the Feldenkrais Method with Emma Alter

Flexible minds

The idea of a lesson is not just to move ourselves, or be more flexible physically, but to have a different experience of yourself at the end of a lesson.Feldenkrais said “I don’t want flexible bodies, I want flexible minds”. The two go hand in hand. After all, our body and mind are indivisible, even if our language hasn’t caught up with modern neuroscience yet!

Mindful body or Embodied Brain?

We are an embodied brain. Or a mindful body. There is no separation between mind and body. It’s the idea that neuroscientist Antonio Damasio talks about in his book “Descartes Error”: that Descartes was wrong in his assumption.
It is not only that one influences the other, but we’re a connected system: mind-and-body. The brain is the command centre, but the body is the receiver and interpreter of information. We can’t exist without one or the other. It’s much more than influence. They’re the same. We just don’t have language to write about it succinctly.

The thinking affects language.

This thinking of separation has influenced our language over the last centuries, so we don’t even have one word in common usage for mind-and-body. We just have this incredibly clunky way of saying it. We have words for so many ideas, but not this fundamentally important concept. The language available to describe it is limited, and limiting. 

Why does it matter?

We share ideas through language. In order to make sense of our experiences we need words to put them into, if we want to be able to discuss or compare with others. Language helps and controls what we think about. It shapes our thinking. 

I lived in Holland for a while, and there they have one word for crispy or crunchy. Chewy and tough translate to the same word too. (Not the only word) but the language that we use constrains our ability to think. 

Language channels thinking.

When I lived in Holland I also travelled by bicycle pretty much everyday.  Everyone does there. I had to learn to mend it, pump up the tyres, replace a tyre (or get it replaced). It was an important part of my daily life.  So the Dutch word for bicycle “fiets” is imprinted in my brain far more clearly than “bicycle”. It was a word I used all the time. But imagine I had to call it machine-with-two-wheels. It’s a much clunkier version of the word, and doesn’t really bring to mind a visual image of a bicycle so quickly. 

But that’s what we have with body-and-mind. It’s clunky, and doesn’t describe it well, or correctly. So it’s no wonder that somatic practices are slow to take off in the western world. The language hasn’t caught up. So society hasn’t caught up with this fully either. Teachers still teach as if there is separation, when there isn’t. Parents talk about mind and body as separate when they aren’t. And until our society creates or words evolve that more subtly define this idea – it will continue to be challenging.  

It’s one of the many things I teach about in my classes and courses.