The fact that the Feldenkrais Method has good results for the people who practice it is visible to me and especially tangible to them in terms of easier movement and disappearing complaints. But what thoughts are behind it? That’s what I want to unfold here.
The Feldenkrais Method: A Need to Change Something
Moshe Feldenkrais developed his method because he needed it for himself. He wanted to help himself after suffering from severe knee problems due to an old injury. His reasoning was, “I’ve functioned well with it for all those years and now suddenly not. What has changed and how can I reverse it?”
In his search for answers, he discovered something strange. Everything he could find about movement education already assumed basic skills like sitting, standing up, standing, and walking. The whole process of how you learn to walk was taken for granted. “But,” reasoned Feldenkrais, “you taught that yourself. How do you know you chose the best option from all the choices you had? The most efficient, the easiest, or the most harmonious?”
Feeling Movement at a Slow Pace
He developed his method by experimenting himself and by observing children who develop their movement through play. The interaction between feeling and moving is very important because it allows you to notice if one movement is lighter and easier than another.
The pace is also important. You see children move slowly when trying something new and make various adjustments. Once they can do it or are satisfied with how they’re doing it, they naturally become faster.
Moving, Perceiving, Thinking, and Feeling
Moshe Feldenkrais saw the elements of moving, perceiving, thinking, and feeling as a unit in every action. In the Child’Space Training, you see one or more babies every day. You can see those four elements develop together harmoniously and naturally. Feldenkrais believed that if you change one of these four, the other three change along with it. For him, movement was the easiest entry point for a process of change: you can notice change immediately, giving you instant feedback. At the same time, you feel different, your thinking changes, your perception changes. This is what people consistently report at the end of a lesson.
Human Possibilities
According to Feldenkrais, we use only a small portion of our brain capacity. By exploring new skills through Feldenkrais movements and creating new spaces, new connections in the brain are also formed, allowing you to use more of your capacity. For me, this was noticeable in my struggle with speaking foreign languages. I had a basic knowledge but never any confidence in using it. Through movement, that ability opened, as if my brain reorganized itself. Newness and strangeness are important principles in the Feldenkrais Method and sometimes are real movement puzzles. This encourages you to new behaviour, new thoughts, a new palette of feelings.
Tibetan Parable
Imagine a carriage with passengers, with horses upfront and a coachman on the box. The coachman is the level of awareness. The passengers represent our wishes and dreams. The horses pulling the carriage are the muscles, and the carriage itself is the skeleton. Consciousness is the coachman. As long as the coachman sleeps, the carriage will wander aimlessly. All passengers want to go somewhere else, and the horses pull in different directions. But when the coachman is wide awake and holds the reins firmly, all horses pull the carriage and bring the passengers to their proper destination.
In those moments when awareness joins feeling, senses, moving, and thinking, the carriage speeds along the road. Then you can discover, invent, create, innovate, and know. You grasp that your own small world and the great world around are a unity and that you’re no longer alone. Moshe Feldenkrais concludes with this parable the theoretical part of his book ‘Awareness Through Movement’.
More about Feldenkrais lessons can be read in the blog ‘What exactly do you do in Feldenkrais lessons?’
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