Working in Movement

I always thought philosophy was a colossal waste of time--at least my time. Saw no use for it.

But then I became interested in Feldenkrais work, primarily to ease aches and pains and to improve my stage presence in giving corporate presentations. In my experience, the weird (or at least uncommon) movement sequences that make up a lesson often result in wonderful sensations of lightness and ease. It's almost like a super warm up exercise that leaves you loose and ready to play, confident of being able to respond to any athletic or performance challenge that might come.

Certainly a good lesson lengthens the muscles, freeing them from the habitual, but often unrecognized, tension that can cause so much trouble. Perhaps the same could be said of a good massage or even a hot shower. A good Feldenkrais lesson can leave you ready for action, but in a calm sort of way. That is in fact one of the stated goals of the Method: the be able to move in any direction available to you without preparation.

There is a lot more than loosening muscles going on in a series of Feldenkrais lessons. The looseness, the lightness and ease are really just side effects. The featured act is changing the experience of embodiment itself. After a good lesson, you can experience yourself much differently than you have before. Almost like going back to infancy and learning an entirely different (and better) way of using your body. It almost brings to light the words of rock musician Bob Seger: "I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then." It's almost like the sense of self itself gets changed.

And that brings us back to philosophy. Philosophers wonder about esoteric subjects like sense of self and embodiment, the very phenomena explored, challenged and sometimes changed in the Feldenkrais lessons.

Shaun Gallagher explores these types of issues on a website with loads of papers that could take months to explore. For a more Feldenkraisian view, this paper by Feldenkrais trainer Carl Ginsburg provides lots of background and connection.

So maybe philosophy is not always a waste of time, at least not a colossal one. But it has taken some weird movement sequences to get me to this point. You can't get that from a book or a lecture.