The Feldenkrais Journal #27 Improvisation

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THE FELDENKRAIS JOURNAL, no 27  improvisation 2014

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, Communications Editor, 5436 North Albina Avenue, Portland, OR 217. If you have an article, drawing, or letter to the editor to submit to the Journal, please send directly to the Editor, Anita Noone, at [email protected]. Please save electronic writings in Word or RTF (rich text format). The deadline for submissions is May 1, 2015. The theme of the next issue is open. For more information about format, length, computer compatibility, etc., please contact Anita Noone.

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The Feldenkrais Journal number 27



Table of Contents

2

Letter from the Editor

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Myriam Pfeffer, Matriarch  Mara Della Pergola

6 Improvising in Reverse:

Learning to Adapt the Feldenkrais Method for Eating Disordered Clients  Donna J. Maebori

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Clowning and the Feldenkrais Method  Emily Davis

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Alfonso  Jane McClenney

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Body Poems  Dan Clurman

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Improvisation, a Breath of Relevance  Jean Elvin

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Getting Rhythm, Having a Ball! Improvisation in Functional Integration—Lessons from Music  Louise Runyon



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Integrating the Feldenkrais Method and the Dalcroze Method: Music, Improvisation, and Function  Adam Cole

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Still Life with Concussion  Julie Frances

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Functional Integration as Improvisational Art  Martin Weiner

51 Contributors

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Letter from the Editor Dear Colleagues, IThe timelessness of our work is punctuated by improvisation. This issue celebrates improvisation, in-the-moment experimentation, and the courage of creativity. Our colleagues have brought us stories of improvisation during individual and group work, as well as explorations of how other methods and fields of study overlap ours. You’ll find some familiar themes and writers here, and I guarantee a few surprises along the way. The passing of Myriam Pfeffer this year was a great loss for our community. Many practitioners knew her work from a 1999 interview with her that was published in The Journal and has been made available on-line by the author, Elizabeth Beringer.* In this issue, The Journal continues its tradition of remembering and memorializing those who have paved the way with an article about Myriam by Mara Della Pergola. As the new Editor, I am struck by how much has been published decades ago, but still seems fresh and relevant. We are re-publishing a deep and powerful piece that Marty Weiner wrote on improvisation and I hope to continue republishing one gem from the past in each issue—both as a tribute to those who came before and as a reminder of our rich legacy. There will be other changes too. Our hard-working, accomplished, and knowledgeable Assistant Editor, Judy Windt, is stepping down. Judy is an unsung hero and no one knows more about Journal nuts and bolts. True to form, Judy has agreed to stay on as a member of the Editorial Board and to help the next Assistant Editor. If you are interested in being a part of The Journal, let us know. There is much work to do and the resulting product is something you can be proud of. Whether you are interested in editing, writing, or graphics, or just want to comment, we’d be pleased to hear from you. There were no Letters to the Editor this time, but you could change that for the next issue. The next issue of The Journal will be open, with no assigned theme. Submissions are due May 1, 2015. Heartfelt thanks to all who participated in this issue. You are an amazingly talented and generous team, and I appreciate all your efforts. Sincerely,

Anita Noone

*Internet search for “Myriam Pfeffer interview Elizabeth Beringer” will yield the PDF version of the article.

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Myriam Pfeffer, Matriarch   Mara Della Pergola It is with the great affection that we remember Myriam Pfeffer who passed away on April 5, 2014, and whose presence still continues to inspire us. Myriam was one of the first Israeli practitioners trained by Moshe Feldenkrais in Tel Aviv. She was born in Lithuania in 1928; later she moved to Israel, but lived for a long time in Paris while keeping a strong connection with Tel Aviv. Through her passion and constant commitment, she molded many generations of Feldenkrais practitioners. I first met Myriam in 1980 in the gym at Amherst. She had already taught for several years in Paris, but at Amherst she was on the floor with us all, fully taking in Moshe’s new discoveries. Our friendship and professional ties began then and were to grow and strengthen in the years that followed. We worked together frequently both in Paris and in Italy, and this cooperation allowed me to observe her teaching, to learn from her, and to exchange ideas with her—in other words to feel close to her. After Moshe’s death in 1984, Myriam, along with the group of first European graduates to which I also belonged, participated actively in the meetings held both in Switzerland and in Paris. These meetings paved the way for the creation of the International Feldenkrais Federation and the Eurotab (the European Training Accreditation Board, the body which, in agreement with the other tabs, gives the guidelines for Trainings, educational plans, and accreditation for Trainers and Assistant Trainers). During those years, we met often

Myriam Pfeffer, 19XX

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in her Paris apartment, where she lived most of the time, to discuss the Method’s future and the building of an organization that would respect its principles. We were full of hope, ambition, and good humor. Myriam wanted to respect Moshe’s legacy and by collaborating with the new generations of practitioners, she became in due time a pioneering mentor of the Feldenkrais community. When Myriam began her first training program in Paris in 1985, she generously invited me to participate, thus allowing me to re-experience a large part of the original training program, and for this I was truly grateful. At that time there were almost no advanced trainings in Europe. Subsequently, she taught in many training programs in Italy, leaving an unforgettable imprint on her students. With Myriam one stopped “doing” movement and truly began to inhabit it. Myriam always had a very orthodox approach to Moshe’s teaching, and created her own personally unique style while maintaining the intellectual rigor and purity of the Method. She introduced his method in France and proceeded to present it in many different professional contexts, thus expanding its influence. Together with her daughter, Sabine, she organized and directed fifteen trainings and several important conferences where illustrious scientists dialogued with Feldenkrais practitioners. Some of the themes were “Learning, Brain, and Movement,” “Longevity,” and “The Emergence of Possibilities.” She held workshops throughout Europe, in the United States, and in Italy, where she won over a sizeable public. Myriam displayed great strength and evident fragility, both underpinned by a keen intelligence. Her very strong rationality, her refined humor, and her deep roots in Jewish culture made her particularly close and sensitive to Moshe’s approach. The Holocaust struck while she was still an adolescent and the miracle of her survival left her alone at the age of 16. Only one sister survived. Her encounter with her husband who was also a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps—and who unfortunately died prematurely—allowed her to form a new family with two children: Marc, who lives in Israel, and Sabine, who followed in her professional footsteps by collaborating with her mother in the Paris school and by constantly surrounding her with great love and devotion until the very end. Myriam thus became a respected matriarch in the Method, while also becoming a grandmother and great-grandmother of fifteen children. She embodied the victory of life over destiny but I prefer to quote Moshe and simply refer to her life with this quote: “You may learn to make your life more as you wish it to be; your dreams could become more precise and, who knows, they may even come true.” (Feldenkrais, 1981).1 With determination, after the Second World War, Myriam focused on recuperating her health and identity and later while she was already a yoga teacher, she found in the Feldenkrais Method what she had not found elsewhere: respect and acceptance of one’s own potential. She sought to transmit this attitude to thousands of persons in France and elsewhere, for these teachings had helped her to come back to life and to continue living in the present despite the unforgettable past. She conveyed a philosophy of movement enriched by her own personal experience, which she offered to her students peppered with inspiring metaphors and anecdotes from different cultures. Hers was a delicate, gentle, never overpowering voice, and her words were always carefully chosen and to the point. Myriam was a profoundly intelligent person who immediately understood the dissonances in a person’s life and proposed new perspectives and new approaches with which to overcome them. She could at times be hypercritical and intimidating for those who spoke blithely in superficial terms or displayed incompetence. But she also knew 4

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how to be helpful and welcoming. Her Awareness Through Movement (atm) lessons were calibrated with great art and with geometric precision: they guided the students to fully listen to themselves and offered gifts of hope and faith that they could care for themselves whether or not they had pain. With the passing years, her physical shape and, almost in parallel, her style became more delicate but also more essential. She let go of everything redundant and, teaching in a thin voice, even occasionally closing her eyes, she still continued to see what the students before her were doing. In 2012 in Paris, while I was teaching in her last training program, she came to visit during the course and as we chatted she told me that despite her aging and the pain that accompanied the many fractures that she suffered over the years she felt that she was teaching much better than in the past. Unfortunately, she added, people did not realize this because they remembered her as the Myriam who had trained them in the past, whereas she had in reality continued to evolve and to progress. These words should allow us to reflect on ourselves and on our process. We can truly express our gratitude for a method that allows us to grow in both professional and, above all, human terms as long as we are able to continue thinking. And we are grateful to Myriam who accompanied us on this path. —Milan, June 2014

1 Moshe Feldenkrais, The Elusive Obvious (Capitola, CA: Meta Publications, 1981), p. 6.

Myriam Pfeffer, teaching

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Improvising in Reverse: Learning to Adapt the Feldenkrais Method for Eating Disordered Clients   Donna J. Maebori One of the most challenging client groups to work with is those with eating disorders. Eating disorders—anorexia and bulimia—are addictive behaviors. Unlike other addictions such as alcoholism or gambling, in which recovery involves abstinence from the addictive practice, those with eating disorders cannot abstain from the source of their addiction, but instead must change their relationship to food and find healthier ways to live around the issues of eating. Everyone involved with the disorders, those who have them and those who work with them, requires tenacity and perseverance to find workable approaches to improvement. In the medical center where I am employed as a physical therapist and Feldenkrais teacher, I had the privilege to work with clients dealing with eating disorders. The clients were part of a day program that met Monday through Friday, from 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., breakfast through dinner. The program was staffed by a multi-disciplinary medical team of social workers, mental health workers, psychologists, nurses, doctors, and occupational therapists. Each client started the program at the point when they were voluntarily admitted, rather than together as a group. Consequently, there might have been one or two new individuals each week. Class size tended to be eight to 14 people. The program participants are primarily women with an occasional man. They tend to be intelligent, come from the middle or upper class, and are perfectionists. A portion of these clients, often athletes, have tested the limits of their bodies and their food restriction has gotten out of hand. Some may be suffering from pre-existing chemical depression and low self-esteem. They judge themselves against an outside standard of physical perfection. A frequent coping mechanism for most of them is to avoid sensing and responding to their feelings. I taught these classes in the late 1990s and wrote all of the material in this article at that time. Reflecting on my experience now, in 2014, what consistently emerges for me when I soften my eyes and reconnect to my teaching and interacting with the students then, is an impression of having journeyed into their minds, into a very different way of processing information. I had to “improvise in reverse,” so to speak, which was enormously difficult. Instead of teaching movement using metaphors, connecting concepts to cultural, scientific and global issues, brainstorming many possibilities for using intention in one’s life, I had to remove all such effervescence and make very simple and clear statements, repeating many of them word for word in every class, keeping instruction as basic and as uncomplicated as possible. As a result, I had to learn to think differently, and change how I processed information to come to a commonality with the students. My perception of being with these women and men changed from finding them baffling and confusing to having an intuitive empathy with their pain and strong defenses, allowing me to see our shared humanity and glimpse the depths of their struggles. The collaboration and guidance a medical social worker provided me was absolutely essential as I grappled with coming to think and teach in a very different way, a task I could not do alone. Even though I had been a Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines, learned the language and interacted with a considerable variety of people and customs, and

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considered myself rather dexterous in relating to varieties of thinking, I found that learning to meaningfully teach and converse with persons with eating disorders was uniquely challenging.

DEVELOPING THE COURSE When these classes started in 1994 I was in my fourth year of the Feldenkrais training. I also had a background in yoga and continued to use that discipline in my work as well. It was the first time that a movement class of any sort had been taught in the eating disorder program. It was all quite new for me, the clients, and the staff. Fortunately, I was under no pressure to produce results. For many months simply developing the class was a struggle, and what I did most likely fit Moshe Feldenkrais’s description of “mucking about” very aptly. There were plenty of protests and complaints from the clients during this process. But gradually, very gradually, a semblance of order and pattern emerged as the class eventually benefited from a solid curriculum with a clear purpose, good attention among the clients, and far fewer complaints. In Feldenkrais work, we are taught to work with that which catches our attention. In my experience, the clients with whom I worked that were suffering from eating disorders exhibited very held-in constriction through the abdominal, low back, and pelvic regions. Additionally, many had rounded shoulders. Considerable constant muscle tension was evident throughout the face, shoulders, trunk, and hips. In sitting, most had their feet drawn up away from the floor, or had only partial foot contact on the floor. They avoided making eye contact and used frequent downward or sideways gazes. Their breathing tended to be shallow and restricted. As I began teaching movement lessons, other characteristic behaviors became quickly apparent as well. I made the mistake of allowing any person to simply go to sleep in the class if that was what they tended to do. This made it all too easy for the students to use sleep in class to avoid paying attention to themselves and to escape from the anxiety through use of this passive mode. Lesson Number One for me as a teacher: keep them awake. Yet even as I kept them awake, I still had trouble engaging them. Week after week, very few expressed that they noticed anything about themselves. Conversation and insights were practically non-existent after the lessons. I would talk to the participants about the possible benefits of paying attention to themselves. I would suggest that the class contents offered choices for how they did actions, and that they could play around with the movements they learned from Awareness through Movement (atm). Nothing seemed to be happening. Perhaps they did not have the skills to take these suggestions. I needed to offer them some way to interact with the material I was teaching. Lesson Number Two eventually came to me as I continued to teach: keep the classes as concrete as possible. In a spontaneous, gut-level reaction to complaints at the start of one class session, I dropped Feldenkrais lessons completely and taught only yoga. That switch provided for a reprieve and improved my relations with the class, as they seemed to enjoy the stretches. They did not need to pay attention to themselves with the specificity that Feldenkrais lessons usually require. After a few weeks of yoga classes, it became obvious that yoga alone would be insufficient to evoke in the participants any attitude change or greater kinesthetic connection with themselves. The yoga temporarily made the class more acceptable, but atm would provide mental engagement and potential for real change.

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As I re-introduced Feldenkrais lessons into the classes, I retained the concrete perspective that yoga had brought into my planning. Each class began to have a more specific theme, with more direct examples of how participants might use the skills in their lives. At my request, a medical social worker taught the class with me for several months. She helped tremendously with presentation and logistics, and led discussions in the class about what the women were learning from their experiences, and how they would use the skills and insights in their lives. From her modeling, I learned how to handle the questions and issues that came up. The women began to request certain topics, such as how to go to sleep at night, or how to handle having a full stomach. I then added these themes to the emerging curriculum.

