied mind experiencing ecstasy. One actually is moved and also compelled to move oneself. Experience itself is not localized in one sensory system, in one image, in one moment. Nor is it in the strict sense private. Otherwise how could the experience of ecstasy be communicated and how could we know that it was? The experience is inter-subjective for anyone open to it or prepared for it. There must be a medium, that is, some modality through which the communication happens, an interlinking between persons. One might conjecture an information transfer. And in one sense there is something of this sort. Beethoven composed a sonata, and transmitted the basics of this sonata through a symbolic form, written music in which the outline of notes and timing are transmitted. Some writers refer to this as an algorithm. However, the information of the written score is insufficient for transmitting the music. Glenn Gould, by the way, could easily read the score and hear the music in his head. In fact he reported that he practiced a piece this way before he ever sat down to actually play it. What Gould did was to create an analog of the composition mentally from the information. To do this he had already organized for himself his own sense of Beethoven. That is, he could add the dynamics of performance that matched his inner sense of Beethoven not included 10

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in the information of the score. Although one could digitalize these dynamics, in the human realm one actually hears and feels the Beethoven dynamic directly without there being some informational, i.e., symbolic intermediate. One could say that Gould invests his complete being in his performance. Video is wonderful for watching what happens in this realm of performance. I am watching a videotape of Sergiu Celibidache first rehearse and then perform the Symphony Number One of Prokofiev with the Münchner Phiharmoniker.4 The process of the rehearsal is so clear. Celibidache is the guide, listening to his musicians with that quality of attention one can only call masterful. He feeds back the sound that he wants. The winds are too loud here, too forceful at another point. The strings need to adjust their bowing. The timing is too slow at one point, the transition of theme from one group of instruments to another does not flow properly. And at one passage he encourages the musicians to play with spite. The point is that he listens and discriminates between what he hears and what he intends aesthetically. He then gets his musicians to produce the sound he desires. As they play over the problematic passages the musicians begin to truly work together. It is as we do in all proper learning. We don’t just repeat something. We shift the performance to more closely match what we intend. Again the notes on the page do not transmit the music. Information in this sense is deficient. Celibidache comments at one point to the musicians, “In classical music parts pass from one instrument to the other. That provides the continuity. Here everything is up in the air. So it is up to us....You must create a unity which is not in the score.” The performance is a marvel. What is most intriguing is to watch Celibidache. Like Gould’s playing of the piano, his conducting is a total involvement. At times he literally dances with the musicians. At other moments he sings. Every facial expression, every body gesture communicates the music. This is not a performer showing off, but only what is necessary to produce the music as he hears it to himself. One sees a strong gesture with the hands at exactly the moment a strong gesture is made in the music. His thinking flashes directly into his action. Again we can emphasize the importance of movement. Celibidache moved in conducting with his entire being. It is his movement that conveys to the musicians the requisite performance, and if he moved only his arm and baton something very different would result. In speaking to one of his conducting students, I was made very aware of just how conscious Celibidache was of all this. The conductor’s baton was only the final point of a whole body experience. There are many echoes of Feldenkrais’s teaching in all of this.

affect and dance: bodies in movement We must at least make a note of dance as the art form most connected to moving bodies. We watch dance as performance and we dance together. Sometimes we dance alone simply as expression. We can abstract movement in performance to form and design. Nevertheless dance and rhythm can connect us.

The San Felipe Corn Dance Most of the villagers not involved in the ritual dance stood around the wide central plaza of the village. There was a sprinkling of “anglos” (non-native visitors) standing in the corners of the plaza, which was enclosed by low adobe houses. We waited for what seemed a long time, as the dance ritual, while announced for 10:30, began when the drummers and dancers felt the moment was proper. Now we could hear the beginnings of the drums and 11

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chanting as the dancers emerged from the kiva of their clan. Soon the plaza was filled with decorated and ceremoniously clothed humans—each one dancing—all moving together but each in an individual way—so that the spectators were soon caught up in the dance. As a spectator I was outside the group, yet I too was caught into the dance. I began to resonate with the movement of the dancers. I became entranced in a way that was different from watching a performance, a formal dance put on for an audience, a spectacle. The effect of the dance was visual—one has to say yes. I was watching, seeing movement, rhythm, an aesthetic—the high steps taken—the turning bodies—the lowered heads—the color—the corn decoration of each dancer—yes. There was also something much more visceral. The dance entered my embodied sense of myself without literally moving myself. I was pulsating with movement. I began to lose my separation as spectator. I was entranced—caught in the intent of the dance—which was exactly to bring the villagers into synchrony to celebrate the corn. As a lone observer—in my brain so to speak—I only see a spectacle. In the feeling of the dance—what I experience as movement, affect, perception all tied together so that I lose myself as separate observer—I am brought to couple with the dancers who are enacting the ceremony. I am thus embodied in a moving, feeling, emotive state, which is shared with the dancers and villagers. I am resonating with this collective. Has this to do with the origin of the art form we call dance? I am watching a performance of Ballet Frankfurt in Germany performing a piece created by choreographer William Forsythe, which is skillfully enacted by the company of dancers and involves complex and unusual moves. The dancers slide, tumble, run across the stage and tangle with each other, creating momentary tableaus and breaking up again. While at first I can observe coolly and stay detached, enjoying aesthetically the unexpected shifts, breaks, and edges created by the dancers, I am eventually stirred by the energy and forcefulness of the movements and the effect of the tableau. The perceptions of shifting space and relationships, the sudden appearance of unexpected movements excites in a different way than the Corn Dance. Is there is a link?

affect: movement in painting As with music, we can consider the importance of movement and affect in other arts. I twice visited the great Monet retrospective of 1995. The second time in Vienna the crowds were far smaller than in Chicago where nine hundred thousand visitors saw the exhibition. In Vienna, I had enough time to become absorbed into the paintings so that I became aware of the movement of Monet’s brush strokes as revealed in the texture of the paint. I had not thought of painting as a movement experience except perhaps in looking at Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings where Pollock’s movement is directly connected to how his paint hit the canvas. One wonders how such direct and concrete art became known as abstract. In Pollock’s work movement is the very essence of what is expressed. It is not abstract at all, but concretely literal. As with Monet, the painting communicates directly through the means of application of paint. It is abstract only if one assumes that a painting should have visual images to be concrete. In Monet one could attend to the content of the picture and not be directly aware of how the movement of the brush is so much a part of the expression of the painting. And yet one is so moved. It is a different movement expression than one might find in experiencing Renoir or any other artist’s work of that period. Monet was a conscious experimenter, and was undoubtedly aware of how his brush movement affected the result he intended in the 12

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expression of his painting. In other words, he was doing something with the brush and calibrating the effect on his own responses. Monet worked as a scientist, exploring a subject at different times of the day to paint the effects of different lighting conditions. Often he worked with multiple canvasses in a given day, switching to another as the light changed. One series, of the houses of Parliament and the Thames, shows not only the change in light, but also differing reflections of sunlight from the water. One actually experiences the light as if coming from the painting. Monet knew how to layer the colors he brushed on to directly create this illusion of light reflecting from water. In actuality there is only the canvass. And when one observes up close, there is no light, only the layers of paint. Thus, the nervous system synthesizes this effect. As Monet painted he was too close to see the effect of what he was doing. Yet he had to know how the layering of whites with other colors would result in producing the effect of reflection. As in the case of Glenn Gould, he was perfecting his art through constant adjustment and calibration.

commentary about vitality affects The world of affect develops long before we have learned to speak. Like perception, it is basic to all the following steps in life. It is physiological, sensory, and strongly connected to movement. It is also chemical, both physiologically and in its transmission from one being to another. It is more than what we label as emotions and feelings. We can say it is a major characteristic of our biological inheritance, and a major aspect of our phenomenal experience. How can we also call it a hidden dimension? As with movement, affect is part of embodied life and even though its presence in experience is essential, its influence is more background than foreground. It is noticed most when it increases and decreases. When it decreases life becomes flat, uninteresting; one is unmotivated to move or initiate anything. When it increases dramatically one becomes manic, hyperactive; one is filled with what is called psychic energy. We have already noted that while emotion is more often foreground, there are other aspects of affect often simply not noticed. With the emphasis on cognition, many thinkers attempt to look for meaning and cognitive origins for what is fundamentally not cognitive. It is most likely the other way around: Without affect, cognitive activity is not possible. Lastly, affect is a major element in inter-subjectivity. It is the medium of how we connect together and how we are originally bonded to other beings like ourselves. Because affect is so much in the realm of the non-verbal, we took music as a beginning for our investigation. It is reminiscent of affect as we first experienced it in our very early life. Daniel Stern (1985, op. cit.) makes the connection where he discusses “the sense of an emergent self” based on his observations of infants and their interaction with mothers and caretakers. Vitality affects is his designation for “. . . the many qualities of feeling that occur,” and “. . . do not fit into our existing lexicon of taxonomy of affects” (p. 54). Vitality affects are an ongoing aspect of an infant’s life experience and are distinguished from emotions that are more immediate and short lived, and which we can categorize. He writes, “These elusive qualities are better captured by dynamic, kinetic terms, such as ‘surging,’ ‘fading away,’ ‘fleeting,’ ‘explosive,’ ‘crescendo,’ ‘bursting,’ ‘drawn out,’ and so forth.” Infants experience such qualities internally as well as feeling them in being with other persons; vitality affects show up in our way of moving and being with another. We call that expressiveness. While some expressiveness can be described as signaled (and this is so for specific emotions that are designated by specific facial and bodily expressions), 13

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the expressiveness here can perhaps best be described as “tuning in to one another.” Stern goes on to state, “Abstract dance and music are examples par excellence of the expressiveness of vitality affects.” Our intent in our book is to emphasize the importance of movement in biological life and to show that growth, learning, and survival is possible only with autonomous animate beings. Feldenkrais discovered how to make use of our autonomy to improve life and our abilities through sensory exploration. While in these excerpts the emphasis is on relations of movement to expression, what we know through our work can be a boon to those who wish to enhance their abilities throughout life. For artists, expressiveness and sensitivity is enhanced through freedom in moving. And awareness, which is both inner and outer, can be enhanced through the movement processes of our method. We come now to the essential insight, that in Feldenkrais’s words, “. . . the unity of mind and body is an objective reality, that they are not entities related to each other, but an inseparable whole while functioning.” 5 Thinking itself requires sensing, feeling, and acting. Affect in all its forms drives all of this as well as the learning process itself. It is indeed an important dimension of life.

notes 1. Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, Basic Books, 1985, and Forms of Vitality, Oxford University Press, 2010. 2. Manfred Clynes, Sentics: The Touch of the Emotions, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977. 3. Geoffrey Payzant, Glenn Gould: Music and Mind, Toronto, Ont. Can: Key Porter Books, 1992. 4. Sergiu Celibidache, Prokofiev Symphonie Classique rehersal and Performance, Munich Phiharmoniker, Teldec Video, 1991. 5. Moshe Feldenkrais, “Mind and Body,” 1966. Reprinted in Your Body Works, Gerald Kogan (ed.), Berkeley: Transformations, 1980.

