I only recently found out that just by thinking about moving a part of the body, the muscles of that body part are supplied with nerves – they are innervated – and so thinking activates muscles, prior to movement. Sportspeople will rehearse a skill or technique in their imagination and in so doing, invoke a sense of muscle memory, so that when they actually move, they are already wired in. For me, this is one of the clearest reminders that our brains and bodies exist in a two-way continuum – a truism that is so often repeated that it becomes easy to take for granted or ignore.

I also recently came across the term ‘flinking’ - a combination of feeling and thinking which is another cheeky way into our brain-body inseparability. Maybe you already knew about these things that are fresh to me....?

And so, as I practice and teach Yoga and am also a trainee of the Feldenkrais Method, I think and feel and feel and think about the similarities and differences between these two approaches to experiencing the body and mind together. As I flink and flink, I’m more and more open and curious about how what I know and feel so far about Feldenkrais, has changed my Yoga, and about what there might be to offer back to Feldenkrais from Yoga in return. I gradually feel clearer about some of the similarities and differences but also experience the relationship between the two like I’m slipping into a sea of unknown potential – a not knowing that tastes like freedom and surprise.

Gentle Movement, Subtle Sensation & Neuroplasticity

Personally, I’ve always loved practicing and teaching different styles of physical yoga and still do. Significantly, though, a lot of what passes as Yoga today, places the physical body centre stage in the form of asana (posture), vinyasa (movement with the breath in between postures), and occasionally with a bit of pranayama (breath) and meditation thrown in. This common tendency to prioritise the body brings with it a sense that through hard effort and doing things right, our bodies may be improved – a main goal is to be ‘good at Yoga’. Whatever that means. This physical focus can of course make us feel great – strong, fully alive, and more at peace with ourselves and the world - and that’s why so many of us do it and I don’t want to knock it at all. But it can mean that often, the more meditative aspects of a fuller Yoga practice or an approach to Yoga that is more therapeutic for anyone injured or in pain – one that encourages refining our attention to sensation, to ourselves, one that explores the full mystery of existence - are blurred through a lens of physical strength and flexibility, image, and achievement.

There came a point about 10 years ago when I was probably ‘better’ at postures than I am now – but I became mesmerised by sensing my body in more delicate detail than I thought possible. When I came off the mat and walked into my day, it was as if I was breathing through every pore of my skin and could feel the earth through the soles of my feet. This process was partly helped by excellent Yoga teachers like Pete Blackaby who place an emphasis on sensing the qualities of physical detail rather than the performance of posture. But then my experience of feeling into subtle sensation and breath was propelled to a new level by practicing Feldenkrais for the first time with Dan Gelblum who is both a Yoga and Feldenkrais practitioner.

Both Yoga and Feldenkrais share goals of self-healing and transformation, drawing on philosophies and practices of mind-body connection. In the broadest sense, both aim to accompany each one of us to a fuller sense of ourselves. And depending on the kind of Yoga we practice, there may be more similarities than differences between the two approaches. But from what I understand so far, there are some clear distinctions – the main one being the pivotal role of the nervous system – and more on this now. 

Further down the post I will return to Yoga and Feldenkrais’ shared goals and potential for reciprocity.  

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“What I’m after isn’t flexible bodies, but flexible brains. What I’m after is to restore each person to their human dignity.”

Moshe Feldenkrais

The Feldenkrais Method, developed in the mid 20th Century by Moshe Feldenkrais, uses slow and gentle movements to explore sensations and potential for movement in the body. The method can be beneficial for anyone with a physical or neurological condition that is causing unease (Feldenkrais is used regularly, for example, for people with chronic back pain, or who have suffered strokes or are born with cerebral palsy, just to mention a few examples but there are many more. And of course, the Method is illuminating for anyone who simply wants to feel more at ease in themselves and to get to know their body-minds more closely. Many Feldenkrais sequences are practiced lying flat on the back or the side of the body, removing the effort of dealing with gravity. Rather than working towards key postures or being encouraged towards certain experiences, the focus in Feldenkrais tends to be on noticing small details that arise spontaneously for the practitioner and as in Yoga, these details can be physical, energetic, and sometimes, emotional. Sometimes the attention is drawn to when and where the movement is easy and smooth and sometimes when it perhaps comes up against some resistance. The idea is that change happens, not by directly trying to change anything, but by simply inviting the body into gentle habitual and non-habitual movements and noticing subtle differences.

Feldenkrais called his method many things, but one I particularly like is that it’s Dancing with the Brain. By becoming more alert in sensing the body, we access the brain’s capacity for new learning and change – its Neuroplasticity. We learn to organise our bodies and ourselves better by noticing differences. Feldenkrais is one of the most mindful body practices out there. And so, while movement is important, it is the stimulation of neural pathways through attention to sensation, in ways that are pleasurable and effortless, that holds the key to how Feldenkrais works on the body-mind as a continuum. Movement and sensing the body can create new connections with the brain - effectively rewiring the nervous system to wake up parts of the brain that may have been under-used or dormant. Our bodies and nervous systems make perfectly entwined dance partners!

