STUDY WITH ALFONS

A blog post about teaching. An exercise to relief tension in your neck and chest, a moment to improve your coordination, to fine-tune your motor-control, to raise your embodied awareness. A liberating movement meditation, if you will, in which you learn, observe, feel comfortable and are at peace.

To do so, consider the following movement: a little bit of sliding of the head to the left and back again. In the following starting position, in the style of a Somatics (or Feldenkrais) class:

Describe the starting position

• You’re lying on your belly,
• with one hand on top of the other.
• Your head is resting on your hands
• and your head is turned to the left.

Instruct the movement:

• Slide your head to the left,
• and back again.

Point out which movement options you want to exclude, and what to do instead:

• Don’t slide your arms to the left, slide your head.
• The hands stay where they are, it’s your head that’s moving.
• Don’t roll your head, don’t put your forehead on your hands. Keep your head turned to the left, keep your nose pointing to the left.

Give alternative instructions for the same movement:

• Your nose is moving closer to your left elbow,
• and further away again.

Describe the quality of how to move:

• Lift your head only a little bit, just enough to allow it to slide.
• Don’t effort yourself, make light movements.
• Move slowly, so that you can observe the smallest details and connections.
• Don’t clench your jaw and don’t hold your breath while you’re moving.

Suggestions: Is it safe, is it comfortable?

• Take rests in between each movement.
• After each movement check in and observe: did you effort? Was there any unintended stressor that you don’t need, that you can let go of?

Tactile cues, describe how the movement connects to other areas of the body:

• You might notice that your shoulders want to move, rotate, lift, and lower. Allow that to happen.
• Allow your chest to side-bend, rotate, twist, naturally.
• You might even observe your pelvis rolling, or your legs moving.

Follow up movements to turn this into a stronger lesson might be for differentiation, refinement or amplification, for example: move the head together with the hands, or arrest the head and only move the hands/elbows/arms, or do the same with the chest and pelvis in relation to the head and arms.

However, I mainly wrote this blog post for the last part, the tactile cues. It seems like this exercise is a movement of the head, therefore, all the movement might be performed with the neck, while buttressing and stiffening the chest. In fact, the breathing might be obstructed, the jaw clenched… all in order to move the head.

How surprising it will be to discover that in this particular situation, in this exercise setup, the chest can let go, and the shoulders might move! The hands stay in place, but the shoulders roll, rotate, twist, lift and lower; the shoulder-blades slide. Would you have discovered that on your own? Isn’t such a little tactile remark by the teacher, such a clue, just wonderful? Almost like a revelation?

It’s like stepping outside into the green after months (or years, decades maybe) of lockdown. Which might be quite emotional, especially if you didn’t even know why your chest was held arrested in such a stiff fashion, and you could have just moved and breathed freely instead. Liberation at last. Tears might roll!

In my last post I started to look into the nitty gritty of what types of instructions are given in Somatics classes (or Feldenkrais-related classes, in this regard.)

It feels like I’ve stumbled upon a rich wellspring of insights on this topic, and I’m excited to continue exploring, and delve deeper into it. But one step at a time. So far I have identified the following types of instructions for getting students into a posture, with titles and examples. I recount:

Step-by-Step: Instruct how to get into the posture

• “Please sit on the floor.”
• “Bend your knees and place your left foot behind you, and your right foot in front of you.”
• “Place your left hand on top of your head.”
• “With your right hand lean on the floor.”

Descriptive: Describe the posture

• “Your left hand is on the top of your head.”
• “You are leaning on your right hand with a straight elbow.”

Corrective: Point out unintended configurations and say what to do instead

• “Your left hand is not behind your head, but on top of your head.”
• “Don’t point your left elbow forward, but sideways.”
• “You don’t sit on your left leg, but on your pelvis.”

In a real class these type of instructions—step-by-step, descriptive, corrective—would probably not always be presented in such clear cut versions, but may be mixed up or broken down.

Exercise: How would you instruct someone to get into the position shown in this picture?

In a real class you would probably start somewhere, “Please sit on the floor,” and then see what is being done and talk as much as needed for your student to arrive in this position—which might be accomplished in a single, short sentence, or might take a lot more talking (and some problem solving, and maybe even some negotiating.)

Why this posture?

Another important question for the teacher is, “Why?” Why start in this posture? What’s the next movement and its purpose? What’s the theme? Only by knowing what we want to explore can the teacher know what to look out for in the starting posture. What details in the posture are conductive to the lesson, that means helpful for the student, and what will be obstructive?

Suggestions: Is it safe, is it comfortable?

Does your student seem to feel comfortable and confident? In Somatics (and Feldenkrais-inspired) classes comfort is a prerequisite for learning. Just like safety is a prerequisite for working out in the gym.

If a student seems to be in pain, or does not feel comfortable, we as teachers should ask. “What is missing?” Do we need to offer alternatives, or more detailed, or better instructions? For example, “lean on your fist if it hurts to bend your wrist.” Or, “there’s blankets available, if you feel cold.”