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What Does It Mean to See Clearly: The Inside View David Webber In 1996 at the age of 43, with a successful career as a Computer Systems Integrator, I was suddenly diagnosed with a severe case of uveitis, a disorder of the immune system that causes inflammation within the eyes. No pathological finding was detected. Within a year and a half I could no longer read my writing, drive a car or work at my profession. For the next six years, I was in pain and afflicted with complications including damage to both optic nerves (optic neuropathy), fluid behind the retinas (edema), cataracts in both eyes and glaucoma. I had five operations; some were successful, others were not. My right eye became infected which lead to a corneal ulcer, the loss of all intraocular pressure and macular (central) vision in the right eye. My ophthalmologist told me that my condition would probably get worse and that I could expect to be on immune-suppressant drugs for the rest of my life. In 2002, I could barely count fingers in front of my face and my visual acuity was 20/400. I was declared legally blind. I was desperate to find a way to normalize my immune system and save what was left of my eyes, vision and life. As Western medical techniques were proving unsuccessful, I tried holistic ones such as the Bates Method of natural vision improvement and acupuncture. For twenty-five years I had practiced the path of Buddhist meditation. But ancient meditation exercises for healing the eyes proved equally inaccessible to me. Nothing I tried seemed to work and as everything got worse, I grew even more fearful, anxious and frustrated. At the same time, I was fortunate to have the love and unconditional support of family and friends. I knew in my heart that while severe, this was an opportunity to simplify and refine my life . The question emerged from within and has never ceased: “What does it mean to see clearly?” By chance, at the Feldenkrais Center in Toronto, Canada, I attended a series of public Awareness Through Movement (atm) lessons. I thought that if I was going to be blind for the rest of my life, at least I could have some fun and learn to roll around on the floor—I did not need my eyes to do that. I was amazed that as a result of bringing my attention to these simple movement sequences, I began to feel better and more hopeful. Out of curiosity, and seeking a new community of friends, in 2000 I joined a Feldenkrais practitioner training program. There, for the first time, I experienced the deep states of calm necessary for relaxing my body, the muscles of my eyes, and practicing the Buddhist healing meditations for the eyes. I no longer need any medication either for my immune system or my eyes. I have regained functional vision in my left eye. The impossible has become possible. But I knew that I had not yet learned how to generalize these improvements throughout my whole self. Compensating in my daily life for limitations and distortions in my field of vision is a challenge and often exhausting. I was longing to feel more stable on my feet. I often felt strain and sometimes pain while walking, standing and sitting. I carried chronic pain in my right shoulder. I was sure this had a lot to do with my eyes. In March 2010 there was an opportunity to have a series of Functional Integration (fi) lessons with Carl Ginsburg at his home and practice in Bad Soden, Germany. Over the course of two weeks I received seven lessons. As the lessons unfolded I learned how to see myself, and the world, more clearly.

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lesson 1 While I was sitting, Carl touched me gently along my back, spine and shoulders. He moved my pelvis and hips, checked the quality of my head movements, tested for structural support through my left and right sides. On the left I was able to remain upright without effort. But when he pressed down through my right side I gave way—and I felt that no amount of effort on my part could have counteracted even gentle force. When I stood and walked around it was clear to both of us that I was more stable over my left side than my right. I lay on my back with rollers behind my knees and ankles. When we found the most comfortable height for my head my breathing deepened. My head nodded in response as he pushed through the sole of my left foot. However, the pressure through my right foot got lost somewhere along the way to my head and my foot felt mushy and dull. There was a clear difference on my left and right sides. Carl worked mostly on my left side, through my pelvis, ribs and shoulders. He spent considerable time with my ankle and lower leg. He rolled my head left and right. When I sat up, I felt my weight very clearly over my left sit bone. I stood beside the table and as he did in the original observation, he pressed down through my ribs in the direction of the floor. It was even clearer that my weight was mostly over my left leg and foot. I walked around a bit and was surprised to notice that as I stepped onto my right foot, my right knee was not oriented over my foot at all. My foot was somewhere out to the right, while my right knee was pointing in to the middle—my leg and foot were not really supporting my weight. I was contacting the floor only along the inside edge of my right foot. I described my discovery and Carl suggested, “Think about how you could feel on the right side from how it feels on the left.” As I found a way to do this in my imagination I could feel my right side respond. My breathing changed and my ribs on the right fanned and opened out. My shoulders shifted. And then I noticed that I now seemed to roll over the outside edge of the right foot as I stepped and my right leg seemed bow-legged. This felt very odd. Back on the table he now worked mostly on my right side from foot to head. Then when he pushed gently through my right foot—especially at the ball of the little toe—his effort engaged the bones in my foot, ankle and knee and I felt my head move easily. There was now a clearer path of movement on the right than I had felt on the left. To conclude the lesson, I walked around, and paid attention to what it was like to feel support through both my left and right sides. Carl asked me to take a few steps backwards and I could feel how my heels connected with the muscles of my back. My pelvis and ribs felt as if they were in a different place relative to my feet and head. I felt stable on my feet, and I experienced a great sense of relief knowing that we were on the right track.

lesson 2 Carl commented that he could see a difference already, after just one lesson. I felt I was sitting in a different way but the changes were not clear to me. I walked around a little, feeling disappointed because I wanted to feel a bigger improvement than I actually could notice, but Carl saw something that interested him and he asked me to come to the table and sit again at the edge with my feet placed on the floor. He said that he thought it might be useful to guide me through an Awareness Through Movement lesson that could help clarify and improve the organization of my feet. He

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suggested that we first work with the foot and leg that was better able to support my weight. While walking I felt that I was again favoring my left side and on this we agreed. As the lesson began, Carl asked me to direct my left knee forward and back over my left foot, just within an easy range. He then took me through a series of movement variations where my attention was directed to my left foot, ankle, knee and pelvis. In the past I had done lessons that were similar to this so I was familiar with the patterns, but now there was depth to the learning informed by yesterday’s fi. I found it difficult to do some of the variations. It was especially difficult to rotate my foot to the left. I just did not know how to do that without strain. However pivoting my left foot around an imaginary peg between my big and second toe triggered an unexpected and very strong sensation right at that spot. I can only describe it as a newly discovered “aliveness” in the webbing between my toes. It streamed directly up to the place between my eyes, filling my eyes almost to tears then spread through my whole body. This was delight. When I went back to test the forward and backward movement of the left knee there was a big improvement in both range and ease. I was now firmly planted on my left sit bone and my weight was clearly over my left side. Again, as I stood, I felt a clear difference between left and right. When I walked this difference felt huge. We repeated the movements on the right. Again the space between the first and second toes seemed to wake up in the same way. Just thinking of rotating my foot around the imaginary pivot triggered the streaming sensations that directly connected my feet with my spine and eyes. When I stood, my weight had shifted over to the right. Walking was much easier and I felt light and pleasurably balanced. I felt I was standing and walking like a happy ape.

lesson 3 The lesson began by checking my general organization while sitting and walking as before. I was no longer feeling the pain in my shoulder and arm that had been bothering me continuously for more that a month. I lay on my front on the table and Carl placed a soft roller under my ankles. My head was turned to the left with my right cheek on the table—clearly my preferred direction. He began by pushing through my feet on both the left and right sides. As he found the general pattern once again, I lost any desire to think and follow the lesson consciously. I wanted only to rest in the peaceful space Carl had created through his open attention. I felt a three-dimensional sense of my ankles working in a way that was new. I could almost see the bones of my feet and ankles working together. What became obvious— and got me thinking and talking again—was the extra strain I could now feel in my calf muscles, especially on the right side. They were like boards, hard and unyielding knots to touch. Carl began working on my pelvis and right side. He rolled my head. I was again in a kind of comfortable mental fog. I was back to just sensing and feeling relationships. When he went back to the right calf the muscles had softened and could now slide over the bone. We were amazed to discover that the concentrated knot of muscle in the right calf had completely vanished. After working with my left foot, ankle, and up to my neck and head, we both felt an obvious reduction of tonus in the left calf. As I rested on the table, I became aware of feeling

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hardness in the backs of my eyes, neck, back and pelvis connecting down through the backs of my legs. It felt compact and rough like brick, but thin like a plywood board. From inside my breathing pushed against what felt like a wall running along the plane of my back. I saw in a flash that this wall was anxiety and fear compacted. At the same time I also felt it to be a structural phenomenon—the muscles at the back of my eyes, diaphragm and pelvis were gripping and shaped by this density like tree roots growing in rocky ground. While the fear I felt was very real, the wonder at experiencing it in this new way dissolved my need to be afraid. I felt entirely safe to breathe. Upon standing up I felt much better organized over my legs. When I walked about it was obvious to me that this wall—built of fear—had been an unknown part of myself, that it related to my eyes and had defined my posture for years. As I walked around the fear became more transparent and began to fade in and out. After some hours it dissolved on its own like smoke. I do not think I said anything about the experience to Carl—there were no words around it at that time.

