This article is dedicated to all
my English colleagues who are sincerely and enthusiastically
engaged in the Feldenkrais work.
There are sick people who enjoy good health and healthy
people who don't. I believe it depends on one's character
which of these two categories one belongs to, rather than
on the presence or absence of a particular illness. I belong
to the 'infirm' who are healthy.
As a child I could only walk with the greatest difficulty
and effort, and couldn't even conceive of touching the floor
with my heels. Many of the things other kids took for granted
were impossible for me. But all this never led me to consider
myself sick or disabled. Despite extreme constraints of mobility
I never felt or imposed limits on the extent of physical
activity available to me. While my parents, my relatives,
and the doctors they consulted saw my physical condition
as a 'problem', I didn't. My attitude resembled that of a
young pianist who had just learned to tackle an easy piece
by Bach and views a piano concerto by Schumann or Grieg -
which he yearns to play - as an exciting and challenging
task.
When I met Moshe Feldenkrais in 1972 I realized that here
was the personality and teacher who had lived in my imagination
long before I learned about his physical existence. This
way of making his acquaintance, I found later, corresponded
to one of the principles of his method involving the relationship
between imagination or mental image and reality. Feldenkrais
was of the opinion that to be successfully performed, an
act - from the simplest movement to the most complex action
- needs to exist first as mental concept or process. This
is a guiding principle in his Awareness through Movement
lessons and informs all his work. Later I understood that
my attitude matched his 'philosophy of life': I felt neither
sick nor disabled, but simply prevented from doing what I
wanted: to study music and become a conductor.
If I describe my instinctively correct attitude to the "problem
of spasticity" here, it's not to show how clever I was
as a child. I am writing as one of the privileged who was
given a chance - by Feldenkrais and thanks to his method
- to follow his instinct and is now enjoying the results.
Today I am in a position to express what every spastic child
senses and hopes - something that represents the seed of
any positive solution, but is in most cases tragically crushed.
My meeting with Feldenkrais had a functional purpose. I
didn't want to get 'well'. I wanted to learn to develop the
physical abilities necessary to conduct an orchestra.
HIS CONDITION WILL CONTINUE TO DETERIORATE
In order to illustrate how insane this wish appeared to
the people in my environment at that time, I must describe
an incident that happened shortly before my first encounter
with Moshe.
After my arrival in Israel a distant uncle had arranged
a meeting with one of the country's most famous neurosurgeons,
so that I could get some advice about my situation and possible
ways of improving it. The encounter went as follows:
I enter the professor's office in the company of my mother
and aunt, a doctor. After having exchanged a few words with
my mother, the professor asks me to walk a little to and
fro. Once I have sat down again in front of his desk, he
turns to my mother and aunt and says in a quiet decisive
tone: "In his case there is nothing to be done any more.
He is too old and I can't guarantee any improvement through
an operation. it is to be expected that his condition will
continue to deteriorate." The man never once turned
to me. It was as if I was not present or 'worthy of professional
attention'. I still remember how he stared at his desk after
giving his verdict - as if he could thereby prevent me from
hearing or mentally grasping his assessment.
Other professors, who had come to medical congresses in
Bucharest and been consulted by my ever hopeful parents,
had passed similar judgements. Thus it happened that, despite
all my parent's attempts throughout my childhood to find
a therapy for my 'disease' among the 'best doctors', 'professors',
and 'therapists', my physical condition kept getting worse.
Shortly before we emigrated to Israel, when I was 16, my
body had fallen victim to a whole range of totally uncontrollable
movements, which made it impossible to execute any intentional
action with even a modicum of precision. Because of my extreme
spasticity my knees seemed to be 'glued' together forever.
Walking meant falling every twenty steps or so. Contacting
the floor with the heel remained utopian as in my childhood
- on all four levels mentioned by Feldenkrais: the sensory,
the emotional, the mental, and that of actual movement.
Since my early childhood I had been painting, albeit with
considerable difficulty, and was much acclaimed as a young
artist, even receiving international awards and a grant.
My work was shown in individual and collective exhibitions
in Romania and abroad. But shortly after my arrival in Israel
I had to give up painting because sitting and holding a brush
caused a lot of pain. In order to prevent the brush stroke
from veering off in an unintended direction, I had to steady
my hand with my cheek.
This was the condition I was in when I met Moshe Feldenkrais
in 1972. What impressed me most during my first session with
him was his simple, direct, matter-of-fact way. When I caught
a glimpse through the half open door of a group of 'disciples'
crowding round his work table - the scene resembled Rembrandt's
painting 'Nicolaas Tulp demonstrating the anatomy of the
arm'- I felt great unease. Those apprentices were to witness
the torments I suffered in my body. At that moment I felt
like a guinea-pig, especially when I saw that one woman was
getting ready to take down everything in writing. 1 had no
idea what would happen next.
