You and your Body-Mind - [a draft]

THE CONTEXT

In 1983 YR published his first book, an extensive textbook about Functional Integration, FI, the one-to-one dialogue teaching of the Feldenkrais Method. He called the book Teaching by handling, The Feldenkrais Method. He conceptualized, organized, systematized, and compiled the extensive wordless material of knowledge that constitutes FI. He did what Moshe Feldenkrais did not (and could not do). In a structured didactic way, he created a communicative language for meta teaching FI, developing some of his own concepts beside those of MF.  Fortunately, it saw light before Moshe Feldenkrais died. We know from MF's foreword about his approval of the book. He recommends it to be read, reread, and used.

In 1986, Yochanan Rywerant started to teach basic trainings with another curriculum than the TAB’s trainings, designed with his textbook of FI as a unique asset and with MF's blessing. After MF's death in 1984, no one could deny YR the right to train teachers, his position was inviolable, although his students were and are not accepted in their own right and status. YR’s goal was clear and pronounced. Having assisted MF in San Francisco and witnessed the failed training at Amherst, he had clarified the do's and don'ts. He wanted the future teacher to be able to teach the Feldenkrais Method, FI as well as ATM, without hesitation, directly after a basic training. It meant having acquired the understanding, the basic knowledge, the theory, and the technique. The knowing what to do, why and how. YR decided upon 90 days over a 3–4-year period to be sufficient and he continued to develop his basic training for 24 years, the last interrupted because of his illness and death.

In 2000, almost 30 years after he himself finished the first Tel Aviv training, YR published his recommendation for a curriculum to teach the Feldenkrais Method for teachers in the book Acquiring the Feldenkrais profession. This book contains his experiences and conclusions from teaching and following students' processes in numerous trainings over the years.  Already in 1994, he developed what he called a Teachers Training, T.T., a meta meta training, that is to learn how to train teachers. The outline of this training is the raw material for this book. The book is unfortunately out of print but available in photocopies.

Yochanan Rywerant continued to be deeply concerned about the course of the development of the Feldenkrais Method, now spreading in many countries. In 2003 he published an article in the Feldenkrais Journal.The title, Envisaging the Future of the Feldenkrais Method. This is the introduction to his well-articulated fears.

“The future of the Feldenkrais Method lies not only in aiming at a steadily increasing number of practitioners, but also in increasing actively the quality of those practitioners. Moshe Feldenkrais himself has been very keen in asserting that his Method is not to be considered another kind of physiotherapy or movement training. He was ridiculing the opinion of some people that considered his system as a kind of "body - work."

He strongly believed that people can learn to have better control over their actions, and hence be healthier. It had to start with clarifying certain ways the brain perceives and acts and seeing the movements of the body as expressing processes within the central nervous system (CNS).

I would like to point out a few areas by which one could in reality follow a possible process of increasing quality. One is to consider the complexity of the ways one may use to adapt oneself as a practitioner to the conditions at hand, as they present themselves while doing an FI or while leading an ATM. One can distinguish in this context three areas of complexity.

First, there is the complexity, or variability of the client's bodily structure, as well as his or her habitual ways of acting or of responding to stimuli. The practitioner's adaptation to this enormous multitude of possibilities makes it already interesting. Take, for example, the distinction between a person's habits and his or her non-habitual actions, just to see how different people could be in this respect.

Second there is the complexity of the practitioner's doings. Usually, those are either verbal or non-verbal questions ("How about this?" "Do you sense that?") or proposals presented to the client, so that he or she might act, as well as perceive proprioceptive stimuli, perhaps differently from the habitual way.

Finally, there is the complexity of the ways the client might react to these questions or proposals. Accepting them or not or perhaps being indifferent to them. Accepting could mean either tolerating it, or allowing it to happen, and perhaps having an insight that this could be a useful pattern not considered before, or a new adaptation to some difficulty. Non-acceptance could present itself in several degrees, usually with some increased muscular tension, as part of a defensive pattern, all this could relate to ATM, as well as to FI…”

I have attached the article at the end of this pdf as well as a well-structured handout from an advanced training in FI in 2006 as supplements.

When Crick and Koch published their research on consciousness in 1992, a new era in brain science began. YR was attentive to integrate this 'new knowing' into descriptions of his practical experience and theoretical view of the Feldenkrais Method. In 2008, a few years before his death, YR published the monograph Corollary Discharge The forgotten link; Remarks on the body - mind problem. Here he concludes the years of teaching, discusses and anchor how a whole unified person is addressed, even if the sensorimotor system is the pedagogical tool.

The image precedes the action, the prediction, is the way brain’s function. Dealing with prediction and its role in teaching and learning, on all levels, is a key to success and understanding Feldenkrais, both as the originator and not least the discovery and the model/method itself. The consequence of this saying is the obvious necessity to pedagogically teach, how the image and the planning of lessons, the three-fold complexity, develop within the teacher. There is more to it. The remaining of YR’s “trilogy” of textbooks needs to address the public and especially, the client/student him/herself.

In this manuscript Yochanan Rywerant chose to articulate essential topics needed to ensure the client/student to understand the intention of The Feldenkrais inquiry. And not only to be able to reason around the experience, but also to become able to make the necessary choices to make the lessons transform into an ongoing quality process. The fictitious dialogue in the draft below, is recognizable in style from his two books and monograph as well as numerous articles and recorded teachings. He uses simple examples and expect logical reflection.

I have merely organized the text and left it in principle untouched, with some small corrections. The first part is a presentation of subjects that are more developed in the second part.

Remember it is a draft.

Sollentuna July 1, 2023