Rollers: 1-on-1 and in classes

If you’re lying on your back during your hands-on Feldenkrais lesson, chances are you have a roller, most likely made of firm but somewhat yielding foam, behind your knees. Your ankles may also be resting on a thinner but more solid foam roller. 

Moshe Feldenkrais started using custom-made wooden cylinders before turning to tubes made of thick, stiff cardboard. When firm foam rollers became available, he also put them to work. Along with the signature low table, stools, and pads for the head, sturdy cylinders, whatever their composition, complete the essential Feldenkrais teacher’s tool kit. 

Moshe didn’t put rollers to work solely for support. He used them to create surfaces that move as the student moves, thereby amplifying and highlighting sensations that normally go unnoticed and waking up the neurological circuitry of balance and learning.

During an individual Functional Integration lesson, he would might a pupil to roll a roller with a foot, then step onto it, or, eventually, stand on it. Sometimes he would have a student sit on a roller while he moved it or them, or verbally guided them through a sequence of specific actions. Sometimes, the student would lie lengthwise on a roller while Moshe gently moved them over and around it. Other times, a person would recline on two parallel rollers instead; Moshe would then manipulate the rollers to move the student. He would also assemble rollers of different diameters to create a kind of dynamic bed for a student to rest on as Moshe moved them one by one and then in various combinations. At the end of this lesson plan, he would artfully remove one roller at a time, gently and gradually pouring the person onto the table.

Though he incorporated rollers in his work with individuals, Moshe never taught an Awareness Through Movement lesson using a roller. Just as he started doing hands-on work and then developed the collective classes, the community of teachers he trained transformed Moshe’s repertoire of roller lessons into the templates for group classes.

Trainer Elizabeth Beringer included an entire week of these roller classes toward the end of the final year of the first Strasbourg International Feldenkrais Training, where I was lucky to experience them and start what would become my long apprenticeship. Unfortunately, this material is rarely taught in current teacher training programs. We are in danger of losing this wonderfully imaginative and transformative aspect of Moshe’s methodology.

Thank you to my colleague and teacher, Jerry Karzen, for confirming that Moshe never taught an ATM class using a roller. 

Also, my heartfelt thanks to Kai Schaper, the International Feldenkrais Federation (IFF) Materials Manager, who was kind enough to help find the two photos, each taken by Michael Wolgensinger, used in this Wrestling for Higher Consciousness post. 

You’re in luck if you’re a Feldenkrais teacher or trainee who joined your national professional organization or guild. Your membership gives access to the IFF archive, including videos of Moshe’s individual lessons during the Amherst training program in 1980 and 1981. These include many FIs using rollers, none of which exist elsewhere.

Photos: International Feldenkrais® Federation, photography by Michael Wolgensinger. All rights reserved.