On "The Potent Self" by Moshe Feldenkrais
An introduction to the power of the Feldenkrais Method
Once we recognize what we enact, we begin to feel in control of the situation and can preserve our peace of mind in spite of adversity.
—Moshe Feldenkrais, The Potent Self
The first time I encountered the Feldenkrais Method it was from the preachy mouth of a New Age artist who had taken one independent workshop and would not stop talking about it. It seemed like some woo-woo nonsense because all of her explanations of it were so simple. She claimed that its power was life-changing and it was all rooted in pelvic alignment and good posture. I experienced this as a young and naive former ballet dancer and I thought I knew everything I needed to know about good posture and proper alignment. This was also a time when I falsely believed that any movement education should be undertaken by a person who intended to hone their skill, or perfect their dance craft. I brushed off Feldenkrais for years until just recently I read The Potent Self by Moshe Feldenkrais.
The Potent Self is anchored in a theory of embodied awareness. It is Feldenkrais' final book on the subject that became his life's work and masterpiece. It is a culmination of his philosophy that was honed not through intrepid scientific observation and discovery (though he did earn his doctorate in Physics from the Sorbonne), but by his lived experience as someone with a body and someone who was a body worker. He came to this journey in his 30's when doctors advised he have surgery performed on his knee to heal an old injury. Impervious to the medical advice, Feldenkrais refused direct medical intervention on his fascia and ligaments and instead opted to fix the problem himself. He quit his career as a military physicist and studied movement awareness full time. Soon after, he restored full mobility to his injured knee. He traveled the world, earned a black belt in Judo, wrote nine books, and developed The Feldenkrais Method that is still practiced and taught around the world.
Feldenkrais workshops are slow, but also intense. After two hours of seemingly nothing happening (it is possible to spend 45 minutes on bending one ankle the "right" way) you walk away feeling looser, maybe a little sore, but also lighter in mood. At the core of Feldenkrais is eliminating unnecessary effort because effort requires energy; if you’re expending too much energy, you will become an “impotent” version of yourself, and this will lead to anxiety, sexual impotency, and depression. The following axiom is that when you’re not over-expending energy and constantly trying to do any action, your body is functioning at the proper level of its own capacity. And then it follows that when operating within your body’s capacity, you will have reserves of energy that increase your overall performance and quality of life enhances exponentially. It's quite remarkable to note the change in your body. It's hard to grasp after one workshop, and this is why those who are certified in the Feldenkrais Method will often say it's imperative to keep up with the practice. But the other thing about Feldenkrais is that once you've learned and integrated the foundational skills, there's really nothing to "practice" except for maybe practicing implementing the skills into your daily, embodied life. After you learn how to properly align your head with your pelvis, or learn how to stop overexerting muscles while performing fine motor tasks, you sort of can't help but integrate them every day. Further, the improvement to your life is clear and measurable after even just a few weeks of living by the Feldenkrais Method. You notice when you're out of alignment, the effects of which is motivation enough to get back into it. After a longer period of time, though, the changes become more subtle, but also more profound.
The current zeitgeist is discussing how the body holds onto trauma. At one point in the last two years it seemed as though everyone was reading the book The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. Indeed it even spent seven months ranked #1 on The New York Times best seller list for Nonfiction. The Body Keeps the Score is good in that it's eye-opening and packed with information about how it's not just the brain's programming that affects our psychological and social experiences, but the body's too. I'm surprised by this book's popularity in contrast to The Potent Self. It seems that Feldenkrais is explaining the same phenomena as van der Kolk, albeit in less medical and neuroscientific terms, but whereas The Body Keeps the Score tends to draw most attention to the evidence of the body's entrapment of trauma, The Potent Self focuses much more on the solutions to healing the trauma. There is a significant section of The Body Keeps the Score dedicated to the paths to healing, but it's largely technical and ideological in nature. There's considerable page space given to cognitive behavioral therapy methods as well as therapies that make use of brain-computer interface technology. But for a book that is arguing so strongly for people to pay attention to their bodies it's surprising that there's relatively little on body-based healing methods or therapy. There is one chapter in this recovery section, "Learning to Inhabit Your Body: Yoga," which goes into some detail on how to use your body to heal your body traumas. It is overall in favor of yoga as a healing method and supports a regular yoga practice as a way to use mindful embodiment to get back into physical alignment, but it takes up 13 pages out of the book's 420-page entirety. Again, I interpret this to mean that The Body Keeps the Score is a book about diagnosis and elaboration on a problem, rather than illuminating solutions.
What does it say about our current society or culture that the more popular text to read is the one with all the attention on the trauma and not the recovery? Given that The Potent Self is less scientific and more philosophical in nature, maybe it wasn't as well-received because of the recent turn toward science worship. And perhaps this means The Body Keeps the Score is a good complement because it has the privilege of time (The Potent Self was published in 1985 and The Body Keeps the Score was published in 2014) and advanced technology with which to measure the things Feldenkrais was naming. But with advanced technology comes also the fetishization of products using the tech. I think this is why there's also maybe so much text poured over brain-computer interfacing in The Body Keeps the Score. There's sort of an expectation that the same tools that are used to measure and prove the problem ought to be implemented for solving the problem. And the beautiful thing, to me, about Feldenkrais' project is that there is no reliance on outside products or services to fix your alignment, and subsequently, your life. As much as the problem is in the body, so too, then is the solution.
I was not familiar with Feldenkrais, but I have been looking for a book which occupies the same space as The Body Keeps the Score. This sounds to be exactly that: thank you Bethany!
beautiful bathany. thanks for the intro to moshe i'll be looking up this book