In 2005, seemingly a long time ago, one of the iconic Feldenkrais trainer drama queens declared that if students do not state clearly their request (wish, problem, concern) before a hands-on session then he will not work with them, even if they’ve already paid their session.

That he said in the Feldenkrais Professional Training Program I’ve attended in Munich, Germany. That and a few more of such incidents from various so called “Senior Feldenkrais Trainers” led me to take a 6 months hiatus because I felt that I didn’t need to put up with such nonsense, thank you very much. I finally graduated in 2008, completed my make-up days in 2009, and finished almost one year behind schedule.

I guess, sometimes we all do and say things that make others feel uncomfortable, and I believe most of us do improve and change for the better over time, so no hard feelings there (and I hope neither from you towards me).

I keep thinking about it because prompting (or not) is such an important topic. For 18 years I’ve been thinking about this “I won’t work with you if you don’t state clearly what you want waa waa, cry me a river” incident, and I’ve worked with thousands of clients with that incident in mind. Not in resentment, but as a question: Is this a good way to start a client session?

And it’s only since I started using ChatGPT that I’ve become aware of that there’s a word for it. “Prompting”- or “proompting” as the computer geeks on Youtube say. So- I will use this blog post and writing to think about the topic of prompting:

Proompting vs prompting

“Proompt. A magical word that engineers use to summon the power of ChatGPT, Midjourney or other AI systems to complete any task imaginable. It is often used in memes to represent the infinite possibilities of artificial intelligence and to poke fun at the sometimes-unpredictable nature of prompt-based learning.”—Urbandictionary

“Prompting is a strategic approach used to increase the likelihood that your child will give the targeted response. It is provided when an ordinary antecedent is ineffective, and is extensively used in behavior shaping and skill acquisition. Prompting procedures rely on reinforcing correct responses that are both prompted and not prompted so that the learner begins to perform skills independently.”—Brave AI summariser

As of now it’s still considered crucial to phrase your prompt clearly and in the right way in order to get the best answer from ChatGPT and other AI systems. Telling an AI what it is you want from it is called prompting. You deliver a prompt and get a response accordingly. The better your prompt the better AI’s response, is the name of the game, at least for now.

But is this the right way to think about Feldenkrais-style hands-on lessons? When do students have the time and opportunity to learn prompting? Is learning to be able to express ourselves clearly and tell others what we feel and need, is this already part of a hands-on Feldenkrais-inspired session?

Would students have to exercise prompting, that is to ask and calibrate the same prompt over and over again until they finally get a satisfying answer from their Feldenkrais practitioner (or “Senior Feldenkrais Trainer“)? So- whether you call it “Stating your concern”, “Asking your question” or “Prompting”—do students even know that there is such a skill and that it should be learned and improved? And on the other side, why should or would a practitioner’s work be determined by—or limited to—the prompting skills of their clients/students?

I might add that in the service industry I kind-of expect good service. When I go to a good hair saloon I expect to be able to say “Do whatever you think will suit me best” and walk out with a great haircut, tailor-made. I also expect to be allowed to make a rather complex, lengthy and unusual request and then too, walk out with a great haircut, tailor-made.

On the other hand, when we go to see a doctor we better make real sure and double check and triple check, and think hard about our request, and then check again if what we said is clear and that the doctor understood correctly, accounting to the fact that doctors are officially the second most common leading cause of death (in the US). Luckily- Feldenkrais practitioners are no doctors, they are private education teachers. And I would expect a good teacher to be even more percipient, discerning and accommodating than a hairdresser, wouldn’t you?

Two quotes. First quote by Eric Franklin, from his book Dynamic alignment through imagery:

Your head floats up and your body dangles easily from your head. If you prefer to use a metaphor, you can think of your head as a balloon and your body as the string hanging down from it.

If you imagine this vividly enough, if you really feel it, sense it, it might (quite immediately) free your neck from some tension. You might sit up or stand up easier, maybe you stand taller with more ease. You might walk easier, breath easier. Do you? Don’t you?

