About the Feldenkrais
Method
An in-depth view
of the nature of the Method
When
you sit on a chair , you not
only drop onto the chair, but each vertebra drops
into a specific place relative to its neighbours;
and so does every other bone - the thigh bone,
the shin bone and even the skull. Each point in
your body travels through a specific path when
you change your physical position and each spot
moves in concert with all the other parts of your
body (face it: you don’t fall apart!)
Feldenkrais
asks:
did each bone go through
the ideal path on the way to the chair; did all
the parts of the body make the best coordination
between themselves; was there enough freedom in
each joint to do the small job (or the big job,
it depends on which joint and the kind of
movement) that was their function?
Ask
yourself:
did you
stop breathing for a second? Did your body manage
to obey your intention? More than that, did it
manage to respond to your intention gracefully
and easily? All of these questions can be asked
about each function; about anything you want to
do.
In
a nutshell,
the
Feldenkrais Method is interested in the dynamic
of the action, and in its quality. An ideal
posture is very rare; so rare that we can say it
doesn’t exist, but whether you are a dancer
or your physical scope is limited, Feldenkrais
Method can take you forward step by step.
* * *
The power
of Feldenkrais Method is that it widens the
limits of ability in an indirect and comfortable
way. It’s not interested in effort, stress
or pain, but in ease and pleasure. Its concern is
that your movement and functioning will hit the
bulls eye through the principle of “minimum
effort, maximum efficiency”. Feldenkrais
says “…what you know how to do well is
not hard to do; or alternatively, what’s
hard to do is not being done well”. On top
of this you have got to add: what’s not done
well will soon lead to pain, and the more effort
you make, the sooner comes the pain. Feldenkrais
compared this “tuning” of the body to
the tuning of a piano, commenting that even the
best musician can’t make a good sound on an
out-of-tune instrument.
* * *
None
of ushad to go
to school to learn to crawl, to sit, to turn, to
walk, to jump, or to talk. We learned all these
tricks subconsciously through a process of trial
and error, gaining the skills bit by bit in an
effortless and natural way. It’s like a
mother tongue which is never forgotten. Our sheer
inventiveness in our physical activity had no
limits, and had our parents run off their feet by
the end of the day. We were all able to take on
such a huge learning curve because of the innate
human capacity to change and to develop. But you
can’t force babies, those well known experts
in learning: they won’t do anything unless
it involves comfort, pleasure and satisfaction.
Surely we can learn a lot from babies - and
Feldenkrais certainly did.
As
we grow into adults we learn to
adapt ourselves to the demands of life; we
restrict our range of movements to what seems
suitable. And so we end up with habits of
behaviour and movement, peculiar to us as our
handwriting, which we are not aware of anymore.
Habits can be very dominant in our lives; they
supply security, flow and identity. You
can’t live without them, and sometimes you
can’t live with them! Some of these habits
bring with them a hidden disorganization that
spoils the natural flow and elegance of movement
and creates a limitation in our ability. With
time this leads to pain and injuries, yet we
don’t know the cause. Stiffness, discomfort
and pain: this is the body telling us to stop or
modify our movement.
The
Feldenkrais Method
makes very good use
of
the innate
human capacity to change and develop that is used
so well by baby and child. As we gathered habits
once, we can now choose new ones. The lessons
reconnect us to the “mother tongue”, to
a dimension of comfort and ease; to our capacity
of inventiveness. Feldenkrais created his lessons
as motor-sensorial experiences, allowing the
participants to reshape the way that they are
using their bodies in a safe environment for
exploration.
The
big advantage is that the
system learns to tune itself; to find good
solutions by its own means; to improvise and
become comfortable to adjustment - so comfortable
that you can trust it no less than you trust your
habit. The internal freedom gets enhanced, which
allows the principle of the natural creativity
(which we all have) to work. I don’t know of
any freedom, joy or confidence better than that.
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