lesson 4 After observing me, Carl placed a roller on the floor next to a wall. He asked me to place my left foot on the roller and let my foot soften as I rolled over the round shape from heel to toes. I was leaning lightly with my hands against the wall for support. Even these small movements felt uncomfortable and my back, shoulders and neck were very active, as if all pulling in different directions. My left foot hurt. Carl asked me to leave my left foot on the roller and to step up with the right. I thought this would be simple but my left foot collapsed under my weight and my right foot was hard to lift. My back and neck were tense and I felt uncoordinated. I was frustrated that I could not do this simple thing. But to my surprise when I walked around I could walk better over my left leg and its support was clear. Again I placed my left foot on the roller and tried to step up with my right foot. Carl pointed out that I was swinging my pelvis and leg out to the side as I lifted my right foot even a little off the floor. My lower back was straining. Carl asked me to see if I could now bring the foot up to the roller in a more direct way, without taking it to the right and around. This was hard to manage, as my back was not cooperating at all. After many tries I learned to make it a little better. Then we tried the same procedure with the right foot, rolling over the surface to first soften to the shape, then standing with the right foot and finding support, then stepping on and off with the left. Carl helped me feel the movements in my back with his hands. He asked me to allow my lower back to arch forward a little while taking the top of the pelvis forward and the tailbone a bit back. I then could feel lengthening through my mid-back and neck. As I learned to do this better my left foot and leg were able to come up to the roller in a more direct path—I realized that there was no need to swing out to the side. This felt like a really new piece of the puzzle—that by holding my pelvis fixed there was no way to bring my foot to the roller in a simple way. I repeated this many times: stepping and lowering, lowering and stepping. All the while I was looking for this new movement through my pelvis and back. Sometimes it was clear and sometimes I lost it and went back to doing it the old way. Coming off the roller and while still standing, Carl very gently held my neck and the base of my skull. “Think of letting go and lengthening.” With this lightest of touch and

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guidance—and a conscious decision on my part to ignore a rising fear of falling—I found a way to stop contracting my neck and upper back. This felt as though my bones had slipped through a sheath of muscles. While continuing to hold me lightly at the neck and head, Carl asked me to tilt my head up and down and look up and down at the same time. Then he asked me to tilt my head up while looking down and tilt my head down while I looking up. These were all very small movements. Confusion cleared. I was able to look at the horizon while standing and I felt supported through my feet and legs and back. As I walked about Carl reminded me that I could allow my pelvis to come back and that I could lengthen as I stepped forward on each leg. To my astonishment I could feel that there was no longer any need for my pelvis to swing to the left and right as I walked. I saw that this had been my habit—maybe for my whole life. I tried out both ways of walking and clearly the old way caused me to feel unstable with every step I took. So I practiced going back and forth between these different ways until the new way was clear.

lesson 5 The initial observation showed better movement of my head in all the cardinal directions, though Carl said that there was still room for improvement. He suggested that we do a lesson “leaning over the table” with knees on the floor. Starting at my pelvis, he touched along my vertebrae, moving in the direction of my head. He checked for movement in the ribs. Through this process I was able to very clearly feel the line of my spine and its connection with my ribs as they pressed against the table. With his hands resting on the back of my pelvis I could feel stable contact in front with the table. He asked me to raise my left-facing head a little without turning in any way. Instantly my pelvis and lower back engaged. He asked me to notice the support of the table and see if my pelvis could remain quiet as I lifted. This took many attempts and false starts. With hands quietly on my pelvis and along with his verbal guidance I slowly lifted my head little by little while learning to allow my pelvis to remain quiet. My lumbar spine was able to arch while my ribs took the weight of my upper body. I could now find support from the table in front as I lifted. To my great surprise I was then able to lift my head easily and turn it freely over to the right and rest it comfortably on my left cheek. I had never been able to rest on the right side of my face before without pain in my neck and strain in my upper back. I found that I could now lift, turn and lower my head with ease both left and right. My spine did the work and my pelvis was stable. My ribs engaged in the front to support the shifting weight. After a rest, Carl sat by my head and lifted and moved my head. Then he felt down my spine as I lifted my head. He touched a few vertebrae in my middle back that were still not engaged. His touch brought movement to these vertebrae and lifting became noticeably easier. My spine grew long and my pelvis was quiet and stable. I felt and saw, with my inner eye, my spine as a white tube connecting my pelvis to the base of my skull. Testing the movements of my pelvis we discovered the range in all directions had greatly increase. He tested my lower and middle ribs for movement and their mobility and differentiation surprised us both. As I walked around at the conclusion of the lesson I was clearly able to feel what it was like to walk with a quiet spine, quiet pelvis and easy shoulders. When he directed my attention to lifting and lengthening from the solar plexus and sternum my breathing deepened and my ribs expanded. Walking was even easier.

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lesson 6 While sitting at the edge of the table I told Carl that in the morning I discovered that I could rotate my right foot to the outside much easier than my left. I also noticed that movement at the tip of my left fibula was almost nonexistent compared to the right. I had never noticed this difference before and felt confused. I showed him the difference. Carl gently supported the weight of my left thigh with his hand, near my left knee. Then, as I turned my left foot out, we discovered that my inner hamstring was simultaneously contracting powerfully in the opposite direction. It was obvious that this was making rotation impossible. When he asked me to try to let go of this strain in the hamstring, my breathing stopped, my ribs tightened and my left side shortened all at the same time. I laughed as I saw the uselessness of the huge effort I was making in my ribs just to turn my foot. As I laughed I could breathe. My foot was now free to rotate out to the side easily and the fibula was mobile at the knee. I walked around and felt new freedom in my legs and longer in my lower back. While lying on my back with a flat pad behind my head, Carl placed rollers behind my neck, ankles and knees. I felt space and length at the top of my spine where my skull joins my neck. He started again, as in the first lessons, by pressing lightly through my left and right feet—especially at the balls of my little toes. Once again it was better on the left side. He rolled my head with many tiny light movements, and then touched my upper ribs and clavicles. My neck felt long and supported by the soft roller. I gradually felt more and more space between my head and neck. We rested a little. With my head lifted in his hands I went into a very pleasant flexion throughout my whole body. As he made small, very delicate movements with the bones of my head, and ears I seemed to be unwinding deep inside my skull. My breath deepened. He brought his thumbs to the upper ridge of both temples. I suddenly felt myself going blind once again: alone, curled up in a world of sadness. I saw my right eyeball fall out of my head and disappear somewhere between my ear and the floor. I felt this as the death of sight. Grief and sorrow poured through me in waves from head to toe. Held in the space of Carl’s attention I felt safe. I was able to breathe and let the full force of these very strong and difficult feelings, thoughts and memories pass through me in waves. As I watched, I felt muscles letting go in my lower back and warmth spread into my pelvis. My right eye came back into my awareness. I felt its weight and round shape. It found a new resting place deep in the center of the socket. Carl commented that he saw a lengthening in the right side of my face. I described what had happened in the muscles of my back. After a short rest, he went back to pushing through my feet. The pressure went through both sides easily to my head.

lesson 7 Carl asked me to sit and to roll my pelvis backward and forward as I shifted my weight first onto the left sit bone and then onto the right. As I did, he asked me to feel opening in my mid-back, solar plexus and ribs. Afterwards I felt fluid as I walked about. Returning to sit, I turned left and right as I looked around actively with my eyes. I could feel my weight shift left and right on my sitting bones as I turned. When I walked I felt even more fluid and coordinated through my feet, back and neck.

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Sitting again, Carl helped me find stability as I leaned forward with my elbows resting on my thighs above my knees. He asked me to let my right hand move down between my legs toward the floor. As my chest turned left in response, I looked up over my left shoulder. I did this many times. Then we repeated this on the other side. As I walked, he suggested, “Let your shoulders move freely, without intention. Let them respond to the movements of your pelvis.” I felt a band of strain around my shoulder girdle. As I learned to let this go, my shoulders started to move more freely as I walked. I felt very good, in a simple way. But in the next moment I suddenly experienced strong fear again— my long held fear of not seeing clearly as I walk with sick and damaged eyes. I instantly felt my neck, ribs on the right, solar plexus and shoulders all contract at once. I told Carl what was happening. “Go back and forth between walking with this pattern of contraction and walking with free shoulders until you can choose for yourself how to walk.” I returned to a roller in front of a wall. This time I easily found a way to stand with the balls of my feet on the roller. This was a big change from the way I stood on the roller in the lesson of a few days earlier. As I stepped on and off the roller, I found movement in the back of my pelvis and lengthening through my spine. Then I tried the old way of lifting my feet with the side movement of my pelvis and realized that with this pattern there was no lengthening through my spine, no possible support for my sternum, shoulders or head. It made me feel tired and sad and weak. Again I walked, going back and forth between the pattern of anxiety and the pattern of ease and length. I went back and forth, going back and forth many times between the two until I could see clearly what was best, and why it was so and how to chose for myself.



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Many months have now passed since the series of lessons with Carl. Within his field of kindness and skill I learned to see myself and my limitations in a more complete way. When needed now, or when I choose to look, the sense of stability I sought to find on my feet when we began these explorations is available, in a simple way. Reflecting this internal shift, life around me—in love and work—is growing richer, filling out and getting better. The view inside and the view outside are one.

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A Walk in a Temple Garden (Kamakura) Keith Wilson Measured ink strokes represent the shape of the land and the overall forces perceived by the observer: the establishment, growth and maintenance of the garden. Lines, marks, and gestures fill the page until the image is in compliance with the memory that was the genesis. Not dissimilar to recompiling a landscape from dream; identifying the main elements and allowing (permitting) an inspired mist or haze to fill in the less remembered components.  While I was recovering from a serious fall, which resulted in a shattered pelvis, I was introduced to the Feldenkrais Method through group sessions held weekly at Studio One in Oakland, California, led by Liza Weaver Brickey. I found that I had an immediate connection to the exercises, largely due to the years I had created drawings and paintings employing a similar approach to awareness of mind, body and memory.

