The Feldenkrais Method and Dynamic System Principles

The Feldenkrais Method and Dynamic System Principles by Mark Reese, Ph.D.

These notes were originally written to Esther Thelen in order to introduce her to the Feldenkrais Method after reading, with great appreciation, her book, A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action.

Moshe Feldenkrais was a brilliant innovator of movement education techniques and, as a theorist, was far ahead of his time in anticipating new concepts in movement and cognitive science. Feldenkrais' approach to movement education is unique in its embodiment of dynamic systems concepts.

Conventional exercise and physical education methods involve strict adherence to positional cues for good form or posture, literal movement instructions, and imitation of visual models. These methods are consistent with hierarchical theories of motor control, which hold that "higher centers" or homunculi can command the body to learn new postural and movement patterns. 

Feldenkrais believed that these approaches were based on an incorrect theory of control and that in actual practice, conscious self-direction alone does not produce functional learning. Rather, he believed that functional learning occurs through the pursuit of exploratory variations constrained and facilitated by functional demands and the environment.

Feldenkrais often likened his movement lessons, which he disliked to be called "exercises" because of the connotation of mechanical repetition, to scientific experiments, demonstrating over and over again how people will find similar solutions to motor problems based on common features of structure and function and common environmental and task demands. 

Common solutions will tend to emerge without instruction or imitation and despite very different initial postural and movement patterns. 

His thousands of lessons were created in part to test his hypotheses about the nature of motor learning.

In contrast to explaining movement solely in terms of anatomy and kinesiology, he said that one must understand the "organization" of movement, meaning its embodied, intentional, contextual nature, i.e., how one organizes an action in an environment to meet various criteria of action, including biomechanical and energetic factors.

Feldenkrais understood the non-linear nature of change. Small differences in any aspect of the task or environment can trigger nonlinear changes in an action. 

His methods embodied a way to empirically discover which control parameters might be effective in learning more advantageous movement and postural behavior. 

He believed that sensitivity to the demands of learning was crucial, and that mechanical repetition, forced stretching, or manipulation could not be the primary means of changing action patterns.

In contrast to teaching improved posture by assuming a position specified by a visual reference such as a plumb line or grid, Feldenkrais emphasized that posture is a component of action and must be learned in the real-time situation of meeting task demands. 

Far from being a position, Feldenkrais's 1940s formulation of "action" is very similar to chaos models. Posture can be well represented as an attractor defined as a zone of stable variation that includes many positions constrained by task demands, balance, biomechanics, support surface, and many other factors. 

The chaotic yet highly organized motions present even in "static" postures, called "postural sway," demonstrate the impossibility of adopting a truly fixed upright position, whether considered good or bad.

To induce the instability necessary to phase shift a system from one highly stable attractor to another, Feldenkrais developed many techniques, including novel tasks, novel environments, novel spatial orientations, and effort substitutions.

Here are some examples of how Feldenkrais taught improved posture:

a) A series of lessons includes variations on standing and oscillating. Stand and oscillate forward and backward, then from side to side, first with feet apart, then with feet together, sometimes with eyes open, sometimes with eyes closed, then circular movements in one direction, then in another. In the second series of variations, one leg is placed in front of the other, and in the next series, one stands with the arms in front of the back or out to the sides in various combinations.

Exploring these variations of movement destabilizes existing postural attractors and a new attractor emerges, defined as a zone of easy movement in all directions, further specified by the additional balancing requirements of a narrow stance and omitted visual cues.

b) Standing and turning reorganize posture in a way that is compatible with the situation of turning and looking sideways. Our habitual posture may be oriented toward primarily forward movement or toward a relatively static orientation.

c) In a quadrupedal posture, on hands and feet, one lifts alternately one hand and the other, one foot then the other, right hand and foot together, then left, then right hand with left foot, then the other diagonal, then both hands, both feet, and finally hopping with all four lifted at once. While the initial placement of the arms and legs varies enormously from individual to individual, a large group of people will converge on the same posture. The task demands of this situation require similar solutions, despite different positions and movement trajectories during the destabilized, highly exploratory phase.

