Notas soltas, Feldenkrais

(http://www.semiophysics.com/SemioPhysics_Articles_learning.html)

By building upon what people actually do, rather than what they should do, he eliminated the artifice and hesitation  (...) He had learned that to be useful new learnings cannot grow out of what people "ought" to do but must grow out of both what people do and would do.

Yet each and every person makes the best choices possible given his or her perception of choices. Change is most possible in this realm of "perception of choices." The practitioner's task is to create conditions for more choices. It is not to correct errors, right wrongs, or straighten people out.  The practitioner's task is elicit from the student new means of action and judgment.

Feldenkrais was able to make use of the human nervous system's ability to organize itself around efficient, enjoyable, and interesting movement.

The nearly infinite possibilities of the child's nervous system are pruned and shaped to fit its culture.

Habits also limit and divide us by pitting body against mind, thought against feelings. We endlessly repeat the same behaviors, while somehow expecting different outcomes. Yet anything learned can be unlearned. By observing and recognizing our learned patterns of behavior we can, given the means, intervene in our own future learning.

Feldenkrais invented ways of invoking a sense of somatic wholeness while simultaneously developing the capacity for learning without goals, comparison to others, or external standards. Lessons are viewed as contexts for learning. Most lessons take place lying or sitting. They are 30-60 minutes long. The thing to be learned is never demonstrated. Rather, students are given movement instructions and allowed to make sense of them kinesthetically, thereby connecting one part of themselves to another. Making seemingly impossible actions easy, Feldenkrais lessons question our assumed limitations. Though our quantitative range of movement may be mechanically limited, there are no limits to the quality of movement. The lessons revivify early childhood impulses to move, explore, and learn. Understanding the logic of the body becomes deeply satisfying.

Instead of initiating movement at a joint further from the torso, one is moving from a joint closer to the torso. The so-called "reversal of proximal (close) and distal (far)" is one principle Feldenkrais used to construct lessons. Feldenkrais employed many other principles, including "the principle of no principles," which is invoked when one needs to act but doesn't know how.

Awareness is the potential to make shifts of attention, to bring to the fore relevant features from the background, to find new combinations and patterns and therefore new meaning.  Awareness can broaden and deepen our lives.

The adult body has 206 bones with varying degrees of freedom of movement between them; taken together, the bones of the skeleton provide the largest possible set of movement patterns.  Evolutionary patterns of use created by the need for survival, maintenance, and reproduction comprise a smaller set.  A still smaller cultural set is delimited by the constraints of a particular language, geography, religion, etc.  The personal set, which is the smallest, is the set of possibilities we have settled upon as individuals.

The personal self thus emerges out of impersonal biological and cultural processes. Attending to these processes takes tremendous vigilance. 

 At the end of a long day of training someone asked Feldenkrais about Castaneda's notion of stopping the internal dialogue.  After pausing for a moment, he replied, "Thinking is a holding back from action, a rehearsal of action. If you act completely with no holding back, then there is no thought and no dialogue. It can be the most violent or the most delicate of actions, but if it is total then it ends thought." (The following was edited in the published version but is restored for clarification.)  Many people mistakenly hold that Feldenkrais' work is opposed to thinking. In actuality mature behavior, for Feldenkrais, requires that thought and action mutually and reciprocally inform each other. Awareness is the consequence of using thought to improve action and action to improve thought. It is awareness that improves our connection to others and enhances the quality of our lives.