Second quote by Julian Jaynes, from his book The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind:

It is by metaphor that language grows. The common reply to the question “what is it?” is, when the reply is difficult or the experience unique, “well, it is like —.”

Is it by metaphor that movement repertoire grows? Or is it by experimentation with movements, such as play? Or by introducing movement context? Or by introducing auxiliary movements? Or by breaking down a larger movement into smaller parts and practicing the smaller parts, replace broken parts with better ones, and then putting everything together again? Like cleaning the engine of a motorbike?

Example: Say you want to improve the turning the head, in standing. You would then observe that movement in a different position, for example while lying on the back instead of in standing. Or you add arm and shoulder movements to it. Or you restrict the head from moving and turn the body instead. In this way you would turn, for example, your shoulder girdle or your pelvis instead of your head. Or you would turn only your eyes instead of your head, and free your brain from some of that compulsory relationship between your eyes and your head (if any), thus freeing up your head movements, and possibly improving your breathing as well.

How do we incrementally and permanently improve movement quality? How do we enlarge movement repertoire? How is it that we replace bad movement habits with even worse ones? How would we replace them with better ones instead?

And why would we enlarge our movement repertoire? Obviously, after a stroke, when the movement repertoire has shrunken down considerably and many movements have to be learned again, almost as if from scratch. Or after an accident. Or after decades of sedentary lifestyle when we suddenly discover that we are stiff like a stick and can’t even sit down on the floor anymore. Improving one’s movement repertoire might also be something that might interest top performers, such as athletes or musicians. Or parents who would like their children to keep improving, instead of them becoming movement illiterate cellphone zombies.

I might argue that the way to improve one’s movement repertoire is through movement, as I described above. Imagery might be nice as well, so might be metaphors, as long as we come up with the images ourselves, I would imagine. Our own images, created from within, for our own movements, to act in this world.

A few days ago I listened to an interview between Dwarkesh Patel and Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI Chief Scientist, about ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence. The following snippet got me thinking:

DP: Robotics. Was it the right step for OpenAI to leave robotics behind? 

IS: Yeah, it was. Back then it really wasn’t possible to continue working in robotics because there was so little data. There was no path to data on robotics. You really need to build many thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of robots, and somehow collect data from them and find a gradual path where the robots are doing something slightly more useful. 

You could imagine it’s this gradual path of improvement, where you build more robots, they do more things, you collect more data, and so on. You need to be really willing to solve all the physical and logistical problems of dealing with them. It’s not the same as software at all.  Link: youtu.be/Yf1o0TQzry8?t=771

I was thinking, “Right. If you screw some pieces of metal together, add some DC motors and an electronic brain, there’s not much to learn of it. Where should the data come from?”

On the other hand, take any organic animal, for example a human. Take our unique, first-person perspective. Our bodies have been going through millions of years of evolution; and from a phylogenetic perspective through billions of individuals lives and trillions and trillions of experiences and stories. We have been diversifying, branching and pruning. Just like all organic beings on this planet we have been pretty busy. The results of these millions of years of development are right there, at our fingertips, literally. I could touch my pointer finger to my nose, and go, “Oh, that’s my nose. It’s quite pointed I have to say.” I could look at a cat and tell her, “You’re so fine, but your nose is much smaller than mine.” And the cat would be quite bored of my tittle-tattle and turn her cute little head away.

Our bodies, which resulted from millions of years of data processing, are right there, at our disposal for learning. When we move a hand, an arm, the head, when we do something useful, or even when we’re just fooling around, it can be a rich experience. But whatever we make of it, it takes a well functioning brain to perform any movement well, and to perceive it well as well. We can spend thousands of hours to learn ourselves and still, who can’t improve further in playing the piano, or in singing, or in cooking? Or even in chewing without biting one’s cheek once in a while. There’s no limit to learning and improvement and failure, it’s our nature.

And then society! Oh so much to learn. How we interact with others, how we learn to become part of a community with our work, but also in thinking, believing, in speaking the same language with the same accent. There’s so much to do, to experience in play, in work, in sink or swim, in life or death; there’s so much data generated.