In contrast to conventional physical therapy, which emphasizes the primarily mechanical factors of muscle strength and flexibility and skeletal alignment and mobility, Feldenkrais saw how many postural and movement problems are related to behavioral habits, including cognitive, motor, environmental, and perceptual aspects. 

In conventional therapy, neurological patients are typically given regimens of passive stretching. In Feldenkrais's work, for example, a child with cerebral palsy is never passively stretched. 

It can be shown that an elbow that normally will not bend, except with extreme force, will bend easily if the child is moved in an exploratory way to see the value of bending the elbow to lean on it to sit up. 

Movements and exercises without embedded functional values are superficial and may be little more than noise to a nervous system seeking multimodal correlations between rich sources of movement and perceptual information related to value-laden action trajectories toward desired goals.

Another striking example is Feldenkrais' systemic view of chronic pain. 

Rather than being literally "in the body," Feldenkrais understood most musculoskeletal pain (except that of immediate trauma) as an expression of a pattern of action, a habit that embodies emotional, biomechanical, neurochemical, and other components. 

Change the pattern and you can eliminate the pain, despite structural problems. Examples of how this happens are

a) Suppose a particular joint, such as the shoulder, is painful when the arm is raised. Feldenkrais discovered that he could move the proximal side of the joint, that is, move the scapula relative to the humerus, without pain. 

Thus, due to contextual differences, one can obtain a kinematically isomorphic movement that is categorically not perceived as such by the person. 

This proximally induced movement is completely painless for the individual and does not trigger the protective, defensive reactions of the more normal, distally induced movement. 

This technique destabilizes the system and allows new patterns to emerge so that after a few repetitions of the proximal movement, the normal distal movement can also be performed without pain.

b) Often a movement is painful in one orientation but not in another. Take, for example, supine flexion, i.e., raising the head and bringing one elbow forward toward the opposite knee, while raising the knee toward the elbow. 

If a similar motion is performed while sitting or leaning on your hands and knees, there may be no pain. 

When the initial movement is repeated on the back, it is usually performed without pain and with greater flexibility and coordination. 

These orientation changes alter the degree of antigravity muscular work, change spatial relationships, generate new proprioceptive information, and most importantly, change the category of action. 

By dissociating the movement from its habitual context, it demonstrates to the system that a movement is not dangerous and it ceases to be painful.

c) In cases of orthopedic or neurological problems, new movements are often taught first on the "better" side of the body, the side that is uninjured, not painful, less stiff, and/or under better neuromotor control. 

Many movements of the body are reciprocal, e.g. the ability to shorten and lengthen one leg in relation to the pelvis is the same as lengthening and shortening the opposite leg. 

Significantly, although the movements are physically isomorphic, movements performed on the right or left side of the body are perceptually dissimilar. This fact is very useful for learning new patterns.

By manipulating the environment of familiar task demands, it is possible to destabilize attractors and help new ones to emerge:

a) Altering spatial orientation. One lesson provides a radical demonstration of the contextual nature of learning and the importance of spatial orientation as an essential, if tacit, component of action. 

You are asked to perform a fairly simple series of foot movements, including supination and pronation, dorsal and plantar flexion, and rotation while lying on your stomach with your knees bent at right angles to the floor. 

Although most people would have no difficulty performing these movements in a sitting position, most people are completely unable to perform them in this altered physical position. 

Even if they can be performed clumsily, without visual feedback, people are often unable to distinguish where their feet are in space and what movement their feet are actually making! 

The lesson then goes on to reinforce the movement by visually tracking the foot. 

Interestingly, this further destabilizes the action, making the person even more confused, disoriented, and uncoordinated. 

