In his lectures Moshé Feldenkrais liked to build a good bit of mystery around his teachings.

And I have to admit that I’ve always liked the mystery. The promise of open-endedness, the lack of fixed limits. The idea that there’s room for creativity, discovery, and that there’s always more to find, to explore, and to harness.

I approached studying Moshé Feldenkrais’s work the way I did practice skateboarding. The way probably everyone who loves skateboarding does practice skateboarding. Rodney Mullen explains it very well.

The microscope did not kill the mystery of the things that are too small to see with the bare eye. Instead it enabled us to peek into the world on a different scale. Moshé Feldenkrais invented the microscope of movement. The movement sequences themselves, and the quality of conduct.

A scene from the Amherst recordings comes to mind:

Moshé Feldenkrais was teaching to a group of something like 200 students, walked them through one of his marvellous movement sequences, when he strolled by Anat Baniel. In that scene Anat was rocking back and forth on her belly like a soldier on duty, a gymnast doing a workout, and every few seconds she stopped and was looking at Moshé Feldenkrais with a face as if she would ask, “Am I doing it right? Do you approve of my performance?” And Moshé just kept standing there, staring at her, and said nothing to her. Then he walked on.

At first I could’t make sense of that scene either. It’s like watching a feature film but without the ending. This scene stuck in my head like a rawlplug in a wall.

In my own research, in my own classes, I experimented with both: intervening and not intervening. As I had the good fortune to follow the progress of some of my students for years I was able to find some answers to these questions: Is there something like self-calibration? Can there be improvement without direct outside intervention in the form of correction, scolding or encouragement? Should I intervene? And if, how much, when, and for how long?

I’ve read a lot of good about Ivermectin for human use. First and foremost it’s shown to kill parasites like nothing else. From bed bugs to head lice to lethal worms living inside the intestines or in the blood stream, or even under the skin. Ivermectin does what no other medicine can do: it can kill parasites with one single dose with little to no side-effects. To me this sounds like a high tech, modern and reasonable alternative to home-remedy parasite cleanses based on drinking concoctions of garlic and walnuts. Furthermore Ivermectin is reported to have anti-inflammatory, anti-viral and anti-cancer properties. What’s not to like? Can I buy it already?

As a first step I went to the nearby blood lab to have my blood tested for antibodies against Strongyloides. Strongyloides is a common parasite in South East Asia that can infect humans easily, but for people with a healthy immune system they can go undetected for decades. My results came back negative.

However, I still wanted to try this “miracle” drug. The pharmacy had a big warning label on their website, “AGAINST PARASITES ONLY.” I got 8 pills for 160k VND, less than 8 USD.

I decided for 3 rounds of 0.2mg/kg, which seemed to be the safe thing to do.

3 days later

I’m not sure if Ivermectin did anything for me. I felt neither positive nor negative effects. However, it was a fun experiment. For me it was not nearly as scary as big media makes it sound like, and not harmful at all.

UPDATE 3 months later

I repeated that experiment a few more times. One time I caught a bad cold from riding a motorbike for several hours alongside the Vietnamese coastline, while wearing a wet T-Shirt. I believe Ivermectin helped me to recover faster.

On one occasion the above brand was sold out, so I bought Ivermectin from another brand (Opelomin 6, from the same pharmacy, also for human use). With this other brand however I did not feel well. I felt nauseous and had heart palpations for several hours. It seems like there are different qualities of Ivermectin, or they mix other things into the tablets, in order to cause side effects when taking higher doses. When I switched back to the AT brand these side effects did not occur any longer.

I was looking at my Youtube Analytics and noticed that people are interested in how to sit down and get back up. Looking at my videos so far I think there’s a lot more to say. 

So I spend an hour or two on Tuesday afternoon thinking about that. Had a nice evening in a coffee shop in the city, a book café where they have large bookshelves filled with books. Went to bed too late, around 1am.

Wednesday morning I woke up early, at 3:50am, and started to verbalise a couple of movements, an intro, and a lesson-learned kind of thing. At 5am I thought there’s no sleep and got up. I went through some of the movements I was thinking about physically. Made some voice notes. Uploaded a longer voice note to the website otter.ai for transcription. Read some of the transcription. Went back to bed at 7am.

I woke up feeling dead at 9am. Went down to the pool and community area to get some sunshine on my skin and do some more mini squats and other movements I could do in standing upright. I walked around like a zombie for two hours. 

Finally I was able to film at 11am. I only wanted to do a 2 minutes long video, but filming took over an hour. Then I headed to Maison Marou, a coffee shop, and did some writing, the Ivermectin story from yesterday. 

At 2pm my friend called. Her husband, my friend as well, needed help with their kids and with moving furniture. 

I started editing the video at around 4pm. Still at my friends house. I was looking at a clear line of thought but discovered quite a few different movement concepts during editing. Good stuff, but too much for a short video. I saw the need to edit away a lot of things, while still keeping enough new ideas and useful concepts for the video to be great.

At 10:30pm I was still not finished. Two years earlier I would have kept going until I was finished. Maybe I’m wiser now, or just older. I didn’t want to ruin the entire next day in favour of a victory. I called it quits. Fell asleep shortly after midnight and woke up feeling a little bit better at 8am.

I was reflecting about the video and my editing. I was walking up and down in my living room, in my bedroom, in my bathroom, sitting down, getting up, sitting down, getting up. I was thinking about my friend yesterday who tried to do the squat down to sit but failed in his first attempt. In the last phase of his sitting-down he was falling backwards onto his seat, like everyone else.

I opened my Macbook and wrote a note for my next video:

Don’t panic when you sit down

With the mini squat you arrive at the front of your chair, not the back.

It’s when you target the back of the seat when problems arise: with balance, and needing assistance, and falling.

The same is true for getting up.

When you want to get up from the back of the chair that’s when problems arise: you need your hands, or you need to swing up, or run risk to fall back into the chair.

1. You come down to sit on the front of the chair
2. You come up from the front
3. You rest on the back

Therefore you need a method to slide back and forth on the chair, or to walk your pelvis on the chair. For this you need lessons in side-bending in sitting…
—
I need to make another video with this new insight. But first I need to finish my video from yesterday. And I need to write this blog post. 

Update: Here’s the link to the video

My friend said I need “staff”. I think I need “staff” and a studio. I don’t want to run a business via meetings in coffee shops. And I don’t want to bring “staff” into my small one bedroom apartment where I film in my small living room. Besides, I’ve always worked alone, I have no idea how to split my work. Anyways, first I need more viewers, more money, more regular income… when I want to invite someone to work for (or with) me I need to be able to promise stability.

It’s Thursday 10am and I’m at the coffee shop with a banana chocolate cookie, fresh orange juice, and a new blog post. First I’m going to finish yesterday’s video, then I’ll start the one I want to do today. I will think about the future some other day.

I noticed: these short videos with movement tricks are all just and good, but they don’t give me the same feeling as I get from lessons that are more true to the work of Moshé Feldenkrais. After a proper Feldenkrais-inspired lesson I feel updated, upgraded, smooth and content, I feel as if I’m on top of the world and as if being embodied (for the lack of a better word) is the best thing ever. I get a satisfying, fresh feeling from the movements of my latest Squat to sit video [link], and I can tell from my work experience that it can greatly help with the motion of sitting down and getting up, but I don’t get the feeling that got me into studying the works of Moshé Feldenkrais in the first place.

Friday. Again, I woke up at 3:50am. I planned a lesson that’s more in accordance with Chapter 1 of Moshé Feldenkrais’s book “Awareness Through Movement”, Chapter Title: What is good posture? “In moving from side to side a pendulum passes through the position of stability at maximum speed,” he wrote. Nice. Then I put the book aside and spent 2 hours planning my next video lesson and went back to bed at 6am.

However, I failed to film today. Hopefully I will succeed tomorrow.

“Oh wow! My daughter & I were just discussing the neck roll we do in the warm-up portion of our Monday evening QiGong class. I was suggesting that she try it this way because it’s less stressful to the neck! (I had a yoga teacher tell us many years ago not to perform the standard neck roll as it can strain the muscles.) Anyway it can feel a little weird to not follow exactly what the teacher is showing but it’s better than hurting one’s head!!” – Youtube comment by Helen Johnson, video link

My answer: I’ve heard that many of these traditional East Asian exercises were invented 5000 years ago… presumably by some monks living solitary lives in remote places up some mountains. In the meanwhile, in the West, we discovered Penicillin, Anatomy, Physiology, Functional Anatomy, Sports and Performance Training, Somatic Education, developed the Microchip and the Internet and we have millions of very brilliant and dedicated minds in academic and interdisciplinary sharing… I like to think that it’s ok to update some of the old, traditional exercises – especially if a teacher is not able to defend (or explain) his teachings in an academic sense, but instead needs to rely on Appeal to authority only.

“Hi Alfons, just wonder if we can practice with both hands at the same time?” – Youtube comment by Florencia Djoe, video link

A good and frequently asked question. It could be phrased to be more general: Why do we often focus only on one part or one side at a time in Somatic Education (or in The Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education)? But let’s stay with this good question about the hands.

My answer: You certainly can perform the movements with both hands simultaneously, but… can you also observe the many details and sensory feedback of each hand (and its parts and connections to your whole self) at the same time? For example, maybe your right hand connects to the lower ribs of your right side very differently than your left hand to the lower ribs of your left side. Would you be able to sense that and work with that when you do both hands at the same time?

Practicing with both hands would almost be like listening to two people talk at the same time, or having an intimate conversation with two people at the same time… not saying that it’s impossible, it might be possible and might have its place, time, purpose, and method, but certainly most people will perceive this as more stressful than listening to only one person – or one hand – at a time. What do you think?

The girl I’m dating at the moment is extremely flexible – in some movements. Like neck flexibility, she can turn much farther than I can, in the hip joints too, she can squat to perfection. She can sit comfortably in W-sitting and lie back onto her back, with her legs bent in W, and find that comfortable for extended periods of time. She can touch her palms together with the fingers pointed up – behind her back. Her hamstrings, however, as I tested them via the 90/90 hamstring test, are almost as short as with most everyone else… who doesn’t stretch. This girl doesn’t do any sports, she doesn’t do Yoga, nor does she do stretching exercises. Apart from a couple of hours of dance class she’s visited years ago she hasn’t done any stretching exercises in decades. But how come she’s so flexible overall?

I have observed her for almost 2 years now. What I can say is this: she’s using unusual postures. When “normal” people would sit straight on a chair, she’s sitting crossed legged on the chair, with both feet up on the seat. Or at least she will have one foot standing on the seat with her knee drawn up to her chest. Here in Vietnam I’ve seen women sit crossed-legged on their motor scooters while driving, but who on earth sits crossed-legged in the bathroom? And she sleeps in the most twisted ways as well. I’ve never seen anyone sleep in such bent and twisted positions as her. For a while I snapped pictures of her sleep positions, so I could wrap my head around what’s going on there. Some of her frequent sleep positions would put some of the more advanced Yoga postures to shame. She’s the opposite of what mattress sales people are promoting when they advertise that their 7-zones mattresses can put the spine to rest in a neutral position. And yet, she can stand upright and symmetrical like any other “normal” person.

So what’s the secret to her flexibility?

Last week I was throwing myself on a couch and all of a sudden went into a stretch, a cat stretch. The kind of extension movement that comes over you and you just can’t help but go with it. My back arched, my arms lifted overhead, I may have even yawned. It felt nice. “The cat stretch”, I thought after the stretch has run its course. I thought of cats and dogs. They tend to do that, but is that their secret to flexibility?

Yesterday afternoon I was standing at a lake in a nature resort and watched a goose clean her feathers. Her neck bent. I stared. She looked up, looked at me. I said, “Good job, Mr or Mrs Goose”. The goose continued her job by wiggling her tail and then working her back feathers with her beak. Left side, right side, she bent her long neck all the way to her behind from either side. She even managed to pick on the feathers of her upper back.

“I think you sleep with your nose under your wing”, I said to the goose. In the distance, just across the lake, I saw two horses. And a third one, a baby horse, which was lying flat down in the lawn wiggling its tail. I was thinking, “Do horses ever lie down?” Was this a horse or a dog? I was thinking about cats and dogs. They never sleep in a straight position. They are most always bent in a curve when they sleep. In the distance I saw the baby horse jump up when her mother moved a step away to find some more fresh grass to chew on.

Cats and dogs clean themselves too, I guess most animals do. They require and make use of their flexibility and full range of motion multiple times per day to reach around themselves with their mouth.

Even I clean myself every day, I do take a shower a day, where I reach every spot on my body with my hands. Maybe I should use my mouth instead? In Feldenkrais we have a lesson called, “painting the floor”, where we slide the foot over the floor. And there’s a lesson where we slide the hands over the body and try to imaging it’s a brush and we paint every bit of the chest, for example.

In fact, I just played with a few movements like this, in a strongly constrained position… lying prone, head turned to the left, left hand standing in a push up position, left knee drawn up to meet the forehead, head bent towards the knee under the bridge that was formed by my left arm… is there no name for this position? I did the brushing with my right hand, and then with my left, I tried to reach as many places as possible. I painted my head, parts of my back, my left inner thigh, my left foot, my right outer thigh… and felt more flexible, more nimble and more complete, afterwards.

Also, if cats and dogs sleep with their spine in a curved position, a strongly curved position I might add… maybe that’s the secret to maintain flexibility.

The cat stretch. Maybe stretching experts have gotten it all wrong. Maybe they’ve put all their eggs in the basket with the loose handle, maybe they were betting on the wrong horse all along. Maybe they should have invested in the cat clean and the cat nap instead.

Who knows? Who cares?