An accidental advanced training

There’s an added dimension for the teacher. What you see informs what you sense in your hands and through your body. The brain merges these sensory channels to create a kind of stereo effect, which, neurologically-speaking, would be considered an example of synesthesia. It’s what happens when there’s a blending of the senses, like when you experience sounds as colors, revealing another way of knowing. 

Sorry, I don’t mean to be esoteric or academic. It’s just difficult to describe this. I could say that sense is a form of intuition, which, as much as it may be true, I doubt would go far in clarifying what’s going on.

It comes down to this: this ability to feel through the other person’s skeleton is fundamental to Moshe’s method. (It’s a skill that traces directly back to his martial arts expertise.) Instead of being a barrier to this non-verbal duet, the footboard heightens the teacher’s ability to sense what’s happening through the student’s structure while, concurrently, making it easier for the student to make sense of it as well. 

What I learned to feel, through my hands and the board, is what’s happening inside the student’s body, not just at the places where the foot meets footboard, but upstream, through the joints of the foot, leg, and further, to and through the axial skeleton, the pupil’s pelvis, spine, and, finally, up to their head. 

This ability isn’t some bizarre type of extrasensory perception.

Quite the opposite. The way your tactile sense can extend beyond the envelope of your skin is well within the scope of what’s considered everyday human experience. Falling, as it does, outside Aristotle’s traditional categorization of the five senses may make it an unfamiliar topic, but, rest assured, the experience is well within the norm.* 

A concrete example of what I’m stumbling around trying to articulate should help at this point. Have you ever, say, searched behind furniture, somewhere you couldn’t shine a light, with a broomstick? When you trace along the wall, you feel the edge of the wall along the floor; not feeling it in your hand, but through that long round piece of wood, at the other end.

That’s what I’m talking about: this uncanny and surprisingly immediate way to sense, somehow, through an object in hand and experience what’s happening at its other end. 

This conversation, undoubtedly, goes both ways. The student experiences more than the places the board touches, recognizing the person behind the board as well. 

As the student, I can tell how éasy or difficult it is for the teacher to hold the board, lift my leg, and move it in one direction or another. I feel the moments when the teacher struggles as clearly as those other moments when the teacher’s actions somehow call my attention to how I’m moving, where I am interfering, and how I can move in ways that were missing from my vocabulary. It’s at these moments that I unearth connections I’d never known or long forgot. In so doing, I discover the path of least resistance. My perspective shifts, altering how I understand myself from the inside and, thereby, changing what it’s like to live in my skin. 

We know, already, that the more we struggle, you or I, as the teacher, the less we sense. What took me a long time to learn was that there’s a lot more to this story. For instance, I realized that the more I struggled, the more I distracted the student. As it happens, the more you and I effort, the more likely we will forget the distinction between showing the student the way and finding it together. Then what happens is that we end up teaching instead of facilitating learning.