All in all, guiding a student into a posture is a conversation that goes back and forth between the teacher and student, and eventually spoken instructions will turn into observable gestures, postures and movement. Almost magic, if you ask me.

So I went ahead to identify the types of instructions we use in Somatics classes, especially in the style that’s inspired by Moshé Feldenkrais, a pioneer of somatic education.

Each type of instruction has its reason to be there, its story, its rules, scope and limits, its pedagogical, bio-mechanical and neuro-scientific reasoning. The occurrence and frequency of the types is generally not fixed, but happen in response to the class, like in a lively conversation.

A lot could be said and written about each type of instruction. Maybe this could be worthwhile for a book; or for designing a study course for scholars of somatic education.

Here’s the list I’ve made. Types of instructions are in bold print, followed by one or more sentences as they could occur in a class, which typically might be called “lesson”:

Instruct how to move into the starting position, step by step

• “Please sit on the floor.”
• “Bend your left leg backward and bend your right leg closer to yourself.”
• “With your right hand lean on the floor.”
• “Place your left hand on your head.”

Describe how the position should look like

• “Your left hand is on the top of your head.”
• “You are leaning on your right hand with a straight elbow.”

Point out unintended positions and how they should be done instead

• “Your left hand is not behind your head, but on top of it.”
• “Your left elbow is not pointing forward in the same direction as your nose, but to the left, as is your left ear.”
• “You are properly leaning on your right hand, and not just pointing it down to touch the floor lightly with your fingertips.”

Instruct the movement

• “Move your head right and left.”

Give alternative instructions for the same movement

• “Bring your right ear closer toward your right shoulder and then your left ear closer toward your left shoulder.”

Point out which movement options you want to exclude, and what to do instead

• “Don’t turn your head, but bend it right and left.”
• “Don’t turn your upper body, but pay attention so that you bend exactly right and left.”

If there’s too many possibilities for students to go into unintended or irrelevant movements you might want to use clearer, more descriptive (for example “your left earlobe toward the tip of your left shoulder”), less ambiguous instructions, or introduce stronger constraints*, instead of loosing your cool.

(*) “constraints” is a technical term of somatic education. It refers to limitations introduced via postural choices, such as lying on the back, side-sitting, leaning on one hand etc, to guide movements in a particular direction. In somatic education, constraints are often used to help students focus their attention and movements more effectively.

Describe the quality of how to move

• “Do very light movements.”
• “Do not rush.”
• “Don’t push yourself.”
• “Don’t try to do a lot.”
• “Do the movements clearly.”

Describe how the movement connects to other areas of the body, encourage students to observe and acknowledge that

• “Notice that when you bend your head to the left, your left buttock lifts further away from the floor. Let it do that.”
• “Notice that when you bend your head to the left, the left side of your chest shortens and the right side lengthens. The ribs on the left side move closer to each other, and the ribs on the right side spread further apart.”
• “Allow your left buttock to lift when you bend your head to the left, and to return down toward the floor when you bend your head to the right.”

Give tactile cues and affirmations that could help with moving and understanding

• “Sense and observe the movements of your left buttock in relation to the floor.”
• “All of your spine will bend and help your movements.”
• “Slowly, slowly, your pelvis will move more, and more.”

Give explanations why something might be happening

• “Your chest and spine are becoming more supple because you move as a whole, in all areas, gently and slowly.”
• “Your left buttock will move up and down more, with ever more lightness and freedom, because your whole chest and spine, including your neck, are becoming more supple.”

Keep quiet to allow students time to explore and discover

• “…”

Notify students about the end of this section of the lesson and tell them in which position you prefer them to rest

• “Leave this and rest on your back.”

As you might know, I like to have a close look at the language used for instructing and describing movement. For example, the beginning of “AY1 Bending the head to the side when sitting” by Moshé Feldenkrais. I don’t have access to the original in Hebrew, but the English translation starts like this:

Please sit up.

Now that’s pretty ambiguous. But I assume that teacher Moshé Feldenkrais was teaching in an unfurnished room, like a Yoga room, where people were sitting or lying on the floor, or on their blankets and mats, and were waiting for the lesson to start. Maybe the following would be more specific:

➨ Please sit on the floor.

The lesson then starts like this:

Bend your left leg backward and bend your right leg closer to yourself.

Now, if you look at my picture (at the end of this post) or if you have studied enough of Moshé Feldenkrais’s lessons you know what this means. However, if this is your first lesson, it might not be that evident. This is the beginning of the theme of the lesson, and part of an instruction to get students to assume a certain body position. This position will then be used as the starting position for a movement exploration.

For a beginner, especially if there’s no picture or other students to copy from, the given instruction is quite ambiguous. We can’t know for sure where Moshé Feldenkrais is going with this, yet. We will need to listen for more. Does he mean to bend the left leg backward like in a pigeon pose, with the left leg fully extended backward? Or does he mean to bend the left leg and left knee, like in a side-sitting pose?

Therefore, I tried to rewrite the instruction to be more specific:

➨ Bend your left knee and place it on the floor to the left, with your left foot to the left and behind you. Bring your right foot close in front of your pelvis with your right heel close to your left hip joint and your right knee resting on the floor out to the right.

