A precious waste of time

Throughout his lessons, Feldenkrais makes comments like this one. He calls the movements “idiotic” and tells his students that the movements have no value. He says that if you couldn’t do something when you walked in, it makes no difference if you can do it when you leave. What did he mean by these seemingly paradoxical statements? Was he being modest? Or was he creating a diversion, using reverse psychology of the crudest sort? It is my sense that this was part of a deliberate attempt to keep the lessons detached from utility, and in doing so preserve their usefulness. It was an attempt to keep them in the realm of science, art, and, most of all, play.

It is accepted by most everyone in our profession that the Feldenkrais Method® is about learning. I think it is also clear that, for Feldenkrais, all learning was not equal. In fact, most of our learning has been based so much on the prospect of reward and punishment that it has seriously distorted our self-image. Learning that served the individual, as far as he was concerned, could only come about by self-education. This is learning that is detached from any particular outcome other than to satisfy our own curiosity. It is how one comes to understand the particulars of a situation rather than just fulfilling the requirements for a payoff or to avoid punishment.

In his book, Behind the Mirror, Konrad Lorenz calls this, exploratory behavior and says that it requires what he calls a “tensionless field” [Lorenz, p 147]. The immediate demands of an organism must be met in order for the organism to explore its surroundings and expand its repertory of behavior. In other words, it must have time on its hands. If you place a rat in an environment and it is well fed and not in danger, it will explore that environment and find ways into every nook and cranny. Moreover, if you introduce a snake into that environment, the rat will take what had previously been “useless” knowledge and use it to find an escape route or hiding place. If you put another rat, one that has not had the opportunity for exploration, into the same situation it will cower in a corner until the danger is removed.

Take a more human example. In my former profession as a woodworker, I was required to make bid proposals for various jobs. This required bringing together lots of information, making a calculation, and turning the results into a presentable proposal. Using a computer spreadsheet for this seemed ideal. In reality, each time I was faced with a deadline I found it easier to do what I already knew how to do: scratch out the calculations on the back of an envelope and handwrite, or peck out a serviceable if inelegant proposal. It wasn’t until I had spent some time just playing around with the spreadsheet program, doing some recreational experimentation, that I made any practical use of it at all.

While learning takes place in any attempt to satisfy our needs this learning is in effect a conditioned response. Lorenz quotes Arnold Gehlen, another ethologist. “It is only the pressure, in a given situation, of a present instinctive urge that forces learning processes to operate, making the animal’s behavior essentially dependent. . . And since its actions are not independent, they are not objective” [Lorenz, p. 147].

This notion of objectivity and the independence of learning was very important for Feldenkrais. We often speak of the functional orientation of the Feldenkrais Method®, but it is important to understand that for Feldenkrais, a functional human being was a person who was able to act on his or her own behalf. In his introduction to Awareness Through Movement®, he says that B. F. Skinner has already shown how to use conditioned learning to produce model citizens and reliable workers, but only by eliminating their self learning [Feldenkrais, p 5].

Feldenkrais’ own experience in science, judo, and yoga would have shown him how ephemeral the “tensionless field” necessary for self-education was. The scientific enterprise went from being the curiosity-driven leisure activity of predominantly upper-class men to a major industry driven primarily by the search for patentable results. Judo was developed by Jigoro Kano as an educational tool. Feldenkrais saw it as having lost much of its potential as it came to be dominated by the competitive and sporting aspects. Yoga in its transport to the west lost many of its developmental and spiritual aspects as a discipline and came to be seen as an exercise system with particular health benefits ascribed to the different postures.

Even the fountainhead of self-directed exploration, children’s play, is being transformed by conditioning from commerce and adult regulation. Lorenz’s “tensionless field” is a disappearing habitat both in terms of space and time. Children’s preschools are chosen on the basis of future admission to grade schools, high schools, and colleges. Sports are pursued on the basis of future scholarships or, worse, to fulfill unfulfilled adults. Streets, alleys, and fields are no longer available for unsupervised exploration. While Feldenkrais recognized that conditioning was unavoidable in childhood, I think even he would be surprised at the lengths to which we have taken it. I recently saw an ad for a cassette player that had speakers that could attach to a pregnant mother’s belly so the unborn could be conditioned to the parents’ voice, or classical music, or multiplication tables.

It is my sense that Feldenkrais deliberately constructed Awareness Through Movement (ATM®) in order to produce the conditions necessary for the unique category of learning that he called self-education. (Konrad Lorenz refers to this as “latent learning” [p 146] because the usefulness or even the content of the knowledge gained is not apparent until it is brought into play by a further, undetermined stimulus.) I think Feldenkrais did this in a number of ways.

The most obvious was by detaching the lessons, at least temporarily, from utility. While some lessons have obvious connections to everyday activities, most do not. The usefulness of standing up from a chair while cradling one leg in your arms is not readily apparent and the benefits of learning how to do so will be spread across a wide range of activities. Feldenkrais also refrained from positing specific benefits to particular movements.