This is a good example of Edelman's concept of multimodal reentrant processing: since the person has never correlated her foot movements with visual cues in this position, the visual tracking does not refine the movement as one would expect but adds another perceptual-action demand to the task space. 

Soon, however, the visual cues help people learn the necessary coordination. Even more helpful, however, is asking students to perform similar movements in different positions - standing, lying on their back, etc. - until they can transfer and generalize information to the novel position of lying on their stomach.

b) Changing the environment. In functional integration, which is primarily a hands-on technique, the student may be placed on rollers (cardboard or plastic tubes or rolled blankets) of various sizes and orientations. 

For example, the student may be asked to lie on a long, narrow roller placed lengthwise under the spine. 

This environment creates novel balancing requirements because it is easy to fall off the roller. 

The practitioner moves the student in a variety of ways to elicit the emergence of different postural and movement patterns appropriate to the pressure and balancing demands of the roller.

Support

One of the most significant changes in the environment is created by the Feldenkrais practitioner providing conditions of greater support. 

Just as research has shown how infant stepping can be re-elicited in the more supportive environment of water, many actions are easier to learn and previously acquired skills are easier to elicit when greater support is provided. 

In Awareness Through Movement, simply performing movements while lying down enables people to perform various movements that they are unable to perform while standing upright, 

This is presumably due to reduced antigravity muscular effort, the reduction or elimination of balancing requirements, increased proprioception due to a larger surface area in contact with the ground, and increased kinesthetic sensitivity.

Part of Feldenkrais's rationale for using support was a perceptual argument that a Weber-Fechner phenomenon was at work, enhancing the discriminations needed for learning. 

Just as smaller changes in illumination are perceived against a background of reduced illumination, Feldenkrais claimed that smaller changes in muscular efficiency could be registered against a background of reduced effort. 

For this reason, Feldenkrais often advised students to use small, even tiny movements in the early stages of learning. 

When an action is facilitated by support, it reduces muscular effort, thereby lowering the threshold at which differences in movement organization can be perceived and learned.

In Functional Integration, support can be provided by lying on rollers, cushions, and surfaces that reduce muscular effort, and especially by using the practitioner's hands in a way that supports the student's body to relieve the postural work that the system is engaged in. 

In a Gibsonian sense, support is understood not in a purely mechanical sense, but in the ecological sense that the surface provided to the student is perceived as providing reliable support for action. This provides relief from postural muscular effort and expands the field of action-perception possibilities.

Furthermore, in light of Fogel's concept of co-regulation, providing support can be understood as helping to establish communication within the framework of the activity. 

Relevant information about the activity is conveyed as participants negotiate their relative share of the effort of an action.

Of particular interest - because of their practical value and theoretical challenge - are highly sophisticated manual procedures, often performed while the student lies on a treatment table, which may involve pushing through the feet or lifting the spine or head. 

When performed accurately, and it takes many years of training to become proficient, it is possible to support, and thus convey information about, enormously complex patterns of postural behavior. 

Feldenkrais went so far as to say that you can create a tabula rasa in the brain from a person's habitual patterns. 

Obviously an exaggeration at best, but what is observed is an enormous destabilization of attractors. 

There is an incredible degree of plasticity that allows the system to enter many new attractor states.

Feldenkrais emphasized that any new movement learning always exploits previous learning and the inherent possibilities of the system. 

For example:

a) In an early approach to self-defense techniques that he developed in Palestine in his late teens, Feldenkrais observed the spontaneous defensive reactions of individuals to a knife attack. 

He then invented a defense technique that was grafted onto and tuned to this pre-existing pattern.

b) In teaching a new behavior, we often tune or refine existing movement patterns, regardless of the notions of "normalcy" that often constrain rehabilitation therapists. 

For example, when teaching a person to walk again after a joint injury, we may facilitate the limping pattern that has emerged as the person's way of coping with the trauma. 

Then we can gradually expand the repertoire by changing the environment or task demands. 

