March 18, 2026 BY ALFONS, IN Disquisition and deliverance

What is our function in life?

Are engineers building humanoid robots in their own image? With box-shaped, stiff chests, excessive load concentrated in their lower backs, and an overemphasis on visual input, while sidelining sensorimotor perception?

Oh! Enough already with this sharp critique! Aren’t they building them to help, to understand, to fix things?

I’ll go find a question.

“What function can an organism reliably perform within a larger system?”

And I will say this:

Just like bees are pollinators, and mushrooms are decomposers, we can find another human that is stuck, or hurt, or has a need – and help them get on their feet and moving again.

In fact, we can do that for any animal, or plant, or thing, or task, or ecosystem. For anything really, it’s our thing.

March 7, 2026 BY ALFONS, IN Disquisition and deliverance

The joy of over-and-over-again

A while ago, a dear patron shared with me that he has returned to the lessons in my hip joint series on YouTube well over a hundred times.

In that same spirit, though on a much smaller scale, two days ago, @georgsgotwood4301 wrote:

been doing this four days in a row, doesn’t get boring, actually the opposite is true. I get a better feeling for the directions of movement through my body. Thanks, great stuff. Now i will go back to lifting heavy planks of wood from one place to the other.

I was thinking: Excellent! Most excellent strategy!  To stick with a lesson, to do it over and over again. Go deeper and deeper. Most excellent!

Students of classic Feldenkrais are usually presented with a new lesson every time they practice. This might seem like… listening to a new song every time we listen to a song, or picking up a new book every time we sit down to read a book. Small wonder many beginner students will complain: What’s the purpose of this? It’s confusing! What are the principles? There are too many lessons!

In the same spirit, but this time as a promise rather than a report, @raycaspio commented just yesterday:

Alfons – What sorcery is this?! Hips are more open. Throughout, I felt increased awareness and beautiful releases in my neck, upper back, mid-back, shoulders, lower jaw, and groin. My back began to feel wider and more rested on the floor. Excellent lesson I will return to often.

I love large, beautiful libraries, especially those housed in most magnificent architectural masterpieces. To marvel, browse, glance, taste, sample. To get a sense of what books are out there (and which topics are kept from ever appearing in the catalogue.) And eventually, to find a favourite book (or series) to return to again and again. Just as with a great painting, or piece of music, a good movement lesson holds enough detail and variation to entertain and reward us each time we move through it.

@anndyercervantes8352 commented just today:

Marvelous lesson! The variations are mind blowing. So much more integrated, so much more ease in my body. Thank you!

And to top off this blog post, like chocolate nibs on ice cream, two more (very recent) comments:

“Dear Alfons, what an amazing lesson! It gave me so much joy, pure and simple joy 😄🥳 What a discovery 🤩 Thanks a lot! ❤️” – @aleksandrasteczkowska31

“Thank you, Alfons, it is always a new world of walking after one of your somatic movement experiences!” – @OriginalArtOnCommission

All comments were on these lessons:

And also, holy smokes, did this blog post eat away on time:

March 5, 2026 BY ALFONS, IN Disquisition and deliverance

This month

A. For many days I’ve wanted to write a blog post. And now the plumber has to clear out the buildup in the sink trap – a chunky, irksome, rode-like bundle of what once was beautiful thoughts.

B. In the Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education, we go: movement experiment → observation → non-judgmental interpretation → suggested variations. However, most people seem to expect: problem → action → result → reward. I might need to adjust. Do I need to adjust?

C. In comes a teacher into the classroom… and starts to lay out random topics, of which some might be on the test. How many people live out their entire lives in a burned-in afterimage of those 10,000+ hours of schooling?

D. Someone wrote, “There’s more poetry written than ever, yet, nobody reads poetry anymore.” 500k views, 30k likes, 1,250 comments. Me thinks: THIS IS our modern poetry. Swipe up.

E. “But keep in mind that in the United States almost nobody who reads, writes, or does arithmetic gets much respect. We are a land of talkers; we pay talkers the most and admire talkers the most, following the public models of television and schoolteachers.” – John Taylor Gatto, Essay: The Psychopathic School, Book: Dumbing Us Down

F. Yet, I keep writing. When I should be talking. When should I be talking?

G. “And I say this to you tonight, let us not forget. There is hope!” – The Crystal Method, Song: Keep Hope Alive, Album: Keep Hope Alive

H. On my homepage I don’t have any user tracking. The skies are clear and I feel merry. But on Substack I can see that last month 2 out of 108 subscribers unsubscribed. Who abandoned me? I want to know. Unease keeps creeping into my thoughts.

I. I feel very optimistic about the horse in this Year of the Horse.

J. Thank you for reading. There’s nothing quite like walking into a clean kitchen in the morning.

February 20, 2026 BY ALFONS, IN Disquisition and deliverance

How to reason something out

I want to think about this here (that much I have figured out already):

What is the difference between movement learning and regular movement?

And so I was thinking: first I need to find out how to think about things, in this day and age.

You know, when I was a kid, I always had to walk from school back to our house. I was used to walk alone, which took anywhere from half an hour to several hours, and led me over poorly paved streets, passing by meadows, eerie houses and farmland, and through a good stretch of then beautiful forest, with a creek trickling down the mountain. In the first year of my walks there was even a few fish in that creek (I kept looking for them, but sadly, they seem to have disappeared forever.) At that time there was no mobile phones or iPod or such things. I had a bulky, plastic-y SONY Walkman, but this thing was notoriously out of battery, the headphones didn’t fit that great, and I had nothing to listen to anyways.