And lastly, our self-directed learning. It’s our dignity, our starting point of new adventures, our lever, saviour and maybe even our downfall.

I just listed three aspects of learning, or data processing, or token generation, if we would call it that. Which reminds me of the very beginning of Moshé Feldenkrais’s 1972 book Awareness Through Movement. It goes like this:

We act in accordance with our self-image. This self-image—which, in turn, governs our every act—is conditioned in varying degree by three factors: heritage, education, and self-education.

In this first paragraph Moshé Feldenkrais also mentions three things that define and shape who we are and how we do things: heritage, education and self-education. For ChatGPT those three things probably would be the model, the pre-training, and fine-tuning.

It certainly could be a worthwhile exercise to re-read Moshé Feldenkrais’s book from this angle, a fresh look at how and why we learn, and what makes us feel that we’re doing something slightly more useful.

I found an interesting comment by Ira Feinstein, Managing Director at Feldenkrais Access, in the blog post / interview / course advertisement titled “Walking Patterns & Your Knees” on the website of Feldenkrais Access, from February 16, 2023:

“I read all of Moshe’s books in my late twenties, but I could only read a page or two at a time without falling asleep. I don’t think I was ready for the information and needed to take it piecemeal.”

I found this a refreshingly honest sharing by Ira Feinstein, and quite similar to my own story:

In Austria, in middle school, we had to read and discuss classic German literature, starting around the age of 12. Really old and hard to make-sense-of texts from bards long gone, but also smooth flowing novels from Hermann Hesse, Goethe, Schiller, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig and the likes. By the age of 17 I was reading Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Wilhelm Reich, Carl Jung, CW Leadbeater, Rudolf Steiner and books like Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter for pleasure.

Btw, I never read Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, but at that time I somewhat enjoyed reading Siddharta, a glimpse into the world of mainstream thinking. Most fascinating, however, I found Hesse’s Beneath the Wheel (The Prodigy), a terrible coming-of-age story that severely criticises academic institutions. I probably should have not followed that up with Ödön von Horváth’s “Jugend ohne Gott”, The Age of the Fish for the English Edition. It’s too much for a teenager.

After having gotten tired of literature, religion and the critique thereof, I learned that it was William Shockley who invented the bipolar junction transistor, the basis for modern microchips. I read that the crucial idea came upon him while commuting to work on a ferry boat in New York. I found this fascinating. I didn’t know anything about electronics at that time and decided to go study the craft and mathematics involved at the University of Applied Sciences of Vienna.

I, too, was already 30 years old when I first stumbled upon the work of Moshé Feldenkrais, by accident. And I agree with Ira Feinstein, I found most of Moshé Feldenkrais’s books difficult to read. Some of them boring and long winded, some of them hard to grasp, and some of them hopelessly outdated in the year 2004.

The book I liked most was, “Awareness Through Movement.“ The first part made a lot of sense to me. It felt like an honest sharing, with a sense of practicality. However, the second part, the one with the actual exercises, I couldn’t read much sense into it, let alone try what was suggested. Take this dense blob of a paragraph for example:

“In this lesson you will learn to recognize some of the fundamental properties of the control mechanisms of the voluntary muscles. You will find that about thirty slow, light, and short movements are sufficient to change the fundamental tonus of the muscles, that is, the state of their contraction before their activation by the will. Once the change of tonus is effected, it will spread to the entire half of the body containing the part originally worked on. An action becomes easy to perform and the movement becomes light when the huge muscles of the center of the body do the bulk of the work and the limbs only direct the bones to the destination of the effort.” From the book Awareness Through Movement, Moshé Feldenkrais, Lesson 3, Some Fundamental Properties of Movement

Maybe that’s the kind of verbiage that made Ira Feinstein feel sleepy, too. I myself I just couldn’t dig into it. I had a foot-tall pile of books by and about Feldenkrais in my study but couldn’t work my way through it. It felt even more inaccessible than Analog signal processing back at University. So in order to get the task done I did some research, found out who could help me understand, and then out of necessity and lack of better options I signed up for a 4-year Feldenkrais training—to get access to the original materials and be walked through the material by people who have been studying this stuff for decades already.

