If a butterfly landed on your arm, would you notice it? What if you were holding a 40kg weight? Our ability to notice change is proportional to the overall quantity of a stimulus. The larger a stimulus, the less we are able to notice differences within it.
This is a general principle of perception that remains true across touch, sound and sight. The quieter you are, the more you can hear.
The Feldenkrais method is based on this concept. Because our ability to distinguish one part of our body from another is obscured by tension, we may know ourselves better by lowering our baseline of tension. This is done by moving slowly enough that new solutions and degrees of freedom may emerge.
Feldenkrais was an ecological thinker, drawing from physics, physiology and psychology to draw up his own healing methodology. His work is occasionally dated in some of its finer details, but after much scrutiny and exploration, I am a believer in several of its core principles.
His work on anxiety, consciousness and curiosity has been fundamental to my research.
What personally fueled my exploration of this work was a chance meeting. A dancer who joined my parkour class. When I saw him move, I expected him to be a veteran parkour practitioner - but he hold me had never done it before. I was amazed by his lightness, receptivity and his ability to give way to force. Parkour had generally been about pushing against force for me - and it was truly breathtaking to see someone yield so effortlessly and creatively.
There is great pleasure to be found in learning to move with more ease, and applying the proper leverage which is often obscured by habits of stiffness.
On reflection, working with sensitivity is an absolutely fundamental aspect of learning. It is programming the cerebellum with degrees of freedom; learning to cook with more ingredients. Through working in this way, we dissolve “parasitic tensions”, and move away from self-judgement.
However, I see that sensitivity in itself is a fragile goal. As Feldenkrais said, “health is the ability to lived your unavowed dreams” - and to live our dreams inevitably engenders risk, play and force. Feldenkrais himself was an advanced Judo practitioner, and I am certain he would agree.
In this way, I see the Feldenkrais method as a tool and an insightful philosophy, but not as a complete system, because it does not deal with the yang side of movement: courage and overcoming force.