So I was walking six days a week, alone, submerged in nature, and my own thinking. That was a pretty good setup.

February 13, 2026 BY ALFONS, IN Poems

Something beautiful in the world

I got stopped by a little flower,
lying upside down on the sidewalk.
A Plumeria flower,
it must have fallen from a nearby tree.
I picked it up,
gently rolled its stem between my thumb and pointer finger,
observed the striking red and white lines that blend together like cookie dough. Delicate yet sturdy,
smooth to the touch.
“These are the petals,
this is the flower’s face,
this is nature’s brightest red.
I work too much,”
I said to myself.
“You are so beautiful,”
I whispered to the flower.

December 15, 2025 BY ALFONS, IN A new day

Learning the legs

I my last post I’ve written about a hip-joints lesson that I have in the planning. Turns out, I need more time to make it a great lesson.

Meanwhile, I felt it’s important to work more on the awareness of the legs, and thus to create a lesson for that.

My new lesson for the legs, done filming, now editing

What good are leg and hip-joint exercises, when we don’t have a clear, internal (in the nervous system) representation of the legs? Moshé Feldenkrais called this the “self image”. However, I’ve often heard students complain about that term. What does “self image” even mean? I always felt that no amount of talking would bring about a feeling of satisfaction for that term.

But now, because of AI training, we have great, very specific, technical terms. So let’s use them to our benefit. For example:

“Unsupervised representation learning”, is where a system discovers structures and objects (stable regularity in the data) on its own, without being given explicit labels. Nobody tells it, “this is a knee, this is a hand”, those structures emerge from the data itself.

“Reinforcement learning”, where a system is provided an environment to interact with, and gets feedback without explanation. It improves behavior based on rewards, or penalties. Nobody tells it the ideal trajectory of a movement, but they discover effective ways of acting through the consequences of its actions.

In fact, to me that doesn’t sound like technical terms, but pedagogical concepts.

For example, in Feldenkrais-inspired movement classes, the teacher provides a starting position (e.g. lying on the back), and has a goal in mind (e.g. rolling over one side to come to sitting), and then leads the students towards this goal by providing…

…well, what do we provide? It’s quite multi-layered, actually, and interactive. Movement instructions, constraints, clues, stories, pauses, and in live classes also hands-on help (tactile information)…

In fact, “interactive” once was a technical term, too. At first, screens only worked one way: from screen to recipient, with little possibility for us to influence what was shown. And then “interactive” came to mean that we could act back by pressing buttons, making choices, typing prompts, and thereby changing what appeared on the screen, or what music was being played.

In fact, before screens, EVERYTHING was interactive. The world was interactive, people were, theater was… I think standup comedy still is, to a certain point.

Of course, in my classes, the rewards and penalities of “reinforcement learning” are not coins and lashes. But the feeling we get from a movement well done (joy, relaxation, ease), or poorly done (effort, strain, fatigue).

Ok, so, a lesson on awareness of the legs. How we use the legs to balance, counter-balance, and how the legs integrate into the upper body. A highly relevant lesson, and also fun to do, me thinks.

I already filmed it. Now I’m editing. Hope to upload and share with you soon!

November 30, 2025 BY ALFONS, IN A new day

A burden or blessing

This morning, when I checked my Youtube channel, I saw this comment:

@suesingh4130, do you have just one lesson that addresses the whole body that i can do every morning due to time constraint, thank you

My first reaction, inside my head, was:

“Oh my, I’m afraid there is no such thing as a whole body address-it-all exercise.”

What we could do, though, is to

  1. identify our weak spots, and
  2. choose the most suitable exercises, and do at least
  3. the minimum amount of repetitions per week, to safeguard those spots in a preventive manner.

I was pretty happy with that in my head, even though, I reasoned, there might be weak spots that are not straightforward to safeguard. For example, a painful shoulder might not need specific shoulder exercises, but

  1. an exercise to keep the chest flexible,
  2. including the structures that support the shoulders, which in turn might require
  3. to strengthen the legs (adductors anyone?), and
  4. to make sure that forces from the feet travel up to the shoulders most efficiently.

Simple question, but the answer in my head became already quite elaborate, a huge graph growing.

And then, half an hour later, at 7:30am I was already sitting in my favourite coffee shop – which I am still, as of writing this. I was looking out of the large window, watching people jogging and sporting by. And while I was watching them moving about, their shoulders going back and forth in relation to their chests, pelvis, legs and feet, I was thinking:

“Oh my, every movement is a whole body exercise.”

Back to square one? No, my premise still stands:

  1. identify your weak spots,
  2. choose the most suitable exercises, and do at least
  3. the minimum amount of repetitions per week, to safeguard those spots in a preventive manner.

What is a suitable exercise, though? For some people it’s as straightforward as doing ten minutes of run-of-the-mill exercises per week…

…for others, including myself, there’s knowledge we only earn by living inside a body that keeps asking questions. Decades of trying things, going from brutal to gentle, from ruthless to compassionate, testing what helps and what doesn’t, always learning, never giving up.

If this is a burden or blessing, I leave that framing up to you. What we can say for certain, however, is this: It brings to light the deepest understanding of the body, of ourselves as a whole, and of one another, and it opens the clearest window into mind, soul, and heart. And ultimately: the world.