EVERY TOUCH WAS A SURPRISE FOR ME .. HE WAS GUIDING MY AWARENESS
FROM INSIDE
Feldenkrais asked me to take off my shoes. His face was
serious but in his eyes there was a hint of laughter. I felt
how he observed me out of the corner of his eyes. His look
was free of all expectation and didn't rest on me for long.
I felt that this person next to me was thinking, pondering,
preparing something. Feldenkrais rolled up two blankets and
asked me to lie down on my back. On his work table my physical
condition was completely exposed. I became aware for the
first time of the convulsive, chaotic movements that prevented
me from gaining control over myself and experiencing a state
of rest. The manner in which he supported my bones with blankets
and wooden semicylinders made me understand that I needn't
tell him anything.
He had already come to inhabit my body with all his mind,
and was guiding my awareness from inside in the most unpredictable
ways. Every touch was a surprise for me. I was amazed about
the extent to which this other person was capable of feeling
my whole being, of empathizing with my physical situation.
In a way I experienced divine love during that session. I
couldn't help bursting out laughing at each touch of Feldenkrais's
hand. It was as if he were playing hide-and-seek with me
and kept saying: "I'll find and catch you in any corner
of your being!" I wanted to shriek with laughter, but
was too timid and 'civilized' and had to resign myself to
suppressed, convulsive, and idiotic giggling instead.
At the end of the lesson, Feldenkrais told my mother that
he had mainly explored this session and the treatment proper
would begin next time. To my surprise my mother, who obviously
had no idea about what had happened during the session, asked: "Can
he be helped in some way?" At that Feldenkrais seemed
to fly into a rage that was very pleasant for me because
it expressed exactly what I felt. He turned his back on my
mother and gestured to where I was sitting, putting on my
shoes: "Why are you asking me? Ask him if he can be
helpedl' At that moment, at the end of my first session with
Feldenkrais, I felt like a person who after many years of
wandering through a Holocaust has finally the chance of experiencing
freedom and peace in times of justice. Mine was a personal
Holocaust in which I had to assert and fight for my integrity
as a being. it was a Holocaust created solely by physical
disabilities obstructing free development of the personality.
My mother told Feldenkrais of my great wish to be a musician,
a conductor. The tone of her voice though seemed to imply
the question: "Isn't he a little insane?" Feldenkrais
looked at me and replied: "As long as nothing is cut
in his body, he can learn anything."
I SEE AND I FORGET; I HEAR AND I REMEMBER; BUT WHEN I DO
I UNDERSTAND
When I heard what my mother had to pay for the session,
I got one of the greatest shocks of my life and experienced
a rather rude awakening from the feeling of being in paradise...
As a recent immigrant my father had a monthly salary that
amounted to the equivalent of five or six sessions with Feldenkrais.
Despite that I had weekly individual lessons with Moshe for
several months, and also began attending his Awareness through
Movement classes which were much cheaper. That involved,
travelling two hours by bus through Tel Aviv and included
changing mid-way. Because the journey was so time-consuming
I went to all three of Feldenkrais's classes. He encouraged
me always by telling me "You don't need to do what the
others are doing, just do what is most pleasant for you'.
I followed that rule for ten years. Whenever he gave a lesson
I couldn`t do, I liked to observe some people in the group,
and it was as if I was looking at a highly artistic ballet.
As these people, some of them in their eighties, got up and
began to walk and feel the effect of the lesson, it seemed
to me that they were like feathers moving in the air or dancers
skating on ice. These experiences - in some cases of perfect
or ideal movement - impregnated my mind with impressions
that helped improve my own self-image.
During the first years my parents looked on my "crazy
passion" with great distrust and felt I ought to occupy
myself with more 'productive' things. Nevertheless they quietly
kept financing it and allowed me to take extra sessions with
Yochanan and Gaby. Thus Feldenkrais learning practically
became my daily bread until I went to live in Germany in
1982. What I gained during that long apprenticeship to the
method is best summed up in a Chinese saying Feldenkrais
used to quote quite frequently: "I see and I forget;
I hear and I remember; but when I do I understand."
