I was just thinking about how the political mandates of the past two years, which followed the recommendations of organisations like the CDC or FDA, basically canceled „non-essential” human touch from large parts of western civilisation.

Please allow me to not follow down that thought.

Instead, the thought that got me excited to write this blog post was this: functional integration, this peculiar way of human interaction and physical study, is like language learning. You can’t just do it to a person. The person is a student, and the student needs to have an interest and a desire to study.

It can be as beautiful as a walk in the park together, where you elaborate on a topic and each other’s backgrounds add to a greater, actionable understanding. Problem solving, but also creative exploration and building foundations, new patterns, new perspectives, refined internal images. Learning, a pleasurable experience as close to the human soul as love and trust and empathy.

The third thought I had while opening my notepad was about the term „functional integration”. Here again, we have the unfortunate situation that an organisation, in this case the IFF (International Feldenkrais Foundation), acquired trademarks for this kind of human interaction and put them under their EULA (End User License Agreement), thus basically rendering the terms useless to the general public. This too, is not a pleasant thought to follow, so please pardon my silence. Maybe, a more useful thought, or question, would be: what terms can we use instead?