At first it felt like a defeat. Me, a snowboarder and skateboarder, a talented mover, needs to take slow movement classes in a retirement home just to understand a bunch of books? In Germany? I went through a whole inner process to get myself to sign-up. Furthermore, due to the high price of the training and the large time investment there was a lot to arrange. Just to understand a bunch of books. Ridiculous. But right upon entering the training venue and seeing the way and quality in which students moved, in which the trainer at the time (Paul Newton) was teaching, in a split second everything in me was consolidated: I made the right choice, I knew I was in the right place.

So this was my beginning of movement-based learning. A whole new category to dive into, again. It was like starting to study German literature or Telecommunication technology all over again. And after a couple of years of studying— my reading, commenting and criticising of Moshé Feldenkrais’s books became easy. In fact, I even started to teach in this field, and to write about my findings and my own understanding.

I think the two decades of studying and working with Feldenkrais’s and related teachings, with others and on my own, did not only broadened my horizon, but it practically changed me. A lot. Not only in the way I moved, but almost in an anthropological kind of sense: it improved the way I speak, see and interact with others, the way I interact with the environment, the way I see the world, the things I do and the way I do things … it improved me and gave me a basis for my own work, my own teachings, my own creating. It gave me a means to connect with other people, to give and to receive, to heal and to grow, together.

Feldenkrais spoke a lot about the inferiority complex and how to make ourselves feel safe. Which reminds me of Alfred Adler, who wrote that contributing to others is how individuals feel a sense of worth and belonging in the family and society. And Viktor Frankl, who said that striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in humans, a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle. Oh, and here we are again, Freud and Dostoyevsky, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, the whole bunch, the great loom, all in the rolling of a leg, in turning the head a bit to one side and back to the center, and then the shoulder girdle, and the eyes, and what does the hip do? And then take a short rest, and see how it feels.

When I first started to use the Internet—around the year 1995—blogging was about sharing personal experiences, insights, discoveries. A blog was a collection of such sharing. It was lively, passionate, personal. It was like exploring unchartered land. Reading as well as writing blogs meant stepping into the unknown, it was wild, exciting, wonderful.

Fast forward to 2023, and I have the impression that a whole lot of blogs should be renamed to “sales pitch”, and most newsletters to “sales letters.” In my mind a “mailing list” is synonymous with “a list of people to advertise to.” Nothing wrong with that, but If they would title their writings to what they truly were then the world would be a better place.

Am I the only one who is tired of all the mislabeling? My soul cannot take it no more. It’s getting too much. And why are so many people ok with that? This kind of indifference makes me feel disconnected from society, it makes me feel like I’m living on an alien planet amongst an alien species. Am I the only human who longs for truth, sincerity, who longs to live in a world where we can expect everyone to be honest and take our fellow humans by their word?

So here you have it. My latest musings from my blog. It’s not a sales pitch.

I remember a cold winter day in January 2018. It was late afternoon and an icy wind was sweeping through the city of Vienna, Austria. I stepped into one of Vienna’s famous coffee shops in the city center.

At that time I was already 44 years old but once again enrolled at the University of Vienna. I already had a university degree in telecommunication and biomedical engineering, I already had my own business, and I couldn’t care less about another degree. I didn’t have any of the anxiety and submissiveness of my very young, fellow students. This time I was enrolled to study Chinese language, culture, modern history and literature. It was my 3rd semester and my 10th year of studying Chinese language. This journey started in the year 2008, in Shanghai, China, where I was enrolled in the prestigious Jiaotong University as a foreign student to study Chinese language as a foreigner.

Winter 2018. 10 years of studying and I was still unable to follow a simple conversation. Unable to speak, unable to read, and my handwriting was still that of a 3-year old.

Yet, that cold winter day—like most days—I ordered a hot green tea matcha almond milk latte, found a place to sit, and started to write my Chinese characters.