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San DIego Garden

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Kamakura

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Forces of Nature

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San DIego Garden

The Walk from Frord’s Cove–Hornby Island

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Temple Grounds

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Awareness through Pictures Helen Miller Figurative art and the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education provide complementary ways of understanding how an individual relates to her surroundings. Both enhance our recognition of the connection between visual and tactile sensitivity. As a figurative painter and installation artist, I study the appearance and sensation of human movement on my sketchpad and Feldenkrais mat. For instance, while drawing the pelvis as an upside down pyramid or trapezoidal prism, I feel for which points of my own pelvis touch the floor. So when I began teaching art last semester, I wanted to explore an extra-disciplinary approach to the age-old study of “the figure”—I wanted to teach a self-reflexive mode of drawing rooted in the artist’s experience of herself moving through space. In this vein, students in the Visual and Environmental Studies Department (ves) and I practiced Awareness Through Movement (atm) lessons, life drawing and an embodied form of art appreciation. Students alternated roles of atm participant, artist and model, maintaining self-awareness as they drew or posed for classmates. By rotating roles, students developed greater insight into the basis, structure and implication of atms as well as greater facility with the tools of drawing. For me the class became an extended workspace, a complement to time spent on the floor and in the studio. Given its emphasis on the cultivation of the kinesthetic and proprioceptive senses, as well as its avoidance of imitation, the Feldenkrais Method may appear disassociated from the imagery that characterizes much fine art. However, working with body image is a crucial component of learning through movement, helping us to “know what we do” and “do what we want.” As philosophers Nelson Goodman and W.J.T. Mitchell write, pictures are “ways of world-making, not just world-mirroring.”1 In the context of a Feldenkrais lesson, images may help us to clarify our actions, to distinguish hands that hang like dead birds, for example, from those that open and close like bells. Images allow a person to more clearly conceive what she is doing and, therefore, experience it more directly. I incorporated the paintings of Paul Cézanne into the class to further elucidate the correlation between image and experience. Cézanne’s paintings chart their development in plain view in dense layers and translucency. Similarly, each lift and turn of an atm lesson appears in the arc of its culminating gestures. Cézanne’s process invoked my students’ capacity to empathize with their materials and subject matter and increased their ability to retain what they were learning about their own somatic intelligence. Part of my goal this past semester was to construct a framework in which students could inhabit the picture plane while continuing to reflect on the artwork critically.



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Most of us have faced the discomforting stare of a blank page. Yet few overly active, and often externally motivated, students have experienced an empty mind, or their own field of vision as empty. An atm lesson called “Relaxed Eyes” served to facilitate such an experience in the first Feldenkrais Method and figurative art class of the term.2 “Relaxed Eyes” uses the gentle rocking of the hips, limbs and head, coordinated with the rhythm of the breath, to relax unnecessary tension around the eyes. At the beginning and end of the 28

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atm, students are instructed to cover and calm their closed eyes with their cupped hands, while attending to what they see. At first, the students reported seeing various afterimages, red and blue shapes, noise or static. The optic nerve continues to fire. By the end of the lesson, most students reported much less activity, a greater degree of homogeneity and large areas of deep blue-black. In the second half of the class, I was interested to see if and how students would transfer their newfound sense of vision’s relatively empty expanse to their sense of a piece of paper. Would they recognize a kinship, symmetry or revealing opposition in the blue-black of relaxed vision and the white or heather grey page? The “Relaxed Eyes” atm prepared the ground of attention by establishing an image of a receptive field, as well as a calm state conducive to observation. Most beginning drawing students are so anxious to succeed in creating a likeness that they have trouble recognizing the primary importance of an 18 x 24-inch sheet of newsprint. They have difficulty conceiving of the paper as a player (or constraint) in the construction of the picture, despite the repeated plea of the drawing instructor to use the whole page! They are inclined to focus tightly on the nude person in front of them, forgetting that people exist in space and that drawing takes place on a surface better engaged with than merely assumed, better looked into than over. The figures in most beginner’s drawings appear to float, or to begin arbitrarily at the knees and end abruptly at the neck. So I asked students to mark, in whatever provisional way worked for them, all “positive” entities in their “negative” field of vision, including the model and including elements like chairs, easels, floorboards and their classmates across the room. Figure drawing courses often begin with a study of the isolated figure. I introduced the context of the room upfront to emphasize its role as more than an afterthought or decorative addition. As we discover in the Feldenkrais Method, a person does not find internal balance, security and independence if their awareness does not also extend out into the environment. This holds as well for images of people in art. Even when the environment is absent, as in the anatomical studies of Leonardo da Vinci, it is implied in the lighting of the figure or in the little hatch marks underneath. The environment and its effects on a given figure are taken into account, as is the generative ground of the page on which the drawing sits. Drawing art students’ attention to grounds and surroundings from the very outset speaks to the essential part they play in the appearance and representation of our human form, and in the direct experience of the human being. At the start of the next class, we taped the first drawings on the wall. Several students used the white of the paper in addition to the charcoal to represent positive space—stools, drawing boards, backpacks and their classmates as well as the model. At this point, Paul Cézanne’s watercolors demonstrated the potential of the figure-ground relationship. Lining the space between things with dabs of translucent paint, Cézanne consistently drew both foreground and background from the same unmarked ground of the page. He regularly left both tree and sky, or curtain and carafe, more or less untouched. While Cézanne was a master of this playful, engaging less-is-more technique, Zen brush painters, woodblock printers, Rembrandt, most Renaissance draftsmen to some degree, black and white photographers, and especially young children, commonly work in this way. High school and college-level students are often more literal, their realism is less likely to risk the ambiguity or duality of more abstract, minimalist modes of representation. They avoid, as the poet James Galvin put it, “The line [that] ravishes the page with implications/ 29

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Cezanne, Les Arbres c.1890-4, watercolor, Princesse de Bassuano, Paris.

Of white earth, white sky!”3 Teenagers and beginning adult artists regularly overdo the more substancial forms shading and touching them up endlessly, covering over a potential basis for unification in their work.4 The uniformity of the artwork’s ground parallels the use of the floor during many atm lessons. The floor provides the student with the opportunity to distinguish the relation between parts of herself, just as the page provides the opportunity to distinguish those parts of the world she wants to represent. Each mark in a Cézanne piece interprets other marks and also activates the unmarked page. Similarly during an atm lesson, the contact of the pelvis with the floor may illuminate the absence of contact of the lumbar spine. A student might sense a correlation between the curves of her spine, those raised from the floor and those that lie along it. Not so differently, we can see resemblances among the unpainted and sea-glass greenery of a Cézanne watercolor. It is by understanding the relation to the ground that one can come to distinguish not only differences and variations, but also relations and a sense of the whole. For the next few classes, we looked to the resonance and reverberations of movements. We started with a classic “Pelvic Clock” lesson. In this atm, students circle the pelvis clockwise and counterclockwise around the face of an imaginary clock on the floor. After the lesson students took turns observing and imagining, through drawing, the movement of 30

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their partner’s head, while focusing on the direction of the pelvis. One can begin to observe the relations of movement involving the entire self along the full length of the spine. We also explored the relationships of movement over time with another classic atm lesson, “Four Points.” The lesson asks students to stand on their hands and feet and to play with shifting their weight, eventually lifting their palms and footpads from the floor. “Four Points” clarifies weight bearing and is ideal for informing discernment of separate while connected sequences of movement, central to life drawing. After the atm, students settled into positions experienced during the lesson as their colleagues drew them repeating the subsequent steps they remembered. The atm lessons, and the drawing exercises built around them, impart a sense of the whole and its relationships by offering an awareness of connections of the person in space, and a sense of how movements unfold over time. We gain clarity in our self-image, or in the image taking shape on the page, and a deeper sense of the process of their making and expression. In fact, a sense of context and a degree of continuity characterize each moment of awareness in a Feldenkrais lesson and each sign of engagement in art. The Feldenkrais 31

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student’s small, gentle movements animate her sense of her whole self and the shape of a whole lesson, recalling recent trajectories while informing upcoming directions. Cézanne’s small, roughly rectangular brushstrokes are equally transparent and prescient in that each patch of paint preserves for viewing the idea of the underlying, forthcoming whole that inspired it. It is not a matter of the artist’s fixed idea about a painting’s outcome or the student’s foreknowledge of an atm’s progression, but of attending to an expanded sense of process. This is why we take our time with the Feldenkrais Method and why sitting for a Cézanne portrait was famously painstaking. A series of rushed, unclear ideas about the changing whole would have made a muddled painting. An atm starts small and begins slowly, exploring the learner’s possibilities, rather than presupposing or dictating results. Pablo Picasso, discussing the implication of just a single stroke of paint in a Cézanne work, could have been talking about intention and reversibility in the Feldenkrais Method: “The main thing about modern painting is this. A painter like Tintoretto, for example, begins work on a canvas, and afterward he goes on and, finally, when he has filled it and worked it all over, then only is it finished. Now, if you take a painting by Cézanne (and this is even more clearly visible in the watercolors), the moment he begins to place a stroke of paint on it, the painting is already there.”5

This whole has little to do with completion, and something, if not everything, to do with beginnings and uncertainty. Cézanne’s painting, “already there,” is not already done or “only . . . finished.” Cézanne’s “doubt” of ever being able to fully realize his ideas is well documented and yet the renewed, sustained curiosity evident in each stroke of paint realizes the whole in his painting. The ability required in drawing to think of the whole while drawing the part, to draw one part while thinking of another, to know both where you have come from and where you are going depends on broad, flexible interest and persistence. In one exercise, my life drawing students attempted to draw their classmates in the midst of an atm called “Central Strength Medley.”6 This lesson elucidates the design of the spine, pelvis and ribcage from a variety of directions and through various combinations of lifting the head, arms and legs. The fairly large, highly visible movements in this lesson recommend it to a study of gesture or “the movement of the whole form in space.”7 Attempting to register what they saw before it was gone, students found themselves “drawing what the form is doing, not what it looks like.”8 They had no time to dwell on details before those details disappeared: the constant transformation of the object of study a constraint in itself. This practice challenged students to maintain a level of engagement like the one they perceived in Cézanne.