CURRICULUM The following is a summary of the course curriculum that I developed. It was taught over a span of two years, with the review sessions added a year into its use. The curriculum consisted of four sections of classes, the result of four themes that emerged over the months of working with the clients. Each section in turn had four classes, with its theme presented over the first three. The fourth class provided a review to reinforce learning. The first theme was “Making a Difference.” The classes were to provide the participants with the experience of sensing a physical difference in themselves through attention to breath and movement. The second theme, “Assertiveness,” taught the participants skills for speaking and interacting with others in an assertive, non-retreating manner. “Calming and Quieting” was the third theme, which taught them ideas for calming themselves in moments of stress, for going to sleep, and for handling a full stomach after meals. The last theme, “Providing Time and Means to Respond Instead of React,” taught the women how to recognize a “fight or flight” reaction within themselves, and how to be able to make other choices for self-organization instead. The first of these twelve classes was made up entirely of yoga poses. The other eleven were atm, with a few yoga poses occasionally included in the “Assertiveness” theme classes to reinforce ability to remain assertive and not retreat. The following is a synopsis of the classes:

Making a Difference 1. Noticing thought patterns, doing yoga poses, noticing the change in how we think afterwards. 2. Portions of Breathing Differentiation, from Lesson 4 in Awareness through Movement (1972, 1977)1. Then noticing the effect of breathing intentionally in an imagined situation that is demanding. 3. Bringing ourselves into rounded, arched, and neutral postures. Noticing the effect of each posture when we sit to converse with another person. Assertiveness 1. Moving the eyes right and left, retracting and telescoping. Then noticing how we use our eye contact, breath, and posture when we look at another person. A frequent response was that feeling their eyes was quite new for them, which they found to be intriguing and interesting, a comment few made in any of the other classes. 8

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2. Sitting yoga poses coming into a supported, neutral posture. Then practicing with each other using posture, eye contact, and breathing when speaking about a serious matter. This movement was most repeated, having been used in a few of the classes, to build ability to come into a posture from which they could speak to another person more effectively, in a way that kept them from retreating away from emotions and conversation. Students would comment that they experienced reticence to be associated with the rounded posture, felt intimidating when arched, and calm with the neutral posture. One student reported that during a conversation with her mother, instead of assuming her customary rounded posture, she changed toward the easily tall posture. She said that she experienced her mother actually listen to her, which had never happened before. 3. In three different actions (on back with one arm held out in front; on all fours with opposite arm and leg raised; turning while standing on one leg with arms held in a circle in front) play with letting go of effort and tension to hold balance by means of paying attention to breath and skeletal support. Then look at some one imagining being tense, then sense breath and skeletal support, and notice the effect on ourselves. Calming and quieting 1. Three ways to calm: Smoothly open and close mouth, smoothly open and close hand, open and close hand and mouth at the same time. Slowly slide one hand on the other hand, with no muscle activity with either hand (from Surgeon’s Hands atm lesson). Sink the lower teeth away from the upper teeth while very slightly and smoothly gliding the jaw first left, then right. All three movements were useful for calming at any time in the day. 2. Three ways to handle a full stomach after meals: Sit and move one knee forward and other knee back, feeling the turning up the spine and head. Open and close one hand, letting the hand come close to the stomach or rest lightly on the stomach and sense the breathing there. Side lying on floor, simultaneously bringing both elbows and knees closer together then further apart to find a relieving and restful position. Lying in a rounded position was consistently reported to be a relief. Sitting moving one knee forward and other knee back, feeling the turning with pelvis, spine and head was taught to address the discomfort for times when lying down was not an option. 3. When going to sleep, say: “I, (your name), am sleeping.” Then notice your breathing; let your face, eyes, and mouth soften; let all of yourself deepen into the bed. Providing Time and Means to Respond Instead of React 1. Sense posture and tension changes when imagining being fearful, angry, or overwhelmed. Then sense contact of feet on floor, imagine expanding belly during out-breath, settle shoulders, allow space in the jaw; imagine lengthening from feet through leg bones, pelvis, spine and head. Sense the effect of this “grounding and centering” to make it possible to stay with a difficult emotion. 2. On back, same-side hand and foot standing on floor, press with the hand and foot, sensing centerline through the turning of pelvis, spine, and head. Then in sitting or standing use sensing of feet on floor, shoulder blades on ribs, and centerline to make it possible to stay with an emotion and respond with a healthy choice. 3. Experiment with the first part of a yawn for opening the throat. Then, in the context of talking with someone about a difficult matter, come into a balanced neutral posture, 9

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breathe in the lower rib case or belly, make clear eye contact, and open the throat to speak in an effective manner.

TEACHING THE CLASSES Eating disorders cause a profound lack of nutrition and an imbalance of chemicals and electrolytes in the system. As a result, cognitive processes are distinctly affected. From a Feldenkrais teacher’s view, clients appear to lack a full ability to abstract and generalize. Therefore, the classes were concrete in nature, and specific skills were taught, with repetition used throughout the sessions to reinforce the concepts. The class periods lasted 45 minutes and met once per week. I would have preferred two times per week for better continuity of teaching and repetition, but in the scheduling of the program, this much time was not available. At the beginning of every class I introduced myself and reviewed the names of each client. I gave the same introduction to the class each time: “This class you are in is ‘Body Awareness.’ This class is yoga and a movement exploration called Awareness Through Movement, developed by a person named Moshe Feldenkrais. In this class you learn three skills: breathing, posture, and movement. These three skills help you do what you want or need to do, such as eating 100%,2 making healthy choices even when it is hard to do so, and being assertive.” At each class, following the introductory explanation, I clearly stated the theme of that day’s lesson, along with ways it would be relevant in the students’ lives. Sometimes a discussion focusing on the theme would develop at this time, such as going to sleep, what balance is, or reactions to having a full stomach. Then we would start the movement lesson. Usually they were asked to close their eyes, with the understanding that, if this was difficult, they were allowed to keep their eyes open with a soft gaze. Most participants were able to keep their eyes closed. I asked them to notice their breathing, reminding them that this would always be the first action in this class. I restated each week that paying attention to their breathing can be an effective way to get in touch with themselves and to sense what may be going on for them. In all but the first class, which used a continuous series of yoga poses and relied upon more “superficial” sensing, an atm lesson portion was given for five to eight minutes, after which they sat up and discussed their observations. Some found the movements and observations interesting, while others, finding the sensations new and confusing, didn’t like the experience. In each class, I reminded them that reactions will vary, that they can be interested in their own reaction, and that these movements might be useful to them. Often the participants needed these discussions to refocus and regroup, since paying attention to their bodies made them anxious and produced a need to escape through laughter, sleep, or asking to leave the room. After the discussions, they would lie back down for the next five- to eight-minute segment of the lesson, and then participate in another group discussion. We had three to four of these lesson segments and discussions in total. After that, in the second half of the class period, we discussed the application of the lesson in daily life or practiced it in role play. At the end, we briefly summarized the material. Every fourth class served as a review of the previous three. At the beginning I would give out a page of short paragraphs describing the movement skills or activities from the three prior classes. Participants would read the descriptions and briefly review the movements. I would ask them, “Can you think of examples of how you can use these movement skills right now in your life?” 10

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We deliberately avoided certain movements and words because they triggered too many overwhelming feelings. While the movement of the pelvis was frequently part of the context of a lesson, we only tried the full pelvic clock lesson once. Clients voiced that this particular lesson was too difficult. Many had a history of sexual abuse, and that much pelvic movement brought up too many issues all the same time. We never used words such as “heavy,” “weight,” “expanded,” “bigger,” and “wider,” as they directly fed into one of the greatest fears of the participants, which was that they would become overweight. The result would be an aversion to anything I taught. However, we did deal with other difficult topics such as sensing the mouth, feeling the stomach, and experiencing emotions. The program highly stressed the ability to “sit with your emotions” as a key ability in recovering from an eating disorder. In other words, stay with feeling an emotion rather than escape its anxiety through distractions such as obsessing about body size, bingeing, or exercise. This class taught “physically” how to sit with your emotions. One woman said that she felt, for the first time in her life, that she could actually stay with sensing the emotion and did not have to escape it.

RESPONSE TO THE CLASS OVERALL One or two women per year spoke about how they really liked the class. Generally, however, the class was not a favorite among participants. For a woman who has been striving to push the limits of, shrink to oblivion, or otherwise negate her body, beginning to pay attention to its sensations may be very hard and unappealing work. The purpose of the class was clearer to the clients when we included demonstrations and discussions about how movement skills learned in class could be concretely applied to their lives. Clarity of purpose ended their reticence and rebellion about taking the class. When clients expressed dislike for the class in general or for a particular movement or pose, they usually remained respectful of the disciplines I taught. The teaching, and a clear class structure, successfully provided the context for recognition that the dislike was actually a reflection of their own issues. The greatest challenge was in having the participants develop the capacity to actually use what they learned and to make real changes. When they did, they frequently mentioned that it provided insight into their behavior, helped them to relax, or enabled them to speak or act effectively. Some reported that a particular movement or action became very useful for them. The most frequently mentioned actions that were useful were sitting and rolling forward with the pelvis into upright posture to fully look at someone when speaking to them; jaw movements that provided general relaxation; and, noticing breathing plus relaxing the face in order to go to sleep. Others recognized personal growth simply in their ability to “almost like” the class and to be more at ease with sensing themselves.

CONCLUSION One of the fascinations I have with the Feldenkrais Method is its potential to encourage more complex thinking: the use of self-observation to allow ideas and insights to emerge, the process of inquiry that can develop as a result, and the versatility of thinking that a student can eventually enjoy. These are some of the great rewards of learning and teaching our Method, which I experience with many other students and clients I work with. However, such response was not the norm in the class I taught for persons with eating disorders. The possibilities and intention for teaching were different and more modest. 11

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Having the participants just gain a tolerance to paying attention to their bodies, or the use of one or a few skills for acting in a more grounded and assertive manner, were my criteria for success. The ability of these women to experience and articulate sensation, like much of the learning necessary for those with addictions, does not come easily. Such growth is, however, part of a beginning of a new framework for thought and action that can sustain recovery and, as a result, life itself. Developing capacity for basic concrete thinking has been tremendously useful with other persons I work with in my profession, having expanded my repertoire of teaching modes and found joy in very simple clear talk with those who profit from such discourse. More, it is understanding of my own defenses, pain, and struggles and knowing that the learning processes of those I teach are simply a mirror of my own that are greater gifts.

notes 1 Moshe Feldenkrais, Awareness Through Movement: Easy-to-Do Health Exercises to Improve Your Posture, Vision, Imagination, and Personal Awareness (HarperSanfrancisco, 1972, 1977). 2 “Eating 100%” was a term used in the program. The clients were required to eat all the food in the meals served in the program. The life skill for eating 100% was the ability to provide daily for their nutritional needs instead of falling back into their disordered eating behaviors.

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Clowning and the Feldenkrais Method   Emily Davis While watching videos of Moshe Feldenkrais, I discovered that, in addition to his brilliant mind, he also had a great sense of humor. On screen, his presence reminded me of some of the great clowns, like Grock or Dario Fo. Now, to me, this is a great compliment, as I have tremendous respect for clowns. I’ve been a student of clowning for over a decade and my studies in both clowning and the Feldenkrais Method have revealed how complementary they are. In my first clown class, Jane Nichols, clown maestro extraordinaire, taught us that pleasure was at the heart of the work. We learned how to find pleasure in everything we did onstage, even in failing. Failure is key to clowning. Think of the great film clowns, like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Audiences love them most when they fail to climb a ladder, muck up the assembly line, or even just fail to stand up without falling down. Finding pleasure in failure keeps the pain of defeat funny. Failure without pleasure turns comedy to tragedy. This perhaps explains why so many clown classes devolve into tears before ending in laughter. During that first clown class, we did an exercise called Mr. Flop. We would meet Mr. Flop when we felt the terrifying drop of failure, when our tricks ceased to please the audience. Let’s say, when you first begin, your hot potato routine has the audience rolling in the aisles. But they soon tire of it and stop laughing, and then you’ve got nothing. Mr. Flop taunts you in this moment, reinforces how little you have, how worthless you feel. We called this The Drop and the more you can sink into it, the more the audience loves you for your failure. The trick is learning how to find pleasure in The Drop. Finding pleasure in that very uncomfortable place of failure seems impossible at first, but with practice it is achievable. Eventually, one can enjoy that moment when the audience ceases to find you amusing. In other words, there is pleasure to be found even in the most challenging and uncomfortable of situations. Finally, you seek out The Drop, because it will yield such rich rewards. When I came to study the Feldenkrais Method, I found a similar regard for doing things with pleasure. When we seek ease and comfort, we are searching for the most pleasurable way to move a leg or lift a finger. Pleasure isn’t the only word we use to describe this quality of movement, but it is one that resonates very strongly with me. Working with pleasure in movement, I soon found that I was able to tackle much more challenging movements than I had before. I was able to find comfort even in things I thought were uncomfortable, just as I had in clowning. It became clear during that first clown class that what we were also seeking was authenticity. I could see that the process of training a clown was fundamentally a process of revealing ourselves. Through wearing the small red nose, our social masks were stripped away and our humanity, however vulnerable, twisted, or flawed, was on display. For example, another clown and I improvised a scene in which I gave her a guitar as a present. I don’t remember exactly what she did with it, but I found it very stupid. I think she may have banged on it like a drum or looked through it like a telescope. I thought, “You don’t do those things with a guitar. You play it, you idiot!” But I tried to be nice. I tried to say “Yes” to her proposition of the guitar as a drum or a telescope, or whatever it was. I smiled. I might have banged on the guitar along with her. 13

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When we sat down afterward, my teacher said, “You wanted to take that guitar back, didn’t you?” and I felt like she’d seen into my soul. Yes, I had! It was a revelation for me to recognize that I couldn’t hide, that my social inhibitions would only get in the way of being a good clown. As my teacher pointed out, if I’d taken the guitar back, we’d have had an interesting scene with some exciting conflict, but instead the improvisation just fizzled out. As our class stood in front of one another, our red noses our only masks, our teacher coached us toward an ever-greater authenticity. We began to sense for ourselves, through our interaction with the audience, when our performances were false and when they struck home. We began to learn when we should just take the guitar back. The process of becoming authentic on stage “in clown” evolves out of a deep listening, particularly listening to the audience. Let’s say you make up a funny dance move and the crowd laughs. If they are laughing authentically, you bet your sweet red nose you’ll want to do that same thing again. In fact, you’ll want to keep doing it, finding variations and tempo shifts, until the laughter starts to diminish, when you’ll want to switch tactics. This practice of finding variations and tempo shifts when something is working applies to a Feldenkrais lesson, as well. When a student takes a deep breath, we might repeat that movement, slow it down, try it from another angle. As in clowning, the process of learning the Feldenkrais Method has led me to a more authentic sense of self. When my learned patterns and habits fall away, what is left is something more honest, more truthful. The Method didn’t turn me into someone new; it brought me back to the core of who I was in the first place. While clown training teaches a deep listening to the audience, the Feldenkrais Method teaches deep kinesthetic listening. Both practices encourage you to listen to yourself and to respond gently and authentically. Try to force a funny thing in clowning and you discover very quickly how delicate humor can be. (I am haunted by a kid from my college comedy class who became furious when we failed to laugh at him. He shouted inches away from our faces, “Laugh! Why don’t you laugh?”) Try to force movement in an Awareness Through Movement or Functional Integration lesson and you discover how little the use of force accomplishes. Aside from pain: force is great at accomplishing pain! You learn very quickly how the delicate and small movements make the big changes. In clowning, your biggest success might come from the way you open your eyes. During a Feldenkrais lesson, your biggest improvement might come from where you focus them.

Cirque Napoléon, l’homme renversé. 1

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In clown class, I discovered how much comedy gold there was to be found in not knowing. As John Wright, the comedy maestro fabuloso who introduced me to the Feldenkrais Method, taught us, the clown lives in bafflement. That is, the less the clown knows, the more remarkable he or she is. One of John’s exercises features a partner who says to the clown, “They tell me you know all the movements.” And, of course, the clown does not know all the movements, but must act as if she does, becoming ever more baffled in the process. The clown’s not knowing the movements is what makes her hilarious. Not knowing in the Feldenkrais Method leads to deeper learning. That is, when we remain open to what is before us and explore it without pre-conceived notions, we make more powerful improvements. If I do a series of movements on the left side, for example, I could speed ahead with the same movements on the right, do them faster and with less attention, because I know them now! But if I slow down and approach the right side as an entirely new experience, I will reap more of the benefits of the lesson. As clowns, we always make it up as we go along. Even when we get into performances, when we theoretically know what’s coming, we are always at the ready to follow the surprise. Now that I’m a Feldenkrais practitioner, this following the surprise feels similar to what it is like to teach the Method. Like a performance, I have an idea of what I’m going to do when I approach a student but it can shift in an instant. When I teach Awareness Through Movement, for example, if I see the group struggling with a movement, I have to shift, find a new way to explain it, a new image, or a way to break down the movement into more elemental parts. The same thing happens on stage, in clowning, when an audience isn’t responding to something I’m doing. I have to try something else, maybe even do less, just as I would in a Feldenkrais lesson. At the heart of both clowning and the Feldenkrais Method there is a beautiful mystery. In both, there is pleasure. There is delicacy. There is sensitivity and deep listening. I think this is why Dr. Feldenkrais himself seems so like a clown to me in the videos. He is so fully present with himself, so authentically who he is and so alive to the people around him. And he has great clown hair.

notes 1 An engraving of the Boswel clown, also known as the upside-down man, at the Cirque-Napoléon. This circus, now known as the Cirque d'Hiver, opened in 1852 to honor Napoléon iii. 16.2 x 7.8 cm.,11 December 1852. In the public domain, as per wikimediacommons.org.