Now it’s 5 years later. It’s the year 2023 and I’m still unable to listen, speak and write in Chinese language. I’m still studying, but on my own; with Youtube, Mandarin Corner, and ChatGPT. I gave up on studying with Chinese language teachers, of which I had dozens. And as things stand, it still seems unlikely that l’ll be able to teach in Chinese language without a translator any time soon. It seems to be a distant dream for me to connect with my Chinese speaking students directly, in their own language. But I have this dream, and to paraphrase Rich Piana: one day I might. There’s something about pursuing this dream, about sitting down to read, listen and write that makes me calm, collected and happy.

What is a dream? 梦想是什么？梦想就是一种让你感到坚持，就是幸福的东西。A dream is something that makes us happy when we strive to achieve it.

On Monday evening I was hit by a motorbike. I headed out on my own small motorbike to pick up my friend after work. We were about the turn into the parking lot of a popular rooftop Bar-Restaurant at the other side of the street, here in Ho Chi Minh City, South of Vietnam, when we were hit by an accelerating motorbike. The other driver came from the other side of the road, went from parking to full throttle, didn’t look out, crashed into my left side.

It’s bewildering how time slows down in such moments. My first reaction was to let go of my motorbike’s handle bar, drop the motorbike and jump off to safe myself. But then something inside of me said, hold it, your friend is sitting in the back, you can’t drop the motorbike. You need to hold it stable.

What a strange thing, sacrificing oneself for the safety of someone else. No regrets, no second thoughts, but indeed very strange to feel this primal connection to the monkey brain so clearly.

I think my sacrifice was very worth it though. My friend said if I had not pulled up and recovered my motorbike from falling, then it would have crushed her lower leg, very likely would have broken it. Also, she would have fallen onto the street. She said we were very lucky because the street was very busy with hundreds of other motorbikes and lorries and cars, but in the very moment of the crash there was no other vehicles passing by. My Vietnamese friend, my neighbour, who has been in an almost deadly motorbike accident merely 5 years ago, where a passing truck almost rolled over her head, missing her head only because she lifted it away in the very last second.

My friend, her legs were so shaky she could hardly stand or walk over to the side-walk, and was awake for most of the night, but she was unharmed, not a scratch. I asked the other driver to move back to the parking on the other side of the street and discuss this over, exchange contacts. That’s where I collapsed. During the accident I didn’t fall and I didn’t hit my head, but the overall hard impact of the motorbike crash must have rattled something inside of me. The world went blurry like the backdrop of a photograph. Everything became muffled, moved into a distance. My legs gave in. I could feel my friend and the other driver trying to hold me up. The color profile switched to a warm cozy brown and red. I felt warm and save. I was thinking, “Is this the end? Is it finally over? It feels nice. It’s so peaceful.”

X-ray showed no bones were broken. My left arm felt painful but there was no visible damage. I felt a big relief. Now, almost a week after the accident the bruises are crusted over, the pain in my left foot, left lower arm, left wrist and left side of my hip is largely gone. My motorbike is fixed as well. And there might be a chance that I get reimbursed for my expenses, by the other driver.

I didn’t tell my brother or my mom any of this. No need to worry them, it all ended well. The reason why I write this blog post is this:

In the night after the accident there’s something strange I’ve noticed in my left arm: when I tried to turn it there was some clicking noise. Some crackling, as if the bones were not connected properly. During the night I worried that my radius bone might be broken, which luckily turned out not to be the case as confirmed by the doctor. But later that day I noticed the same phenomenon in my right shoulder, and then in both feet and both knees. A crackling, a clicking, when I moved. It was as if the tensioning network of my tendons and muscles got loose. As if the strings that held my bones and joints together were loose. I felt my joints became loose like the legs of my IKEA chairs. I took a long rest.

Another day later the clicking of my joints and bones was gone, apart from some tender spots everything was back to normal. The miracle of the human body. I’m not sure what to make of it, but it seems like the tensioning of my bio-tensegrity network that holds my skeleton in place is not genetic and not mechanically fixed, but entirely done and upheld dynamically. Done either by the brain, or by some chemicals or hormones or adrenalin or something.

Interesting. For the duration of one day I had the impression that the human body is just a bag of bones that are held together by soft tissue, best practice and good will. Nothing is set in stone.