Report
of a workshop with Mia Segal and Leora Gaster - San Diego, CA - Jan
10-14, 2007
There were about 30 of us who met in a lovely old hotel in downtown
San Diego for a 5 day workshop with Mia Segal this January. The
weather was literally freezing but Mia and her daughter Leora
created a warm, generous atmosphere that had us learning and
working well together. There was such a marked change in the sound
of the room during our partnering time over the five days. In the
first two days as we were searching for comprehension of what Mia
and Leora were asking for, there was a lot of talking and noise.
For the last three days, the sounds were completely different.
There were great, rich silences punctuated with ahs, ooohs, and
ah-ha's amid sprinklings of softlaughter.
How did we do that...
Because I knew I was going to write this report, I queried people
during the five days and tried to get a feel for common
experiences. One thing that I heard from a number of people has to
do with Mia and Leora's ideas about knowing, authority and
discovery.
They not only behaved, but taught us to behave with less arrogance,
less authority and more ability to explore and discover. They
showed us how to NOT know as well as how to find out. Leora
repeated over and over that in her experience, Guild graduates have
plenty of sensitivity (and lots of ideas) but we don't seem to know
what to do with what we sense. She described her interest in
separating content from form, and in teaching us a form that could
be applied to every situation. Interestingly, I think that's
exactly what they did. They gave us a very simple, functional
framework to apply to our sensing.
And what was that simple framework? What was it that took us two
days before we could begin to move with it without so much effort?
It was to observe, confirm, connect. Actually, the first two days
were just about observation! And in fact, they weren’t trying
to get us to do MORE with our observation, but less. When they
asked "What do you see?" we were prepared to offer explanations,
analysis, conclusions, theories and abstractions. "No," Mia said, "
just tell me what you see!" and we stammered to silence. "We are
looking at her on her side folding forward. Do you see the sternum?
No? Then don't tell me about the sternum. What do you see?" It
sounds so simple, doesn't it?
She said, "What do you see move first or most? Describe how it
moves: forward, back? Closer to something else? What moves second?
What doesn't move at all?" They taught us to be clear about what we
were seeing as opposed to what we were thinking ABOUT what we saw.
They required us to be precise.
Next, we put our hands on the place we noticed and described what
we sensed. Here again we had the same problem: we wanted to say
what we thought or knew about what we sensed rather than what we
sensed. "Look," Mia would say, reminding me so much of Moshe, "With
my hands on her side, I feel my fingers moving closer together as
she folds while my palms move apart along her back. That's it! Now
you try."
Surprisingly, this practice put us in a very different state, one
of greater sensitivity and openness -- one that I think we would
all recognize from the moments when we are working most
effectively. And it is not easy! It was hard work to maintain
ourselves in that sensing-not- concluding place.
Using the phrase that Leora exhorted us with: "Resist the
temptation!" to jump ahead to thoughts and ideas. As Mia kept
saying, "I don't know the answer!" We have to let the movement
speak. It requires diligence to limit ourselves to what is there
before us, to let it tell us the answers through our sensing
"senses".
This process also revealed its opposite (in that lovely,
Feldenkrais process of differentiation) . The opposite is what we
are all trained so well to do in the modern world, and that is to
interpret what we observe, to jump to conclusions. It seems to make
us harsh and imposing in a certain way.
So, we spent two days just learning how to observe, and then the
sound of the room got soft and... moving.
Once we got a feel for observing, the next step was confirming with
touch, just following, not influencing. Again, they required great
precision of us.
They made us practice using words to describe precisely what we
sensed through our hands in terms of our actual sensing apparatus.
They asked us to use two hands so we could describe the sensing in
terms of relationships. We were asked to use two hands first at the
place that moved first or most and then move to a second place. How
did the second place relate to the first?
How was that different from what we saw?
Finally, we were asked to create the movement ourselves. Once
again, we flew off on the wrong track by trying to create the whole
movement with just our two hands in the first place we chose to
touch. No. They showed us to create just the tiny piece of the
movement that the person themselves would create at that place.
Then once again, move to the second place and find the
relationship, through our sensing, with the movement at the first
place.
At one point Mia said (as I understood it), "You don't want to
create movement. Why do you care if they do this movement! But you
do want them to feel how they do what they're doing. That's what
makes the difference! You show them what they are doing here and
here, and how these two places are related in they way they are
doing it. That's all!" We found that when we "shined the light" on
small pieces of the movement, then suddenly it WAS possible to do
the whole movement with just our two hands, lightly,
effortlessly.