Now that sounds sufficiently specific to me. However, it’s quite long. Is that really necessary? How could I shorten it again? Isn’t there a name for this pose in English? Fortunately there is, it’s called side-sitting. I re-phrase:

➨ Sit in side-sitting with your left leg to the left, and your right foot in front of your pelvis.

This sounds better. I feel my re-writing is accomplished from a writer’s perspective, but I don’t feel happy from a teacher’s perspective. Calling it “side-sitting” might take away from the openness, and might put students on railroad tracks (of pre-conceived images and already deep grooved movement habits), rather than invite them to venture into the wide open; and thus calling it “side-sitting” might compromise the entire lesson.

So you see, this whole business of writing and choosing words and putting them in their right place seems to be all fragile, convoluted and difficult. Contrariwise, in a live class, in speaking to students who readily listen, move, learn, make mistakes and improvements… when teachers and students can see each other the speaking seems to be easy and light, swift, and direct.

Yet, in sum total the scrutinising look in writing seems to be beneficial. Moshé Feldenkrais himself started out in writing, as evidenced by his early books on Judo and self-defense, which he wrote early in his career. He formed his own language model, his base, in writing—before he started to teach regular classes in speaking. I think this in itself is a remarkable—and significant—discovery. And even though discussing movement instructions in writing seems to be a bit tedious, it indeed is making the speaking so much better.

Psycholinguist Frank Smith wrote in Understanding Reading (2004):

• The statements the man ate the fish and the fish ate the man comprise exactly the same words, yet they have quite different meanings.
• A Maltese cross is not the same as a cross Maltese,
• nor is a Venetian blind the same as a blind Venetian.

These (slightly) amusing examples illustrate the significance of word order. Putting words in order isn’t just about grammar; it’s crucial to convey your intended meaning, wouldn’t you agree? Not agree you would?

I recall another quote from Frank Smith, from his book Landmarks in Literacy (1995): “Dogs chase cats cannot replace cats are chased by dogs in any meaningful context. The first is a statement about dogs and the second about cats.”

But what about your body and breath? Is the difference between them as easy to observe as the difference between cats and dogs? The following instruction seems plenty ambiguous to me and could be interpreted in various ways:

(a) Lift your head and breathe in

Does this mean to lift the head and breathe in afterwards? Or should we breathe in while lifting the head, as in coordinating these two actions? What if we run out of leeway in lifting the head, and there’s still plenty of in-breath available? Should we stop the breathing short? And how should we deal with the disturbed breathing? Am I overthinking this? What are we supposed to do, exactly?

On the other hand, consider this instruction:

(b) On an inhalation lift your head

While the first example (a) might imply to breathe on purpose, the second example (b) suggests to wait for an inhalation to happen and then to lift the head together with the breath-in.

In my previous blog post I’ve used the image of a surfer waiting for a wave. The wave will come on its own, there’s nothing the surfer could or must do for the wave to arrive. He just need to be ready at the moment he starts to float onto the wave, in order to catch it.

If you like, the next time you’re resting on your belly, play with this idea of lifting your head, and wait for the next inhalation to happen. How does it feel like to let a breath deliberately go by, and how does it feel like to catch a breath and lift your head, to ride your breath like a surfer rides a wave? And how is that different to deliberately force a breath to happen when you lift your head? When would you lift your head anyways? Is it really completely arbitrary, that specific moment when you start lifting your head? See what interesting things you will discover!

I was just finishing up my Patreon post for my latest video, Day 7: Move surprisingly lighter and easier, working on the summary of the third main movement, when I wrote “add breathing.” Here’s the links to the sources:

• https://youtu.be/ofG0FLXtmyA
• https://www.patreon.com/posts/lifting-head-in-98629124

Suddenly, I found it odd to write “add breathing.” I was thinking, “Aren’t we breathing all of the time?” Therefore, I changed it to “become conscious of your breathing.”

However, it still didn’t feel right. This seemed better: “shine a light on your breathing, as if shining a flashlight in the dark, to bring your breathing into conscious awareness.” Much better. Thus I wrote:

Breathe in, when you lift your head. Breathe out, when you lower your head.

No. Once again, no, it didn’t feel right. I felt that this didn’t chime with the image of highlighting, the image of becoming conscious. It sounded more like manipulating your breathing, or trying to force it to comply with a command or exercise instruction. This seemed better: we wait for the breathing to happen, we wait for a breath, like a surfer awaits the perfect wave:

The next time when you breathe in, lift your head, then lower your head when you breathe out.

or, to use a noun instead of a verb, maybe to stay closer to the image of the oncoming wave:

On the next inhalation lift your head, then lower your head on exhalation.

Perhaps it’s my interest in detail and language that’s responsible for why it takes me 2 to 6 hours to write a simple post. Is it worth it? I like to think that my patrons appreciate my dedication. After all, it’s their support that makes my writing and filming possible in the first place. So, without a doubt: Worth it! Definitely!