STUDY WITH ALFONS

Over the past two decades I’ve experimented with multiple ways of writing down movement sequences. My journey started with the popular stick-figures-with-arrows format, commenced to screenshots with annotations, to multi-column spreadsheet variants, to verbose transcript-like documents, to my wonderfully concise and visually appealing study cards. 

My two books „My Feldenkrais Book” and the „Getting Better Day By Day” workbook are both part and product of that journey.

What is my question? 

I think I need a couple more blog posts to find out what my question is. Finding the right question is just as important as finding the right answer. Sometimes a question is „on the tip of my tongue”, and won’t just roll off yet.

„What will you teach tonight?”
„Shoulder circles.”

Some movement sequences have been taught by so many teachers, so many times, and in so many ways, that they have a title people can immediately make sense of. Which people? All people? Is the lesson titled „Shoulder circles” really unambiguous?

„What will you eat tonight?”
„Italian.”

Fair enough.

„Little red riding hood. Let’s start the story in a different way: It was dark inside the wolf.” – Margaret Atwood for MasterClass

Me looking into how to teach reading in order to learn more about how to teach movement – and sensing, and feeling, and thinking – was a blissful ride so far. There’s plenty of quality research on how-to acquire literacy skills.

I can’t say the same about story writing. Googling „How to write down a story” is just as poor of an experience as reading the News Feed on Facebook, or stepping out of an airport in a developing country, or any other place where people scream for attention in order to sell you something. And not always to the best of your interest.

Most „resources” about story writing, the best ranking ones on Google that is, assume that you don’t have a story yet, and need to develop all its elements from scratch. But what if you already have your story, just too many questions on how to write it down? Sure, it’s possible to adapt to any kind instructions, but where are the proper resources, the research, the delightful teachings of seasoned essayists?

Out in the wild (children’s playground or shopping mall), one of the first rules my mom taught me after I’ve learned to walk was this: „Whenever you lose me you walk back to the last place we’ve seen each other, and you stay there and you wait for me.” To go back to the last place where I wasn’t lost and take it from there, how’s that for a story? One of the first storybooks my grandparents owned, and one of the first storybooks I’ve ever read, was a collection of stories by the brothers Grimm. Maybe I should track back all the way to the brothers Grimm and see what I can learn from them. Let me google that…

„The rise of Romanticism during the 18th century had revived interest in traditional folk stories, which to the Grimms and their colleagues represented a pure form of national literature and culture. The Brothers Grimm established a methodology for collecting and recording folk stories that became the basis for folklore studies. Between the first edition of 1812–1815 and the seventh (and final) edition of 1857, they revised their collection many times, so that it grew from 156 stories to more than 200” – Wikipedia, the Brothers Grimm

Holla die Waldfee! This path looks promising.

The day passed by like… like… like my youth. At times I thought there’s so much I can still do and time is plenty and life is long and looking back it was over in a blink of an eye.

I lost a lot of time in my morning session in the coffee shop. Instead of working I was reading up on the life of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, whose novella Carmella I read on the weekend. I even found a little bit of conspiracy surrounding the circumstances of his death in 1873, just one year after his Vampire novella got published. I felt perfectly entertained. Ah yes, and I watched a bit of Jeff Cavaliere’s AthleanX. I’m particularly interested in how he’s teaching one-on-one. I’m very impressed by his mastery of the English language and how he uses it to crush it on Youtube. Side by side to the genetically gifted players of The New York Mets Jeff looks totally like an underdog.

What else did I do?

I filmed AND edited a video. I call this a success. A more comprehensive version of the shoulder-and-hip-circles class was on my personal wish list for over a month now. However, after listening to two audio recordings of Moshé Feldenkrais today (both from ATM lessons for Elder Citizens) I reconsidered my big plans and went for a 10 minute version.