I also learned with one of my partners, that when the the path of
her influencing movement was not matching my pattern, I got antsy,
sometimes wanting it to be more, or less. When it was accurate, the
amount of the movement was irrelevant. It went where it belonged
and the light shined straight through. Ooo's, aaahs and
ah-haaa's.
………..
I was describing this challenge of accurate observation to a friend
(who works with Waldorf schools) and she said, "You know, you're
describing phenomenology. " Yes, that's it exactly! Phenomenology
is a scientific method which describes what we do in Feldenkrais,
beautifully. It was used and elaborated by Goethe in his scientific
work and is experiencing a great deal of interest again in these
modern times:
'Goethe's way of science was highly unusual because it moved away
from a quantitative, materialist approach to things in nature and
emphasized, instead, an intimate, firsthand encounter between
student and thing studied. Direct experiential contact became the
basis for scientific generalization and understanding. ..'
'Phenomenology is a science of beginnings that demands a thorough,
in-depth study of the phenomenon, which must be seen and described
as clearly as possible. Accurate description is not a
phenomenological end, however, but a means by which the
phenomenologist locates the phenomenon's deeper, more generalizable
patterns, structures, and meanings.'
- http://www.arch.
ksu.edu/seamon/ book%20chapters/ goethe_intro.
htm
Even the opposite experience of becoming harsh and imposing was
well described by Goethe:
'Goethe emphasized that perhaps the greatest danger in the
transition from seeing to interpreting is the tendency of the mind
to impose an intellectual structure that is not really present in
the thing itself: "How difficult it is...to refrain from replacing
the thing with its sign, to keep the object alive before us instead
of killing it with the word." The student must proceed carefully
when making the transition from experience and seeing to judgement
and interpretation, guarding against such dangers as "impatience,
precipitancy, self-satisfaction, rigidity, narrow thoughts,
presumption, indolence, indiscretion, instability, and whatever
else the entire retinue might be called."'
………………….
Mia and Leora chose three ATM's which we used over the five days
both as ATM's and the basis for our FI practice. The FI practices
were very interactive and allowed for -- even necessitated, for me
-- using the intentional activity of the student in doing the
movement. In Leora's FI's as well, there was much more switching
back and forth between "FI" and "ATM" modes. There was a very
effective use of asking the student to do intentionally what they
were doing unintentionally.
The FI practices were broken down into small pieces, which was
helpful. And yet, each piece stayed related to the whole movement.
Even when working just from the knee, the development of the
process meant that we were simply feeling through ourselves,
through the knee to the whole movement, the whole experience. So
there was never the sense that a practice was an artificially
isolated piece that would somehow fit into a whole at some later
date.
At this point, I could include the specific instructions for the
ATM's and FI practices we did, but perhaps this report is already
long enough. Many of us commented that the practices we did were
not significantly different than what we learned in our trainings.
The big difference was the lack of
Tension to know or to make something happen. The difference was
that the practices were to develop our skill in sensing, not in
moving.
So instead, I will only describe one more thing.
Mia was working with one of the attendees who has severe shoulder
pain with a frequent tendency to dislocate the shoulders. Mia
watched, observed, asked us what we thought. (We jumped to
analysis: "She should unlock her knees!" "She needs to move her
computer screen!"... It was strangely discordant.) Mia just looked.
Then she said, "I don't know. I'll have to think about it."
The next morning she said, "Come here. We have to stick with what
we know. What I do know is function. The large bones and muscles
are for large movements tapering to small refining movements at the
peripheries. See this: this person moves a great deal in the arms
and the fingers with little movement at the shoulders. Movements
from the pelvis stop here and here. This creates great strain at
the places in between -- at the shoulders. I don't know for sure
but I believe that if I worked with her to show her how movement at
the pelvis is connected to movement at the arms and fingers, I
believe her shoulders would improve. Let's stick to what we know!
Remember the basics!"
This reminder to stick with what we know was both demanding and a
big relief. It's a relief to know that what we know is simple and
effective. It doesn't need to be more than that.
Observe, Confirm, Connect
The framework that Mia and Leora taught us over these five days was
based on a rigorous but simple method of phenomenological
observation. It can be used with any ATM, any FI, any person, in
any situation, to develop a moving, effective relationship which
reveals in each of us "the essential core of a thing that makes it
what it is and what it becomes."
Amie Slate
Los Angeles, Ca