What is The Feldenkrais Method?
It is a method of
learning, and in Feldenkrias the
learning is through movement. How we learn a movement is probably how we learn
everything. Looking at how we learn, and drawing awareness to that, can change
how we learn. The Feldenkrais Method
can be about movement, but it can also be about much more.
From Learn to Learn by Moshe Feldenkrais:
“I do not intend to “teach” you, but
to enable you to learn at your own rate of understanding and doing. Time is the most important means to
learning. To enable everybody—without exception—to learn, there should be plenty of time for everybody to
assimilate the idea of the movement as well
as the leisure to get used to the novelty of the situations. There should be
sufficient time to perceive,
and organize oneself. No one can learn when hurried and hustled. Each movement
is, therefore, allotted sufficient
time for repeating it a number of times. Thus, you will repeat the movement as many times as it suits you during the
span of time allotted.”
In Awareness Through Movement lessons, a
class setting and one in which the teacher or practitioner is guiding the class
through verbal instruction without visual demonstration, participants or
students will take instruction and interpret it in their own way, through their
understanding of the instruction. As the class continues, the practitioner will
guide students with verbal cues and images yet not with corrections. It’s not
helpful to correct when it’s not clear yet what we’re doing in the first place.
Plus, what a correction means to each (Sit up straight! Don’t slump!) will be different.
Even if we narrow down the correction (Pull your shoulders back! Chin up!) each
correction implies a different meaning to each individual—a meaning based on
experience and association, or lack of these, with the implied correction. Also
and just as importantly, these corrections (Sit up straight! Don’t slump! Pull your
shoulders back! Chin up!) are ideas and not movements, and they involve many smaller, finer movements,
which happen to result in sitting straighter or with shoulders further back.*
It’s in this way that
a Feldenkrais teacher doesn’t teach.
A practitioner will introduce movements and possibility and each student takes
those movements and possibilities and experiments with them. Is this what I do?
What happens when I do this? Does this hurt? (If the answer to this is yes, then
do less or rest.) Am I hurrying? Am I breathing? Am I letting go of the
movement before I try it again, maybe in a different way? Each student takes
responsibility for their own learning by asking themselves questions and with
the answers, maybe alters their movement.
Each class is another
introduction to learning and this kind of awareness to oneself. Maybe what I
thought was unhurried movement a few weeks ago seems hasty now. Maybe what I
thought hurt me yesterday was actually my discomfort with the novelty of the
movement, or the other way around.
Teachers of the Feldenkrais Method are learning too and
make mistakes. Perhaps a practitioner rushes you on to another movement. Or unconsciously
gives a correction rather than an alternate way of moving. It’s up to you as a
student to remember that you are in charge of your learning. You don’t have to
do what a teacher says. You can recognize the instruction as a correction and
note it or resist it. You can rest when you need to or stop moving completely
and do the lesson in your imagination** or simply rest your attention. If we
give this right to discernment away to our teachers, we’re missing important
opportunities to learn and develop aspects of ourselves.
Though we live in a
culture and society of quick and easy changes and fixes, most good and lasting
changes actually take time. Learning is certainly no exception and is likely
the most important and encompassing change. We learn “at [our] own rate of
understanding and doing.” This is true in each class and over the course of
many classes. And how we learn in class is probably how we learn in life.
* This brings up
another important piece of the Feldenkrais
Method, which is that there is no such thing as “good posture.” There is
posture for a particular activity, movement, or moment. Dr. Feldenkrais
referred to this idea as “acture,” coming from the word “act.” Rather than “posture,” which has at its root in
the word “post.” This will be discussed more in another piece of “What is the Feldenkrais Method?”
** This brings up
another important piece of the Feldenkrais
Method, which is that our nervous systems, our brains, we, are affected by
doing things in our imagination. This will be discussed more in another piece
of “What is the Feldenkrais Method?”
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