The Feldenkrais Method: Teaching by Handling
A textbook offers all the possibilities that a well-developed text has over speech.
Moshe Feldenkrais refers to the humility of learning, when he is authorizing Yochanan Rywerants textbook on Functional Integration
A threefold approach;
oral, written and handling
I had the benefit to study the profession with two textbooks at hand, one for ATM and one for FI.
The handling I learned with rich meta teaching.
It is still wishful thinking that this should also be a matter of course for every student in the various educations all over the world. Yes, teaching Classical Feldenkrais is craftmanship, but not without an extensive theoretical anchoring.
Thomas Hanna (1928 - 1990) organized the first American training. I publish the foreword with the consent of Eleanor Criswell Hanna.
Extracts from the preface
"In The Feldenkrais Method: Teaching by Handling, Yochanan Rywerant has devised a framework for understanding an immensely subtle and elusive technique for human change.
Rywerant has successfully created the architectonics for understanding a major area of human cybernetic functioning and, in so doing, has effectively established the vocabulary for a new area in the field of nonverbal communication. Feldenkrais, the inventor of this new area of Functional Integration, is also its most brilliant practitioner, as well as its most inspirational and intuitive teacher. What Rywerant has accomplished is to have taken this intuitive clarity and worked it into an ingenious intellectual framework that makes sense of the technique's elusive subtleties. He has succeeded in removing the mystery from a method that creates impressive improvements in the motor system with a remarkable economy of means."
"Through his work at the Feldenkrais Institute, as well as his own private practice, Yochanan Rywerant has become thoroughly experienced in the theory, practice, and neurophysiological foundations of Functional Integration. Thirty years of acquaintance with Feldenkrais have imbued him with a lucid vision of the precision and care necessary for the successful practice of Functional Integration. It is this same vision that informs the pages of this book and offers the reader an authoritative account of the Feldenkrais system with all of the exactitude and subtlety that Feldenkrais demands."
"Rywerant's conception of the "manipulon" as a basic unit of nonverbal communication is at the heart of this cybernetic theory. And his discussion of the different types of manipulons gives a comprehensive description of the discrete ways in which "handling" can communicate information to the brain. His discussion of the functions of the brain and the central nervous system are clear and very much to the point; this clarity allows us to understand how the manipulatory sessions prescribed form and way of proceeding."