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"Reconnecting with Mia Segal" -- Eleanor Criswell Hanna reflects in the Somatic Society Newsletter -- Winter/Spring 2011 Edition

eran@oa-sys.co.uk — 2011-08-13T14:06:40-05:00

”Mia Segal is a master teacher, a treasure. She is a beautiful somatics pioneer with a lifetime experience to share with those in her presence. Somatic educators from all disciplines will find her deeply inspiring.”

--Eleanor Criswell Hanna, Ed. D

Standing ATM with Mia Segal - 2011

eran@oa-sys.co.uk — 2011-08-15T17:09:33-05:00

”This lesson has a history. My son was playing basketball in Israel and the captain of the basketball team was his friend. They always used to come to our house. Moshe would always try to find an opportunity to use this method and would say ‘ahh, you come here’. So he took this captain of the basketball team and did this ATM. That’s where I learned it for the first time.” -- Mia Segal, at Post Graduate Seminar in Seattle, April 2011.

Click here to listen to Mia’s ATM Podcast!

Interview with Mia Segal. 2003 by Pati Holman

eran@oa-sys.co.uk — 2010-11-09T11:12:27-06:00

Mia Segal's interview 2003_Pati Holman

The story of hanna; an amazing child with cerebral palsy, written by Stephanie Buffum

eran@oa-sys.co.uk — 2010-11-01T18:17:36-05:00

The Story of Hanna

Newspaper Article 2 March 2010

eran@oa-sys.co.uk — 2010-04-12T16:44:01-05:00

Newspaper Article - in German

Letter From Chancellor of the Weitzman Institute

eran@oa-sys.co.uk — 2008-08-20T17:00:55-05:00

weitzman

Letter from David Ben Gurion, Israel's First Prime Minister

eran@oa-sys.co.uk — 2008-08-20T16:59:09-05:00

From Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion page 12

testimonials

eran@oa-sys.co.uk — 2008-07-03T22:14:07-05:00

“I have long been intrigued by this subtle form of retraining the nervous system, which I recommend to patients whose movement has been restricted by injury, cerebral palsy, stroke, fibromyalgia, or chronic pain. I find it to be much more useful than standard physical therapy. I also believe that the Feldenkrais Method can help older people achieve greater range of motion and flexibility, and help all of us feel more comfortable in our bodies.”
Andrew Weil, MD, Author

“Dr Moshe Feldenkrais' method will be of great benefit to all of humanity. From my own experience I know the remarkable results achieved. “
David Ben-Gurion, First. Prime Minister of Israel

“This (work) encompasses not only an upgrading of flexibility, coordination, posture, voice and breathing, but also – and above all – concoiusness raising, sensing, feeling and thinking.”
Meir W. Weisgal, Chancellor, The Weitzmann Institute of Science

“Dr. Feldenkrias is probably the most important authority in the world today on what he terms human improvement. “
Meyer Weisgal, Chancellor, The Weitzman Institute of Science.

“Feldenkrais has studied the body in movement with a precision that I have found nowhere else. “
Peter Brook. Film & Stage Director

“The Feldenkrais Method is the most sophisticated and effective method I have seen for the prevention and reversal of deterioration of function.”
Margaret Mead, PhD, Anthropologist

“After just a few moments of the Feldenkrais exercises, people often find themselves, as if by magic, easily doing things with their bodies that they never thought possible. The Feldenkrais exercises are ingenious.”
Yehudi Menuhin, Violinist

“Following the program with Feldenkrais, patients showed significant improvement in their levels of pain, decreased medication and increased quality of life.”
.American Journal of Pain Management

“The Feldenkrais Method has had remarkable success in a wide range of complaints ranging from the debilitating to the merely nagging. “
Science Digest

Feldenkrais has studied the body in movement with a precision that I have found nowhere else. - Peter Brook. Film & Stage Director

From clients and students:

Your lesson in early March . . . so beautifully linked with the San Diego material of January, plus your compassion in hearing the story/ offering to brain storm with me related to my Mother's brain injury, moved me to a new place. With deep appreciation, I thank you.
DH.
Student, (Stanford)
____________________________

