The function of touch in the Feldenkrais Method

The touch in the Functional Integration of the Feldenkrais Method is in its essence non-manipulative, but intends to remind the brain over which parts of the body it doesn't take control: those parts which do not serve the intentional movement as they should, just because the brain does not have enough control over them. Non-invasive touch, a touch not burdened with any intention of getting compulsively specific results in specific time allows the touched person to direct all her perception, sensations, feeling and thinking, briefly, her attention to oneself in a reflective way which is not intellectual, but sensory. In other words, touch serves in Functional Integration as an instrument for helping the touched person to "listen to what happens in oneself" more than she does this usually, and not as a manipulative, invasive instrument.
This "listening to what happens in oneself" is in the Feldenkrais Method the instrument for any improving of self-perception and awareness. It is the improvement in this field which allows the nervous system to realize the differentiation needed for an accurate functional activity. More control in movement and action results in a characteristic feeling of freedom, ease and lightness. So, the moment they feel ease in their body the children move ceaselessly. That's why they mostly don't have to be moved or manipulated in order to develop their functional competence.
The movements done from time to time by a practitioner to his client/pupil during a Functional Integration session have the task to make aware, in and through movement, in the dimension of space, of the new level of body awareness acquired first by touch. The moving in Functional Integration plays the role of integrating the new quality of self-perception and ease in the space perception.
In the process of functional differentiation and functional development touch always precedes movement: in F.I. as in life. This is an universal law in the living world which applies to the most primary functions as feeding and reproduction as well as to the highly developed ones like playing a musical instrument which first has to be touched with the hands, mouth and sometimes also with the feet that the movements make sense at all. Real swimming also needs first the contact with water.
For infants and children touch and movement are primary organic necessities. In Functional Integration with children one has therefore to be very cautious and economic with manipulating movements. Other than the case is with most adults, young children rather integrate by themselves the effect of the touch in their nervous system through spontaneous, playful and exploring body activity, immediately they feel the ease achieved by touch. They are eager to translate in movement every new acquirement in self-perception.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Feldenkrais
• Method
• Functional
• Integration

[2stunden]

Now six years after I started studying Feldenkrais I start to realize what I am learning. It is a hard wakeup and Moshe Feldenkrais' his words "the ignorance, the stubbornness and the inability to think of the people around him" become real, it's like waking up in a nation filled with kind, loving, caring ... but still: Zombies.