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Alfonso Jane McClenney At the age of five, Alfonso contracted tuberculosis from his father, who later died of the disease. Several years after his father’s death, nuns found Alfonso, his mother, and his brother starving on the streets of Bolivia and placed them in the local orphanage. Recognizing that Alfonso was seriously ill, they admitted him to a hospital. An abscess discovered in his spine was drained. Over the next few years, Alfonso was hospitalized several more times. His spine and rib cage were seriously deformed by a secondary illness, Pott’s disease—tuberculosis of the spine. Several thoracic vertebrae had abscessed; other thoracic vertebrae were dissolving and parts of them destroyed. His rib cage and sternum protruded far forward, his spine and rib cage were contorted into extreme curves, and his neck seemed to sink into the “barrel” of his torso. His deformed ribs were squeezing the organs of his upper body, such that his heart and lungs would eventually fail. Alfonso, for all practical purposes, looked as if he were wearing his rib cage. Because of the compromised condition of Alfonso’s lungs and heart, doctors told the nuns he would require surgery to survive even a few more years. He was sponsored and brought to Seattle by the International Smile Power Foundation for his surgery, a process that took three years of writing to various agencies, surgeons, airlines, hospitals, and governments. Eleven-year-old Alfonso arrived in the United States in December, 2001, for a life-saving operation. At the time, my office was in Redmond, Washington, where Alfonso’s temporary American guardian, who had been a client of mine, was living. She hoped Feldenkrais work would be helpful for him. I had worked with numerous children and was interested to see how I could be of assistance. Children are fun to work with because you can easily introduce the element of play, and they are quick to give up fixations. When I met Alfonso in early 2002, he shook my hand in a serious manner, greeted me in Spanish, and smiled a radiant smile, his eyes twinkling. I watched him move around the clinic, observing his gait, movements, and his barrel-like rib cage, which restricted his neck, back, and arms. I wondered how he might move after surgery. It was obvious this boy had a real love for life. I agreed to work with him after his surgery. Alfonso underwent a 12-hour procedure. Fortunately, his spinal cord functioned normally even though the vertebrae and ribs did not. The surgeons removed diseased portions of ribs. Entire vertebrae were removed or grafted, and four quarter-inch-thick rods were placed on either side of his spine. He was then placed in a cast encasing his entire trunk. He would remain in the cast, his spine immobilized, for four months. A month before his body cast was removed, Alfonso began to limp badly on his left leg. His guardian brought him in for a lesson. He could roll and crawl with the body cast, but he limped badly when he walked or ran. After placing him on the table, I began inquiring with gentle touch how both legs moved and how movement from his feet went through the cast to his neck. I discovered that his left hip joint was restricted. When I asked him how each leg felt as I moved it, Alfonso adamantly replied that his left leg was “stupid.” I asked him if perhaps the “stupid” leg might actually know something that the “smart” leg did not? “No, no, no,” was his answer, repeating, “Stupid leg, stupid leg.” 16

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Thinking perhaps play would distract him from his “stupid” leg concept, I sat him on a large ball. We grasped forearms and began making slow pelvic circles on the ball. He smiled impishly, trying to unbalance me from my stool. I watched how he compensated, leaning far to the left to place weight on the left leg, nearly losing his balance. He did the same when standing. When people are unable to bear weight efficiently on one leg, I often observe them over-compensating, leaning farther out away from the leg. He had difficulty stacking himself up not only over his sitz bone, but his heel as well. We continued making circles and changing directions until his nervous system began to make a better choice and keep him a little more centered on the ball. Next, holding colorful plastic rings in my hands, I had him continue moving the ball in a circle as he reached to take one or more rings away from me—a kind of “keep away.” We began making lateral movements of his trunk, and forward and backward movements. Sometimes his head went in a different direction from his pelvis to grasp the rings I was holding. Occasionally I would let him grab a ring and then attempt to hold it out of his reach. When he successfully grasped a ring, he would try to keep it away from me. As he kept his eyes on the rings, he forgot his “stupid” leg and focused only on getting the rings. As we laughed and played, I noticed his left leg began to respond similarly to the right, helping to support his balance. Sometimes I would lower the rings towards the floor and have him attempt to grab them there. As his pelvis became lighter on the ball, more weight came onto his feet. He surprised himself by allowing the ball under him to roll away, leaving him standing. Alternately, I took the rings higher so he would have to bear weight first on one leg then the other, once again coming to stand in the process. As we progressed, his weight-bearing became more even. His desire to compete drove his learning. Hoping to further improve his balance and weight-bearing abilities, we tried another game—hopscotch. I made a quick hopscotch grid on the floor with masking tape. Using a beanbag for our marker, I showed him how the game was played. We began hopping with his right leg, since I knew he could balance well without falling down. We went through the course twice. Then we went through the course again, hopping first on the right leg, then the next square on the left leg. This proved challenging, but thankfully his competitive nature overcame his need to favor the left leg. We skipped and hopped, sometimes on one leg then two. He began to hop equally well on both legs. Later, I asked him if he could tell me now which was the “stupid” leg. A look of utter confusion came over his face. He couldn’t decide. Wonderful. Nearly a month later, the body cast was removed. Although his spine and rib cage had been significantly altered by the surgery and metal rods, he immediately assumed exactly the same posture as when I first met him. He looked as if he were wearing a barrel over his chest. At first, I blinked in surprise, and then I laughed at my own expectation. Yes, of course, why wouldn’t he assume the same posture as before surgery? Even though his rib cage had changed dramatically, his self-image had not! It was a habitual posture, as if he were still wearing his ribs on the outside of his torso. His body and brain required new information. Patterns of self-image start early in life. But, clearly, Alfonso’s challenged early years had not damaged his self-esteem. He engaged with other children and adults and appeared to be a happy child in spite of his disadvantage. Even his serious physical condition did not seem to dampen his spirits or his ability to relate to others. However, his perception of how his body moved in his environment had not changed even after corrective surgery. How could he experience his torso in a different way? How could his now different spine support him better? Our balance games had worked to help his balance over his legs, but now how to affect his torso and change his self-image? 17

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For our first lesson after the removal of his cast, I thought we would try supporting his torso and moving his ribs, so I placed him on his belly over a large roller and slowly moved each rib. As he became more comfortable, his breathing changed, and his neck and low back lengthened. We began to make crawling movements, laughing and rolling side to side on the roller. I asked him to raise and lower his head and again reach for rings as I moved them from one side of the roller to the other. Even with the rods in his spine, his new rib cage began to respond and lengthen. Breathing improved. We played with swimming movements of arms and legs while he was on the roller, incorporating his vestibular system and the use of his eyes. He looked up, down, right, left, and outward, which encouraged more functional use of his spine to find the rings. When he finally sat up, his head no longer sank between his shoulder blades. He held his rib cage lower, his neck appeared longer, and his head was more upright over his spine. He resembled a more normal child. His walk was easier, freer. Then, remembering his “stupid” leg concept, we played on the ball again to see how the left leg would respond. Absolutely no issue. We had time for only three more sessions before his return to Bolivia, but in those three sessions his manner of being upright in the world changed dramatically. He could run, reach, swim, sit, and crawl with less restriction. At our next lesson, I initially put him on his belly on a roller as we had done before. This time, we focused more on his breath. Placing my hand in various places on his rib cage and back, I asked him to breathe in those areas to move my hand. His breathing became slower and deeper, with more movement evident in his entire torso. I hoped he would begin to experience his rib cage as a more flexible, movable part of himself. We moved off the roller and onto his back. Bending his knees, I stood his feet on the table and asked him to lift his pelvis into the air a little at a time. Even with all the rods and screws in his spine, he was able to explore lifting and bearing weight along his spine. Now he was laughing and wiggling. Standing once again, he found himself more upright, taller than he was before. He was leaving the barrel-shaped self-image behind, at least for a while. In between lessons, he was swimming nearly every day, which enhanced his breathing. Our last lesson was two days before his return to Bolivia. We returned to being on his belly over a roller, repeating many of the things we had begun earlier. Thinking of another way to help lengthen his back and engage his hips, I put him on his back and had him hold each foot with a hand. From there he slowly brought each foot towards his mouth, then lengthened his leg away towards the ceiling. We progressed to lengthening a leg and rolling, and then added sweeping his knee under his elbow, enabling more movement in his hip joints and pelvis. Laughing gleefully, he was rolling along the floor, all smiles. Sadly, our session ended, it was time to go, and we had to bid our good-byes. Huge hugs and tears, and he was whisked away. As he walked out the door, he was taller and moving more fluidly. His guardian returned to Bolivia months later to visit Alfonso and reported he was playing and romping with the other children in the orphanage. While life in an orphanage may seem less than ideal to us in this country, for Alfonso this was a far better life than he would have on the street. He was doing well in school and had been accepted into a special bilingual school. Alfonso taught me that his illness may have malformed his body, but it could not alter his spirit or character, or his willingness to play. My practice is not only with children. But children have taught me that the value of play is key to their learning and improvement. Their minds are so willing to forget their inability. Suddenly they find themselves doing something they could not an hour or a month ago. Watching their faces light up with understanding or success is incredibly gratifying 18

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Body Poems1 Dan Clurman

GLIDING Undulation with my inner centipede. Looking for another leaf to crawl across, another edge to eat. Then falling into the grass. I could crawl through here for ages. A hundred legs swim out of my pelvis and ripple the whole undercurrent in this universe of plants. I live here with dirt, ants, holes and water, gliding along, along, along.

TURNING Turning, not toward or away, not into or out of, turning spine through a shape called ribs as seasons turn, without complication, to each other, as trees’ leaves turn in autumn and swirl on the wind, chasing them, falling in & out of my hands, so my body turns from lying, to sitting, to standing to walking, just walking home with you.

BREATHING Breath enters and leaves as wind touches trees and shakes loose leaves. Breath floats on a current of spine rivers, vertebrae boats. Shoulders splash in waves. Whole body shore sinks & spreads, sinks & spreads.

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A NEW SHAPE Sudden gradual open push up spine to reveal head can go up up up to the top of the canyon over the endless ravine below. Rushing rapids suddenly in sight smooth out through throat. Utter delight rafting over the white water past ribs that roll out around previous rocks. I hadn’t felt the surge of this river in a long time, the rush of hips rocking back, my head floating out over these cliffs and riding the river below. Two songs sung at once towards twilight as the moon glows on the water, calm now in pools. The whole world swims through this new body.

ROCK ALONG THE GLIDE Rock again glide along that rocking so all parts rock along their glide joint to joint shoulder to neck to turn to that rock and glide again all the way down to that essential central pelvis as it rocks along the path most fundamentally my life Not stopped anywhere each breath cradled in this body gliding home rocking to a steady pulse exactly exactly to the sunlight of this day.

1 Dan Clurman, from his book Floating Upstream, available from from the author for $18:  396 61st Street, Oakland, CA 94618.

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Improvisation, a Breath of Relevance   Jean Elvin Improvisation is at the heart of every art form I love, always there like a consistent and reliable friend. Even if hanging out in the background, its presence is never far away. Teaching the Feldenkrais Method is no exception. As a practitioner, I cherish the implicit invitation to adapt the material to the situation at hand. I’d venture a guess that a majority of Feldenkrais practitioners share a passion for improvisation, regardless if they’ve thought about it in that way. Whether enjoying jazz music, dancing Argentine tango, playing theater games, training martial arts, or teaching a Feldenkrais lesson, the tug to listen deeply in the moment and invite a shift in a certain direction informs us all. In order to improvise well, you have to know the form. Art forms that embrace improvisation as part of their very fabric often take longer to internalize, as the foundation must be reliable. Jazz musician Marcus Roberts said, “You want to go into the world with confidence . . . you want as much information as you can get your hands on.”1 Become as knowledgeable as you can, work on your “chops,” and when the moment requires that you adjust, things will go well. Teaching is a responsive form, as is conversation, story telling, artistic performance, and learning. As such, they all share an affinity for improvisation. And each form is mastered, as students of the Feldenkrais Method know, in its own organic time. My first recognition of the Feldenkrais Method as an improvisational form was when listening to trainer David Zemach-Bersin during my professional training. He described how, regardless of knowing an Awareness Through Movement lesson inside and out, his teaching of it never comes out the same way twice.

through improvisation, we establish relevance Movement is expressive and therefore personal. It helps us reach into ourselves, recognize and develop our identity in our original sensory language—one that we experienced before our mastery of words. We might say, “I think with my whole body: I move, therefore I am.” We continually adapt and improvise to establish our identity within our relationships, through the expressive playground of movement—near, far, same, different, attract, repulse. Relationships are based on a collection of non-verbal conversations that underlie every verbal experience. “The brain is literally rooted in the rest of the body in a dramatically rich way.”2 If we accept this as true, then improvisational responsiveness is the neural birthright for practitioners and clients alike. As practitioners and teachers, the body-mind is a rich field in which to anchor the newly emerging habits of our clients after a lesson. With the Feldenkrais Method, we lead our clients into forgotten or less traveled movement territory. The journeys we take, such as reestablishing a smooth gait after an injury or inviting a greater connection of the arms to the trunk are more like conversations in mapping than they are like one-way bus tours. The magic of what we offer gains potency as our clients discover how to integrate the new actions into their personal world. Integration is an improvisational form where the practitioner sets the frame and the client provides the bridge to his or her own sensory and movement repertoire.

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homework—inviting simple artistry When my clients want homework, or some way to recall the wisdom of their Functional Integration (fi) lesson, a simple structured improvisation to explore between lessons can be just right. The following sample helped two recent clients who were working on balance. The first client experienced an fi lesson based on “Spine Like a Chain.” The second client’s fi lesson explored the hip joints and the sensation of the pelvis rotating around the head of the femur in various ways. I introduced the following movement either as a test movement before the lesson or—very simply and briefly—after a period of appreciating the sensation of standing because they asked for something they could do standing up at home. “Stand with your hands on the back of a chair and bend your knees with the feet apart. Slide one foot lightly along the floor to the side and then gradually shift your weight onto it, so that you are now standing on that leg. Close the other foot to it and shift your weight from one foot to the other a couple of times. Alternate feet by then sliding the other foot to its respective side, and shifting your weight smoothly to stand on that leg again.” Adding this level of awareness to a weight shift is the perfect homework for becoming more confident. The improvisational part happens when we encourage the client to notice the smoothness, the quality, or to play with how lightly the foot slides across the surface of the floor. With a few refinements, this is also a way for partners to fine tune their balance and create a clear communication at the opening of an Argentine tango. This skillful, improvisational dance form often begins with partners shifting their weight together seamlessly, each holding his or her own balance, also creating a shared balance, harmonized as one. The mover and the moved are allowed to listen deeply and play. By presenting our clients with well-crafted structured improvisations, such as a simple movement game, we give them a rich field of movement on which to focus their own improvement. A game that asks for indirect attention to the new quality or pathway can help them playfully recreate a satisfying sensation, making it their own. Unlike the more complex coordination and potentially deeper, more relaxed focus during an fi or guided Awareness Through Movement (atm) lesson, a take-home game is best left simple, short, and flexible. Three-minute games can be quite powerful. The benefits often increase if they can be engaged in casually, or extended as one’s interest dictates. Clients who have experience with specific forms will enjoy a game with terminology or references that are familiar, such as a small dance, a kata, a riff, a motif, or a refrain.

argentine tango—improvisation built on connection Dance teachers refer to Argentine tango as a lead-follow dance. Though it can be presented as a performance style with set choreography, the heart of the style is improvisational and includes a physical connection between the two partners that enables them to be instantly responsive to each other—not unlike a practitioner and student during a Functional Integration lesson. In fi, a practitioner’s attention to good self-use and sensitivity provides the connection. In Argentine tango, this connection is sometimes called the frame and often referred to as the embrace. Both achieve the same function, namely a functional connection that allows them to adjust the distance or closeness between the pair for each step, while being able to continuously feel the “lead and follow” with each step and weight shift.

