the Feldenkrais Method with Emma Alter

This week I’m in Palermo, Sicily. I came to do part of my child development course.

Whilst I was here wanted to see a little of the city. Yesterday we went to the Catacombs of the Capuchin Monks. In Sicily in the 18th-20th centuries mummification became a big thing. People mummified their family members after death, so they could still go and visit them. Many of them are still there, dressed in their finery.

The mummification had different levels of success. One little girl had been preserved in arsenic, so she looked almost life-like, if a little blue. Others still had skin, and hair, so you could get a sense of what they might have looked like in life.

And there were a lot of dressed up skeletons. Which for me, thanks to Feldenkrais, provoked mainly curiosity. Rather than Halloween/Zombie movie discomfort. There was a little of course. It’s rare you get to see that many skeletons at a time. It was interesting to see such variety in the shapes. And in other people’s responses.

I definitely don’t want to be mummified myself, in case anyone was thinking about it! But the relationship between ourselves and our skeletons in general could be improved. So it’s not something that unnerves people, but that you have enough contact with that it feels normal.

Why is the skeleton important?

Our skeleton is our structure. It’s the underlying bones that the muscles move. When a muscle gets its instruction from the brain, it turns on – which is contraction. Off is release / elongation back to the original length.

So knowing the general shapes of our skeleton, and joints underneath the skin is useful. It helps us with understanding what movements are possible, and which aren’t.

If you concentrate on moving your bones, movement becomes more ergonomic. This isn’t the outcome if you focus on muscular effort. Part of a Feldenkrais lesson is learning to sense your skeleton beneath your skin. It’s a simple system (compared to the rest of them). With time, we can all learn to do this. If you only did this part, getting really clear about the skeleton, it would make a difference to the way you move.

But body mapping (or skeleton-mapping) isn’t the learning in a Feldenkrais lesson. We’re also improving our orientation. Our relationship to the environment.

We have skeletons because of the force of gravity. It’s unlikely, without gravity, we’d need skeletons. So all those alien movies where aliens attack Earth would probably have more problems moving themselves around anywhere than anything else!