Gone forever

It was only after I started recovering from the long, arduous recovery from the surgeries, chemo, and radiation that I tried to access my online data storage I’d been using. When I couldn’t access my account, I contacted customer support, only to learn that they had deleted my account because I hadn’t renewed it.

When I checked the vast backlog of accumulated emails, I found the bills I’d missed. When I asked the support if they had a backup, they informed me that, due to privacy protection laws, they no longer keep any kind of backup.

Poof!

Gone were all the files from grad school, the editorials and articles I’d written for the In Touch newsletter and the North American Feldenkrais Journal and other publications, rough drafts and notes for articles, project plans, course curricula, a considerable collection of transcripts of ATM lessons, and so many of the precious materials I’d accumulated over the years.

It’s not the only time I watched data and documents vanish in the vast ether of the Internet. Much to my dismay, this form of digital disappearing act has become a recurrent theme in my professional life. When we changed the software we used to manage contacts, calendars, and commitments, we lost all kinds of data. Similar losses occurred when we transitioned from one system for constructing and administering the website's backend to another; often, we didn’t discover that things had vanished until long after it happened.

From the first time I received a Functional Integration lesson lying on a foam roller, I’ve been fascinated by Moshe Feldenkrais’ ingenious use of these devices as a teaching tool. I’ve made them part of my personal and professional practices, incorporating them into Functional Integration lessons, teaching workshops and classes highlighting them, and assembling the classic roller lessons into an extended postgraduate program, Reclaiming Rollers. I even found a collapsible roller I could travel with easily.

In 2023, I chose to integrate much of what I’d learned from decades of working with them into a new workshop. The course combined the classic ATM classes that Moshe Feldenkrais created, lying and sitting on a roller, with a beautiful lesson, created by Bill Hutchinson, one of my Amherst Training classmates, that involved leaning against a roller on a wall. I called the course Foam Roller Revolution (I know, but I couldn’t resist the pun) and made it the theme for that year’s Awareness Through Movement summer camp.

Because I was still in recovery mode, it seemed like a great idea when someone else offered to organize and administer the workshop. I taught it live at this sponsor’s facility; I was excited because it was my first in-person post-pandemic program. To make the course accessible to a broader audience, we decided to stream the workshop online via Zoom while I was teaching it.

That was a well-intentioned, yet unbelievably naive, decision. I discovered that it’s difficult, if not impossible, for me to split my attention between the people in the room with me and “the folks at home,” as they used to say on TV. The situation was made much worse by the technological nightmare that ensued: the microphone worked either in the room or online, another audio signal mysteriously appeared, there were also transmission interruptions, and so on.

The sponsor hosted the recordings on their Zoom account to make them available to everyone who’d signed up. That also seemed like a good idea, that is until half of the recordings vanished from the account last year. We investigated, but it turned out, once again, that there was nothing anyone could do about it. The files simply no longer existed; it was as sad and straightforward as that.

After lamenting the loss of the roller workshop files for the past year, I decided to take action and reclaim my work. This time, I’m reclaiming complete control of the recordings and making them downloadable, so you can be confident that your access won’t disappear.

Starting next month, I am offering an updated version of the workshop as a series of Awareness Through Movement (ATM) classes meeting weekly for seven weeks. Foam Roller Revolution 2025 offers you two opportunities to participate:

1. Wednesdays, 17 September to 29 October 20255:30 to 7:00 PM Pacific time
2. Thursdays, 18 September to 30 October 20258:30 to 10:00 AM Pacific time

Tuition includes access to both series of live online classes and the edited audio recordings of at least one version of each week’s ATM lesson. You can attend either class series or both, as your schedule allows.

• $177 Full Price
• $137 Early Enrollment
  (Available until 11:59 PM Pacific Time on Wednesday, 3 September 2025.)
• $107 Instant Enrollment
  (Available until 11:59 PM Pacific Time on Sunday, August 17, 2025, only.)

Please note that all tuition is household pricing: anyone living in your home is welcome to participate at no additional cost.

Ready to find out how rollers are good for more than self-massage? Want to discover how they can help you change your posture, breathing, and coordination? To learn more about this course and to sign up, please click here.

The first week of next month, I will be teaching the second five-day module of Reclaiming Rollers in Florence, Italy. (Enrollment is available to Feldenkrais teachers and trainees.) Please contact Bruno Gabelli [write his name as one word if you email him] at gmail.com for more information and to enroll.

Early next year, I’ll be teaching the same postgraduate program in Santa Cruz, California. Enrollment is limited to eight participants; we’re finalizing the dates now.

Please let me know if you're interested in attending so that I can add you to the list.