Now, with the help – and burden – of daily blogging I’m improving my English language skills a little bit myself as well. No big jumps or anything fancy, but enough to see my shortcomings, to see and hear things I previously didn’t. Decades of watching TV series and movies in English, as well as using English in my profession, didn’t seem to yield much progress beyond the level I was stuck at. Years and years was I scouting the shelves of libraries and book stores – and the Internet – to try to find out how to become better at English. Much to my disappointment I found very few books that I liked or trusted in being able to live up to their highly promising covers. I bought two dozen or so books on the topic, including an ESL preparation textbook the size of a cupboard, but most of these books were just dead collections of phrases, grammar, dead-boring exercise drills, and pages that could suck any reader’s life-force right out of their eyes. Surprisingly the ultimate answer to improving language skills was not in a particular book, but in the medium „book” itself: All it takes is to read more self-selected literature, preferably fiction, preferably read aloud. Forget about that speed-reading and flit-through-100-books-per-year nonsense.

It’s almost midnight already, I finally finished my blog post, but I’m still uploading my video to Youtube and working on the meta data (thumbnail, description, filling out the upload forms). Tomorrow I want to produce a transcript of today’s video, and then I want to improve it, re-write it. And then I want to film the same lesson again.

I enjoyed today’s filming quite a bit. And the thought of improving it, and with it my way of teaching, my language, my phrasing, my precision, it excites me. It sparks joy. Maybe it is a way of tidying up, and all the pleasures and possibilities that come with it. At the end of the day there is another day, and enough time.

Regardless of what millionaire motivational gurus shout out loudly: Writing a blog post every day is not perfectly normal. At least Sundays should be off.

„I was amazed to discover how many of my patients told me they could not feel whole areas of their bodies. Sometimes I’d ask them to close their eyes and tell me what I had put into their outstretched hands. Whether it was a car key, a quarter, or a can opener, they often could not even guess what they were holding—their sensory perceptions simply weren’t working.” – excerpt from: Bessel van der Kolk MD, „The Body Keeps the Score”

I was trying to verify this quote. How many people are like this? How many people ask others to close their eyes and put objects into their outstretched hands? And how many people can’t tell a bottle opener from a car key with closed eyes? How big is this problem?

As I see it, using all my senses, in many instances I wouldn’t be able to tell a bottle opener from a fridge magnet, considering in how many shapes, sizes, and colours these things come. Some time ago my mom brought home a pocket sized cat that on closer examination was a nail brush, and another time a pocket sized frog that was secretly a bottle opener. A friend of mine ordered a watch from China that from afar looked like an ordinary, rather clunky looking wrist watch; but its main feature wasn’t to show the time, it was a cigarette lighter.

Interesting question, nonetheless.

I didn’t find relevant studies yet, but I found a study called „Human perception of shape from touch”, Helmholtz Institut, Netherlands, Astrid M. L. Kappers, 2011, which yielded two interesting quotes:

„In actively dealing with objects, both the cuteanous sense (input from receptors in the skin) and the kinesthetic sense (input from receptors located in muscles, tendons, and joints) convey information.”

Technically speaking, I like the accurate description of what Feldenkrais people simply call skin-to-skin and skin-to-tissue and skin-to-bone contact (and any variation thereof). When we touch someone else we can do that to various degrees. For example when I use my hand to touch someone’s arm I can imagine touching their skin, to check the tension of their skin, if it’s soft or hard, dry or moist, hot or cold. Or I could feel deeper into their arm, to get a sense of their muscles and tissues, or I could feel even deeper into their arm, to feel their ulna and radial bone. All this with very little changes to where I put my hand and the amount of pressure I apply – just by changing what I think about and what I’m looking for.

Socially speaking, just by touching someone’s arm, there’s probably just as many, if not more, ways to touch another human. To say something and to receive something by doing so.