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By the middle of the semester many students found themselves with more questions than they could pursue. If curiosity is the mother of invention, then inhibition maintains its necessary focus. In order to get through a drawing, or to move yourself in a certain way, you learn to do certain things and not others. You figure out what to do and what to leave off doing. The contemporary painter Gerhard Richter speaks to the significant responsibility required of inhibition: “The most important thing, in life and for humanity, is to decide what is good and what is bad. And it’s the most difficult. I remember a time when it was out of fashion to judge a painting good.”9 32

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Earlier in the interview, he says “To see what’s wrong, this is so difficult. To make it right is easy, but to see what to make and what not to make is harder.”10 Of course, it is helpful when learning to draw, as when learning to move, not to think in terms of good and bad, much less right and wrong. Yet in any new or difficult situation, we encounter the challenge of recognizing the role of choice, the importance of making decisions. Movement occurs as a matter of differentiation and selection. When Richter says good and bad, right and wrong, he does not follow up with a list of arbitrary rules to be applied. Instead he articulates the constant adjustment required in the unfinished work of awareness. As in the structure of any good Feldenkrais lesson, that of a good drawing class reveals unnecessary or inappropriate habits, engages the ability to make decisions, and accommodates the forming of new possibilities. The discovery of non-habitual possibilities and their integration is a constant theme in both the Feldenkrais Method and drawing. In particular, the importance of coherence among marks and movements is paramount. Teachers of figure drawing are forever admonishing students to subordinate parts to the whole. Beginners are forever getting stuck on a 33

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part—an arm or a leg—or caught up in surface features—nostrils, nipples and belly buttons. The pelvis, vertebral column and rib cage, central as they are in determining the position of the head, as well as hips and breasts, remain mostly indistinguishable to the untrained eye. The tip of the tenth rib, the scapula or the iliac crest—potential guides to perceiving the direction of major parts of the body—all too easily go unnoticed. As Robert Beverly Hale, the foremost artistic anatomist of the twentieth century stated, “There are many forms that the beginner has neither heard of nor thought about. For him, these forms literally do not exist.”11 To demonstrate the distinction of the ribcage and pelvis, I began the penultimate drawing assignment of the semester by asking each student to draw her partner’s torso using cubes or cylinders. Many of these torsos consisted of an upper body and stick-like arms. If the pelvis was included it was rarely differentiated from the ribcage other than through texture, shading or the fact that someone’s leggings were a different color than his tank top. The challenge for many presented by the word “torso” illustrates how language influences what we are and are not able to perceive; names can arrest the image-making inclination or come to substitute for images and reflection altogether. Next we did an atm lesson called “Lift Leg on Side.”12 This straightforward lesson has a profound way of highlighting the divisions that enable the torso to bend and extend. Nevertheless, when students drew torsos using geometric shapes again, most every student drew the same indistinct, undifferentiated mass—more loaf of bread than multi-part structure that allows shortening and lengthening on either side. During the semester, it was necessary to facilitate making connections and to find ways of encouraging students to follow their instincts without co-opting their experience. My guidance appeared most helpful when it came in the form of a question; the more concise and precise the better, though leading questions were always a potential pitfall. A teacher can clarify and confirm a student’s inclination; she can also overlook or compound a student’s frustration. I was encouraged when I remembered to breathe before redelivering instructions and regretful when I found myself retreating or simply persisting with fingers crossed, as if my own enthusiasm would carry a lesson. Starting again, we revisited the previous lesson on the torso, so that students drew from what they learned in the “Lift Leg on Side” atm. When I asked them to recall the overarching movements in the atm and then to represent these movements using only one or two lines, they drew Vs, arcs or half circles. Then they superimposed torsos over these lines, using cubes or cylinders. I expected two blocks, one block on either side of the V, for the pelvis and ribcage. Some of the drawings did indeed look like this. Another drawing consisted of a fan of cylinders: the ribs she had felt expanding when lifting her waist. Yet another drawing pictured a cylinder from shoulder-to-shoulder and a cylinder from hip-to-hip, tilting in different directions at either end of a bowed line. In yet another drawing, cylinders crisscrossed the gestural line of the overarching movement. One student told the class she decided to work only with cylinders, because the atm “smoothed over her edges.” And last, I asked students to alternate drawing each other’s whole bodies in the sidelying positions adopted during the lesson, again with cubes and cylinders. The resulting tin-men and tin-women could breathe and bend. A sense of balance and counterbalance characterized the drawings as limbs took their cue from the center of the body and each angle engendered an equal and opposite angle—Vs bred Ws. Cézanne once advised a younger painter to “[t]reat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone . . . .”13 Cézanne was renowned for “the sense of solidity” he achieved with 34

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Cezanne, Woman with Coffeepot, c.1895, oil on canvas, approx. 51⅝ x 38¼. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

such building blocks. In our next meeting, we considered the different kinds of solidity expressed by these underlying shapes and their role in the emotional resonance of a portrait. Students drew cubes and cylinders to interpret paintings, touching on what Cézanne himself might have envisioned. They observed how a shape like a board representing the length of a woman’s torso often contributed to her rigidity, isolation and even worry. They found slouchy cylinders structuring the relatively relaxed bellies and chests of men, who appeared significantly more at ease. We discussed the implications of the structural components of Cézanne’s depiction in terms of his own anxiety surrounding human contact and the presence of figure models. We evoked circumstances that may have prohibited a woman’s sense of self, such as class, work and dress. There is not a jolly woman or man among the hundreds Cézanne painted. The air of dissatisfaction evident in a number of their portraits is compounded by pursed, downturned mouths and hollow, downcast eyes. Yet there is a tension in many of Cézanne’s portraits between the melancholic gaze of the sitter and the animation of the setting. The portraits often present a world of things—e.g., coffee cups or tablecloths—from which the 35

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subject appears oddly isolated. The painter’s broad interest, even exuberance, functions to offset his subject’s apparently narrow perspective. Over the course of the 1870s, Cézanne’s painting scaffolds and disperses the impasto of his earlier, relatively one-dimensional figures and grounds. Inspired by his time in nature, and incorporating new notions about framing from photography, Cézanne depicted an examination of a painting’s perimeter. The circumference of a scene interrupts or extends the frame. Notice that the rocks in the foreground of these paintings appear more like abstract outcroppings, roads convert to corners of the picture plane and trees obscure houses on hills. As a recent research paper on the psychology of vision observes, “Acuity is highest at the point of fixation and drops off precipitously and continuously with increasing visual eccentricity.”14 Cézanne’s painting speaks of the “eccentricity” within “low-level” vision. He often painted the foreground and the edges with a broader brush, frequently not painting them at all. He painted this as what he was looking past, and not at, with a sense of their proximity to his own materiality. As the Feldenkrais Method demonstrates, our experience of low-level vision can create meaning of the highest order. As we take in more of the world with our gaze, we sense the extent of the ground beneath our feet and the space beyond the boundary of our skin. We become increasingly aware of the simultaneous, though infinitely “. . . different scales, different degrees of empathy and identification, different intuitions of distance or proximity” which T.J. Clark perceives in certain of Cézanne’s late paintings.15 Popular psychology of vision calls the foveal, or most acute area of vision, “what” vision, contrasting it with embodied “where” vision. When we relax into our experience and inhabit the periphery of our field of vision, we find out not just what we want but where we are.



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The last class of the semester began on Hemlock Hill in the Arboretum with an adaptation of an atm lesson called “Expansive Vision.”16 It is a lesson that gradually expands peripheral awareness. I combined “Expansive Vision” with sections from atms in which students are asked to run their fingers along their faces and from atms in which students are asked to run their vision, the pathway of their eyes, along the wall. The idea was to explore space in relationship to the boundaries that divide it. We draw divisions in space in part through imagining that we are touching things. If you have not touched the thing you are looking at, if you cannot imagine touching it, chances are that you cannot see or represent it very well to others. In this way the sense of touch usually associated with immediacy and closeness involves memory and informs vision, deepening and extending our experience into the distance. Stephen Kaplan and other psychologists have been studying the effects of natural environments on a person’s capacity to pay attention. His studies indicate that a walk around town is nothing compared to a wander in the woods or a park when it comes to recalibrating the ability to focus on a given task. An infinite variety of “soft fascinations” engage your involuntary attention, giving a rejuvenating break to the directed attention typically exercised in art class or at work.17 As Cézanne, a nature walker, grew older, he spent more and more time outside the city, while his paintings of both exterior and interior scenes grew increasingly innovative. Nature expands your attention, while the city often puts demands on it. This is due in part to what Kaplan calls the field or forest’s “extent”: its endlessness or lack of continuous boundaries. For the last drawing assignment, we observed trees in the relatively natural environment of the Arboretum, using Cézanne’s woodland landscapes as a reference. We made 36

