Together in the room

In the three weeks since the fifth anniversary of the novel coronavirus being declared a global pandemic, I found myself appreciating how grateful I am for being together in the room, facilitating learning in that direct, face-to-face, in-person way that quarantine made impossible.

While I’ve been an advocate of the incredible possibilities and invaluable benefits of online education since long before the upheaval of COVID-19, I never suggested or believed that it is better than learning together in the same place. There is something special about seeing the entire class spread out in three-dimensional space, observing how students sit, shift, and respond around me and not from afar, flat and apart in small squares on a screen, following their gestures, facial expressions, and physical attitudes, noticing who responds and connects with whom, and to listen to how they breathe, individually and as a group.

Not only that . . .

There are some things, such as the sensitivity, clarity, and skill of a Feldenkrais teacher giving a hands-on lesson, that you only learn in the presence of one another. I may be able to see a lot watching someone giving a Functional Integration session on a screen, but I can’t put my hand on theirs or their back to sense what’s happening and, more importantly, to help them realize what they’re doing and how they’re going about it.

Only when we occupy the same time and space coordinates can I lie on the table and ask a colleague to do with me what they were doing with someone else moments ago. Or ask someone to sit behind me, put one hand on my back and another on my elbow so that they can sense and follow me as I do the technique they’re learning.

This aspect of Moshe’s methodology does not consist of handholds, placements, and mechanical motions. As the teacher, I’m not commanding the student to move in specific ways; I’m asking tactile questions and waiting for the responses. A hands-on lesson is a conversation where how you say something — by touching someone — is as important as what you say.

A hands-on lesson is a real-time sensory-motor conversation in the language of embodied self-perception — knowing yourself from the inside out — and a dance between two people — where we sense ourselves and each other. By listening with my hands and whole self, I can bring another person to listen to themselves, to notice what’s happening all along, under their nose but out of their conscious awareness, and to discover what’s possible, not in an intellectual manner, but in a lived-in, experiential, in-the-flesh way.

What’s most precious is being able to guide the participants in my courses to work this way with each other. In this way, we learn from and with each other, becoming each other’s coaches and guides. The sense of community and mutual learning that develops is crucial for feeling connected as colleagues and necessary if we are going to establish a genuinely supportive network of learners and teachers.

If you’re a Feldenkrais teacher or trainee who is ready to refine your hands-on skills and upgrade your self-use, deepen your understanding of how lessons work, find out how to be a more compelling and effective teacher, and expand your repertoire of FIs you can count on, there are several in-person opportunities to study with me this year:

• Next month, I’ll be teaching the first module of the Mastering the Method program in Ljubljana, Slovenia. We will spend five unhurried days learning a remarkably reliable lesson for fostering length and finding skeletal support.
• The first weekend in July, I’ll be teaching a different module from that program in Paris, France. I will be presenting two Functional Integration compositions using rollers, one with the student sitting in a chair and the other with them lying on their back with the roller behind the neck.
• The first week of September, I’ll teach that same course in Florence. (Please contact francescoambrosio1 AT gmail for more information.)
• Then, during the first week of November, I will be starting The Trilogy, the most popular advanced training in the world, in Madrid, Spain.

If the timing and other logistical details work for you, I hope you will join your colleagues and me in one of these courses.