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improvisational theater games In theater games such as those created by Viola Spolin, players often become familiar with each other through a mirroring game.3 In this game, one member of a pair moves slowly enough so that the facing partner can do the same movement as exactly as possible, acting as the mirror image of the leader. The two proceed without verbal cues until the coach calls, “Switch leaders.” This continues a number of times, until each member of the pair has tried both leading and following. The coach then calls, “Switch at will,” giving the players a chance to switch the roles of lead and follow without verbal cues, by using only nonverbal movement. The pair must rely on silent perception and cooperation. Soon everyone finds out if one role is more natural and gets a chance to practice both.

follow the follower I have heard some version of this “lead-follow” process described in the Feldenkrais Method, in improvisational theater games, in Tai Chi Push Hands, and various dance styles including Argentine tango and Contact Improvisation. “Follow the Follower” was coined by Spolin and created as a further step in her Mirror game, yet some variation of this universal theme occurs in many forms. The leader initiates a step or a rhythm for the pair, listens to the follower’s timing, and responds to (or follows) the follower. As the communication is refined, there is the possibility that—even if one partner has a clear role as leader—it may at any moment appear and feel so seamless that their movement has the quality of spontaneous co-creation. When a Feldenkrais practitioner slows down, lowering the client’s head, taking time to let the client’s skull rest completely, and sensing its weight, the practitioner is able to find the natural path of the client’s movement without interfering. There may be a responsive moment where the practitioner again follows the client, allowing him or her time to experience a breath or give up tension. This clarification of self, created through connection, is the epitome of following the follower. Some forms (Spolin Theater Games, Tai Chi Push Hands, Contact Improvisation) intentionally change leaders as part of their tradition, others (Feldenkrais Method and Argentine tango) less so.

dedication and rigor become inviting through improvisational forms Jazz great Wynton Marsalis describes give and take this way: “The art of jazz music is a communication. We play off of each other.”4 While some jazz jams are more challenging, asking implicitly, “Can you top this?” or “Can I throw you off?”5 the jazz music of atm and fi is not unlike that little boogie-woogie tune my piano teacher found for me to practice when I was eight years old. It has a particular catchy rhythm, an intriguing call and response between the walking bass of the rhythmic left hand pattern and the reply from the melodic, upper register right hand. It’s playful, with a recurring—if insistent—motif. It establishes a familiar theme, such as pushing through the foot to roll to the side, or using 23

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compression through c7, t1, or the sitting bone. Yet it has some delightful surprises you don’t first expect, such as the melody of the eyes leading the back, the head looking up, or the neck arching into a healthy curve. Teaching is improvisational by its very nature because it is interactive. It is the improvisational form I practice most frequently, including both fi and atm. Riffing on a theme, you or I might change the opening of a lesson according to the energy level of the group. By responding to our clients and students, we adapt our material moment by moment. We reframe it to have more relevance to those individuals, on that day, also in that climate, and in that studio. The following example is typical of what we all do as atm teachers, almost without recognizing our own spontaneity. On a warm day near the end of the semester, most of the participants in my college atm class were tired and seemed almost asleep. Instead of starting lying down, as I had intended to do for a lesson with a side-bending theme, I asked them to stand up. I pretaught the lateral movement of the trunk by asking them to slide their hand down the outside of their thigh, so that their trunk, head and shoulders bent to the side. This was an easy way to use gravity to get the movement idea across to them without having to rely primarily on their ability to interpret my words when they were so tired. By the time they lay down, they were familiar with the lateral direction of the movement and, in spite of changing their orientation to gravity mid-stream, were able to easily interpret my words. My mentor Daniel Nagrin would often challenge his dance improvisation class with an open-ended invitation to find what was rattling inside, setting the tone with a suggestion such as, “Someone something is resting in an open field.” “Take five clearing breaths and quiet your mind.” So much like a body scan, it’s uncanny. “Someone something feels an urgency, an impulse/ to venture out/ to shelter near others” (or some other enticing instruction). We developed movement motifs and tried and true “home base” comfort moves for our “someone something” of the moment, as method actors would develop their character’s walk. “Someone something encounters someone something along the way.” “Go exploring until you find something that attracts or repels you. . . .” Depending on the structure provided, when a dancer is attracted to another’s movements, she may mirror those actions, dialogue, trade solos like jazz musicians, or color the motif from her own point of view. Mirroring and dialoguing is not unlike a Feldenkrais practitioner who senses the movement pattern of a client by “going for a ride” without changing that pattern and then suggesting an alternative pattern through the practitioner’s hands-on connection with the client.

frequent or extended rest It’s helpful to remember that the Feldenkrais Method offers something unique, distinct from other improvisational forms: extended rest. The Method allows movers to improvise within the structure of a lesson, but more distinctly, to notice the effects of what they’ve done during the resting phases. Most dancers are accustomed to switching from one movement phrase to another quickly, and from performing movement combinations on the second side immediately. At a Feldenkrais and Dance workshop that I co-teach, improvisation includes an invitation to slow down and to rest. The luxury of enjoying new patterns, in addition to sensing their effects, is a welcome distinction. We create value by incorporating time to appreciate the changes one feels.

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a homework game My fi client felt asymmetry between her two arms and wanted to feel greater connection of her right arm to her trunk, similar to the left. Her fi lessons involved the spine, shoulder blades, arms and ribs, especially with movements related to reaching and catching, even down to the feet. During a short series of lessons where we explored differences in mobility between the two sides of her ribs and trunk, she improved. For this hula dancer working as an occupational therapy assistant, the differences in her arm movements seemed characteristic of different ways of concentrating. She noticed that one side moved in a more curving, spatial, even poetic way, compared to a linear quality on the other side. After fi, she typically found the differences to be less pronounced. Between and after fi lessons she wanted to have something to do at home to extend the benefits she felt. The key turned out to be a structured improvisation. We had explored this movement only briefly during the beginning of her third lesson, but it became the foundation of her homework. While she was lying on her back, I asked her to find the balance of the two arms as they extended to the ceiling, as if they were hanging like a carpenter’s plumb line (only forward toward the ceiling). Her improvisation was to move one arm slightly away from the center balance point, less than an inch and a half in any direction, and to feel the movement of the other arm. While exploring this reflexive relationship, she was to let the arms communicate as though having a conversation between the two limbs. This improvisational homework created an effective bridge between the FI lessons in my office and her own mastery over the way she used her two arms. Through improvisation, we establish relevance.

polishing our chops What can Feldenkrais practitioners learn from other improvisational forms? Is their tradition of training relevant to us? Is it more rigorous than ours? How can we best develop our skill (our “chops”) and our confidence? Daniel Nagrin used to stay in his New York studio for days on end, convincing friends to bring him food so he could keep dancing. cbs producer David Browning recognizes, “Here’s the thing about jazz musicians, I think even more than classical musicians—they do it all the time! If there’s an instrument around, somebody’s gonna be playing.”6 I’m reminded of stories of Moshe teaching intriguing movement patterns to dinner guests in his living room before their meal. While you might not go quite that far, do you have a repertoire of fi lessons? How could you clarify or expand on that? Where do you find new atm lessons? Can you recognize the FI styles of your favorite trainers or practitioners? Marcus Roberts is so accomplished a musician, he can play jazz standards in the style of at least six jazz masters who preceded him, by request. If we are going to challenge ourselves to a place of mastery and confidence, we too can benefit by studying—perhaps playfully—everything we can get our hands on! The following are recommendations from Feldenkrais trainers with whom I had email conversations about how we can “polish our chops.” Alan Questel’s recommendation, “Teach as much as you can,” reflects the tradition of musicians, actors and dancers who hone their craft through constantly performing. Arlyn Zones offers, “One resource that comes to mind is SF Second Year Notes by Stanley Brown. It would be great to have transcripts or tapes, but we don’t. Anyway, there is a fair amount of fi there . . . a lot more material than a volume of ay or a week of Amherst. Feldenkrais Resources publishes it.” Larry Goldfarb recalls a late 1980s SF Bay Area Study group that worked with the material from the third year of the sf training. “That was when my fascination [began] with 25

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what I now consider mf’s implicit pedagogy . . . his unspoken but profound notions of how students learn over time—not just during one lesson, but across over the span of a series of lessons.” He recommends, “Explore, play with, investigate, study, reflect on, discuss, teach, apply, and learn from [a] series of lessons [such as] the sf and Amherst trainings as well as . . . the Alexander Yanai transcripts. Begin by considering how the various [sequences of atm] lessons weave together over time. You might ask yourself . . . how these lessons come together to take forgetting into account, how they build on one another, and how, indirectly and benevolently, each series can—when taught well—lead to such a reliable and inclusive way to develop coordination, skill, and ability.” David Zemach Bersin shares, “In terms of learning how to think and improve your action, it is much more important to study Dr. Feldenkrais, the source of the method, than to spend time and money going to this or that advanced training, no matter what new technique or perspective is being sold.” [I suggest,] “Go through the entire Esalen Workshop by Dr. Feldenkrais and do each atm in the order that it was taught. Then [translate] each atm lesson . . . into fi . . . some lend themselves more readily than others.” Start by transposing into fi lessons #2-3, 5-7, 9, 17, 19-22, 24, 27, 31, 39 and talking about the construction and strategies behind each lesson.” Secondly, “We have some 200 of Dr. Feldenkrais’s fis that were filmed. . . . Watching these videos will provide a treasure trove of information and inspiration, even to the most experienced of practitioners.” Choosing even one of these recommendations provides enough material to keep us happily improving for quite a long time. If knowing your repertoire is the first step, being willing to develop your style, to add fluency and relevance, is the next. Along those lines, I invite you to spend some time improvising with other forms besides the Feldenkrais Method, for the sheer enjoyment. I bet it will be fun to use your beginner’s mind, especially since you already have so many skills established from practicing and teaching Feldenkrais. The next time you want to build a bridge to establish relevance for a client, consider how quickly that reliable and playful friend—improvisation—is at your side, lending a valuable perspective.

notes Image page 23, Master Argentine tango dancer Juan Carlos Copes and his daughter, Johanna, perform at the 2011 Tango Day, in Buenos Aires. Photo: Estrella Herrera. Flickr: Día del Tango. Author: Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 1 60-Minutes. “The Virtuoso,” 60-Minutes video, 13:30, June 22, 2014, David Browning and Paige Kendig producers, www.cbsnews.com/60-minutes/ 2 This is a reference to the embodied point of view of the mind in neuroscience, as described eloquently in “Large-scale Integration in the Nervous System and Embodied Experience,” Francisco J. Varela, Special Guest Lecture, First European Feldenkrais Conference, Heidelberg 1995, reported by Ilana Nevill, http://www.feldenkraisnow.org/embodiedexperien.html 3 Viola Spolin, Theater Games for the Classroom: A Teacher’s Handbook (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1986), p. 75-76. 4 60-Minutes Overtime. “Jamming behind the scenes with jazz greats,” 60-Minutes Overtime video, 5:50, June 22, 2014, www.cbsnews.com/jamming-behind-the-scenes-with-jazz-greats/ 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid.

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Getting Rhythm, Having a Ball! Improvisation in Functional Integration—Lessons from Music   Louise Runyon As a dancer and performing artist, I have long found improvisation essential to my work. As a Feldenkrais practitioner, I find it often necessary to switch horses in midstream, especially when working with children, to go with the flow, respond in the moment, to improvise. And although I am not a musician, I had some recent experiences with a child that drew on two key facets of music: rhythm and improvisation. I have worked with a ten-year-old girl with cerebral palsy, Christina, for three years. When she first came to me at age seven, her father carried her in. During our time together, our lessons have been oriented toward developing her awareness of the parts of herself that might keep her from walking. She has since gained much freedom in her feet, legs, pelvis, rib cage, shoulder blades, arms, spine, head, neck, jaw, and breath, and found a much greater integration in movement through all the parts of herself. Christina’s gait has developed gradually over time, and she has also made great progress in the past year in cognition, following instructions, making eye contact, sitting up straight, walking with knees apart, making heel contact with the floor, and many other areas. She still has been challenged, though, to integrate all of the freedom she has found into effortless walking. She has tended to lurch, draw her elbows toward her sides, keep her knees rigid, and has generally brought her fear into the act of walking. She has also remained in her own world to a great extent, often compulsively repeating a litany of names and phrases. Recently I had the idea to work with the element of rhythm. My thinking was inspired by Ruthy Alon’s emphasis in Bones for Life® on rhythmic movement, the idea that walking is a rhythmic action and that rhythm is an organizing tool. In other words, rhythm can help the nervous system “tap in” to integrating all the parts of the body into unified movement, and so help transcend the confusion of disparate parts. I also chose to incorporate ideas from a recent workshop in Atlanta with Anat Baniel, and her emphasis on deeply connecting, engaging, and playing with a child. We are rhythmic beings living a in a rhythmic world. Our hearts and lungs work rhythmically, walking is rhythmic, the moon orbits the earth and the earth orbits the sun rhythmically, and so on. But for children with cerebral palsy, voluntary movement is rarely rhythmic. Christina is a highly musical child with the ability to sing any song she has ever heard, but she does not do so rhythmically. She takes piano lessons but does not play rhythmically. She learned to swim at one year old, but does not stroke rhythmically. And without rhythm, walking is a great effort. I began with Christina lying on her back, feet standing, and gently tapped her knees together while counting “one, two, three, four.” After awhile, she chimed in on “four,” beginning to participate and engage in the experience. I pushed upward from below her knees, alternately left and right, to lift her feet so they could come down in “steps,” still counting. After awhile I paused before “four,” and she began to fill in the number. I then asked her to put her own foot down, and she began to do so. I provided some resistance so she could feel herself clearly, and soon she initiated each step. She slowed the process down and it became slightly less rhythmic, but we continued to count.

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I moved on to tapping her bent elbows on the table (taking the elbows backward is an action she doesn’t do easily), gently clapping her hands left and right on her stomach, and other variations. Christina continued to say a number of the counts out loud and continued to initiate the movement against the resistance I provided. At the end of the lesson, while I counted, she took seven steps on her own in perfect rhythm. It seemed clear that she was thinking about the counts, and not about falling. As she walked to the car afterward, uphill and on grass, she took 20 steps, all in clear rhythm! My thought was that if she were to focus on rhythm rather than on the difficulties of walking, she would be able to walk more easily. In fact, stepping rhythmically to the car, she was like a different child. She still leaned against her dad on this trek, but that was OK. She was progressing, step by step. Christina was very much engaged in this rhythmic lesson, more so than at any time in the past. She made repeated eye contact and never once reverted to reciting her litany of names and phrases. Her breathing, that autonomic rhythmic function, had also deepened considerably. The next week, she walked in differently. Her father was behind her, but she walked without assistance, her arms in front of her, elbows less pulled in to her sides. She looked more solid and more confident. She spontaneously lay on the table with feet together, knees apart—not her usual preference. When I began “clapping” her feet together in rhythm, she said very clearly and directly, “I don’t like that.” She voiced a definite signal to change horses in midstream. For Christina, this was a huge leap in direct communication with me. I immediately stopped and began to tap her knees gently together, and she did not object. One of Christina’s habitual patterns of movement is to clap her hands forcefully together and lift her head suddenly off the table. During this lesson we worked with clapping hands in a different way: seated, quietly and gently, and in fours. This helped her brain differentiate between different kinds of clapping, and helped her know more clearly what she does when she engages in her habitual pattern. Still in sitting, I began to stamp her feet alternately left and right on the floor, again counting in fours. Christina filled in the blanks by saying the numbers and initiating the movements where I paused. Stamping was an especially big development. Recently she has been able to sit with her feet flat on the ground, and she understands a request to do so. For a long time, though, her feet would hover just above the floor. In her brain, she has not understood gravity’s pull on them, or what the floor is for. When I stamped her feet for her, there was no resistance and they made a loud, clear “slapping” noise. Her father and I were amazed. She was also able to do the movement herself and make noise with her heels—not as clear a slapping sound, but distinct nonetheless. Again, inspired by Anat Baniel’s book Kids Beyond Limits,1 we also spent time playing with a soft scarf fabric that wafts rather than falls directly. This delay made it easier for her to catch the scarf and taught her success rather than difficulty. She plays ball with her parents at home, but because eye/hand coordination is challenging (she had two surgeries as an infant for crossed and lazy eyes), throwing has been easier than catching. Christina was tremendously engaged with this activity with the floating scarf. She didn’t always track the scarf with her eyes, but when she did, she could catch it. At one point she successfully snatched the scarf from my hands, and was extremely pleased with herself. I also used the scarf’s movement around her as she lay on her back, to encourage reaching, not just to straighten her arm, but to extend through her spine, ribs, and pelvis. At one point she rolled over almost to her side in reaching for the scarf, again looking like a different child, as rolling has not been easy for her. 28

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In addition to stamping Christina’s feet down, right and left, on the table as she lay on her back (all the time counting), I asked her to lift her feet right and left to stamp them. I asked a couple of times, but this movement was challenging for her. Suddenly, she let out a huge sneeze, and both feet (and her head) flew up into the air! She, her father, and I all had a huge laugh at this. Christina was being the master of improvisation. At the end of the lesson I counted in fours and extended her arms left and right overhead (left/right alternation of the arms a key component of walking that she hasn’t had). Christina began singing with gusto. I barely knew the song but was able to discern some kind of tune and the fact that it was in a four-count. I began to sing the tune with her, counting “one, two, three, four,” over and over. We created a beautiful medley with many different pieces coming together: her singing words; the numbers one, two, three, four; rhythmic movement; and alternating use of her arms. We had a lovely and impromptu blending of musical improvisation and the Feldenkrais Method. When Christina walked out to the car this time, she wasn’t able to find the same rhythmic steps as before. But again, she walked in a very non-habitual way. Every few steps she stooped, deeply bent her knees and stuck out her pelvis, while reaching for the ground. Her parents taught her to reach for the floor years ago if she felt she was going to fall, but she hasn’t done it much lately. This was a far more relaxed walking than her more usual uneven gait. She used her arms functionally as opposed to compulsively drawing elbows in to her sides, her shoulders were relaxed, and her knees were much more fully bending. In addition, she seemed to view the ground as friend rather than foe. As Christina develops one step at a time, it is with the idea that she won’t get everything at once, but she can continue to break out of habitual, non-productive patterns. She can try something new, evidence of learning that will further and further wake up her brain and allow her to become more functional. By using rhythm, play, improvisation, and a strong connection with Christina in these lessons, we both really had a ball. I can’t wait to see what happens next!

notes 1 Anat Baniel, Kids Beyond Limits, 2012 : The Anat Baniel Method for Awakening the Brain and Transforming the Life of Your Child With Special Needs (Perigree/Penguin, New York and London, 2012).