In simple and kind ways that are very accessible, Feldenkrais helps us learn the most efficient and pleasant way of organising our bodies and ourselves, whether we’re lying flat on our backs or when out and about in the world. Helping to find ease and new options for feeling and moving the body, and then by what seems like some kind of miracle, finding fresh options for experiencing and responding to other areas in life, Feldenkrais presents a highly sophisticated system that re-educates the neuro-muscular system. This system does nothing less than lead to self-understanding, healing, and transformation.

Ruthy Alon puts it better –

“It’s not just a method of body movement, but rather an awakening of bodily resourcefulness and creativity.”

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Some key aspects to Feldenkrais sequences known as an Awareness Through Movement (ATM) Sessions:

·      Less is more

·      Easy movements with as little effort as possible

·      Start with tiny and slow movements

·      Without judgement - no correct way of doing something

·      Enjoyable

·      Not posture but action

·      Listen close-in and notice any minute or big differences in sensing the body

·      For everyone whether you’re physically fit or exhausted, injured & in pain

Now, it may be that the prospect of less is more might sound boring – and I probably found it so at first. Some people compare the movements to watching paint dry or grass grow. But then something unexpected happens – just by listening in more closely, by noticing minute sensations and differentiating one from the next, it’s like learning to have a body again and learning to move again. I liken these qualities of re-sensing and of re-birth in Yoga and Feldenkrais, to what I imagine it’s like to be an insect slowly emerging from a chrysalis or pupa into the air and light and discovering a capacity to move – an insect alive, sensate, and maybe just a little bit enchanted.

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Yoga & Feldenkrais apart and together

I don’t really want to do an exhaustive check and compare between Yoga and Feldenkrais, partly because I don’t know enough and need to do a lot of reading, but also because there are forms of physical Yoga practice that have more overlap with Feldenkrais than others, particularly at the level of the gentleness of the practice and the focus on attention rather than achievement. I’m thinking here of Body Sensing from the iRest tradition (Kirsten Guest, Richard Miller, James Reeves), and Pete Blackaby’s Intelligent Yoga. Pete Blackaby explicitly talks about body-mind (re)mapping in his classes, for example. And there are aspects to Yoga that I haven’t even touched on here that are relevant to an exploration of sensation, thought processes and neural transmission – such as the sophisticated enquires into Energy that are a key aspect to the Hatha and Tantric traditions.

So, I’ll just highlight a few things that I’m wondering about at the moment –

o   What are you invited to experience in a class?

o   What is the role of the nervous system?

o   What is the bigger picture?

What are you invited to experience in a class?

I wonder how often, in a Yoga class, you’ve been invited into feeling the subtleties of your body and breath? Where do you feel? What do you feel? How does it feel like this? Is it different like this? Maybe very often. But I wonder if it’s more common for you to be encouraged into aligning your body towards something like a perfect posture with a clear sense of the wrong and the right ways to do that? The more I teach Yoga and the more I practice Feldenkrais, the more interested I am in inviting students to feel and notice the detail. When people ask me to adjust them and to tell them how to do something better, on a good day, I will ask them how a position or movement feels in their body. And how about trying to do it like this or that? Sometimes I forget and get caught up in the idea of a good posture. I can sometimes feel a pressure to do that. And I also still hold onto a desire to come into beautiful shapes and fall into the trap of comparing myself to others. Maybe I’ll never let go of that? Maybe the point is just to be aware of what we’re doing and what we’re being asked to do; and then to notice what we’re feeling and where. What changes?

What is the role of the nervous system?

This is a bigger topic than I can do justice to here. But, for now, as far as my understanding goes, most Yoga practices place a slightly different emphasis on the nervous system than Feldenkrais and are far less explicit about the role of neuroplasticity in increasing a sense of well-being and ease in the world. The nervous system of course is mentioned in Yoga - most often when comparing the fight or flight mode of the Sympathetic Nervous System to the rest and digest mode of the Parasympathetic Nervous System. There is also a lot of interesting research into Yoga and pain relief – why and how we experience pain. But, overall, we practice Yoga because it makes us feel more whole, more connected, more at ease – and all these benefits come from us turning down the volume on our dominant tendency to go go go and all of the anxiety and stress that goes with that, to find a quieter, more spacious place to be. The effects on the brain from Yoga can improve our attention, our concentration, our language and our memory. So, in a sense, finding ourselves more easily and more often attuned to the Parasympathetic Nervous system is a form of neural re-wiring. There are of course occasional exceptions to this, but I don’t generally understand Yoga’s relationship to the brain in the same way as I understand the explicit emphasis at the heart of Feldenkrais on neural creativity and change. I don’t hear Yoga practitioners suggest they’re dancing with their brains!

Something I want to research properly now – and if anyone has any recommended reading, please let me know – is where and when Yoga is studied in explicit relation to neuroplasticity.

What is the bigger picture?

So far, it might sound like I think Feldenkrais has more to offer Yoga than the other way around. I don’t think this is the case and there are many dimensions to both practices that I haven’t touched on here (but hope to in future writing). To round off this piece, I’ll go back to the bigger picture – to the origins of Yoga & Feldenkrais and to what they seek – and maybe here find a way in which, for my taste anyway, Yoga might have something to offer to Feldenkrais.