If, on the other hand, as some therapists do, one ignores the existing adaptive pattern and tries to forcibly move the person through a "normal" range, the person may react defensively (in effect, becoming more stable in their pain avoidance pattern) and not be receptive to new learning. 

Feldenkrais emphasized that one needs a learning theory, not just orthopedics, to account for the adaptive changes that occur after trauma. 

And the task of rehabilitation is not just mechanical, but systemic. 

After serious injury and healing, even under the best of circumstances, one does not simply regain function and behave identically to one's previous patterns. 

Post-traumatic behavior is a creative solution to a unique problem of action. In addition, it is possible to learn to function better than before by new means.

c) Intrinsic System Dynamics. Feldenkrais invented many series of lessons that explore and utilize intrinsic system dynamics, similar in some respects to the Kelso experiments. 

Some of these involve oscillatory movements generated by rhythmic ankle flexion performed while lying on one's back. 

Because of the pendular nature of these movements, coordination involves figuring out how to push off when the kinetic energy of the previous push and return has been dissipated (like pushing a child on a swing). 

There is no need to specify the frequency or force required, as these will emerge from the dynamics of the system. 

There is a great improvement in posture after doing these variations, presumably because one learns to perceive how efficiently compressive forces can be exerted through the skeleton (without the need for anti-gravity work) in a manner analogous to the upright postural requirement of organizing gravitational compression. 

In another series of lessons involving lifting and dropping the legs or other parts of the body, one learns inter-limb coordination that does not depend on neural coordination but rather on structural-functional joint and limb properties. 

As a physicist, Feldenkrais appreciated the fact that movement can have self-organizing properties. 

As a judo teacher, he knew what it meant to use gravity, momentum, and other physical forces.

Implicit here is the idea that actions contain subsidiary coordinations that, when learned, can be transferred to other skills. 

Feldenkrais understood how to construct and deconstruct action components from and into subsidiary coordinations. 

Contrast this with reductionist models of action that emphasize local muscle power elements.

Goal and non-goal orientation

The use of goals as attractors can be a double-edged sword, and it is important in learning strategies to be flexible about how they can function as potential control parameters. 

Goal orientation obviously enhances learning by giving a person a better understanding of what is expected and desired and can help to call up memories of how to solve similar action problems. 

However, conscious attempts to achieve a goal that is perceived as impossible can further deepen existing attractor wells. 

Individuals may have a long history of learning how not to succeed at various tasks due to pain, poor coordination, lack of strength, etc. 

Conscious attempts may simply trigger painful and unsuccessful strategies. 

This is another reason why Awareness through Movement sequences are both deconstructive and constructive of specific skills. 

Feldenkrais also often ingeniously invented lessons designed to elicit novel behaviors by introducing various constraints that lead to new and unexpected abilities. 

Examples of "surprise" lesson structures include

a) Moving the pelvis in a variety of ways while sitting in a chair, triggering efficient standing without the thought of getting up.

b) Lying on the floor, holding the foot, and moving it toward the mouth and other directions, leading to rolling to sit up, without any conscious idea that the lesson was about learning to sit up in a new and more efficient way. 

I watched my own son, Nathan, learn to roll from back to side in just this way at the age of three months. 

Rolling to the side seemed to be an accidental consequence of finally putting his big toe in his mouth! 

This is just one of hundreds of examples of how Feldenkrais was a master at using early developmental movements as a way to promote many coordinative skills in both children and adults. 

It also demonstrates that the adult's idea of what the child is learning may not be an accurate representation of the child's developmental trajectory. 

Many actions are learned in the process of gaining the coordination needed to satisfy other than obvious goals. 

This is analogous to Gould's remarks about evolutionary change. 

Organic structures can be used for functions other than those they originally served, and so can learning behaviors.

Because of context sensitivity, the familiarity or unfamiliarity of the environment is another important variable that can trigger or suppress the emergence of previously learned patterns. 