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Integrating the Feldenkrais Method and the Dalcroze Method: Music, Improvisation, and Function   Adam Cole

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Dr. Feldenkrais rarely discusses music in depth, at least not in his books. While he clearly had a high appreciation for the arts, it seems that the use of music was one area that he did not choose to explore. This task has been left for those who have followed him. This being said, Feldenkrais was well aware of music as an avenue for improvement. He refers to musicians in his books as examples of types of people with a high degree of refinement of function. While I have never seen any evidence that Feldenkrais himself was a musician, he worked with a few extremely famous performers, Yehudi Menuhin being the most notable example. Music, like the Feldenkrais Method, offers the means for awareness and integration. What it sometimes lacks is a systematic means of attaining a function beyond the stated goal of improving a performance of a piece of music. Like all the arts, and like many other therapies and approaches, it may achieve greater ends through elusive means. Despite the difficulty in nailing down the concrete benefits of music as used for self-improvement, certain educators have made use of it for just this purpose.

an introduction to dalcroze as kindred spirit Among the music educators to grasp this most acutely, Emile Jacques-Dalcroze may be said to have the most in common with Feldenkrais. Dalcroze was a Swiss musician who was dissatisfied with the way Western European conservatories in the early twentieth century were producing educated musicians who could not actually play. He departed radically from typical educational practice and developed a method whereby music was felt before it was explained. A study of his history and the path by which he came to create what is known as the Dalcroze Method reveals a person much like Feldenkrais, curious, self-informed, and brave. Dalcroze practitioners seek not only to make use of that bravery, but to embody it. Training is not passing on information, but immersing students in a process that will transform them, much as they will transform their students. There are debates among the community on how the Dalcroze Method is to be propagated, with one underlying issue being the conflict between knowing a certain amount of information versus becoming a certain kind of teacher. Dalcroze instructors are expected to be able to create music and music games through an improvisatory process, both at and away from the piano, and must be able to monitor the progress of their students so as to make adjustments to the music and the games that will maximize the learning. Perhaps these descriptions sound familiar, and even reassuring, to a Feldenkrais community with the same ideals and difficulties, and only marginally different tools. One aspect of Dalcroze’s work involves the use of movement in time as a primary tool for discovering music concepts. In Dalcroze Eurhythmics and plastique animée, students improvise movement across the floor to the sounds of pre-composed or improvised music. They strive to reflect, or recreate in themselves, a picture of this music. By doing so they can begin to embody musical concepts like half-notes with their one movement per two pulses, the smooth continuous movement of a legato phrase, and the Simon-says-type music of imitative canon. Typically, those who promote the benefits of a Dalcroze educa30

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tion cite an increased sensitivity to music, an improved expressiveness, and a higher level of functional musicianship. They may also mention that students experience a general sense of well-being after doing such lessons. The reasons for this are perhaps elusive, even for the teachers, and it is here that the discussion gets very interesting for a Feldenkrais practitioner. Unlike Feldenkrais, Dalcroze was not scientifically trained and so his terminology is, by necessity, often self-invented. This has caused problems with the propagation of his work, which can be more difficult to approach than other progressive music education methods such as Kodaly and Orff that were developed at the same time. Even more interesting, however, is that many of his disciples who were fluent in his musical ideas seem to have been unable to discuss what appears to be a deeper kind of education that Dalcroze strove for but was unable to articulate in terms that were universally understood. Dalcroze suggested throughout his life that his Method could serve to improve all aspects of a person’s being, to make them healthier. Many of these ideas stopped with him because of the apparent lack of clarity behind his thoughts and claims. For instance, there have been disagreements about what Dalcroze meant by terms such as “a-rhythmy” and “joy,” which seem to refer to a deeper kind of learning that is not clearly articulated. In his comprehensive survey of the work of Dalcroze, Michael Giddens discusses this term “joy,” used by Dalcroze to describe an effect of his Method that he could not sufficiently account for. Despite the brevity with which Dalcroze discussed the non-musical benefits of eurhythmics in Exercices de plastique animée, two important points were revealed. Firstly, he stated that the balance between man’s mind and body achieved by eurhythmic exercises was a significant factor towards attaining the non-musical benefits he attributed to his system. Secondly, this balance was said to produce a “calmness” in the entire organism, which gave rise to a unique sensation which Dalcroze called “la joie.” This “joy” was a phenomenon which only those who participated in eurhythmic classes would fully comprehend, and come to “know” within themselves. It was also a feeling that did not lend itself to verbal description, and because of this Dalcroze pleaded with educators not to dismiss his claims as mere exaggerations. He admitted, “I cannot make you understand the nature of this ‘joy’ but I do wish to state that it exists in all people who have applied themselves to the study of eurhythmics for the necessary amount of time.”1 As Feldenkrais practitioners, we may recognize this joy and calmness as familiar effects of “integration” and “awareness,” terms that we also have some difficulty explaining to the public. For this reason, it should come as no surprise to a Feldenkrais practitioner to hear a story of Dalcroze observing that one of his students’ shoulders was higher than the other and offering to “fix it for them!” Indeed, some of his musings could be mistaken for Feldenkrais’s own: “A harmonization of our nervous system, the stimulation of slack motor centers, control of instinctive behavior and spiritualism of corporal manifestations, should establish a unity in our organism both for preparatory and executory purposes…A time will come when our bodies attain—through a complete reconquest of the muscular sense—an independence bringing our acts into direct union with our desires.”2 This goes beyond any kind of musical achievement and moves into questions of differentiation, integration, and habit. On Feldenkrais’s side, we are all aware of the history of indifference and skepticism among the scientific and medical community for Feldenkrais’s well-thought out ideas. Feldenkrais, while able to describe his Method in scientific terms, seems to have resisted concretizing his work in particular disciplines, perhaps for fear of the inevitable reduction 31

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of reach that might result. While the status of the Feldenkrais Method may be slowly improving, it remains a hard sell for those in the medical profession who like to diagnose and stick to concrete definitions, or those in the arts who may be uncomfortable with overly precise description and aim. A doctor intent on diagnosing a single cause for an ailment may have little patience with the more amorphous idea that seemingly unrelated symptoms could be alleviated through something as fuzzy as a learning process. Meanwhile, creative performers who make a living out of blurring boundaries in theater and music may find any description of the creative act that involves the function of the skeleton and the nervous system clinical, inhuman, or reductionist. The Dalcroze and Feldenkrais Methods both use concrete steps to achieve more global, less easily definable results. However, the particulars in the approaches of each Method differ, as do many of the expectations of the teachers who implement them. Because the Methods overlap without being redundant, I believe that a union of Dalcroze and Feldenkrais could satisfy both the concrete thinkers and the amorphous ones, while simultaneously strengthening the two Methods. Neither needs the help of the other. Yet both would be enriched by an integrated approach of the two. What follows is a discussion of the ways in which a Dalcroze-inspired music program can interface with observations and processes common to the Feldenkrais Method.

music as containment Containment is a term that, for this discussion, can be defined as a psychological enclosure around an infant by its mother, a context that is provided to a young creature who lacks such a context, and therefore lacks sufficient orientation to develop in a direction. Before a child is able to sense the floor and propel itself, such containment is extremely valuable in forming a bond, establishing identity, and determining next steps for development. While music is not typically described in terms of containment, it can serve the same purpose for an adult that the mother’s arms do for an infant. It provides a kind of soundenclosure which, if appropriate to listeners, can orient them. J. Scott Goble, in his groundbreaking book, What’s So Important About Music Education3 has done an extensive study showing that musics of varying cultures, used for varying purposes, share a common trait of serving to restore a kind of equilibrium, whether psychological, social, or physiological. When working with middle-schoolers and even some adults, I often provide them with a musical task such as singing, coupled with movement. The students believe, of course, that we are working on a musical task when, in reality, I am asking them to pay attention to their changing sense of self. Because they are improvising their moves in an environment where pleasant music is playing, they recognize that they are safe and in control of their choices. They do not often see that I have constrained the improvising to direct their awareness, as when I ask them to move in a circle any way they like and then ask them to notice which way they have chosen to go. As we change the direction of the circle to the less habitual, they are primed to notice things about themselves without feeling selfconscious or wondering what the point may be to these movements. Music can serve as an effective containment for clients, providing them with a context that is less disorienting than a typical lesson. While temporarily lost in one sense, that of functionality, the client may maintain a sense of connection and stability by having music introduced to the situation. This approach may provide clients with a more positive experience of the Feldenkrais Method, one that they can quickly gravitate towards. 32

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music as scaffold for learning sequence Sometimes Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lessons are hard to take in, both for students and practitioners. The aim of a Feldenkrais lesson, the reason for Moshe’s choices, and the given sequence can be opaque despite the phenomenal results the lesson can bring about. Chief among the difficulties is the recognition of the structure of the lesson: its beginning, its process, and its desired result. To some extent, Feldenkrais may be said to have kept the dramatic arc of his lessons deliberately obscure. It may be that he wanted a student to trust the instructions implicitly because, otherwise, the student might attempt to anticipate the aim of the lesson and mistake the end for the means. By leaping to the end to show themselves or the teacher how good they are at the desired movement, the student misses the very process that leads to improvement. Nevertheless, this powerful aspect of Feldenkrais’s methodology also may be driving certain students away. Not everyone in every culture is comfortable trusting implicitly a series of strange instructions that ostensibly have nothing to do with anything in their experience. Lacking any kind of orientation, the anxiety of a student may prevent them from experiencing the lesson or making it clearer. Music, at least traditionally constructed music, has the advantage of being more transparent to our ears and minds without being concrete or requiring the use of language. We may not understand how a Mozart sonata is designed, but we very well might feel its process in our bodies, recognize the recurrence of musical themes, hear their transformations, and respond to the dramatic unfolding of its sounds. Because we have a profound connection to musical sound, we can “comprehend” more in it than we need to explain. One of the ways in which I teach according to Dalcroze principles is to improvise music on the piano for my students to respond to. I manifest a certain level of organization in my playing, and the music contains natural places for breath, tension and release, as well as many levels of organization, including the melody, the harmony, and the larger structure. I can ask the students to incorporate what they hear in their movements. It is as if I am providing a sonic FI, with my hands reaching them through the music. When I combine this approach with language specific to ATM, pointed, focused, and questioning, the result can be a class full of people who are sensing and moving without feeling lost, overwhelmed, or wanting to sleep.

music as task in which to practice function One of the great advantages of the Feldenkrais Method is that, while its means are specific to the lesson, its aims are very general and can be so global as to be described as “a universal improvement.” Again, however, each advantage has its flip side. While a practitioner may see the use of more integrated “twisting” in a client as a means to reduce back pain, improve the carriage of the head, and make walking easier, a client coming out of an ATM class without specific guidance from the practitioner may have no real sense of what to do with these improvements. Thus parasitic habits may quickly reassert themselves, as the new pattern is not integrated into the desired function, and a client may find he or she must learn the same lesson a number of times before it sticks. Musical activities are concrete to the extent that they serve the purpose of generating music or dance. As with musical structure, however, the concrete nature of musical movements is in the service of a more generalized product, the elusive musical sound. Habits may still creep in as musicians attempt, perhaps neurotically, to replicate the perfect 33

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phrase, but the thought process behind music making lends itself to thinking beyond the habit towards an ideal of sound or phrasing. Therefore a musician engaged in a Feldenkrais lesson, or a Feldenkrais student engaged in a music lesson, has the opportunity to immediately make use of a new way of twisting towards a valuable end. The feedback of the beautiful sound they begin to make with their instrument, or the phrase they can play wonderfully because they feel it, serves as a tangible marker of the use of improved functionality. Music thus serves to solidify the effects of the lesson very effectively. What I am able to do by combining Feldenkrais and Dalcroze is offer students an experience that incorporates their entire selves in the process of playing a piece “better.” They may move to the music they will perform, move in silence with the music in mind, or move to completely different music that relates somehow to their piece. Ideally, as they think about themselves functionally as well as musically, they gain a clearer picture of the means by which they have improved, which goes beyond what they can hear, or even what they sense emotionally. The act of making music serves as a way to put their functionality to use immediately, rather than wait until they stand up to walk, or sit down to type.

dalcroze and feldenkrais: a marriage of equals To my knowledge, few if any Dalcroze people are conversant with the Feldenkrais Method, and the same can be said of Feldenkrais practitioners in regards to Dalcroze. Each camp may be aware of the other, and may marvel at the similarities of issues within the communities, but the lengthy certification that creates a barrier to entry into either of these groups makes it highly unlikely that anyone will endeavor to master both. A Dalcroze Certificate, only attainable under the supervision of someone with a License or Diplome, and usually necessitating travel to another state, may take up to three years of study. Licensure requires additional years. To my knowledge, only one Feldenkrais practitioner, Eric Barnhill, has managed this feat of combined certification and is engaged in merging the two approaches. The lack of contact between schools is a great pity, because Dalcroze’s methodology provides numerous opportunities for differentiation, integration, and awareness. What they may be lacking is a systematic means of applying these music-specific tools to a more general well-being, which is what Dalcroze apparently was hinting at. In this way, the Feldenkrais Method can both make use of the remarkable Dalcroze lessons as a means to improve its results, while simultaneously providing a powerful framework whereby the desired effects of Dalcroze may be better monitored and propagated. As an example, Dalcroze teachers frequently ask participants to move across the floor to music. While moving, the participants may be asked to keep one beat with their feet and another, quicker one with their hands. At a later point, the participants may be asked to switch the rhythm of the feet and hands. This is, of course, differentiation of the hands and feet, with the ultimate aim being integration of the movement into a musical whole. Throughout, the music provides containment and context. Often in these situations, participants are left to their own devices to negotiate the difficulties of such moves, with gradual introduction of the challenges over time serving as the best way to avoid frustration and encourage progress. Can you imagine, however, an ATM lesson that has been constructed to further differentiate the hands and feet, so that the participant is able to recognize the location of the difficulty in navigating both? What if such a lesson could systematically approach the problem from three different points of view that have been chosen so that the sequence of 34