The first stirrings of the Yogic tradition began over 5000 years ago as rishis or sages in ancient India found their curiosity piqued about the nature of the universe and the human position within it.[1] The Feldenkrais Method resulted from the enquiries of Moshe Feldenkrais in the mid 20th Century, when he explored non-surgical ways of bringing an ease of movement into his severely damaged knee.[2] There may be more similarity to the basis of these origins than first meets the eye.

Even within the broad church that Yoga has become today – ranging from ascetic practices of solitude in Himalayan caves to Rave & Tequila Yoga in Milton Keynes - there seems to be a shared understanding that the fullest version of ourselves includes, but also exceeds, the limitations of our individual brains and bodies. I quite like the clarification that in so-called Western traditions, while consciousness is understood to be a product of the brain-mind, in so-called Eastern traditions, the brain-mind arises from and is a condensing of consciousness in which time and space are unbounded and infinite. Conscious intelligence is in every cell of our body and every cell of our body participates with a more expansive intelligent space-time than our brains can contemplate. The problem is that we most often forget what we really are and what we are connected to, as we become wrapped up in the trials and tribulations of daily life. The extent to which this bigger picture - some would call it a spiritual picture - is brought in as a reminder, during a Yoga class, of the true meaning of Yoga – of course varies.

As I study the Feldenkrais Method – and I have only completed one of four years of training – I find it very interesting how Moshe Feldenkrais and other practitioners talk about coming into an awareness of the whole self as being what the method is essentially about. Moshe Feldenkrais’ writings say a few things about how the self and more intelligent self-organisation emerge through relationship between the body-mind, the environment, and other people. The experience of the method during a class or a one-to-one session is described as one of relationship – teachers and students occupy a shared space. We don’t develop and experience ourselves in isolation. What is left unstated by Feldenkrais is a sense of understanding of what the nature of Being and of Self might be. There’s something refreshing about this light touch when it comes to the bigger esoteric, existential issues that Yogic philosophy is so explicitly open to.

On a more tangible note, some of the most inspiring parts of both Yogic and Feldenkrais teachings focus on a human capacity to let go of the burdens of physical-mental conditioning and to learn afresh how to be ourselves. In general, the understanding for both traditions goes a bit like this – the more we identify with our thoughts, our inherited beliefs about ourselves and accumulated habits in our bodies, the more we contract and suffer with physical and mental unease. But the more we can expand our perception beyond our habits and well-trammelled thought patterns, and the more we open to the unknown – the mystery of existence – the more we are likely to experience ourselves at ease and free.

It’s significant that there’s no explicit spiritual dimension to Feldenkrais. More than that – the method and how it is taught is most definitely secular and there’s a hygiene to that – it may be cleaner not to lay claim to any greater understanding of the mysteries of existence. Here is a method that allows us to explore, to feel, to change without the fetters of ancient tradition and expectation. There is little room for esoteric knowledge as power to go astray as sadly it has done for some of the Yogis out there. But at the same time, Feldenkrais, leaves many existential questions around the mystery of Who am I? unexplored or at least left in between the lines. And it is this line of enquiry that I most love about Yogic philosophy and practice and miss in Feldenkrais.

There is a Feldenkrais practitioner who has to be one of my favourites – and that is Jeff Haller – and I think what I love about his teaching is that he is open, more explicitly than others in the Feldenkrais world – to using the Method to bring us into a closer awareness of the unknown, the mystery. There’s a flavour of the devotional to Jeff Haller’s teaching that I, for one, really love – and it is this for me that suggests that Yoga could bring to Feldenkrais a more open and explicit questioning and celebration of life’s mysteries and how our body-minds are entangled with those.

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Well, I love a wild, free, energetic Yoga flow that would appear to have little in common with Feldenkrais. But maybe I love it all the more now because of the gentle, open listening that Feldenkrais has introduced to all of my Yoga practice – whether that practice is gentle, energetic, slow or fast. Something I heard the Feldenkrais/Yoga practitioner Faye Berton say recently, that rings so true for me, is that she found that when she practiced Feldenkrais, she felt ‘ooh I’m too loose’ and when she practiced (Iyengar) Yoga, she felt ‘ooh I’m too tight’. But by going on – exploring being somewhere in between too loose and too tight, Faye came into the simplicity and openness of awareness – and this is ultimately where she (and I) wants to be.

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Some web resources that have helped me so far......

Barbara Anderson https://bodyandsoulkc.com/about-barbara-anderson/

Faye Berton https://faye-berton.com

Pete Blackaby https://www.peterblackaby.co.uk

Daniel Gelblum https://hathadan.wordpress.com

Jeff Haller https://www.insidemoves.org/Home

Carole Kress https://www.feldenkraisaccess.com/rooted-yoga

Rachel Polasznik http://www.betterbodylab.com/about-us.html

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[1] For a detailed history of the Yogic tradition, see Georg Feurstein (2001) The Yoga Tradition: Its History, Literature, Philosophy and Practice 

[2] For a great chapter on Moshe Feldenkrais and the development of his method, see Norman Doidge (2016) The Brain’s Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity.