The Feldenkrais Method. Part 1

 

What is the Feldenkrais method?

The Feldenkrais Method is an approach that helps people expand their repertoire of movement, sensation, and expression. It helps people improve the way they use themselves.

The regular practice of the Feldenkrais Method can help a a wide range of people. From those with very limited physical or intellectual abilities to those who move very well and want to move even better. We can start working with babies from a few weeks old, little children with cerebral palsy. We work with problems of neurological, skeletal, or muscular origin, we work with the very old and with people in wheelchairs.

The concept of proper use of self within the Feldenkrais framework.

Good use of self could be defined by the fact that the person does not use more energy than is necessary to perform an action. The action is performed with effort distributed proportionally throughout the body, using the skeleton to support the weight rather than the muscles doing superfluos work.

There are many ways to describe proper use of the self. The way a person uses his feet is important; the way a person breathes is important; the way a person relates to others socially is important; the way he uses his hands is important.  There are so many important features of good self-use. 

An important thing in the Feldenkrais Method is self-awareness. 

The main component is kinesthetic self-awareness, so that one can feel the difference between a more or less efficient action. We can become aware of the presence of parasitic efforts and eliminate them to know enough about the learning process so that where one feels interference in action, one understands how to discover new possibilities for action.

We learn how to evaluate what is more or less effective

In order to learn you have to make comparisons. So let's say you're asking a person to get up from a chair. Let's say you start with this exploration of where to put your feet. If the student has a very low level of self-awareness, then we start with different distances between the feet. We try feet very far apart, then feet very close together, feet too far under the chair, feet too far forward, heels too far in, heels too far out, and so on. 

Gradually, when the student can distinguish between the obvious discomfort of some positions and the relative comfort of others, you start making smaller and smaller variations until you reach the point where you can't do anything with your feet. You'll get your feet up to a certain point where you can't really tell if one way or the other is making a difference, and then you have to shift your attention to something else. 

A lot of the Awareness Through Movement and Functional Integration classes are done this way. It's a sequence of exploring certain relationships and then integrating awareness of those different relationships until you feel how it all fits together.

The context of all these explorations 

The exploration is related to a given function. It can be very specific, it can be the function of getting up from a chair, to stand on your own two feet. It could be the function of getting up from a chair while turning, to stand on one leg and be able to quickly turn and move in the opposite direction. These two functions would require different explorations. So function is the basis for the types of variations explored.

What's more important is learning about yourself. 

How to make better use of yourself in any activity. 

It's not possible to consider self-use awareness separately, not to link it to a real situation, where there's a particular intention or form of action. Taking function, or the use of self, out of a context of intentionality is a very abstract thing... very philosophical. 

Self-use means nothing until you have something to do in your life that's important to you. It's your engagement in an activity that means something to you; and whether it satisfies you or not, that's what makes the difference between a happy person or not: or a person who makes good use of themselves or not. If someone doesn't know what he wants or knows what he wants but doesn't do it, it doesn't matter how efficiently he does what he does, he's not making good use of himself.

 If "I've got a back problem or a bad knee" or "I want to improve my tennis game". 

The focus is on the whole person. We may not attend to certain things explicitly, but we keep them in a corner of our minds. This can have an effect on the kind of metaphors we use to explain the aspect of the process to the person. It will certainly influence the suggestions we make about what to look out for, or the kind of work we give the person to do between sessions.

When someone actually comes to you to work with you, what do you do? 

Do you look at the way they move, the way they use themselves, and the effect that has on the thing they're concerned about. Do you help people use themselves more effectively, to get a positive effect on the person's area of interest?  Improving the way a person uses themselves both generally and about that concern.

 Let's say someone comes in with a back problem; usually,  there is something in the way they move that exacerbates the problem, if not causes the back problem. If the person had enough awareness to do something else on their own, there would be less discomfort in that area. 

So one of the first things would be to design a lesson that gives the awareness of other movement possibilities. Also to see how one manages its own life, the attitude to pain, what one does when in pain.

Looking at ergonomics, work position, or for example, if one spends a lot of time in the car, look about the car seat, and the way one uses itself to drive. If one's in pain at certain times of the day,  look at what one's doing - are we resting? Are we stretching or something like that? Being aware of our behavior in some way. A lot of people don't really know how to deal with back pain. Not just with the degree of movement they use, but in terms of the degree of rest, exercise, ergonomics of their lifestyle, and personal relationships.

How does the Method help a person to organize themselves differently, to release tension

We could start with a body position and action that we already do reasonably well. 

So, for example, someone who has pain in the middle of their lower back may be able to lie comfortably on their side and from there go to lie on their back (even in this action performed relatively well, you can see the pattern of misuse that exacerbates the problem). 

By taking a completely primitive function like rolling onto one's back, which the person certainly learned when he was three months old, and working with that, we can quickly establish what a well-organized action is. The person acquires the experience of a movement that he or she feels to be graceful, and pleasant. They'll be able to recognize it, to enjoy it, and so it will improve the way they use themselves, which they'll transpose to other situations.

How do you actually go about teaching someone to do that? To feel it?

We use a variety of passive movements, the choice of which includes action characteristics. 

So to roll onto the back, the shoulder will go backwards. 

Part of the lesson will be to make the shoulder go backward.

 Let's imagine that at a certain point in the movement, there's an abduction of the hip and a rotation of the pelvis. Some parts of the back muscles would be lengthened, others shortened. 

"I can actively take up the work of these muscles, bringing muscles together, lengthening others; in a sense simulating the action in its normal course. Doing this draws the person's attention to certain relationships, and they will then have a more integrated sense of how to do the action. If she feels that I'm doing it with her passively, effortlessly, she can acquire the sensation that it's possible to move effortlessly herself."

Is a way of breaking down a movement into specific parts and then reintegrating them into a conscious action? 

There's a movement analysis that breaks the movement down into different parts. 

There's also an analysis of the characteristic way in which the person stands and moves. Some aspects we deal with are more directly related to what we call movement, and others are more related to the pattern of self-use.

The learning transfer to the person's other activities

"Giving the person a comfortable and pleasant movement experience triggers highly efficient modes of organization that are already present in the nervous system. 

We make the assumption that there's a sort of healthy person beneath the surface. 

Also, once you've triggered that in an activity, (depending on the extent of any injury), it will tend to spread on its own. 

Also, working with basic functional activities, like rolling, already includes features that are relevant to many other functional activities. 

For example, being able to roll from one side to the other already prefigures walking; the transfer of weight from one leg to the other. 

The two techniques of the Feldenkrais Method, are Awareness Through Movement and Functional Integration. 

Awareness Through Movement (ATM)

ATM is an active technique in which people perform movements organized in a lesson, around something functional. Most lessons are given with the person lying down, although many lessons are done sitting, standing, walking, or moving.

In ATM, the practitioner asks the person to perform the movements. You don't actually tell the person what to do and how to do it, it's really a suggestion to explore. 

 In Awareness Through Movement, no visual examples are used. Everything is done through verbal instructions, for two reasons. 

Firstly, so that the person doesn't imitate, but has to discover for themselves what they feel is correct, and secondly, because there really is no appropriate visual model. 

The assumption is that there are a large number of solutions to any problem. 

For example, there are many correct ways to go from lying on your back to lying on your stomach. 

We can impose constraints on the way the movement is done to exploit this. 

For example, we can insist that the person keeps one foot and one hand in contact with the ground at all times, turning it into a kind of learning puzzle. 

By the end of the lesson, by exploring different ways of doing the same thing, the person learns to do the movement very efficiently, and with a great sense of pleasure and self-satisfaction.

Is the person necessarily aware of how it all fits together? 

No. We believe that in the early stages of the process, a lesser awareness of the desired outcome facilitates the learning process. 

A very simple way of getting people to stop wanting to get straight to the point is not to tell them what we're trying to teach them.

Functional Integration 

Well, the same understanding of body organization and learning is present in both Functional Integration and ATM. 

Integration of function refers to a quality of action where you don't interfere (negatively) with yourself, or, to put it positively, where you act in a unified way to realize your intention. 

The function is simply the activity, the matrix in the lesson. 

The theme of the Functional Integration lesson might be a movement like rolling from the back onto the belly, but in a deep sense, Functional Integration refers to the way a person functions in their life.

Finding out how a person is learning something

There are several signs. First of all, there's the sensation that if there's integration, by moving a given part of the body you're able to feel the response of the person's whole body. This is one of the things we're looking for by the end of the lesson, that wherever you move the body from, you can feel the whole body respond. Most of the time, of course, it doesn't respond, so what we're looking for is to increase integration throughout the lesson. 

We look for changes in breathing, sensations of length, and reduction in muscular tension. This can be a decrease or an increase in tone. It's very different with each person.