Between the Lines, a Feldenkrais®-oriented reading and discussion group will meet from 6:30-9:30pm on Wednesday, February 15 at The Feldenkrais Institute of New York. Admission is “pay what you like,” with a suggested donation of $10.00. All are welcome. In addition to the discussion, we’ll do an Awareness Through Movement® Lesson.
In our meetings of Between the Lines during 2016, the reading assignment was an entire book. The discussion was largely undirected by me, as I wanted to see what group participants were curious about after doing the reading.
During those 2016 meetings, we discussed books that were very much centered on what the Feldenkrais Method® is, how it works and how various movement habits and patterns affect not only physical comfort but the comfort and contentment of our entire “self.”
One comment I got from several people is that they would appreciate an evening that focused more on a specific topic. That seemed like a good idea to explore so that’s what we’re going to do on February 15th. Moreover, this time, the material will include some reading from Feldenkrais as well as some readings from other authors that I believe directly support Feldenkrais’ ideas about the human organism and its possibilities for improvement. This material is much more about why the Feldenkrais Method is structured as you know it and less about the how.
The reading assignment is in three parts: 1) the chapter titled “Subjective and Objective Reality” from Dr. Feldenkrais’ book, The Elusive Obvious; 2) Chapter 5 from Lynne McTaggart’s book, The Field; and 3) Chapter 9 from Tor Norretranders’ book, The User Illusion. The chapters from The Field and from The User Illusion are available (in direct violation of copyright laws) for download at this link. The files are stored on Google Drive. You should be able to read The Field excerpt directly from your browser window. You will likely have to either print or download the excerpt from The User Illusion as in Google drive, it appears sideways and there is no way to turn the image. If you download it and view it in Acrobat or another PDF reader, you should be able to rotate the image without difficulty.
In the reading from The Elusive Obvious, Dr. Feldenkrais asserts that much, much more of the capacity of the human brain is devoted to “subjective” reality processes (those that occur subconsciously) than is devoted to “objective” reality processes (those of which we are consciously aware). However, the average human spends nearly all of his/her time paying attention to objective reality. Feldenkrais felt that this leaves a gigantic part of human potential untapped. In creating the Feldenkrais Method, he attempted to give humanity a way to improve that vast part of our mind that most of us leave completely to its own devices.
It seems to me that most Feldenkrais teachers find themselves frequently trying to communicate to students why the way we work is so different from other physically-based healing or learning modalities. We are trying to explain that human movement is largely directed (or organized or assembled) in the subconscious and that by its very nature, the subconscious and all of its activity cannot be directly “known” by consciousness. We are trying to help our students improve something through a process of learning that is impossible to consciously monitor as it occurs. (We can consciously notice the effects of our work but not the actual process of improvement.) Further, physical organization is only a small part of what the subconscious controls and Dr. Feldenkrais knew that improving efficiency in the area of physical organization would bring about a concurrent improvement in the functioning of subconscious activity in general. Therefore, he truly believed that helping humanity improve subconscious efficiency was equivalent to helping the human race to evolve more quickly.
Norretranders’ book, The User Illusion, attempts to help us understand the nature of human consciousness. He, too, makes a clear distinction between the mind’s unconscious processes and consciousness. His ideas support those of Dr. Feldenkrais in intriguing ways that further encourage us to attend to and consciously “stay out of the way” (this is my interpretation) of our subconscious whenever it is reasonable to do so. The User Illusion can be a tough read. If you start the section and find it too dense, skip to the bottom of page 241 and read to the end of the chapter. That last section contains the information most relevant to our discussion. Then, if you want more detail on how Norretranders reaches the conclusions he comes to, you may want to go back and read the beginning of the chapter.
In The Field, Lynne McTaggart, goes even farther in bringing together research done by a number of scientists who are working on various projects related to quantum physics. The main thesis of her book comes from a thus-far unprovable hypothesis that there is a field of something (energy?) called the zero-point field that is, in fact, the “stuff” of which everything in what we would call “existence” is made. This includes matter in all forms, as well as thought, feeling, ideas—really anything of which one can conceive. Because the zero-point field is the basis of all that exists, there is no fundamental difference between what we perceive as material and what we believe is immaterial. Further, the zero-point field, because it is one thing, means there is a constant connection and communication between everything and anything that exists.
In terms of how this has affected my own practice of the Feldenkrais Method, it has turned one of our basic tenets: the possibility of “joining” another person’s nervous system, from a hypothetical notion to be sought after but never-to-be-attained (because of the seeming separateness of beings), into something that I can believe is not only a possibility but rather a certain occurrence whenever one has a clear “intention” to join another.
The chapter I have provided from The Field deals, in part, with some ideas of how certain parts of our brain function, of how information is processed in the brain and of how the outside world is “decoded” and interpreted by our brains. All of these things are ideas that directly support Dr. Feldenkrais’ idea that each one of our versions of “subjective” reality is a much richer and potentially more productive area on which to focus our desire to improve, rather than, as most learning modalities stress, maintaining a focus on what we can learn and “know” consciously.
I’ve highlighted some sections in the chapter from The Field. This was done for my own benefit and isn’t really meant to guide your thinking in any way. Generally (if I remember my intent correctly), I felt what I highlighted in blue had to do with the general topic of conscious and unconscious activity, and the yellow highlights were more directly relevant to the Feldenkrais Method.
If all this seems in any way daunting or too complex, please don’t let that dissuade you from coming. My only interest in creating these reading and discussion groups is to make what we attempt to do through the Feldenkrais Method more clear, simple and understandable. I hope to help you appreciate your own ability to make what may seem, at first encounter, to be highly complex ideas a part of your own, fundamental understanding of what it means to be a human being.
I very much look forward to being with you on February 15th.
