Carl Ginsburg, former professor
of chemistry, writer at heart, now much in demand as a Feldenkrais
Trainer, is not a dancer. The way, however, he touches people
in Functional Integration and teaches future Feldenkrais practitioners
establishes a sensitive and effective form of communication
that has dance-like qualities. All of us who completed the
First London Training in 1990 think with much affection and
gratitude of Carl's calm presence, poise, and generous support.
At the beginning of an interview recorded during an advanced
workshop, Carl talked about the early 70's and his search
for a method to cure his long established back pain. Rolfing,
Bioenergetlcs, Chiropractic, Osteopathic and other treatments
were interesting but didn't really help. Even the gentlest
form of exercise was no good:
I would end up hurting myself more. I had a sense that in
a way my dissatisfaction with my life was related to having
back trouble ... I wasn't doing what I really wanted to do
with myself. I was teaching chemistry in a small college
in upstate New York ...
I think, at that time, my real dream was to be a writer
and I felt I didn't have enough capability to realise the
dream in a way that I could also support a family. I did
write poetry at the time and publish some, but I didn't feel
that I had the freedom to really make a choice for myself.
Carl wasn't alone in being dissatisfied:
Actually we had formed a group of teachers at this little
college looking for a way to "right livelihood",
as we put it. We were looking to find work for ourselves
that fitted our values because we felt that the institution
as it was didn't fit our values ... We were looking to form
a counter institution.
In 1974 Carl joined a Gestalt workshop at the New England
Centre in Amherst, Massachusetts:
Through the contacts that we made, I got involved in this
Gestalt Workshop, which I had taken with the ostensible purpose
of doing something that would increase my skills at group
leadership. But of course, the Gestalt workshop really was
much more about me than improving my skills ... In those
days I was beginning to realise that I was a human being
with feelings that I was not expressing, and I always tended
to over-intellectualise everything and avoid feeling and
making contact with people through that. It seemed that the
things I was incapable of - to my mind, being in touch with
movements and feeling, and also moving in a co-ordinated
way - were simply beyond me ... In the end I began discovering
altematives to behaving in that way. What happened at the
workshop was that someone who had studied with Moshe Feldenkrais
at Berkeley offered a Feldenkrais workshop. So I did it.
He would teach a little ATM in the morning and I found it
fascinating right from the start. I would do these little
processes and suddenly discover I had improved somehow. And
then I did a weekend workshop with him and that was mind
boggling, because now I suddenly saw that my intelligence
with regard to movement was very stunted by my lack of development.
There was a relationship between how I hurt my back and being
underdeveloped in terms of my own sensibilities.
My fascination was that here was a process that could give
me alternatives.
Anyway that process was the missing link... I saw that these
movement sequences could do something that none of the other
work could do, that I could gain an understanding and a learning
that worked and was immediately practical. It was astounding
to me that these simple movements could achieve that. And I
said to myself 'Well, whoever developed such an idea has to
be a genius!' Because nothing else ever approximated it. For
example, the Krauss exercises I used to do had you do relaxation
before you did the movement or the exercises. But It didn't
prevent you from hurting yourself again because you could still
move in the same idiotic way. The same happened in yoga. I
didn't have a pathway leading to learning. But here I suddenly
could move ten times more than before because the movement-sequences
were so ingeniously put together. Nothing I had tried before
had achieved that.
I came out of that workshop with the commitment that I would
find Feldenkrais and study with him. My family listened to
all of this and thought I was crazy of course. But it was
my mother who saw an advertisement announcing a Professional
Training in the Feldenkrais Method, to be sponsored by the
Humanistic Psychology Institute ... I think she was sorry
afterwards... She didn't know what she had unleashed ...
I mean a complete burning of all the bridges. I had started
the process before, but by the time I had decided to go to
San Francisco I was no longer a chemistry professor. I had
arranged to get laid off from my position at Syracuse. So
I was now an unemployed person. But you could get unemployment
insurance in those days ... Of course I couldn't pay the
training with that. But it turned out that when we bought
a house we had an extra parcel of lend and it sold two weeks
before I needed to send my cheque. So the money just appeared...
And with the unemployment insurance I had enough to keep
the family going and to live in San Francisco.
My first reaction (to being in the training) was that everything
Feldenkrais said made sense to me - and that at a number
of different levels. It wasn't simply what he said about
movement or anything like that. It was what he said in the
overall context of the process. At the same time, I was convinced
that I wouldn't be successful because I felt like I didn't
have the skills or that I wouldn't be able to develop the
skills ... for example, to touch people. I thought, 'I'm
not even comfortable on the floor touching somebody. I cant
even organise myself to be comfortable yet ... How am I going
to develop the sensitivity in my hands that seems to be essential
when I have never done anything with my hands?' My whole
life had been spent in intellectual kinds of pursuits, being
clumsy. Even as a chemist I was often clumsy and dropping
things.
Did that feeling persist right through the Training?
No. Something changed. One thing in the first year of our
training. Moshe was very clear about was that you didn't
have to do anything in the sense of doing something in a
direct sort of way. We did some exercises in the class where
we just touched without having the intention of fixing something
or making something better or doing anything with that kind
of intention. I had that idea in mind ...
In the fall after the first summer I went to visit some
people at a Sufi Community. Two of the friends I had worked
with at Syracuse lived there. They had a friend who had a
shoulder problem, and of course Moshe had said over and over
again "Don't touch anybody with a problem". They
kept saying "Why don't you see what you can do for him".
And I said "I'm not qualified" and so on. But of
course, I got talked into it and then, since I knew that
anything I did might hurt him, I did what Moshe had said,
which was to not have any intention of fixing or making better.
So I did it and he gets off the floor and says "Boy,
that feels different!" It was a little shock to me but
1 said "Whatever this is, it's simple enough that I
can do it".
I mean, if I understand what Moshe said and it had that
effect with this person, then I did have the ability. And
actually, from that point on, I always thought I could do
it ...
I had every intention of setting up a practise. l don't
know whether you could think of it as having a vocation in
the true sense of the term. Remember, we had done this thing
about "right livelihood". Well... this sounded
like right livelihood to me. I was quite frightened to go
out in the world without much support and present this new
idea to people... but I was willing to do it.
The family didn't support that particular thinking: Well,
here's Carl and he's a college professor type and he's a
not very good salesman and hustler. So what's going to happen?
What did you do?
... Well I went to Albuquerque... My wife had cousins in
Alberquerque. I stopped there and met a man who was a Gurdjieff
teacher and a therapist. He was fascinated with Feldenkrais
work and said "Why don't you come and teach some workshops
in New Mexico". So I came back and taught two workshops,
and people were very open and interested. I met a lot of
people who said "Why don't you come to Alberquerque?
We could use somebody like you here". This man also
had space in his little office complex. He said I could rent
office space and he had a group room where I could teach
classes... So it all fell into place. I went home and announced
to the family that we were all going to Alberquerque, which
the children resented... actually.
I set up the practice and the therapist referred a few people
to me. So I had a few clients. It was very slow at the beginning...
but the classes seemed to go pretty well. I taught ATM and
had just a few clients for private work. Then, in the spring,
there were a few more. I was on the radio, on talk shows.
I did free demonstrations. I did some advertising in an alternative
newspaper. But it wasn't that which seemed to generate other
clients. It seemed to be the clients I worked with that generated
other clients.
Within two years I had got to a place where the thing was
working. But it worked in the sense that I had people who
felt the work was valuable and who were willing to send other
people.
As an assistant in training programmes Carl discovered new
dimensions
Teaching in a training group, I discovered the important
thing was how you create the lesson. The lesson you would
teach in an ordinary workshop or classroom situation has
a lot of impact. But for the training group, you needed to
refine and focus... to develop to another level... The lesson
has to be taught in a more specific and more refined way.
In a sense you have to think that the main basis for the
students learning to teach lessons is their experience of
your teaching. If your teaching isn't clear then your students
aren't getting a good model from which to operate.