In those first ten years of involvement with the Feldenkrais
Method, which I remember as the most beautiful, exciting,
and creative of my life, I couldn't explain to myself why
this method had such a tremendously positive effect. But
over the years, and with the experience of hundreds of actual
and videoed lessons in which Feldenkrais always explains
a little of the underlying theories, I began to understand
more and more of the truth, the universal truth that motivated
Moshe's enormous creativity. His books, his practical teaching,
and his theoretical talks provided a kind of explosive material
that eventually led to an eruption of ideas in my own head,
and those ideas revealed to me the essence and meaning of
the method. This can best be rendered by the term INTENTIONAL
MOVEMENT.
I am convinced that Feldenkrais had a universal truth in
mind and wasn't only putting forward 'his' particular method.
His method - more than others - is characterised by the fact
that it takes into account the multiplicity of factors determining
our existence. As I understand him today, Feldenkrais saw
a person's condition as the result of her or his behaviour,
and this behaviour could often be directed against the self.
The vast system Feldenkrais developed over the course of
more than forty years, which is now called the Feldenkrais
Method, is much more a matter of pure education than of "healing" or
'therapy' or whatever else you might want to call it.
THIS SAME IGNORANCE OR LACK OF EDUCATION IS ALSO RESPONSIBLE
FOR MUCH OF OUR SUFFERING
As I began gradually to deepen my underatandng of this method,
I became more and more aware of the desperate need for real
education everybody seems to struggle with, the kind of education
that enables a person to distinguish between "good" and
'evil", "right' and "wrong", and between
appropriate and inappropriate behaviour. The fact that most
people suffer from back-pain is only one symptom of how "uneducated" we
are - Feldenkrais called it "ignorant", uneducated
not in connection with knowledge of physical education but
in terms of our understanding of the phenomenon of Life in
general. This same ignorance or lack of education is also
responsible for much of our suffering and so-called illness.
For me any disease viewed from the vantage point of the Feldenkrais
Method is a symptom of wrong development of the personality.
This faulty process could be corrected more or less through
adequate 'education" or "reeducation', depending
on the person's degree of retardedness and readiness to learn.
Orthopaedic surgery for spastic children and other such
'cures' can also only be explained in terms of this dismal
ignorance of the phenomenon of Life. The connection between
the functioning of our muscles and our brain was established
thousands of years ago. I cannot understand why children
still undergo operations for lengthening their muscles, especially
since in all cases known to me such interventions have led
to a worsening of their condition. The surgeons who dare
to use a knife and destroy the organic integrity of a spastic
child haven't yet grasped - or don `t wish to understand
- that muscle contractions are determined by the behaviour
of the nervous system and "behavioural commands' of
the brain, and cannot be influenced by the artificial lengthening
of the ligaments. When you touch the legs or heels of a child
who has undergone such an intervention, you can feel the
functional disconnection in the operated joints. In many
cases the feet are swollen and dangle helplessly, the legs
are dragged behind, or, in the most positive instances, are
stiff and straight like sticks.
A HEALTHY PERSON IS ONE WHO REALIZES ALL HIS MOST HIDDEN
DREAMS
As mentioned above, the universal truth Feldenkrais also
incorporated in his system is the inherent inclination of
all living beings to act according to some distinctive intention
whose concrete realization leads to some kind of satisfaction.
This principle applies to the amoeba looking for food just
as much as to the great human beings whose convictions and
ideals determine their actions. We are told that these "great
personalities" sacrificed their lives on the altar of
their mission - be it art, science, religion, social justice,
or whatever else - when in actual fact they could only live
in accordance with their inner "drives". Feldenkrais
says in one of his books: "A healthy person is one who
realizes all his most hidden dreams." This is one of
the statements that enlightened me most about the meaning
of the method and about the TRUE WAY one must follow in applying
it. As far as I am concerned this is the only 'must' I would
utter when speaking about the Feldenkrais Method.
At this point I would like to quote my "master" once
more and at the same time give his much beloved statement
a more precise meaning: 'Life is movement and without movement
life is inconceivable.' When Feldenkrais asserts: "Life
is movement", he doesn't refer to mechanical motion
but to constant change, i.e. to the continuous REARRANGEMENT
and adaptation to a heterogeneous environment implied in
the process of being alive. I would complement this sentence
by the following: 'Life is intention, and without intention
life is inconceivable'
I WITNESS THIS FEELING OF LIBERATION FINDING EXPRESSION
IN OUTBURSTS OF DELIGHTFUL LAUGHTER AND JOY
I don't manipulate human beings. I don't try 'to relax'
them, or teach them 'to be quiet', 'to be obedient', 'to
be passive', I PROVOKE them to REACT to some specific 'irritation'
or stimulus which I produce mostly through the touch of my
hands. Thereby I am able to detect some misfunction in their
reactions, and then I begin to 'reeducate" the person
concerned, using auxiliary stimuli to adapt her or his reaction
in a more effective way to the irritation I am causing.