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rubbings of the ridged bark, stepped back to draw the whole tree, and stepped back yet again to paint the trees in the landscape. Using ink and more substantial cotton rag paper, we painted an indigenous stand of hemlock by culling from the page both the individual trees and the negative space between them. The tree branches reached out, evoking the arms of students in the “Expansive Vision” atm—into the space occupied by other trees, clouds, birds and visitors. “The world in painting is one of bodies, but bodies in surroundings.”18 To this we may add bodies in motion in an ongoing relationship with their surroundings. Each painter worth his brushstrokes reinvents the medium’s capacity both to express and encompass its figures. In the case of Cézanne, as in the case of the Feldenkrais student, the body, the self, is quite literally in context. It is not only that Cézanne’s figures occurred in space, but that each subject’s equilibrium was contingent upon his connection to a dynamic, constantly changing situation. In the woodland landscapes, the painter’s signature solidity breathes, surfaces and recedes, thus finding balance in this way. The paintings are not airy or impressionistic; rather the quality of expansive breathing contributes to their substantiality. It is part of what we enjoy so much about them—they look like what it means to feel fully present, positioning us within their inhalation and exhalation. ATM lessons that address breathing more directly may support students in imagining themselves and their drawings, from the inside out. I am currently developing a lesson with students that draws together 18th century British artist William Hogarth’s “line of beauty,” the “S Curve,” with the atm “Increasing the Mobility of the Chest.”20 How does the spine participate in standing, in that Classic, Renaissance pose, one hip higher than the other, the other shoulder dropped? Which leg is the model standing on? Which leg do you favor? Potential directions include exploring the stance of Standing Hanuman, a sculpture of a Hindu god (c. 860–1279), Praxiteles’ Aphrodite (c. 350-330 b.c.), Donatello’s David (c. 1440s), contemporary artist Bruce Nauman’s “Walk with contrapposto” (1968) and postmodern dancer and choreographer Trisha Brown’s “Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970).” As the leaves on the trees continue to change, I imagine the lessons will take us outside again, this time for a walk in the woods. As I continue to teach I am moved by the shared possibilities for further exploration of our hybrid curriculum.

notes 1. Mitchell, W.J.T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), xv. 2. Webber, David. “Relaxed Eyes”, Seeing Clearly. (NY: The Feldenkrais Institute, 2009). cd/mp3 3. Galvin, James. Resurrection Updated: Collected Poems 1975-1997. (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1997), 200. 4. For a generous, original perspective on the developmental significance of this kind of overly careful drawing, see Gardner, John. “Chapter 6: The Reach toward Realism,” Artful Scribbles: The Significance of Children’s Drawings. (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 143. 5. Wechsler, Judith, ed. Cézanne in Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1975), 76. 6. Paris, Laura and Seth. “Central Strength Medley” from Central Strength dvd. 2002. dvd 7. Rosen, Jane. “Seeing Through Form.” from the Teaching section of Jane Rosen’s website http:// www.janerosen.com/teaching/art12/animal/ 8. “Seeing Through Touch.” from the Teaching section of Jane Rosen’s website http://www. janerosen.com/teaching/art12/animal/

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9. Storr, Robert. Interview. “Gerhard Richter: The Day Is Long.” (Art in America, 1 January 2002) http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/gerhard-richter-robert-storr/4/, p.4 10. Storr, Robert. Interview. “Gerhard Richter: The Day Is Long.” (Art in America, 1 January 2002) http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/gerhard-richter-robert-storr/4/, 3 11. Hale, Robert Beverly, Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters. (New York: Watson-Guptil Publications, 1964), 14. 12. “On side; lifting the leg and straightening it” from Alexander Yanai - #101, Volume 3, Part A, 665. 13. Rewald, John, (Ed.), translated by Marguerite Kay. Paul Cézanne, Letters, third edition,(Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1946), 234. 14. Henderson, John M. and Hollingworth, Andrew. (1999). High-level scene perception. Ann. Rev. Psych., 50:243-271. 15. Clark, T.J. “Freud’s Cézanne.” Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 157. 16. From the website of Feldenkrais practitioner Peter Dawson. 17. Kaplan, Stephen. (1995) The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15, 169-173 and Kaplan, Stephen. (2004) Some hidden benefits of the urban forest. In C.C. Konijnendijk, J. Schipperijn and K. H. Hoyer (Eds.) Forestry serving urbanised societies. (Selected Papers from conference jointly organized by iufro, efi and the Danish Centre for Forest, Landscape and Planning in Copenhagen, 27-30 August 2002).Vienna, Austria: iufro (iufro World Series Vol. 14). 221-232. and Richtel, Matt. “Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain,” The New York Times, August 15, 2010, 2 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/ technology/16brain.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&ref=technology 18. Clark, T.J. “The Special Motion of a Hand.” London Review of Books, Vol. 30 No. 8. 24 April 2008. http://www.lrb co,uk/v30/no8/tj-clark/the-special-motion-of-a-hand. 1. 19. Feldenkrais, Moshe. The San Francisco Evening Class Workshop, Volume I (Moshe Feldenkrais/ Feldenkrais Resources: 1976, 1980).

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The Story of Ren and Mere Using the Feldenkrais Method with Someone in a Coma By Louise Runyon On Monday morning, I received a phone message asking me to come to Grady Hospital, Atlanta’s huge, public teaching hospital, to work with someone in a coma. I was immediately interested, and also very cautious. I called a fellow practitioner, who echoed my concerns about entering a hospital intensive care unit to do the Feldenkrais Method of movement education. However, I was assured that friends and family were already exercising this person’s limbs with the acquiescence of hospital staff, and I felt that our work could be helpful. I decided to go. It turned out that the young man in the coma was someone I knew. Ren is a friend of my son’s; we had met briefly a couple of times. The previous Thursday he had been in an accident at work: he was pinned between two shipping containers, the kind that attach to tractor-trailer beds or train flatcars. On arrival at the hospital, Ren was unconscious with a Glasgow Coma Score of 3 (the lowest, meaning no response). He had two collapsed lungs and an anoxic brain injury—loss of oxygen to the brain. His pupils were reactive, the only sign of his not being brain dead. When I arrived at Grady, Ren’s wife, Mere, told me the family felt that Ren was “deciding” whether or not stay in the world. That seemed accurate to me—I sensed that he was very present, considering his situation. But aside from blinking and a response to pain on being suctioned, he had no movement. The question of continuing or withdrawing life support hung in the balance. Ren had had a Feldenkrais lesson some time back and loved it, and that is what led Mere to look for a practitioner.



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day five of coma—lesson #1. Ren was lying slightly rolled to the left, propped up by heavy-duty foam wedges and thus quite unmovable. He had compression cuffs on his legs (to reduce the chance of a blood clot) and a blood pressure cuff on one arm. He had bilateral chest tubes, tubes in mouth and nose, IVs in both hands, and electrodes on head and chest. Ren had broken ribs on the right side. Avenues for movement were limited, and I was extremely cautious on this first visit. I began with his feet and, per Mere’s instruction, talked to him throughout the lesson. I talked to him about the brain healing itself, told him that if he didn’t have full function when he woke up, he could still learn, restore function, and make progress in an infinite way. Mere told me that he is a perfectionist and she felt he might not want to come back if he wouldn’t be fully functioning. I loaned the family My Sroke Of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who suffered a massive stroke and documented her recovery in this excellent book about the regenerative nature of the brain.1 I moved from Ren’s feet to his left arm and ended with his right arm—his most damaged, traumatized side. I talked to him about the trauma, acknowledging its severity and affirming his right to feel great anguish when I approached this area. With a very soft pillow, I traced the diagonal paths between left shoulder and right hip and between right shoulder and left hip, thus helping Ren begin to make connections: between his left and right sides, between his upper and lower halves, and between the two sides of his brain. I also showed Mere how to do this. She told me that Ren is a pianist and a dancer. I talked to him about how those functions could be restored—that they might be changed, but that 39

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new avenues could be opened up. At the end, I told him that my son sent his love and healing. At this Ren yawned, and then he started to cry. He hadn’t done either of these things before. My sense throughout was that Ren was listening, and that at the end that he didn’t want me to leave. I felt he knew I was able to offer something that he deeply needed: a conversation in the language of the brain—comprehensible, feel-able and sense-able, because embodied in movement. That night, Ren continued to yawn and began to stretch; he lifted his left hand and started biting on his feeding tube.

day six—lesson #2. Ren had been given antibiotics for pneumonia since Day Three; on Day Six, he seemed to have withdrawn, perhaps in order to deal with the infection. But he was lying neutrally on his back and therefore much more accessible. I continued my approach of working with his right and left legs, then left and right arms. Because of his position and because I felt more confident, I moved up from his feet and began to roll his legs. In general, he did not have exaggerated muscle tone but did tend to draw feet and knees inward. I worked with supporting muscular patterns in legs and arms, enabling him to feel what he was doing, and the muscles released. In the first lesson when I worked with Ren’s right arm (the traumatized side), there was virtually no “availability” of musculature—I couldn’t find any direction in which the muscles wanted to go; it was as if his right arm was simply not present. At the second lesson, the musculature in his right arm was significantly more available. While I was working with his left arm, he moved both elbows in and out. In addition to re-tracing diagonal paths, in Lesson #2 I introduced “Bell Hand.” This evolutionarily primitive movement of slowly, rhythmically drawing fingers and thumbs toward each other and away (like a kitten kneading) evokes an organizing response deep in the brain. (Mere consistently did Bell Hand after this with Ren, as well as trace diagonals and many other movements I showed her.) The medical staff wanted Ren to squeeze someone’s finger, and the Bell Hand movement is a precursor to this; one finger at a time, I worked with Ren on the idea of squeezing. I stood his elbows and lifted his forearms to work with rotation, and circled each fingertip with thumbtip. He stuck his tongue out and turned his head for the first time. When I went to his right arm, Ren started crying. He opened his eyes, mostly the right: his eyes did not seem to be working together. I felt he was seeing me, but his right eye looked sad and distant. day seven—lesson #3. Ren was again neutrally on his back, not rolled to either side. I continued the same approach but took it further. I lifted both legs and rotated them, and moved his legs in circles at the hip joint. Again, they released from being drawn in, although later they drew in again. I told Mere that was fine, that he had information about the possibilities and would release his legs when he was ready. When I went to Ren’s left arm he opened his eyes. I saw on his face emotional anguish, physical pain, and then a smile. Ren seemed tremendously in tune with what we were doing. With Mere lifting an arm and me lifting a leg, we brought opposite arms and legs toward each other on diagonal paths. Although challenging to get around all the tubes and pillows, I lifted his shoulders for the first time. His left collarbone connected in movement to his shoulder; the right did not. Again employing the strategy of supporting the pattern, I inhibited the movement in his right collarbone as I lifted his right shoulder, and the collarbone began to participate. I also began to connect Bell Hand with breath, first closing the hand on each inhale, then on each exhale. The more “natural” way would be on the exhale—as the hand folds or closes, the whole body may synergistically do so; and exhaling is more about folding—but by experiencing both options, Ren’s brain would be better able to clarify and select the optimal. 40