What are the characteristics of your particular teaching
style?... What do you want your students to get from you?
I have a sense that my particular way of teaching has certain
characteristics that come across. One is that I seem to be
very comfortable in a situation where I can create a lot
of safety for the students... That the students feel like
they can make mistakes and ask questions and so on... That
came naturally to me. Part of it is that I tend to feel I'm
not so very special and that other people could easily have
skills that I have... I suppose it was always hard for me
to create an image of myself where it was something much
more than I thought I was. But on one level I am aware that,
over the years, I developed a lot of ability to be very skilful,
particularly doing FIs. More so initially than in teaching
ATMs. That came easily in the end although as I say, initially
I felt I couldn't.
I found that since I had a very quiet style, students seemed
to feel comfortable with that isn't flashy but at the same
time students seem to like it.
A lot of the other trainers like to work with very large
groups and feel quite comfortable with that. I don't so much.
I like between thirty and forty students actually. I could
even work with a smaller group of course and be more comfortable.
When I do advanced trainings for example, I keep the groups
really small... Lesss than 16. That's my own personal choice...
What interests me the most is to do a couple of things.
One is to give people the sense that the actual doing of
the work, no matter whether you're teaching ATM or doing
FI, is always staying in tune with your senses. That's a
theme I feel very strongly about. Because, I suppose, that
was a strategy that worked for me. One of the ways that felt
comfortable when working was that I could find out what I
needed to find out through my senses. I didn't have to develop
a whole model of what I was doing in order to do it. Other
people have other strategies. But for me that was the strategy
and I see it seems to help people.
The other thing I am interested in a lot is just simply
to see that there's a way of thinking in the Feldenkrais
Method that is very distinctive. It relies on understanding
that we're working with a person In a context - and the context
is the person's life.
This thinking is in terms of seeing what the person needs
in that context and finding a way towards eliciting that
for the person so that it becomes a process that's a very
human process.
The process is about how human beings operate and how the
nervous system is in a situation. I very much like this idea
that we don't think in a cause and effect kind of way. That's
a very different kind of thinking than the kind of academic
thinking I was trained in.
As I say, from the very beginning, the things Moshe said
would make sense to me. One of the things I was most attracted
to was his way of expressing himself and taking and thinking
about what he did. His way of doing was so opposed to the
kind of academic training I had. It wasn't anti-intellectual
or unintelligent. On the contrary it was unifying. It involved
every aspect of being human. It was sensitive. It was sensory.
It was also thinking in a direct kind of way. It was intelligent
in the sense that it could be intellectualised after the
fact. Which Moshe did do.
But Moshe wasn't sure that he was actually succeeding in
teaching people to think differently.
He tried. I think that it was the toughest part of what
he attempted to do... That it is the part of the work that
we do poorest, as trainers... I've often asked myself how
that can be improved and haven't come to a conclusion yet
but at the same time I think that in the process of training,
in asking questions and answering questions, a lot can be
done. For example students often have quandaries and questions
that result from their own language confusions. I know that
some of the teachers attempt to deal with that by directing
students into their experience again, which is a way of doing
that kind of clarification. My guess is that I haven't evolved
my own teaching in that direction as much as I'd like. But
finding ways to direct the question into experience is a
way of clarifying the thinking that I like. If you are tuned
into the senses you see what the result is. You can see the
results come about through the interaction and not through
specific knowledge...
It's thinking from the senses into acting... It doesn't
bypass the intellect so much as the symbolic level... the
verbalisation. For people who haven't taken that step its
hard to imagine what it is. Early an I started doing that
in the FI work and it would come about that I would act,
that is touch, do something, feel, and then realse that I
hadn't any verbal model of how I got from the sensing to
acting and back and forth, but I had done it nevertheless.
Could you put that into words later, with hindsight?
Of course. Moshe always called that the third approximation
or the fourth approximation. By that he meant that after
you knew what you did you could in fact describe your 'thinking'
process... but that description came post experience. For
me that is the beauty of the Method.
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