Thanks for the invitation. B (paraplegic patient) described the outing as "exquisite." I appreciate very much your attention and Leora's beautiful handling of my friend. Kind regards,
K.B. Caregiver of stroke patient, (San Francisco)
____________________________

Dear Mia and Leora,
I am still resonating from the wonderful training in January in New York.
I feel like a light bulb with plenty of shining in me. I appreciate the elegant simplicity and clarity of your teachings this winter and I am able to use them with such joy and pleasure in the successful movement of my dancers and students. Because we have had such a brutally cold winter here in New York City, I have had to apply the lessons to myself often, in order to keep my breathing easily available. The lessons work! I see you are teaching all over and I miss you both. I am waiting eagerly for the notice of the next segment here. PM Student,
____________________________

I spent yesterday with B...wow! I could notice several major improvements... the way she walks, run, stands, and sits. Here attitude is really good...she's been getting out more. I think that the changes that you helped her make in her body, led to changes in her attitude. All I can say is “Wow!” I also watched the DVD... I can begin to see how you think about the body.
Father of CP child,

I can’t put into words how meaningful my experience learning from you and Mia in San Diego and again with you yesterday in Austin has been. I will jump at any chance I have to continue to study with you. I am interested in participating in the Post Graduate Training in Berkeley.
TR Student

Wow. Wow. Wow. This scoliosis stuff is Le Bomb!
I had a new client come to see me this morning with neck and shoulder pain. Now that I know what to look for it was obvious to me that the pain is related to a scoliosis that she has.
So I gave a lesson like the lesson I saw you give B and J (kneeling over the table)--certainly not as well as you did, but the same ideas, and lo and behold, when she stood up she had grown 3/8 of an inch!
This is so fantastic!!!
Thank you so much!
Please let us know when you'll be back to teach again
ED
Student

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.

The simple message: Observe, Confirm, and 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, and 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."
AS student
____________________

Thank you for a truly amazing training. I learned so much and I'm sure will keep learning from what I've learned. I can't wait to get my hands on my first student today!
RG Student

YANG-SHUN: SWIMMNG CHAMPION

"Dear Leora, In 2003 and 2004 we visited you a few times at the Feldenkrais courses you treated Yang Shun there ever since we are going to Anna Verberne who still treats him every month. I would like to tell you it is going well with Yang Shun he is doing fine at school and was successful with swimming last month he participated in the swimming championships for disabled on all the distances he competed he won the gold medal so he can call himself Swimming Champion now you find a few photo's of this match with this mail I think the Feldenkrais also helped him to get this far thank you for being in the start of that also give our best wishes to Mia with love, also from Sophia and the children. Met vriendelijke groet,
Jan"

Article: Reflections after a workshop

eran@oa-sys.co.uk — 2007-11-11T17:47:57-06:00

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

YANG-SHUN: SWIMMNG CHAMPION !

eran@oa-sys.co.uk — 2007-03-14T08:24:22-05:00

Many of you may remember a very special demonstration subject in F 10 - Yang Shun had come to us after various surgeries for club-feet and was walking with difficulty with braces. He stole our hearts and admiration immediately with his brilliance and determination and made wonderful progress in front of our eyes working with Leora. Here is a letter from his father and, below that - photos of the SWIMMING CHAMPION !

"Dear Leora,

In 2003 and 2004 we visited you a few times at the Feldenkrais courses you treated Yang Shun there ever since we are going to Anna Verberne who still treats him every month
I would like to tell you it is going well with Yang Shun he is doing fine at school and was succesfull with swimming last month he participated in the swimming championships for disabled on all the distances he competed he won the gold medal so he can call himself Swimming Champion now you find a few photo's of this match with this mail I think the Feldenkrais also helped him to get this far thank you for being in the start of that also give our best wishes to Mia

with love, also from Spohia and the children
Met vriendelijke groet,

Jan"