ACTIVE THINKING on the part of the person being taught plays
a CRUCIAL role in this learning process. (The flickering
of the eyelids is just one sign that the student is not passive
during the lesson.) The session develops as a kind of conversation,
a kind of argumentation in which I am trying to convince
the other person that s/he has a right to freer and more
spontaneous expression and reaction to my stimuli. Such spontaneity
is experienced as ease, lightness in action, which is no
longer impeded by physical or mental resistance. In my sessions
I witness this feeling of liberation finding expression in
outbursts of delightful laughter and joy, especially in the
case of small children during the first three years of life,
no matter how invalid they are. Thanks to its nature and
being so young and so 'new', a small child Is much more open,
willing, and able to learn, that older ones. Small children
are immediately ready to distinguish between something pleasant
and interesting and something compulsive and humiliating
to their personal integrity. They will cry without thinking
twice.
Healthiness also implies the ability to recover from a big
trauma, i.e. to learn and adapt to new situations - since
a change in situation can be very traumatic. Many people
who find themselves in circumstances that are strange or
unpleasant to them can't cope and decide "there is nothing
to be done" to improve their lot. The helplessness of
a doctor in the case of a spastic patient, for instance,
is a sign that he or she is potentially as ill, as spastic,
as the patient. The doctor has as little idea as the patient
about how to change and improve that particular situation.
If the spastic person had learned what is superfluous in
her (or his) movements, she would move with more ease and
grace; and if the doctor knew what to do he could help effectively
instead of recommending that some tendons should be cut.
To illustrate what I am trying to say: Just think of a non-swimmer
falling into a swimming-pool; His movements would be at least
as uncoordinated, tense, and inappropriate in terms of his
intention to get to dry land as those of a spastically handicapped
person. But nobody would recommend a surgical operation to
get that nonswimmer to perform appropriate swimming motions.
As a swimmer one would simply teach that person how to adapt
to the new medium, i.e. how to move in it instead of drowning.
IF YOU CANNOT HELP YOURSELF, YOU WONT BE ABLE TO HELP OTHERS
EITHER
It gradually dawned on me why Feldenkrais used to tell people
who were relatively flexible in ATM classes but didn't apply
their attention in doing the movements: "You can be
flexible, you can be clever, but in this way you'll never
be able to improve yourself, i.e. learn."
If Feldenkrais, on the other hand, said about me or another
spastic "He is able to learn everything" that meant
that he could cope with the given condition, and if he had
been stuck with it himself he could also have helped himself.
I am now convinced that responsibility is the crucial element,
and this responsibility expresses itself in the degree one
is capable of being attentive to oneself first and foremost.
One cannot be more responsible for others than for oneself.
So if you cannot help yourself, you won't be able to help
others either. An ape cannot be responsible for driving a
car, and I would never entrust myself to such a driver! An
ape cannot teach driving because it can't be aware of the
actions involved. A person who has the temerity to sentence
another human being by saying "there is no chance of
improvement any more" is at least as handicapped as
the person he condemns to "no change".
When Feldenkrais asserts that a habit is only useful as
a means of learning other new habits that serve one's particular
purposes better, and can then be forgotten, he means that
it doesn't matter what your condition is - whether you walk
on a tightrope or are dependent on a wheelchair. What counts
is whether your quality of being allows you to learn new
things or not. If it does, you are saved.
Only now with all the experience I have acquired in the
years since his death, do I understand why the thing Moshe
Feldenkrais stood for is not a method but a universal truth.
A great man, a yogi, who gave some seminars at the University
of Tel-Aviv in the mid-seventies, proclaimed that one can
learn from books, but that is limited; one can learn from
a guru or teacher, but that is also limited; and one can
learn by oneself, and that is without limits.
Feldenkrais never said I would not be able to practise his
method "because of my uncontrollable movements" as
some of his assistants initially did. Those who passed such
a derogatory judgement on my future ability to give Functional
Integration leosons didn't dare to "think Feldenkrais" through
to the end. I myself felt "potent" and able to
offer the marvellous experience attainable in a FI session;
and for me it became a necessity to "convince" others
of the possibility of a more pleasant existence.
My physical condition is of no importance in working with
others since the quality of Feldenkrais work is ultimately
determined by the purity of unconditioned intention, i.e.
by the power of pure imagination.
(Translated and edited by Ilana Nevill) |