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the learning is clearest? Furthermore, what if the levels of differentiation and subsequent integration were so interesting that participants no longer worried about mastering the skill, only to find at the end of the forty-five minutes that they were remarkably better at it? Of course, in addition to having discovered a great improvement in their ability to differentiate the hands and feet, participants would discover that they walk more easily, that they breathe more freely, and that their sensations have been heightened. This kind of revelation may occur after a Dalcroze lesson anyway, but with the addition of a Feldenkrais approach, such improvement may be deliberate rather than a pleasant by-product. Moreover, the ease of movement will translate very nicely into freedom at one’s instrument. Dalcroze’s Method as it applies to children, and especially children with special needs, points at an even more compelling merger of the two modalities. The Feldenkrais practitioners who succeed with children do best to create a sense of play in their work. The games Dalcroze employs can serve as ideal opportunities for play, such as a game in which a ball is passed around in coordination with a piece of music according to various rules determined, sometimes on the spot, by the instructor. Typically, these games are meant to introduce a concept such as hearing the steady beat inside a complex musical texture, and involve increasing levels of difficulty designed to encourage the participants to discover something about music or their response to it that will make the game easier and more enjoyable. Again, a certain kind of thinking may be used in passing around a ball and matching that passing with a sound in the mouth or a counting sequence. What the children see as a game can be carefully monitored with an eye to the moments of difficulty. It may be appropriate at this point to take a brief aside and choose a different activity that the practitioner knows will contribute to the skill, but is not immediately obvious to the child. Dalcroze teachers work this way, and Feldenkrais teachers know which activities would most efficiently serve to focus the childrens’ attention on improvement of function. The key to merging the two approaches from the Feldenkrais side is a greater willingness to improvise within the context of a lesson. In an ordinary ATM lesson, this can be very challenging, as the instructions are carefully sequenced. When music is involved, however, especially along the lines of a Dalcroze lesson, there are more obvious opportunities to improvise, explore, and sense. While expecting Feldenkrais practitioners to study Dalcroze, or even to study music, may be too much to ask, it would be in everyone’s benefit to foster a conversation between the two communities and seek ways to collaborate. Those of us in the middle would certainly benefit from initiating and mediating the conversation, as well as clarifying the strengths of the different approaches. The resulting work of the combined schools might serve to improve our standings within the general community, and would undoubtedly improve the lives of a great number of participants.

bibliography Michael Giddens, Freedom Through Rhythm: The Eurhythmics of Emile Jacques-Dalcroze (Master’s Thesis, University of Melbourne, 1984). Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, Rhythm, Music and Education, tr., Harold Rubinstein (London, Chatto and Windus, 1921), p. 237. J. Scott Goble, What’s So Important About Music Education (Routledge Research in Education, 2010).

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Still Life with Concussion   Julie Frances Wham! The jolt of a car slamming into the back of my minivan grabbed my attention. After a shock of expletives, my first thoughts were of my daughter riding in her wheelchair in the back. As I looked, she seemed okay. I phoned 911 and followed their instructions. A trip to the emergency room the next day confirmed that my daughter was fine while I had suffered a mild concussion. Mild? I could barely keep my head up and the entire right side of my face felt as though it were melting. An objective glance in the mirror confirmed that Salvador Dali had just added the right side of my face to his The Persistence of Memory. Ah, yes, memory. In the days to come, so many givens seemed to slip through my brain. I found that I was unable to write cursive or keep more than one numeral or letter sequenced at a time. Filling out the accident report was a challenge and taking down a phone number became a near impossible mission. I couldn’t put names to objects, tolerate anything requiring a screen, or bring into focus anything that required a depth of visual concentration or higher processing. In short, I found myself slipping into the realm of the drifty, flighty, ditzy, irrational, impulsive—adjectives I would never have used to describe myself. Until now. What was that? What was that? What was that? Three days later, I got my daughter off to school and commenced vomiting. My head was a total fog. The ghost in the machine was pressing hard against the back of my right eyeball, clambering to get out. My right temple throbbed. I lay on the couch wondering if a short nap would revive me enough to see clients in a couple hours. I spun the notion round and round until the phone rang. It was my dear friend Margaret calling to check in, see how I was doing. I gave her an update and agreed to cancel clients in favor of rest. Rest didn’t come. I lay drifting. This must be what the Buddhists describe as an empty mind. Thoughts floated through but nothing stuck. I kinda liked it. Not productive but I didn’t feel worried or concerned. I was observer and observed. There was no judgment, only awareness and observation. My eyes landed on a large bamboo bowl. I wondered what it would look like if it were tea stained. Oh, let’s find out. I was in the middle of daubing the bowl with strong black tea when Margaret called back. She was soon at my door to escort me to the hospital. I was checked in and after a battery of tests, said concussion was upgraded (or downgraded depending on your point of view) to moderate. One of the consultants asked me to describe what I do for work. I mustered my inner Mr. Rogers, “Now boys and girls…” He was impressed. Probably one of the simplest descriptions of the Feldenkrais Method I’ve ever given. He pronounced me fine. I could only think, “If this is fine, I’m in big trouble.” Friends came to visit and found me in near darkness. Light hurt my eyes and I 36

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closed them against all but the faintest glow. Playful jokes and word play, the brain food of my childhood, I met with blank stares. My humor had been badly bruised along with my brain. As I lay cogitating, it began to anger me that someone who didn’t know me from Adam could say I was okay. okay?!! Okay wasn’t okay enough. I wanted my brain back. Unable to rally the energy to wrap my head around the outrage, I drifted off to sleep. And then I slept and slept some more. Even when I was “awake,” it was as though I was sleepwalking. My head felt full of cotton wool. Processing and thoughts were muffled, emotions dulled. Little was clear. Confusion became a fact of life. I got lost coming and going even on familiar routes. The ordinary became unique. I was transported to a new and unusual world, at once home and incredibly foreign. Self-supporting, I had to get back to work. So after little more than a week of rest, I embraced my inner somnambulist and got on with life. I cut back my hours, juggled my schedule, and rallied my energies to focus on my daughter, my clients, and sleep. After one month, I was still unable to work a full week. Even today, 18 months after the accident, I find teaching 20 lessons a week to be my limit. At that, I require significant “down” time and often find I am unable to sustain enough focus to work on tasks outside direct client hours. Wanting to expand my practice into other areas as well as present and write, I recognized that I needed additional support. I hired a virtual assistant, a tech support/project assistant (aka a personal Sherpa to keep my business life organized and help me set priorities), and negotiated with a friend to handle my bookkeeping. Housework became a faint memory. Social engagements all but vanished from my calendar. So did invitations to teach, speaking engagements, and vacation. Chairing the Conference Programming Committee? Oh, my. I did what I could and learned the ever-useful skill of delegating the rest. Who says old dogs can’t learn new tricks. Clients wanted to talk, to find out what had happened. I gave them a choice. “We can talk, or I can work. I can’t do both.” I struggled some days to remember who these people were. My tactile memory remained, but names? Not so much. I called clients by the wrong name, forgot their stories. Once I greeted a returning client as if she were completely new to me and to the Method. Words completely dissociated from lessons escaped my mouth. I experienced a serious disconnect between thought and action. That disconnect was memory retrieval. I took to teaching very simple Awareness Through Movement (atm) lessons, something my clients greatly appreciated, and relied on notes—something I had always been loath to do. I spoke less and touched more. As long as I kept my conversations tactile instead of verbal, I discovered I was okay. Despite the apparent chaos, my newly muffled brain, the eye within the neuronal storm, gave me greater depth in my work. I felt more, became more deliberate in my lessons, and slowed way, waaaaaay down. I had no choice. It took a lot of effort to focus on the lessons I was giving. There was nothing left for lifting legs, never mind heads, or for giving physically “large” lessons. It was purely out of self-preservation that I adapted my lessons to become very small, very precise. Every teacher I had ever encountered admonished, “Get out of your own way.” I now fully experienced what that meant. I focused on feeling and almost completely abandoned “doing.” After more than a year of working this way, a fellow practitioner reminded me of Moshe’s dictum to “don’t do!” Another reminded me of the time Moshe fell asleep while giving a lesson only to have his client remark that it was the best lesson ever. I took the “integration” in Functional Integration (fi) to heart. The simplest (and most simplistic) description of my new process of working is to say that I shifted to being completely present to what is. In short, I lightly but securely place 37

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my hands on both sides of areas of tightness/discomfort/dis-ease, letting my imagination draw my hands closer and closer together as though they were magnetically attracting one another.1 This creates a very deep connection and place of knowing as well as a deep sense of security for the client. There I stay, serving as witness, calling my client’s nervous system to attention and setting the stage for change. Once change begins to happen, I am able to connect by sending very tiny amounts of force, step by step, along the kinematic chain, waiting for feedback and the shift that says the force can move through to the next link and the next until the area of discomfort or confusion has a clear path to re-integration with the whole. Once the path is clear, small movements are enough to direct functional change. All those years of engineering school were not for naught after all. My work became no different from what I had done in “Strength of Materials,” calculating the direction of force through a structure to find optimal strength. The experience with my work and the effect it had on clients was definitely positive. It was a bright spot and I was grateful that at least I hadn’t lost my perpetual optimism. The rest of life, however, wasn’t so rosy. I found I’d been propelled into a land of visual and auditory overload. There I became ever so easily distracted. Driving was interesting to say the least. “Oh, there’s a lovely building.” “Look at the road. Look at the road.” I had to keep reminding myself to focus on the task at hand. I took to the back roads with little traffic and stopped all but essential nighttime driving. My range was greatly reduced and I felt a nagging urge to take my half down the middle. Aaargh. I’d become my mother! More than once I had to cancel home visit clients because I was unable to process the sensory load of driving along the standard American thoroughfares lined with shopping centers and fast food outlets. My brain screamed, “Enough!” Three weeks post-accident, my gp referred me to a concussion specialist. Hoping for answers and relief, I was eager for my first visit—another couple weeks of waiting. Alas, just days before I was due to see him, his office assistant phoned to tell me that he would not be able to see me as he only saw “sports related” concussions. What was the difference? I had no idea, but I asked what they suggested. See a neurologist was the answer. I made an appointment with the recommended group and set out to wait. Three months!! I needed help now. A client pulled some strings and within days I had an appointment with a wonderful neurologist who finally helped me to understand what was going on. The fog that pressed in all around, the spaciness, the inability to focus were all a form of migraine. “Most people,” he told me, “think of a concussion as bruising of the brain caused by the brain hitting against the inside of the skull. But that’s not it at all.” He explained, “Think of the neurons of your brain as a bundle of wires, each with its own insulation. As long as that insulation is in place, messages go through clearly. But strip away the insulation and let the wires touch and the messages get scrambled. That is what’s happened to you. The trick now is to give your brain the opportunity to heal the insulation without learning that these migraines are ‘normal’.” Talk about neurons that fire together wiring together. I appreciated this emphasis on learning along with his willingness to provide options each step of the way. I felt I’d found a wonderful advocate, someone I could definitely work with. That learning did take more than rest and simple movement. The neurologist recommended a cornucopia of drugs. Never a fan of big pharma, I was reluctant, but I soon became grateful for his bag of magic potions. For the first time since the accident, the veil seemed to lift if even for short periods. I was nowhere near normal, or my semblance of it,

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but I felt I was on the path. The time between episodes of foggy brain and pounding head gradually lengthened. I slowly began to tolerate more than momentary glances at my computer, cell phone, etc. I could listen to people talking and actually absorb some of what they were saying and retain some of the content. With time I could once again identify a paper towel out of context, balance my checkbook, and spell fruition. I also found I was more able to take to heart the core of the Feldenkrais Method—learning to learn. Learning. The same client who connected me with the neurologist also consulted a neuropsychologist on my behalf. Hearing about the visual issues I was experiencing, she recommended I wear color-therapy glasses. The light turquoise lenses had an immediate positive impact on the pressure in my head. I changed the screens on all my electronic devices to a soothing blue. It helped significantly but even today, 18 months after the accident, I still have difficulty with computer screens and need regular and prolonged breaks in order to stay focused. Because I was having visual issues, I thought why not consult a behavioral optometrist. Turns out I knew just the person—my regular eye doctor. I went through a battery of tests. Yes, there were definitely issues that could be corrected with training. I was game—anything to help me get my brain back. I started the program, supplementing it with Feldenkrais “eye” lessons. The result was not pretty. I went into a full-blown manic episode. Sleep, the one thing I needed more than anything became impossible. I felt supercharged, but also foggy brained. An odd combination if ever there was one. Given the droop on the right side of my face, I could have doubled as a Central Casting zombie—hell bent on going somewhere with no idea why. Despite my inability to think clearly, I had the sense to stop. The neurologist assured me that things would come back on line, with time. Ah, yes, time. “I want to be better now,” became “Well maybe someday.” Time and I made our peace. Even though I had previously been able to stand on one foot with ease, balance became a significant issue for me. I also experienced a good deal of pain in my neck, right arm and left sacroiliac joint. My gp referred me for physical therapy. I opted to go to someone I knew and trusted whose approach was quite compatible with the Feldenkrais Method. She didn’t push me beyond what was possible. The few times I tried it myself were disastrous, resulting in more head pounding and generalized confusion. Many of the exercises she suggested approximated the end versions of atm lessons. Pelvic tilts, spine like links in a chain, rolling with legs crossed, chin-tucks and head rolls. I chose a lesson approach to the exercises, going easily and simply until I was able to perform the end movements with relative ease. I developed my own strategy using atm-like sequential movements as an alternative to the prescribed stretches and gave myself mini-fi lessons to release my psoas and open my hip joints. Over time my flexors and extensors began to balance and I was able to stand upright more comfortably. Balance, however, remained an issue. In addition to the in-session balance exercises, I began to challenge myself. Could I stand on one leg? No. What if I stood with one foot fully on the floor along with just the tips of the toes of the other foot? Yes. I could do that. Could I stand with my legs crossed one in

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front of the other? What was that lesson? Shift weight, heel toe, heel toe… Full lessons were too much for my system so I made up mini-lessons increasing their complexity as I went along, backing off when my vestibular system yelled, “enough!” I saw two other practitioners (Ellen Soloway and Julie Casson Rubin) for lessons. They helped me release the physical memories of the accident—a seatbelt here, braced foot there—and replace them with greater ease and mobility. Over time the dissociated bits reunited with the whole. Like the pt and the neurologist, they both worked to create clarity. Their lessons were clear and simple, pablum for a starving child. My brain couldn’t handle too much. Both understood that and avoided ambition. I felt I was in good hands. Like the pt and the neurologist, Ellen and Julie gave me just enough input to allow me, my body, my brain to assimilate the message and move forward. Their work facilitated a wonderful, internal understanding of the power of small and slow. The irony of all that small and slow has not been lost on me. I have a life that is anything but small and slow. My 27-year-old daughter is physically disabled with cerebral palsy. She is the reason I came to the Method. Having to move at a snail’s pace has given me great insight into what it must be like for her to be challenged by even the simplest task, to find joy in the smallest accomplishment. Last week she brought a stick of celery to her mouth and for the first time in her life took a bite and brought her hand, celery still firmly held, away from her mouth. We both beamed. I got it. I really got it. She wasn’t able to repeat the movement at the moment. I understood that as well. Learning, I discovered and continue to re-discover, is not linear. I progress, fall back, progress, fall back and progress again. Each stage of healing brings with it its own lessons, pleasures and challenges. Though this is written in what appears to be a sequential manner, nothing I did, or tried, or continue to experiment with was a one-time and done “success.” I resonate with the Tortoise and his slow and steady approach to the race. From a purely emotional perspective one of my greatest challenges has been the loss of my ability to lift my daughter. Immediately after the concussion, lifting any amount of weight would raise the pressure in my skull and bring on a substantial headache. I have a lift system and I relied on it quite heavily in those early months. But I worried about losing the ability to lift. A mechanical system is fine but it isn’t convenient, nor is it a possibility in many, many circumstances. Lifting is an essential part of my life. I worried as my strength waned and my ability to lift my daughter for even a short transfer became more and more difficult. Nearly a year into my healing and at the ebb of my strength, I sought the help of a personal trainer. Again, I chose someone I knew well who respected my Feldenkrais, slow and steady, make it playful, learning approach. Together we continue to work on strengthening and balance. There are days I have to cancel because my head hurts too much, times when a migraine threatens and we have to work slowly. Other times I can put on boxing gloves and punch, relishing the rush of adrenaline and endorphins with each jab. I’ve discovered Indian Clubs and their controlled calm alternative to weight lifting. It’s been a practice, all of it—the things I continue to do on my own, creating mini-lessons, challenging myself to do just a tiny bit more, as well as the things I rely on others to guide me through. I’ve got a good team. They hold me accountable when my wandering brain and inability to focus lead me astray. Now, almost 18 months later, I continue to heal. I continue to play with possibilities. Sure, I still don’t multitask very well but I am far and away more adept at handling life than during the early days when I could either fix lunch or breakfast but not both at once. I can brainstorm without setting off the internal lightning storms. I have even reengaged with a 40

