A confession

I have a confession to make about ignorance.

While training with Moshe Feldenkrais in Amherst, Massachusetts, in the early 1980s, I participated in Awareness Through Movement classes that featured the motion of rolling the head between the hands. I learned about the different ways to do this and understood that the idea was to keep my hand flat and not press or push the head. I heard Moshe repeatedly tell us that the freedom (of the movement) of the head is the measure of well-organized, efficient action. Even so, I recall the incredible frustration of trying to go from lying to standing and back without interrupting this action, feeling clumsy and disconnected.

I saw Moshe, his assistants, and experienced teachers rolling their students’ heads during Functional Integration lessons. When I received individual lessons, I experienced the unmistakable benefit of this technique. Nevertheless, I graduated from the program without comprehending its significance in Moshe’s methodology.

Though I didn’t know what it did, or how to interpret what happened when I did it with my students, I have to confess that I rolled my students’ heads during their hands-on lessons. I knew it did something significant for my students, though at the time, it was more an aspirational gesture than any form of technical prowess or pedagogical competence.

It was only through my apprenticeship with Edna Rossenas and my participation in postgraduate programs that I began to understand the true power of this technique. I learned how to help others improve and discovered how to do it myself with greater finesse and ease. I saw how it had a transformative effect on global muscular activation, but I had only the vaguest notion of why.

After studying how he taught ATMs around this theme in his weekly classes, during public workshops, and at the San Francisco training, I began to connect these lessons and this technique to Moshe’s concept of how humans orient to the horizon. I was gaining insight into how this action is based on our anatomical frame, particularly the biomechanics of the spine, and uncovering its relationship to the neurology of coordination.

Only after I could finally understand what Feldenkrais referred to as the ideal organization of movement, comprehend what interfered with it, and learn how to address it, did I begin to truly appreciate why this motion matters so much. Experiencing the difference it made to my students’ coordination, balance, and breathing cemented this understanding.

The knowledge of one generation
is the ignorance of the next.
— Frances Wright

After working in teacher trainings and leading postgraduate programs around the world, I realized that I wasn’t the only one who didn’t understand or appreciate this deceptively simple action. That’s my main motivation for sharing what I’ve learned in Unlocking the Power of ATM: Rolling the Head Between the Hands next month.

You can find out about the course content, schedule, and tuition here. Please note that enrollment is only available to Feldenkrais teachers or trainees. To receive a 20% discount on tuition, sign up for the course before early registration ends at noon US Pacific Time on Monday, 21 July 2025.

You don’t have to be a Feldenkrais professional to sign up for a free Mind in Motion Online account. When you’ve established your account — which takes a couple of minutes, at most — you’ll have access to many no cost materials, including a recording of me teaching one version of this classic Awareness Through Movement lesson. You’ll find it in the Free ATM/AY Lessons section of the website’s library.