I found the second quote, which is concerned with touch or haptic perception as well, even more interesting:

„What the research on after-effects has shown convincingly is that the haptic perception of shape or curvature is not veridical. A flat surface will not always be perceived as flat and conversely, a curved surface might feel as flat. Moreover, this percept changes continuously during the day, as the perception of human subjects will be strongly influenced by everything they touch. A few seconds in contact with an object is already sufficient to cause a change in the perception of the next object. It is even the case that what a hand or finger feels is partially influenced by what the other hand or another finger has touched before.”

This states in clear terms what I knew from my own movement practice, as well as of my practice with working with people: touch is not infallible, not absolute truth, but is influenced by experience, calibration and by the things we touched before. The left hand might find an object to be flat, while the right hand might find the same object to be curved.

The study states that haptic perception research had just started, and a lot has  yet still to be discovered.

Thinking about it.

I have a sweet tooth. I like good pastry. I was born in Vienna, in the middle of Europe, and was always exposed to an abundance of good pastry, cakes, and delicate sweets.

The thing with sweet desserts is that some are almost too sweet to eat. And maybe you can relate to this: you take a bite of a sweet dessert, and find it quite sweet. But then you take a bite from an even sweeter dessert, or you take a sip from a cup of hot chocolate where you dumped way too much sugar into, and suddenly the first dessert, that was quite sweet, doesn’t taste that sweet anymore. Did you ever have such an experience?

Sensory after-effects are common to all senses. Not just touch. Not just vision.

In fact, I reckon that after-effects are common to probably everything we do. If we slouch a lot, the slouched shape will slowly creep into our bones and bend our skeleton. The same goes for excessive exercise: the constant, higher muscle tone will eventually bend the bones, re-shape the skeleton, and obstruct the work of the nervous system, lymphatic system, and whatever else is floating inside the bio-tensegrity network of muscles and tendons. I once met a healthcare practitioner who took this idea even further and said that in her experience constant, long-term high muscle tone can cause organs to swell up and eventually cause them to fail.

Take home point: knowing neutral, being able to feel neutral, and being able to find back to neutral are important concepts to work on and work with in lesson of Somatic Education. Fitness has stretching, we have „finding neutral”. Not only for muscles, but also for the state of the nervous system. And maybe it could be extended to more philosophical viewpoints too.

Today I collected two very different styles of teaching. One is from The Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education, and one from a Physical Therapist.

The Feldenkrais bit is from a live class by Gaby Yaron, one of Moshé Feldenkrais’ original Israeli students. „During the second and third years of the San Francisco Feldenkrais Professional Training Program, 1977 and 1978, Mia Segal and Gaby Yaron shared the teaching of Awareness Through Movement classes two evenings per week. These were exciting classes attended by over 100 people including many training program students and members of the general public.” Says the cover of the textbook.

The following text is my own re-telling of the lesson, and not verbatim from the textbook – as these transcripts were never made available for purchase to the general public and intended for Feldenkrais practitioners only. However, I think my re-telling still is a very close representation of how sentences and ideas were phrased in this series. This lesson from San Francisco Evening Classes, taught by Gabi Yaron, „On the side, turning with a straight arm in an arc” started like this:

„Lie on your back, extend the legs. Arms and hands next to the body. Scan your body, feel how your body is resting. Compare your right and left leg. Same length? How do the hip joints feel, the knees, the breathing, the pelvis on the right and left? Compare ribs, shoulder blades, shoulders. Slowly, roll your head left and right. How far is the left ear from the floor, how far the right ear?

Slowly roll onto your left side, bend the knees, put the right one on top of the left. Now extend both hands in front of you on the floor, right palm on left palm.

Slowly lift your right hand towards the ceiling, follow it with your eyes, allow your head to roll along. Move your hand further behind to the right, as far as it’s possible without effort. Allow your head to roll along and keep looking at your hand. Return the hand. Lift the right hand, look at it, move it behind to the right, see how far you can go. Do not lift your right knee. Feel how you are breathing. Continue, forwards and backwards with the hand. Now lift the hand towards the ceiling, stay there, look at it, lengthen and shorten the arm towards the ceiling. The shoulder-blade lifts when the hand moves upwards to the ceiling. And back again. The shoulder-blade moves along. It lifts from and lowers to the floor. Do not bend the elbow. Only the shoulder-blade lifts and lowers.