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long-standing project. The concussion taught me very quickly that I didn’t have to be super mom, super woman, super anything. I learned the power of “no” and the pleasure of having support. Back in the days when reading the menu at Starbuck’s took more energy than my short attention span could muster, I simply let people know that I had a brain injury and would they please be patient. Honesty in this case was the best policy and I learned the valuable lesson that assistants make life so much easier. So does simplicity. Disorder and clutter continue to render me unable to act. Just looking at a pile of papers, dirty dishes, a table strewn with mail, freezes my inner file clerk and I have no idea how to begin to sort it all out. This is an ironic and humbling shift for someone who once worked as a closet designer. With time I’ve become more adept at selectively narrowing my range of focus to one thing, one step, one action. Sometimes one is all I can handle. Sometimes I can string several together. I let the pressure behind my right eye and the mists in my brain decide. Overwhelm has become a constant companion. It doesn’t take much for my mind to begin to wander and my focus to leave the building. Particularly difficult is dealing with my daughter’s perseverance. Simply listening to her repeat the same question over and over sets my brain adrift. Trying to re-direct her takes all of my spare resources. Still, I persevere. Dealing with the effects of the concussion has meant more than a bit of financial juggling. I gulp each time I look at the mounting credit card bills. It’s also meant developing a greater tolerance for dishes in the sink, unanswered e-mails, and unfinished projects. Still, I am coping and doing much better. So much better in fact that, feeling more and more stable with barometric pressure changes, I recently tried to wean off one of my medications. The experiment was short lived. Incoming snowstorms gathered in my head and the pulsing in my temples said, “Easy girl. There’s no shame in taking care of yourself.” Self-care has never been a large part of my personal vocabulary but I’m beginning to understand and embrace its true value. In June, I took a 10-day vacation. The lack of stress coupled with lots of rest, the companionship of close friends and no real physical or emotional demands, gave my memory a much-needed boost. I came home to find that I could retain information in clearer and larger bites than when I left. I also found that I was beginning to “feel” my emotions. Anxiety and depression, absent through most of the past year and a half began to creep in. I now find myself getting “cranky,” a very good sign that healing is happening if one is to put stock in my grandmother’s logic. I wonder what would happen if I had the ability to literally vacate more often. I also wonder about my long-term prognosis. Will my focus ever truly and completely come back? Will I ever regain my ability to retain information? Work at a computer without my mind fogging over? Regain my balance and strength? Shed the 25+ pounds of medication-induced weight gain? The list goes on and on. A close friend put me in touch with a neuro-researcher who kindly gave me a crash course on concussions along with information on the various medications and plans for withdrawal. The biggest take away from our conversation: brains heal very slowly. Patience is indeed a virtue. Explain that to clients, family and friends. As more and more time goes by people begin to question my progress. They can’t believe I can still have issues this many months after the accident. I do. I am grateful that the issues continue to diminish and I feel more of the self I remember re-emerging. The biggest challenges now are sensory overload and the inability to focus for more than short periods without bringing on brain fog and a throbbing temple. I crave calm. Lately I’ve been fantasizing about Walden Pond. 41

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Writing this meant taking many breaks, stepping away from the computer, releasing my focus. After writing and editing for about a half hour, I am well aware that I am pushing my limits. The consequences are a day of brain fog and the threat of a full-blown migraine. There is a very fine line between enough and too much. I need to revert to an earlier era where life was slower and tasks more diffuse. I’m off to take a walk. It calms my head. In the end, I try to jettison all but the most necessary, take time to consciously rest, abdicate where possible, and focus only on those things that truly enrich my life. It seems to be working. My brain and I have a pact. I listen to it and it continues to heal. It’s a devil’s bargain but I’ve learned to live with it.

notes 1  The initial idea for this approach came from research I had done for a friend and fellow practitioner who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. We both questioned whether or not a cure was possible. She had heard of circumstantial evidence. I wanted more. So I undertook an internet search and stumbled on the work of Dr. Janice Walton-Hadlock, DAOM, who uses a static holding approach to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system and elicit healing. Finding that this approach was indeed effective in supporting positive change, I extrapolated to adding small forces through the kinematic links to provide structural integration as well as a backdrop for functional change.

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Functional Integration as Improvisational Art   Martin Weiner In keeping with the current issue’s theme of improvisation, we are reprinting this article by our respected colleague Marty Weiner (1943 – 2011). The article was first published in the Performing Arts issue of the The Feldenkrais Journal No. 14, Spring, 2002.

In this article I will explore Functional Integration as a form of improvisational art. I am not proposing this view as an objective truth or a reality. I am simply offering a possible perception, a way for practitioners to understand what they are doing that may enhance their capacity to interact effectively with clients. We are always acting within a perception, a model or construction that helps us make sense of our actions. Different perceptions produce and allow for different results. For me, living Functional Integration as an improvisation has been very rich and freeing, and I present my experiences in the hope that others may also find some expansiveness and new possibilities in their work. I am also a stone sculptor and will be drawing extensively on this art to help develop some of my themes. There are a lot if similarities between bringing a beautiful sculpture into being and working with a person to help develop his or her beauty to a higher level. Imagine a theater stage empty except for a few simple chairs, a stool, a low flat massagetype table, and a few soft pieces of foam. A woman from the audience (it could be a man or a child) brings a work of art onto the stage and puts it on one of the chairs. In this case, the work of art is her body and the dynamic way it expresses itself in movement. You could say, if you will pardon for a moment the implied duality between the person and her body, that she is an artist working on her body—a living sculpture—from the inside. A short, stout, balding man enters the stage from the wings and, after sitting down, begins a conversation with the woman. Soon he asks her to lie down, making her comfortable with some of the cushions lying around. He begins touching her, exploring her texture in different places and discovering how her sculpture moves. Slowly he begins to push and pull her limbs and torso and head in different directions, like some strange dance. After a half-hour or so of this slow, tactile interaction the woman gets up and explores some more movements under the man’s verbal instruction. He gives the instructions as if the work of art were his and he is directing its movement and expression from the outside, although the instructions are given so skillfully, it seems he is on the inside, directly experiencing the woman’s experience. Both the woman and the members of the audience who can appreciate the beauty and subtleties of fine art begin to notice changes for the better in the living sculpture. She is more at peace with herself, more harmonious, more aesthetically pleasing to look at, and more graceful, elegant, and happy. The above scenario could clearly be the barest sketch of a session with Moshe Feldenkrais, or any other Functional Integration [fi] practitioner. Many people, including Moshe himself, would call it a “lesson.” Calling it a lesson does capture something about what is going on but, unfortunately, it misses some other very essential possibilities and it is also a bit misleading and limiting. Functional Integration sessions are lessons in the sense that the clients do learn something. They come away with skills that they did not have before the session, so there is a learning and thus, by implication, a teaching that is transmitted. Saying that there is a “teaching” suggests further that the practitioner knows something 43

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that he or she is imparting to the client who, in this model, is called the student. So, operating within the model of Functional Integration as a lesson constrains the practitioner to know in advance what the lesson is, what the person needs to learn, and how he or she is going to teach it. This has handicapped many very potentially able practitioners with the burden of thinking that they have to know something that many, in fact, do not feel they know. More importantly—and this is the misleading and limiting aspect—it inhibits the process of discovery and creativity that was the heart of Moshe’s work. I take seriously Moshe’s claim that he was not teaching anything, although the person does indeed learn. I believe that from Moshe’s point of view, from where he was experiencing things, it was not a lesson at all in the sense that he was teaching something that he knew in advance. It was something he was creating with the person, on the spot, in the moment. It was like a jazz performance without a score, which is being developed and discovered as it goes along. The point is this: While it may be considered a lesson from the client’s, or student’s, point of view, it may be very useful from the practitioner’s point of view not to think of it as a lesson because that description or model is loaded with connotations that restrict, rather than enhance, the practitioner’s ability to create and produce the very learning experience that the term lesson implies. I want to suggest instead a different model to work within—Functional Integration as improvisational art and the practitioner as an improvisational artist. For me, an improvisational art is one in which there is no script, no set series of actions to be performed. What is done at any moment is in direct relation to and flows out of what has just been done. What evolves is an on-line creation in response to what has just happened. Applied to fi it means that the practitioner works without a script or lesson plan, responding in any moment directly to the effect he or she has just produced in the client. The practitioner keeps modifying or creating his or her response in an on-line fashion based on what is currently happening with the client; and what is currently happening with the client is related to what the practitioner just did, which is related to what the client just did, and on, and on. Moshe said on many occasions, “If you do what you know how to do, you may not do what the client needs.” I have seen how viewing fi in the strict framework of a lesson, and viewing a lesson as the search within what a practitioner already knows for the appropriate tool or technique, has incapacitated many practitioners. Further, it also does not do justice to the way our brain works. The most recent neuroscientific model of the human behavioral intelligence system conceptualizes the fundamental units of “behavioral intelligence” as complexes of information that enable an individual, in a particular motivational state, and a particular position and environment, to achieve a behavioral goal. Activating these behavioral units with movement, whether initiated by a practitioner or the client, changes these units. Because these units are associatively connected to similar ones, any movement of the individual functionally reorganizes vast networks of behavioral information. When a practitioner touches a client, the client’s brain has changed. But so has the practitioner’s. In the process of having touched and moved the client, the practitioner’s behavioral intelligence system has received an enormous amount of sensory feedback, which is brought to bear in determining the next move. A session is thus an interactive and on-line improvisational dance between two nervous systems, which have evolved to do this dance precisely, creatively, and elegantly.1 In viewing an fi as an improvisational art, it is helpful, as I indicated earlier, to see the client as an artist who is working on a living, moving sculpture—her body. She is bringing her art work to the practitioner for help. To help her develop her art form, one must respect 44

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her style of “sculpting”—how she already moves, what she would like to be able to do, her style, her intelligence, and the unique way it puts together her body and actions. If I bring a stone sculpture that I am working on and having trouble developing to a master sculptor, I do not want him to say, “Your trouble is that you are sculpting abstract shapes and you should be sculpting animals.” I want help in developing my piece as an abstract work. I want to be able to express me more, not someone else’s style. This means that as practitioners we have to have a deep respect for, and understanding of, the life and being of the client—or the fellow artist. Our work with them is thus a collaboration between two artists; a collaboration in which the centrality of the client’s experience must be respected throughout the whole process. Understanding fi as a lesson subtly implies that the lesson, the methodology, and the practitioner are at the heart of the process for, after all, it is the lesson that must be imparted and learned correctly. From the practitioner’s point of view it is easy to think that the client has entered his or her world for their expertise at diagnosing a difficulty, albeit at a sophisticated and kinesthetic level, and applying some techniques to expand the possibilities of movement. Many practitioners who view a session as the giving of a lesson also feel that they are the causative agent responsible for producing a specific result. This is different from allowing ourselves as practitioners to shift our view and experience, that despite the client’s having entered our office, we have nonetheless entered the client’s world and the client is central in that world. The art of improvisation involves entering that world totally and catalyzing an improvement by becoming one with it. To put it differently, it is the client who brings the blueprint for the session, not the practitioner. The practitioner, as a skilled artist, knows how to sight read the score from the client’s system as the session unfolds and to create the appropriate music or “lesson” on the spot. As a work of art, the client is not a pathology. There is nothing wrong and no need to fix anything. The client is simply a work in progress who is trying to develop further and needs the help of the practitioner to explore new possibilities. We are heavily influenced, even as Feldenkrais practitioners, by the culturally prevailing mind-set that therapeutically helping a person involves finding pathology—what is wrong—and fixing it. Bringing a work of art into being, on the other hand, is an act of love and a process of midwifery whereby the artist assists a life form to find an appropriate expression in his or her medium and take shape in this dimension. There is a lot of similarity in this respect between a work of art and a client who comes seeking help to better embody and actualize his or her potential, the idea of what they would like their life to be. Helping the inherent beauty of a person to unfold and presence itself is a very different enterprise than finding pathology and correcting it. As improvisational art fi is much more the process of assisting potential beauty into expression than it is a matter of straightening arms and legs or spines. As improvisational art, the emphasis in fi is on the activity, or the performance itself. In thinking of fi as a lesson, there is emphasis both on something that exists beforehand (the lesson) and on a product—what the client learns—which is the goal of the whole business. For the lesson to be successful, it seems that the practitioner has to have this goal in mind and has to work to produce it. In an improvisational jazz performance, for example, there is not an independent product that is the goal of the playing. There is no goal separate from the playing, and the pleasure of the artists and the audience. The music is in the performance, not in something that exists at the end of the performance. In relation to fi, I would take the radical position of saying that the goal for the practitioner is not in producing any end result in the client. The goal is the elegance of style and manner of the improvisation itself, the way the practitioner connects with the client and “dances” with her. As Moshe 45

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said, it is not what he did but how he did it that made the difference. If there is any result, it is simply the natural by-product of the performance. Aren’t we taught that in atm it is precisely by not having a goal that we get results? The improvement comes about from how we attend to the process, and not by how we effort to bring about some pre-existing idea. Why should it not be the same in fi? Let me address a potential misunderstanding: just because it is an improvisation doesn’t mean that an fi session is random or unprincipled. In the same way, just because it‘s a jazz improvisation doesn’t mean that any old thing goes. When a jazz artist plays, his or her music has to have internal integrity. The music isn’t random. It has to follow certain rules in order to be pleasing to the ear. Further, these rules are generally well known to musicologists but, oddly enough, they may not be known to the musician to the same extent. The musician may just “feel” what is appropriate. These principles are intuitive with great musicians. They evidence them in their play, but their play is not necessarily being consciously generated by them. This is an important distinction for my model and I need to elaborate on it. Much of what passes as scholarly and profound explanation of what is going on in a painting, for example, and what the artist is expressing, is not what is going on in the mind of the artist at all, at the time he or she is producing it. I know this first-hand from some favorable critiques of my sculpture by supposed experts (who, by the way, were art critics, not artists) who went on at length about what is happening in a sculpture and what I was “saying,” etc. The fact is, they did not touch at all on what was going on in me as I was creating it. I didn’t even have any knowledge of some of their concepts, let alone use them as the source for generating the sculpture. I just followed the stone and my instinct and did what looked and felt good to me. So, although what I produced can be explained in certain mathematical terms about proportion and relationship, or in personal psychological and/ or mythical symbolism, it was not these terms or these explanations that were going on in my head at the time that I produced the work. A sculpture can express rules of harmony and proportion without my knowing these rules or consciously considering them as I create a piece. Moshe’s explanations of a lesson after-the-fact are often best understood as the reasons why what he did worked to help the client. They aren’t necessarily what he had going on in his mind as he worked. The reasons that move us to do a particular movement with a client and the reasons why it worked may be two entirely different issues. When we give reasons after a session we may simply be explaining why, given the laws of the universe, what we did was successful. But this explanation may not have been living in us and generating the action. We can know what to do in this instant with a client, in ways I will discuss below, without knowing the explanation that subsequently accounts for the value and utility of what we did. As artists doing fi, we may do a lot intuitively, a lot that is not based on our systematized knowledge of the neural system, anatomy, a repertoire of techniques, or methodologies. Though a skilled neuroscientist may be able to explain in technical terms why what the practitioner is doing works, the practitioner need not know the explanation in advance for the work to be successful. This is the essence of improvisation. There may be an intuitive sense of aesthetic harmony, for example, which is functioning in the fi practitioner—so the work is not random or “mucking about”—and these intuitive principles may be applied in the course of a lesson without the practitioner consciously thinking about them. There was a major shift in my own work as a practitioner when I learned, for example, that centering myself and being calm with an enraged person was 46

