The Finnish line

While working on my doctorate in Kinesiology, I attended a classmate’s birthday party. I couldn’t get my conversation with one of the other celebrants about the Feldenkrais Method of neurophysical education and what it offers out of my head; when I got back to my place in the wee hours of the morning, I wrote it down.

After working on it independently for a few days, I asked my student and neighbor, the writer and singer Norma Marder, to edit the account of that conversation. With her insight and guidance, I polished Felden-WHAT? before publishing it in Telekinesis, the bi-annual newsletter I sent to Feldenkrais teachers worldwide in the early 1990s. 

Since then, colleagues translated the article into Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, and Russian. Today, I received an email informing me that a group of Finnish Feldenkrais teachers and trainees completed translating the piece. (This collaborative effort is a testament to the shared interest and dedication of the international Feldenkrais community.) I offer my heartfelt gratitude to the members of the group—Päivi Nikula-Väisänen, Piia Surakka, Johanna Lapinniemi, Iina Kautiainen, and Marko Seppälä—who did the work and to Raisa Vennamo for instigating the project.

Instead of using a standard copyright, I chose to license the article and its translation under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This decision was made to encourage you, MIMO members and other colleagues, to share, reproduce, publish, and distribute the article. As long as you attribute the work and make it available under the same conditions, that is, with the Creative Commons license, you are free to do so.

You’ll find the original English version and the translations here.

For today’s post, I used a photo by Baptiste Valthier that I found on pexels.com. I adjusted the size and made minor changes to the original image.