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day eight—lesson #4. When I arrived Mere told me that Ren’s brother had asked him to give the “two thumbs up” sign the previous night. Ren didn’t do it when asked—but one hour later, his brother saw both thumbs in the air. He also lifted his arms that night. I revisited legs and arms, and this time we physically connected them—the left hand and right knee through a towel which Mere and I held in place. On the other diagonal, the right hand and left knee could reach. Ren seemed very taken with touching his knee with his own hand. I could also see that his breathing was changing pace: it was at times faster and at times slower, which clarified to me that he was breathing on his own and not solely on the even tempo of the respirator (the respirator at this point was being used as backup). At my suggestion he began to breathe more slowly and deeply. Mere felt strongly that beginning to connect Bell Hand and breath the day before was very significant to him; it probably began to strengthen his ability to breathe on his own. Having had his breathing done for him by the respirator since the accident, he now began to consciously reclaim the autonomic function of his own breathing. The musculature in both arms felt very much alive. In addition to connecting his hands with opposite knees, I connected his two hands to each other and connected each hand with his chest and with his face (despite breathing and feeding tubes), “closing the circle of contact” so that he could re-know and re-claim himself. Both eyes simultaneously opened wide early in the lesson. He was using his eyes to express himself and respond, and they were working together. While he was looking at Mere I asked him to blink, and he slowly closed his eyes. It wasn’t a rapid eye movement but it was purposeful. He did it two more times. The next day I didn’t see Ren; he had his second eeg, and the tubes in his mouth and nose were replaced by tubes in his throat and stomach. The eeg showed a slight increase in stimulation responses. Ren had had an MRI of his brain on Day 6, which showed damage to both sides of the thalamus and to both sides of the basal ganglia due to lack of oxygen. The thalamus processes information, relaying sensation, spatial sense, and motor signals to the cerebral cortex, along with the regulation of consciousness, sleep, and alertness. Wikipedia says, “…damage to the thalamus can lead to permanent coma.” On Day 8, when Mere was talking to someone about my working with Ren’s hip joints, he suddenly drew his knee up toward his chest, as I had done with him. day ten—lesson #5. For the first time, Ren’s face and head were free: no tubes, no electrodes, no tape holding tubes in place. In addition to revisiting legs and arms, I worked with his face, which had been so taken over by equipment. I felt that reclaiming his eyes, mouth, nose, ears would be important in regaining his orientation and communication with the world. As I traced his jaw, telling him that he would be able to eat soon, he started opening and closing his mouth, clacking his teeth together. I worked with the muscles of his cheeks around the sinuses, and talked about breathing. Suddenly I noticed that he was flaring and unflaring his nostrils. He opened his eyes, and I asked him to close them if he could see me: he did so, clarifying that he could both see and hear. Then I felt my elbow bumped—Ren’s right forearm flew up in the air. Mere thought that he was saying “hi” to me. I held his hand closely in response for a long time, then placed it on his leg so that he could feel both his leg and hand. I brought Ren’s hand to his face so that he could feel both face and hand, and to Mere’s face and head so that he could feel both her head and his own hand, touching. This would be my last time to see Ren for 11 days—I was going out of town. I spent a long time explaining I would be gone, but that he had the tools he needed to continue to make progress. I talked to him about the aquaculture project that he and my son had been 41

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involved with, telling him that Brian had caught the first tilapia out of the pond in my yard. I told him the tilapia was a beautiful blue color and held my hands up to show him how big it was. As soon as I started talking about the pond, Ren’s eyes opened and he seemed very excited. His left arm also moved. Ren continued to make progress while I was gone. He frowned, smiled, and responded to commands. He appeared to recognize individuals. He turned his head and seemed to try to speak despite the tracheotomy tube. Mere continued to do Feldenkrais movements with him daily. His lungs were healing, and he was coughing up mucus. He mouthed the words “yes” and “I love you” to his wife. His lips fully pursed to kiss her three times. When his mother left after two weeks, he indicated that he really did not want her to go. Also while I was gone, Ren rolled his head left and right to respond “no” to a question; Mere says it has historically been hard for Ren to say no. She says that Ren is a mover and shaker, and believes he feels shame at lying still and idle for so long. During this time Ren was evaluated for a rehab facility. Mere was told that the criterion for admission to any rehab facility was Ren’s ability to “wipe his face with a cloth”—perhaps directed toward the ability to bring hand to mouth and feed himself.

day 21—lesson #6. When I returned to town, Ren had been given morphine for two days—which I questioned. He was much less alert and present than he had been. But he was lying neutrally on his back, and his legs were not turned in. His left foot was in a boot to prevent foot drop (the boot was changed to the opposite leg every four hours). When I removed the boot his left leg did turn in, but I felt encouraged that the right leg lay comfortably open. We worked with folding, or flexion. Our previous work of connecting arms and legs on the diagonals was diagonal folding, crossing the midline, but our work today was directed toward bringing hand to mouth and all the synergistic aspects of folding. I brought each knee toward his chest, his hands to his face, and then with Mere’s help added bringing his head toward each knee and each hand. In keeping with the idea of global movement being much more easily recognized by the brain than isolated movement, it was much easier for him to move his head toward his hand or knee when his hand or knee was also moving toward his head. We worked with the action of nodding “yes,” and rolling his head “no.” I talked to him about the importance of being able to say no, to have choice. I brought a cloth and had hoped to put the cloth in his hand while moving head and hand toward each other, but because of the morphine this didn’t seem possible. He couldn’t take in too much that day. I had also hoped to work with eyes right and left with head rolling, but again, it was clear to me that he wasn’t able to. However, these were functions we could begin to approach. His ribs were healing and he no longer had the chest tubes; there was now the possibility of working with ribs and chest. Just before I returned, hospital physical therapists had begun to work with Ren. This was an encouraging sign to the family; it indicated that the doctors now thought Ren would make it. day 24—lesson #7. When I returned to the hospital three days later, Ren was both off morphine and out of icu. He was very much awake and tremendously expressive, indicating both delight and interest—he was truly no longer in a coma. Ren made small sounds twice during the lesson—“Uh.” He was able to not only roll his head left and right, but nodded “yes” twice. He followed my hand left and right with his eyes. He also squeezed my fingers slightly, bending the first joint of all four fingers, then lifted both arms together at the elbow a couple of times. I stroked his arm and face with a cloth, put it in his hand, and brought it to his face. I also brought in a long-handled wooden spoon, put it in his hand, 42

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and helped him tap the spoon on a book as on a drum, talking to him about the piano. Ren seemed very pleased. He was very alert for most of the lesson, but closed his eyes and turned his head away in the middle and at the end. Now that he was not sleeping all the time, rest and sleep would become very important. He would need time to process.

day 27—lesson #8. On this day Ren was mostly sleeping—he was not very expressive and only opened his eyes a couple of times. Mere reported that the previous day, however, he had moved his head and shoulders forward, as if trying to sit up. Today I added movement of the chest and ribs into flexion in bringing hand and head toward each other. Working with his chest prompted Ren to bring both arms off his lap. It was as if he had been waiting to have his torso addressed. I also worked with his pelvis for the first time. It was very difficult to access as he was turned to the left and propped up with foam wedges, but his pelvis released a little bit. Working with him flat on his back was going to be important in helping Ren access movement through his whole self. I helped him squeeze the washcloth, leaving out one finger at a time to clarify all the fingers as being important to a fist. He responded with tiny movements of his fingers.



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As of this writing I have given Ren 15 lessons. We have been working on rolling to his side, and from the side to sitting. The physical therapist began this, bringing Ren up by physical force. I am providing clues on how to do this, working with his spine, ribs, pelvis and the relationship between his head and spine to clarify verticality. It is much easier to bring him to sit, although he can’t hold his head up for long. He has dealt with elevated blood pressure and a urinary tract infection, and still needs a lot of sleep but part of the time he is very awake, very aware, and looks like a “normal” person sitting up in bed. I removed his pillow part of the time to provide more freedom of his head; it is quite a revelation for him. He keeps his mouth closed now—a big difference. He is lifting his knees and arms, squeezing our hands, and trying to roll to his side on his own. He is doing a lot of squirming, demonstrating significant differentiation in his chest, shoulder blades, collarbones, and spine much like a baby in its extraordinary learning process. Recently the physical therapist had Ren in a wheelchair, “walking” with his feet, and the occupational therapist reported Ren was responding beautifully. He is now able to bring a cloth to his face. The tracheotomy tube has finally been removed. With all the company and activity, Ren was tired, but still very alert and active when I arrived. He was making sounds, and will be better able to vocalize once the opening in his throat heals. He made beautiful movements to roll to his side and I assisted him to come to sit several times. He held his head up quite easily. When I reminded him about his hip joints he sat even better, coming off his tailbone onto his sitting bones. I supported him from behind, moving his chest in and out of flexion with the movements of my own torso. When I peered around to ask if he was tired and wanted to lie down, Ren mouthed the word “no.” Between times of sitting, I worked with differentiating Ren’s ribs, which have been a solid block. Toward the end of the lesson, Ren searched with his hands on the bed for something, we couldn’t quite figure out what. We finally realized that he wanted to hold our hands. When I left Ren mouthed a word. I made several unsuccessful guesses; Ren appeared satisfied when I finally guessed “Thanks.” While it was at first intimidating going into the icu to work with Ren, there was no problem. Hospital staff were constantly in and out, but respected what we were doing; they 43

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saw it as exercise and tried not to interrupt. It was hard for me to get medical information, and what I was told was sometimes confusing and contradictory, but I just continued and worked with caution. The work with Ren was quite straightforward and simple. In some ways it was easier than working in a normal setting because consciousness didn’t interfere, although, of course, our goal was consciousness. I was calm, slow, and very present, and I always told Ren what I was doing—so many things were being done to him without explanation. In an intensive care situation life is in the balance, and there is a great sense of urgency among medical personnel, friends, and family. There was a strong feeling that Ren needed to “respond to commands” in order for those around him to be confident that he had a future. There is reason for this, but I believe that the approach of “making requests” helped provide the freedom for Ren to make his choice.