This can be beneficial or problematic, depending on whether the patterns are useful.

The phase of destabilization described as preceding phase shifts and new learning was induced by Feldenkrais through the introduction of novel task demands. 

One of the most powerful (and quickest to produce) examples is moving the eyes in the opposite direction of the head to induce greater flexibility throughout the body when turning to look sideways. 

According to Feldenkrais, our inflexibility is not in our muscles and joints, but rather in our habits, which involve a lot of unnecessary muscular effort. 

Because of the importance of vision in controlling many movements, directing the eyes in a non-habitual way while engaged in an action deeply destabilizes normal movement patterns and allows the emergence of more efficient patterns that are available but suppressed under current circumstances. 

This approach is incredibly effective (and easy to document, I might add), and stands in sharp contrast to prevailing therapeutic modes that aim to either stretch, relax, or strengthen the neck muscles, none of which address the dynamic, variable nature of action.

Another effective way to increase the neck's range of motion, without stretching, is simply to move the eyes many times in a direction congruent with the direction of the head. 

Deep changes in muscle tone are induced, allowing the head and neck to be turned much farther in the direction of the eyes. 

Feldenkrais liked to explain such effects in terms of neuro-reflex pathways involving tonic adjustment. 

A better (dynamic systems) explanation here would probably be that moving the eyes elicits strong attractors that reflect a long history of coordinated eye and head movements in many visually guided behaviors.

Feldenkrais emphasized how action and perception are inextricably intertwined. 

The easily misunderstood name for his system of movement education, "Awareness through Movement," reverses the more conventional idea of body awareness. 

Feldenkrais's movements were intended to enhance knowledge and perception, not as an end in themselves. 

Only through movement can one perceive oneself and the world, and perception makes movement possible (as Shakespeare said, "Surely you have sense, or else you could not have movement"). 

Feldenkrais also emphasized many connections between motor and cognitive processes. 

Some examples are 

a) In the above example of oscillatory movements, one learns from the body's movement. One cannot say that one is teaching the body, nor that the body is teaching itself.

b) A series of counting lessons show how one is actually counting one's own patterned eye movements as well as objects in the world. 

In other words, counting involves multimodal correspondences and correlations. 

Learning speed reading involves learning how to speed up and smooth out one's movements so that they don't stop on individual words, as they do when subvocalizing.

c) In lessons involving visualization, we learn how there are patterned eye movements and other muscular contractions that correlate with shifts of attention. 

For example, visualizing the right side of the body involves eye movements to the right. 

Mentally exploring the shape of one's foot elicits coordinations that reflect a history of putting on socks, getting foot massages, and walking on different surfaces. 

So-called "imaginary movement" draws on our earlier experiences of movement exploration. 

The training of visualization, perception, and action are all intertwined.

The movement variability in all Feldenkrais lessons embodies an important principle from evolutionary and ecological biology - that variation is key to the potential required for learning and adapting to novel conditions. 

A well-learned skill embodies sufficient variability to meet the demands of changing environments and tasks.

Feldenkrais invented thousands of manual and active techniques to facilitate the challenge of unique people, unique problems, and unique solutions. 

He did not advocate routines or mechanical exercises of any kind, but rather an exploratory journey that enhances coordination and skills according to the individual's goals. 

Implicit in this work is an attention to micro-differences in learning, micro-differences in muscle patterns, joint movements, and postural dispositions. 

Many therapies ignore, trivialize, or attempt to erase these differences, based on a Platonic ideal of healthy movement or posture, technologically implemented through machine-like movements, often involving the literal coupling of man and machine. 

Feldenkrais was a refugee from more than one totalitarian regime and placed a high value on human freedom and individual differences.

New research methods and theoretical ideas seem to support much more attention to these individual differences and provide scientific means to learn much more about such differences. 

It is encouraging to see, perhaps for the first time, scientific interest in such a "close-up" view of action and learning.