the Feldenkrais Method with Emma Alter

As it’s the Jewish New Year this week, (Shana Tova to those of you that celebrate!), I thought it might be interesting to share a Hebrew concept many of you may not have heard of.

Hafshata: “the virtue that arises when something is taken away.” 

I was introduced to it recently, when a Feldenkrais colleague wrote about mistranslations in Moshe’s book, “The Potent Self”.

Feldenkrais wrote most of his books in Hebrew, one of his many first languages. (He grew up in Russia, now Ukraine, until the age of 14, when Russia was set alight with civil war. Moshe Feldenkrais and his family narrowly escaped Jewish pogroms in the area.) Feldenkrais was a polyglot, numbering Yiddish, Russian, Hebrew as well as English as his early languages. Later learning French, as well as German.)

Hafshata in learning:

You could think of it as the gaining of simplicity through letting go of what’s not necessary.  A way of thinking that’s at the heart of the Feldenkrais Method. It’s a more Eastern way of thinking than we have in the West. In Europe, dualism has been one of the more pervading ideas through the centuries. It’s not surprising that thinking is shaped so differently there. Hebrew is a language of verbs, of action. Linguistically, everything is based around the verbs, far more so than English. 

There are four parts to every action.

Thought, emotion, sensation and movement.

These function together, simultaneously. You can’t extract one from them, they’re indivisible. Our language doesn’t really allow for this concept, it’s a limitation to our thinking.

We don’t even have a single good word for mind-and-body. Which we know is indivisible.  The holistic embodied experience of being human. But the English language doesn’t allow for this. All four occur together at one. The internal shifts that we create when we change our emphasis is what creates our experience of the world.

We all know people who like to talk, and create order through words that reflex their thinking. And those who prefer to say less, but do things. We have habits around the lens we choose to view the world through.

Hafshata in Music:

I had a quartet rehearsal a while ago. We were arguing about some point in the music, and couldn’t agree. I ended up asking what’s the priority for you here? And it turned out, although we were talking about the same moment, we all had different focuses, different habitual musical priorities. One was thinking about timing, one  articulation, another colour, and the other about tuning. And in fact, once each’s words were stripped back to the crux, it also became apparent we could incorporate all those things at the same time. A beautiful moment of Hafshata. Taking away so that something new could emerge.

Feldenkrais is about stripping away what we don’t need.

So we can get simple enough to understand what we want, what we’re doing, how we’re doing it. Reduction to find something new leads to different Feldenkrais-ian concepts:

• Working slowly: so you can feel more of the details. Then there’s less need to “succeed” by pushing through discomfort or tiredness, adding more tension.
• Do less than you can. So there’s space to feel yourself. Space to sense the difference between different qualities of movement.
• Move small, so you can become more sensitive to more refined differences.
• Remove the need to do it well. So you can see which emotional drivers hold us in thrall. So that doing can get more simple, rather than focussing on the trying. (As in Yoda’s famous quote- “do, or do not, there is no try.”
• Remove the need to succeed. Then you can enjoy organic learning. Learning through sensation and feedback.
• Move between moving isolated areas, and the whole of yourselves. to learn to sense ourself in our entirety. And then in entirety in our environment.  To see what’s unnecessary in what you’re doing or thinking. How you’re adding extra complications, or complexity to what could be simpler, easier. 
• As you let go of unnecessary tensions it becomes easier to feel our whole self. All of you at once. The action where doing, feeling, sensing, thinking, language become one.