Necessarily, the family as well as the medical community has had a strong attachment to outcome, while Ren needs to process, learn, and re-learn in his own time and according to his ability at any given moment. As Feldenkrais practitioners we know that there is no freedom and no learning without choice. My role is to help him become aware that he has options, and that learning would always be possible if he decided to stay in the world. It seems clear he has decided to stay. Other practitioners worked with Ren—he had energy work and chiropractic, including network spinal chiropractic. Friends and family held prayer circles and exercised his limbs. I believe all of this helped; Mere feels that Ren’s response to the Feldenkrais Method was dramatic, immediate, and the most clear. She has worked with Ren diligently between our visits, and displays a keen understanding of the Method. Medical practitioners were skeptical about what Ren’s developing movement and facial expressions meant, whereas Mere and I saw them as Ren understanding and trying to connect. The medical view was that these were only “random” movements without intention or purpose; that what we saw as crying was just a change in the musculature of the face. As a Feldenkrais practitioner, I know that just as a baby’s early random movements represent its learning process, whatever neural pathways Ren can piece together right now represent learning and his path to regaining function. I feel confident that his potential for learning is infinite, regardless of medical prognosis, because the brain’s capacity for regeneration is profound. I hope that Feldenkrais practitioners will not be intimidated by a hospital setting should they receive a call to help. We offer the kind of hope and learning that no other discipline currently provides. My feeling is that Ren is flying, learning and growing by leaps and bounds, and that he will restore full function. I don’t know for sure that this is true, but that is my feeling.

notes 1. For another excellent book on neuroplasticity and the ability of the brain to heal from severe trauma, see Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself.

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Points of View Gay Sweet Scott Ways of Seeing, by John Berger, in collaboration with others, is a short but influential book that asks us to consider from what vantage, literally, socially, and economically, we in the west view the depictions of others. Although Berger has written many books about how we perceive and how we understand what we view, Ways of Seeing is something of a milestone. The book evolved from a BBC Television series broadcast in 1979 and it may be his most influential and widely read publication even though he has been regarded as a Marxist critic and to some degree marginalized on that account. Today it would be unlikely to read in a contemporary text, “The art of any period tends to serve the ideological interests of the ruling class.”1 Or the following: Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity. All reality was mechanically measured by its materiality. The soul, thanks to the Cartesian system, was saved in a category apart. A painting could speak to the soul—by way of what it referred to, but never by the way it was envisaged.2 [Italics mine.]

Of the seven essays that comprise the book three are composed of images without words and four include text. Thus the reader is directed to do considerable looking without instruction. In the little paperback the illustrations are small, poor quality, and printed in black and white. They are not seductive. However, the ways of seeing that the book presents take time to consider. It’s pleasing to mull, to observe, and think, and look again, and pause at one’s own pace, to move forward and back, movement impossible in film. While the illustrations are frustrating in their distance from the actual work, they serve, perhaps inadvertently, to illustrate that reproductions are not the originals. But they do serve to demonstrate the authors’ concerns and readers have little chance to be entranced by the quality of the illustrations. Although the distinction between the experience of viewing a reproduction and experiencing work “in the flesh” is not addressed in Ways of Seeing, Berger and his collaborators’ arguments remain compelling. At its most fundamental, Ways of Seeing asks the viewer to consider how the artists and advertisers looked at or saw their subjects and by extension challenge us to reflect on how we view others, as well as how we view depictions. One of the loveliest discussions in Ways of Seeing concerns Rembrandt’s portrait of his wife.  She is neither young nor conventionally beautiful—her flesh is not smooth or perfect—and, as Berger observes, she has assumed a pose in which her torso and pelvis are rotated in a way contrary to the likelihood of anyone’s anatomy. The magic of the painting, aside from ensuring we never question the impossible pose, is the quality of observation communicated by the painter. The painting is a depiction of intimacy and seduction that embraces love and time. Berger presents Rembrandt’s painting as counter weight to another painting, a sublimely beautiful Igres nude whose gaze engaging the viewer invites and accommodates the viewer’s appropriation. While some of the arguments in Ways of Seeing have become familiar in discussions of gender, they have not substantially influenced visual literacy, the capacity to reflect criticallity on the influence of conventions or a develop a vocabulary with which to question images. “Sexy” men and women still sell automobiles in the name of freedom to savage a desert. We tend to read portraits framed against the sky without questioning the influence of camera angle, to look up to ennoble or look down upon to denigrate. It is a device that 45

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tends to go unnoticed, and so unquestioned. However, perspective situates the viewer as well as the subject, or the person observed. The cliché that beauty is in the eye of the beholder could pose more resonant questions regarding how we view others. What of the “less” beautiful? How do we learn to see what we see? As practitioners of a craft that requires we observe others and ourselves we have much to learn from Berger and he would argue more to learn from Rembrandt. Both charge us to consider that how we observe, whether we like it or not, embodies our conventions and evidences our values and goals. One of Berger’s gifts is that he presents the very idea of ways of seeing: he is interested in the experience of the artist, the subject, the viewer, their interrelations.

notes 1. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. (London: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 86. 2. Ibid, p. 87.

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Balance Rika Lesser Standing, still, without arrogance, the coating on the tongue, thick as cough syrup, warm as ermine I cannot help not having come first or second or in some other place, only last Never the only one, but always a girl not innocent but solitary I keep my hair clean, shoulders over my hips, hips over my ankles, center of gravity low—where it likes to be—and wait, swaying: for clarity, for equanimity Relax— it may take a long time In truth there are no straight lines

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Contributors Carl Ginsburg has been writing about the Feldenkrais Method since the beginning of his training with Moshe Feldenkrais (1975–77) in San Francisco. In his incarnation prior to his Feldenkrais career he taught chemistry at the college level. In addition to his many writings he also edited Feldenkrais’s book, The Master Moves, and wrote a book of short stories, Medicine Journeys. His new book The Intelligence of Moving Bodies: A Somatic View of Life and its Consequences is now available. Rika Lesser is the author or translator of a dozen books of poetry, most recently Questions of Love: New & Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow, 2008), and Mozart’s Third Brain, translated from the Swedish of Göran Sonnevi (Yale, 2009).  She is a secondyear student in David Zemach-Bersin’s ny4fmtp. Eytan Mandel, Feldenkrais practitioner, Tel Aviv. 1983–1988 Piano performance (B.Mus), Jerusalem Music & Dance Academy. 2003–2006 Yochanan Basic Training. 2006–March 2007 “crossover” “Almagor 4” Jerusalem training, December 2007 Awarded “crossover”, 2008–2009 “trainer’s training” Yochanan Rywerant, 2009–2011 Euro t.a.b. member, 2008–2010 Yochanan Basic Training, 2007/08/09 International Advanced trainings, Dec, 2010 Tel Aviv, Organizer of the International Advanced in memory of Yochanan Rywerant. Helen Miller paints, draws and makes video and sound installations about moving. She also teaches Awareness Through Movement and Figure Drawing at Harvard College. She dedicates the article in this issue to Renaissance Feldenkrais practitioner Chris Moffett. Louise Runyon has been in Feldenkrais practice in Atlanta since 2000, and completed Bones for Life® training in 2003. She works with a wide variety of clients including musicians, people with neurological conditions, and people with chronic pain.  In addition to Awareness Through Movement and Bones for Life classes, Louise offers

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workshops on the pelvic floor. She is a dancer/ choreographer and a poet, and has published two books of poetry. Gay Sweet Scott is an Assistant Trainer and former English teacher and lives in Berkeley, California. She has been an editor for The Feldenkrais Journal since 1991. David Webber is certified as a Feldenkrais practitioner. Based on his own healing experience, he has been teaching Seeing Clearly © workshops worldwide, including presenting at the North American Conference on Natural Vision Improvement, the 20th and 21st International Conference on Holistic Vision, and the 2010 Feldenkrais Method conference. Ingrid Wilczek, Physical therapist, Medical Doctor; Feldenkrais practitioner since 1986 (Munich I and San Diego I); medical practice with three colleagues, G.P.; private Feldenkrais practice since 1986, Munich area, Alpes. Trainer candidate since 2010. Keith Wilson received his BA and MA from UC Berkeley in Architecture. He left active practice 12 years ago and has been exploring native knowledge and intuitive response through the indirect observation of nature. The daily reflections are documented in sumi ink/watercolor paintings of mountains, meadows and horizons. He has a studio in San Rafael and on the Sonoma coast where he lives part time. David Zemach-Bersin studied closely with Dr. Feldenkrais from 1973–1984 in the US and Israel. He is the Director of the New York City and Baltimore Feldenkrais Professional Training Programs, and a graduate of UC Berkeley, with post-graduate work in physiological psychology. For over 30 years he has maintained a practice, served as President of The Feldenkrais Guild, and is co-founder of the Feldenkrais Institute of New York and Feldenkrais Resources. 

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, Cliff Smyth

Production:

Margery Cantor

Proofreading  copyediting:

Cookie Murphy/Pettee, Judy Windt, Elaine Yoder

Cover:

Keith Wilson Front cover: The Dark Garden, 1991 Back cover: Ford’s Cove

    Journal no.  Journal no.  Journal no.  Journal no.  Journal no.  Journal no.  Journal no.  Journal no.  Journal no.  Journal no.  Journal no.  Journal no. 12 Journal no. 13 Journal no. 14 Journal no. 15 Journal no. 16 Journal no. 17 Journal no. 18 Journal no. 19 Journal no. 20 Journal no. 21 Journal no. 22

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 Open Issue Teaching

All back issues are available through the fgna office. Price to Guild members is 6, to non-members 1 per copy.

    THE FELDENKRAIS JOURNAL , no 23, aesthetics    fa ll 2010