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far more useful than anything I could possibly learn about the amygdala, or septum (the brain nuclei implicated in rage and aggression), although the client’s response to my calm may be explained in terms of the chemical impact on these areas of the brain. At the 10th annual fgna conference, Dr. Karl Pribram, a noted brain theoretician and researcher, asked a group of Feldenkrais practitioners who were trying to figure out from their knowledge of the brain what might work to help an epileptic having a seizure. “Did you ever try hugging a client having a seizure?” This was a strange question from a heavyduty scientist in a room full of Feldenkrais humanists. Clearly, he felt acting on our human instinct and compassion, with our hearts genuinely reaching out to connect with another person’s situation may produce results more profound than those we might generate from our scientific knowledge. I want to shift at this point to discuss sculpting. Aside from the fact that fi and sculpting are intimately related for me personally as art forms, the analogy may shed some light on a practical understanding of fi as improvisation. Sculpting itself is not usually considered an improvisational art. It is a “productive art” that generates and leaves behind a product. The result, not the process, is what is important. Many sculptors work in a way that emphasizes this mechanical view. They work with compasses and rulers, living models and maquettes (a model of the final product usually made in clay or plaster). They copy the maquette in stone often using a very old, painstaking, process called “pointing” that uses a simple device to make an exact copy of the maquette in the stone. This way of carving is very rote and technologically oriented. The carvers who do this work are craftspeople, not artists. Their technique is impeccable and superior to mine. In fact, it is so impeccable that they can make better copies of my work than I can. But they are not artists. They cannot sculpt without something to copy. They do not create. As difficult as it is to imagine, if you give them a stone and simply say, “Sculpt a work of art,” even with all of their technical skill they literally do not know what to do. I would liken this way of sculpting to giving an fi lesson “by the book” : knowing what you are going to do in advance, copying a lesson you saw someone else give at some time, or even a lesson you once created yourself. It can be done with great skill, like a master craftsperson, but it is not art or creativity. It may even be very effective in a particular case but if we can only draw on what we have already done or seen, we may not be able to create what needs to be done in a new situation. This way of doing fi can be extremely effective, but it is not what I mean by fi as improvisation. There is another method of sculpting, called direct carving, in which one doesn’t have a model. You just carve your idea directly into the stone. For me, even this goes too far. I would say, you just carve with no idea. You just follow the action already going on in the stone, and a work of art usually results. I say “usually” because there is a risk. One is constantly in unknown and unmapped territory. There is no model you are following and so it is entirely possible that the stone is reduced to rubble in this process before you reach something beautiful. This element of risk, of not knowing what is going to happen, is also an important aspect of fi as improvisational art. It is because we are usually uncomfortable with the unknown that we take refuge in having the Functional Integration equivalent of a maquette—a lesson—to follow. I consider direct carving, where you dance with the stone without a script, to be much more analogous to the experience of creativity in fi that leads me to call it an improvisational art. In fi the client is already a work in progress. They already function in some way or other, so there is a given, a life-form that must be respected and danced with. It is the same with stone. A raw piece of stone is already a sculpture. It is a shape. I like to 47

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work with irregularly shaped stones and start by simply exaggerating some protrusions or depressions and see where that leads. Most sculptors who work from maquettes start with a block of stone with six smooth sides because it is much easier to start with something more or less neutral when you want to impose a pre-existing idea. I would like to give some guidance at this point as to how to actually do fi as improvisational art. I understand that simply making some of the distinctions I have made so far does not move the practitioner into a state of being able to do it. It is like telling a concert pianist to “just improvise,” create something on the spot. Just improvising also takes tremendous practice and the development of skills independent of the ability to simply play the piano. The difficulty is that there is nothing mechanical that one can offer which will move a practitioner of any art into a state of being present in the moment so that they are actually creating art. One needs to learn to attend differently and to be present differently. I can make some suggestions about the area of consciousness I think it is valuable to explore in order to cultivate these skills. However, I have come to realize over the years that the only possible way of really teaching someone how to be present with a client and do fi as improvisational art is by actually working together directly with them guiding their experience with a meta-level of improvisational art. In other words, one learns to do improvisation in an environment where the teaching is itself the practice of improvisation. You have to teach improvisation without a script. Isn‘t this the genius of what Moshe did in his trainings? He showed up day after day without any notes and created an experience so that we each could learn how to be creative in new situations as the need demanded. He taught us to do fi creatively by creating each day’s experience, by feeling his way into and through what was happening, and being present with things just as they were. I remember seeing the tape of the first day at the Amherst training and if my memory serves me, he says that he doesn’t know how it will happen, but somehow over the next four years people will learn to do what he can do. Unbelievable! None of it was scripted. There were no lessons. It was one of the most brilliant pieces of on-going improvisational art that I have ever seen. So recognizing the limitations that are inherent in trying to communicate what I want to communicate by the written word, I will nonetheless try. How does one “just sculpt” ? Where do you begin and how do you proceed if you do not have an idea or a model to work from? This is the same question as, “How does one do an fi session without a lesson in mind at the outset?” Let’s explore this, for it is ultimately at the heart of the matter on being able to practice fi as an improvisational art form. To the question, “How do you carve an elephant?” Michelangelo supposedly said you get a large stone and simply take away everything that isn’t elephant. Oddly enough this story gets cited a lot in Feldenkrais circles to demonstrate a variety of points. Perhaps it is because fi is viewed as a process of taking away what inhibits a person, what interferes with movement and being oneself. Whatever the reason, it is instructive for me to explain my understanding of what it means from the inside, as a sculptor. As usually understood, Michelangelo seems to place the sculptor at the center of the enterprise, removing something from the stone. It is a subtractive process in which he is the boss and the stone is not mentioned. He has a vision at the outset and sees clearly what needs to be done. This is fine if you want to carve an elephant; that is, if you have a project in mind. It is similar to the idea of fi as a lesson that pre-exists the learning, a view that I elaborated earlier. But what if you just have a stone that is asking to be sculpted and you have no idea of what you want to carve? What happens if you have a client that is asking for help and you don’t know what to do? The two situations are not unrelated. In both cases you start with 48

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something. The stone is already a sculpture before you ever lay a hammer and chisel to it. It is already a shape. The client is already a work in progress—formed, with a shape, habits, desires, a life. Both need to be developed further to bring out their beauty. Both want to feel better about themselves and function better and feel more in harmony with themselves. The point is, you start with something. You are not just “carving an elephant” as if it makes no difference to the stone or the client what you do to them. This is exactly the situation I find myself in when I carve and when I give an fi. In relation to sculpting, the stone uses me as the vehicle to reveal itself. I often refer to this as “following the stone.” I am not imposing something on the stone. I am following the motion inherent in the stone. At first, it is following lines and gestures in the stone that already exist. Then I begin to work with the very tool marks and grooves that the process of sculpting has created in the stone. After a while I begin to feel shapes moving in my own body that relate to the shapes that are being revealed in the stone. These shapes start to externalize themselves in the stone and the exploration continues as a dance between the internal forms moving within me and the shape they are taking externally in the stone. It is a very magical and humbly mystical happening, like being present at a birth where one just assists a natural process. More generally, how do you get started or involved in the process of creating new possibilities with someone who is already a someone, a person who already has a life history and a particular way of manifesting in the present? I believe one starts by honoring the being that is there, by appreciating that they have a spirit independent of you and that it is an honor for you to be invited into their process. I believe one ought to stand humbly and in awe of the process they are about to engage in—entering into the life process of another person with the intent of affecting it positively. The Hippocratic dictum—Primum, non nocere; first don’t harm—already misses the point by inhibiting action, rather than encouraging proper action. “Respect the spirit and life of the being with whom you are about to become engaged” would be a far more meaningful proscription for producing creativity. Then I begin to explore and discover what is already there. With a stone, the irregular shapes begin to suggest movement, direction, emphasizing something here, defining more clearly something that is only hinted at there. fi is the same. You begin to look at the person—how does she create herself, how does she already move, how does she already stand? Feel the differences between her two legs or feet. Let the experience of the differences talk to you and lead you on. Since it is a process of discovery, not the teaching of a lesson, you can allow yourself to be free and experimental. There is nothing you are getting wrong. You need not know what to do in advance. Exploring and creating are diametrically opposed to having a map and following a lesson plan. Explore what captures your attention. There is a communication, a calling, between the practitioner and the client. A session is an arena for curiosity and experimentation to reign. Develop hypotheses about the person and examine them in vivo. For example, given how this person’s feet are and the differences between them, are their knees and hips what I would expect to find? How has their brain organized their body so that it all fits together to produce the pain or difficulty or restrictions they are experiencing? I cannot stress enough how much a process of exploration and discovery it is. If the practitioner explores with the intent of simply becoming aware of how the person has put her “sculpture” together, since the client’s brain is intelligent it uses the exploration to get information about itself and makes adaptations in light of this self-awareness. The practitioner need not discover and do—the client is also discovering in the same instant and she is the one who does. That is the nature of the brain. 49

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One way to understand it is that the client uses the practitioner’s hands and touch to learn about herself. From that point of view, our responsibility as practitioners is to be available to the client as a vehicle for self-discovery. It is very similar to what I described above about my being the stone’s way of carving itself. In fi, we are the client’s way of knowing herself. As we explore, with each touch and each movement the client learns about herself and makes adaptations. We are not working on the same client from moment to moment. One has to keep a sense of openness. Once you think, “Now I have it. I know what I am doing here,” you have turned a dynamic process, a living creation, an improvisation, into a static thing. In essence, you have destroyed the uniqueness of the person and have limited what she can contribute to the process. It is my experience and fundamental belief that being available in this way and being truly present to another person as a vehicle for their becoming aware, without the idea of having to do something, produces some movement, some sensation, some information that leads to intelligent action by the client. We as practitioners also have an intelligent brain and are making changes related to the sensory input we are receiving about the client as they change. In this way two intelligent systems are connected and keep modifying each other in a creative dance that is impossible to script in advance. To codify it and turn it into a repeatable lesson does not honor the fundamental nature of the brain and its capacity to interact creatively on-line with another brain through the medium of touch. As I said above, treating a lesson as if it were a repeatable unit is at best craftsmanship, but not artistry. I remember Moshe saying that he never did the same lesson twice. Clearly, however, it appeared that he did do some things over and over with different clients, as if he were repeating them. In light of what I am saying here about fi, it is easy to understand that Moshe was indeed not repeating something. I would say he was discovering it again, creating it anew, for the first time. It was in essence a new creation since it came out of his on-line interaction in the present, with this particular person, in this particular situation. The fact that it looked to be the same as something he had already done was a judgment in the mind of someone watching, not the experience of the two participants. fi done in this way is not just ballet with a few new twists. I am talking about throwing away your toe shoes, feeling the wood of the stage with your feet, opening to your own experience in the moment, and letting it unfold—trusting that, if you surrender to the rhythm, it will find you.

notes 1  La Cerra, P., and Bingham, R. (1998). The adaptive nature of the human neurocognitive architecture: An alternative model. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. usa, 95, 11290-11294.)

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Contributors Dan Clurman is a Feldenkrais Practitioner and a communications coach. He integrates somatics  with coaching. He teaches Feldenkrais and Mindfulness meditation workshops at Esalen Institute and Spirit Rock Center. He teaches at Golden Gate University and UC Extension. His books include: Floating Upstream (poems) and You’ve Got To Draw The Line Somewhere (cartoons). His site is www.danclurman.com Adam Cole is a music educator working in the public schools of Atanta, Georgia, and the director of the Adam Cole School of Music (www.mymusicfriend.net). He incorporates the Feldenkrais work into his instruction to enhance musical learning, and to broaden awareness about the Method. Adam is also a novelist and composer whose creative works reflect and make use of the Method in various ways. Emily Davis is a Theatre Artist, Shakespeare consultant, and Feldenkrais practitioner in New York City. She has an mfa in Directing from the University of California, Davis, and a ba from Sarah Lawrence College. Emily is the Artistic Director of Messenger Theatre Company, for which she writes, directs, and performs. Her arts blog is Songs for the Struggling Artist and her Feldenkrais blog can be found on FeldenkraisArts.com. Mara Della Pergola studied with Moshe Feldenkrais at Amherst, currently directs two trainings in Italy, and teaches all over the world. The first Italian practitioner, she has been president of the Italian Guild aiimf, and the founder and director for more than 25 years of Istituto di Formazione Feldenkrais in Milan, where she lives. Her background is in the psycho-social field and theater. Jean Elvin (1997) teaches Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement at Stanford University’s Health Improvement Program, and at City College of San Francisco, where she developed five Feldenkrais courses for the PE and Dance Department. At Sweet Agility, her private practice in Palo Alto, ca, she works with the public and with dancers, as well as teaching community classes. Jean holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in dance from Arizona State University. She continues to enjoy movement of all types, especially when a somatic component can be explored. She lives in Santa Clara with her husband and their cat.

Julie Francis holds degrees in Environmental Engineering and Urban and Environmental Studies. She leapt into the Feldenkrais world in the late 1980s when her daughter was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. The accidental impetus for her article occurred on February 23, 2013. She regularly blogs about applying fm principles to all of life. Her website is www.optionsforease.com. Donna J. Maebori graduated from the 1996 Oregon Feldenkrais Professional Training. Also a physical therapist and yoga instructor, Donna works at Providence St. Vincent Hospital in Portland, Oregon, where she developed the rehabilitation department’s persistent pain team service and participated in forming therapy services for dizziness conditions. She taught a weekly class to eating disorder clients in the hospital’s outpatient mental health unit for three years, 1995-1998. Mainly in the Portland area, Donna has taught several courses to physical and occupational therapists on the Feldenkrais Method and its use in rehabilitation. She authored a chapter describing the Feldenkrais Method in, Neurological Rehabilitation, 4th edition. A member of fgna, Donna was treasurer for the Northwest Region for 12 years, and with two other practitioners organized annual Oregon Advanced Trainings for 14 years. She is currently a member of the nw Region finances committee. Jane McClenney, a Feldenkrais practitioner since 1996, owns Move Lightly, a Feldenkrais studio in Ellensburg, Washington. Her clientele is diverse, including people with spinal cord injury, horseback riders, cowboys, ranchers, professors, students, and office workers. She teaches weekly Awareness Through Movement classes in her studio.  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 those with chronic pain. She is a dancer/choreographer and a poet, and has published three books of poetry. For more information, see www. FeldenkraisAtlanta.com.

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Editor:

Anita Noone

Assistant Editor: Judy Windt Editorial Board:

Adam Cole, Isabelle Ginot, Elin Lobel, Helen Miller, Judy Windt, Elaine Yoder, Matt Zepelin

Production:

Margery Cantor

Proofreading  copyediting:

Judy Windt, Elaine Yoder

Style Guide assistance:

Matt Zepelin

Technical wisdom: Manny Nathenson Front & back covers:

Tiffany Sankary, Front cover, “Play”; back cover, Feldenkrais Illustrated. Quote: The Case of Nora, p. 56

Interior art:

Dan Clurman, pages 19, 52



Julie Frances, pages 36, 39 Jane McClenney, page 16 Photos of Myriam Pfeffer, pages 3, 5, courtesy of Sabine Pfeffer



    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 Journal no. 23 Journal no. 24 Journal no. 25 Journal no. 26

General Issue (photocopy) 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 Aesthetics General Issue Let’s Play Science

All back issues are available through the fgna office. Price to Guild members is 10, to non-members 15 per copy.

THE FELDENKRAIS JOURNAL, no 27  improvisation 2014