[..] Slowly roll onto your back, extend the legs, close the eyes, scan your body. How do the heels lie, the ankles, the knees, the hip joints, the pelvis, the chest, the shoulder-blades, the fact? Do you feel how you are breathing? How is the movement in the rib cage? Does it expand to all sides? Do the small ribs at the waist move? Is there more space in the mouth, in the throat? The nose lets more air flow in. Roll your head to the left and right, how does it roll?”

The class started with a so called „scan”, which was then followed by movement instructions, and ended in another „scan”. In this way students have time and opportunity to observe some of the after-effects of the lessons, and the differences it made.

The second text I’m quoting is from a class by Physical Therapist Jeff Cavaliere, which was recorded on video. The teachings couldn’t be more different, both in style and reach. Unlike the textbook of Gaby Yaron and Mia Segal, Jeff Cavaliere’s video is public and free-to-watch. It’s called „The Official Bench Press Check List”, and has been watched more than 8 million times. Here’s the first few paragraphs of the transcript:

„What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com. Today we’re going to talk about the bench press. Classic exercise. Now, it’s probably one that you’ve done a million times, but you’ve got to make sure you’re doing it right all the time because one bad rep on a bench press could lead to a lot of problems. A lot of times, in your shoulders. Sometimes in your elbow. Sometimes in your wrists. Sometimes in your chest, with a torn pec. You’ve got to make sure you’re doing it right.

So I’ve put together a checklist, and we’re going to go through it step by step and make it really, really simple so we’re making sure you nail each portion of this.

The first thing, when you load the bar, ideally you’re doing it in a cage here. Secondly, you’re putting a clip on the bar for safety.

However, I will point out – as someone that has learned this from experience if you’re training at home – you may not want to use the clips. Why? Because if you get stuck and there’s no one around to spot you, your only option to really get out from under that bar is to dump it and if the clips are on here, you’re not going to be able to do that. So again, not something I advise.I would rather you setup in a rack to do it.

Now, the next thing. This is stupid simple, but look over my shoulder here. What is the placement of the bar in the rack itself? Is it centrally located? Because a lot of times you’ll come up and find them kind of like that. All of a sudden it’s already throwing off your alignment and it’s really easy – again, stupid easy to do – but make sure you do it because it’s important.

[..] The next thing is the chest itself. You can’t bench with a flat chest. You’ve got to get your chest up. So what we do is, we pull our shoulder blades down and back, which again, creates a stable base that I can actually push off of. Same thing as I always talk about. You can’t fire a cannon from a canoe. You don’t want to try and jump from a canoe, or jump from sand. You want to jump from a hard surface. You want to be able to press from a firm surface on the other side. So we pull that together.”

As the title promises Jeff Cavaliere goes through a comprehensive list of things that are important to know for the fitness exercise „the bench press”, and ends in a call to action (purchase from and support the video creator).

At a first glance his teaching style seems to differ from the default Feldenkrais Method style in the following ways:

• easier to read / listen to
• brighter, highly energetic language
• short, expressive sentences mixed with longer, more difficult ones. As in engaging essay writing.
• great use of presentation techniques for multi-modal learning
• makes himself relatable, explains how he has also had to learn this and where he struggled with it
• easier to understand what he’s getting at
• works through an easy to follow list of important points
• mixes in phrases of encouragement

There’s one point very similar to Moshé Feldenkrais:

• Storytelling. Mixing-in personal stories to illustrate and to underline the importance of his points. And to give students a rest, time to integrate what they have just heard or learned. A moment to breath. In his teacher trainings in Amherst and San Francisco, Moshé Feldenkrais used storytelling extensively.

I see moving through extensive movement sequences a bit like Steven Krashen sees extended reading, for the purpose of improving reading and grammar: during extensive reading we might not notice that we are learning new vocabulary, expressions, or grammar. Nevertheless, learning and language acquisition is happening. We might notice only quite a while later when we are suddenly using expressions (or language) we didn’t even know we knew.

I haven’t watched enough of Jeff Cavaliere’s videos (yet) to see how his energetic style holds up in one-on-one sessions, when walking a person through a set of movements, step by step, while also responding to this person’s learning needs. For example if he had a client who cannot feel or control his shoulder movements, and has no concept (or self image) for the movements of his shoulder-blades. Or how Jeff Cavaliere would go about movements that are beyond stretching and strengthening. Teaching how to correctly hold a hammer to hit a nail might be different from teaching how to re-learn to play the violin after an accident that left one hand largely paralysed. Let’s see. I’m very much looking forward to learn more and to further explore his teaching style.

Ok, this is not a master thesis, just my daily blog post. Baby steps. Tomorrow I will try to re-write the Feldenkrais bit. Keep the core concepts of Feldenkrais, and freshen them up with some „Jeff Cavaliere.” To the best of my abilities, that is. This is an exploration how movement instructions can be combined with essay writing, no promises.

„Somatic Movement Education teaches you how to release, lengthen and completely relax habitually contracted muscles.” – quote from a high-end therapy website

Despite my love for reading good diction, I hardly make it through the first few paragraphs of most movement instructions.

My problem is „good diction.” Language that is well formed, instructions that can actually be followed, and lessons that are useful for my own life.

I couldn’t make it past of what I quoted at the beginning of today’s post. Whatever else there is to read on that website, I didn’t get to it. I was thrown off. I had to stop and think about it. And I already spent more than two hours writing and deleting and re-writing and deleting, and trying to finally write something I wouldn’t delete. I’m looking for the culprit, I simmer the can of tomato juice down to a thick broth. That wasn’t the right image. Let me try this: I do gold panning, I pan the gravel to find the nugget:

1. How to release, lengthen and completely relax habitually contracted muscles.
2. How to completely relax habitually contracted muscles.
3. How to completely relax muscles.

There’s just no way to completely relax muscles other than cutting them off from the nervous system, like in an amputation. And even then they will stiffen up and go into Rigor Mortis within a few hours.

In fact, just last week I saw a guy dozing off on a flattened sun lounger next to the pool. A muscular fellow, I guess: three times a week two hours at the gym. He was lying flat on his belly, head slightly turned to a side, a neck like my leg’s quadriceps in its best days. He looked like sleeping, but his legs and arms and fingers were held in a way that were clearly tense. If it was my client my first lesson would be to learn how to lie down without holding that much habitual tension. I wonder how these people sleep at night, with a residual muscle tone greater than what I can show for at the gym. But then, I’m not into workout programs, cocaine and hard stimulants, what do I know about these kind of problems.

I shift my thoughts to think about my friends who are into Yoga and positive thinking. I reason „completely relaxed” must be a figure of speech. A phrase that entails an intentional deviation from ordinary language use in order to produce a rhetorical effect. A compassionate, flowery image to help people wind down and restore, to find their inner goddess and guidance from higher self.

It keeps nagging.

I can’t sugarcoat it. I can’t give it a pass. Call me stubborn, but this will not go down my throat.

Nobody alive ever completely relaxed any of their muscles AND kept them on the body. Ok, I agree, nobody ever teleported, and nobody every competed in a game of Quidditch, and yet we can imagine it, talk about it, and work with it in the form of feelings, inner posture, and reveries. On Dec 14, 2020 a group of BASE jumpers recreated a game of Quidditch from Harry Potter and leaped off a 650ft mountain on broomsticks.

And even if there was a way to completely relax muscles, how could they be lengthened and relaxed at the same time? And released where? Into all that I AM? Released from all assignments?

I don’t know how to overcome that sentence. Maybe it’s not my muscles, maybe it’s my brain that needs to fully relax. Maybe I should head back to that website and register for their classes to find out how.