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“How can something so gentle be so powerful?”
“You hardly did anything; how could that cause the changes that I
feel?”
I’m often asked questions like these at the end of someone’s initial
Feldenkrais Functional Integration session. The work seems so
gentle, so non-intrusive, that people often find its effectiveness
surprising. As you come to understand the Method, however, the
reasons for its effectiveness become more understandable.
In a typical Functional Integration session you lie fully clothed on
a low table (similar to a massage table but lower and wider) while
the practitioner touches and moves you in gentle, non–invasive ways.
The intent of this touch is to explore your neuromuscular
organization — your subconscious responses to touch and movement —
and to have a tactile, nonverbal conversation with your central
nervous system about how you organize your body and your movement.
The process is akin to biofeedback, though more subtle and complex.
In conventional biofeedback you are “hooked up” to a sensor
measuring some aspect of your physiology that you are normally
unaware of, such as the tension in a group of muscle fibers or the
temperature of your fingertip. The biofeedback machine transforms
this measurement into something you can see or hear — lighting a
light or sounding a tone when the muscle fibers relax, or when your
skin temperature rises. Without knowing exactly how you do it, you
can learn to keep the light lit, or the tone on, thus consciously
controlling what are normally unconscious processes. In this way you
can learn to relax habitually tight muscles, or to increase
peripheral blood circulation by warming your fingertip.
In Functional Integration the practitioner is the biofeedback
instrument — sensing and providing feedback (through touch) about
internal processes more complex than those addressed by conventional
biofeedback. Instead of isolated data like tension in a small group
of muscle fibers or the temperature of a fingertip, you receive
feedback about larger and more complex patterns of neuromuscular
organization and response. Through touch the practitioner also
suggests alternatives — new organizations more comfortable, or more
functional, than the old.
We often think about our limitations as structural deficiencies —
muscles too tight or too weak, nerve damage, joint misalignment, the
wear and tear of growing older. Structural deficiencies require
mechanical correction, if they can be corrected at all. So we turn
to exercise to strengthen “weak” muscles, deep tissue massage to
relax “tight” muscles, drugs, forceful manipulations, or even
surgery. These are forceful interventions, and we come to think of
force as a necessary component of healing and change.
Functional Integration is based on an altogether different
perspective — focusing on behavior and neuromuscular organization
rather than structure. Limitations arise from the ways we use
ourselves, from sometimes chronic disorganizations we subconsciously
build into our actions and even our basic ways of
being-in-the-world. The sources of this disorganization are many —
injury, illness, emotional stress, even environmental factors like
flat floors — but the result is the same. We organize our actions in
ways that are inefficient, counterproductive, even pain producing.
We persist in those inefficiencies because the habits that maintain
them grow so strong we aren’t even aware that other possibilities
exist, let alone of how to find them.
Functional Integration helps you find those other possibilities. It
is a way of learning to organize yourself more efficiently, so that
action, even just being-in-theworld, becomes easier, more fluid,
more fun. The gentle non-invasive movements you feel in a Functional
Integration session are not intended to “fix” anything or to create
any structural change. They are a source of new experience, a chance
for your nervous system to move beyond the narrow range of patterns
to which you habitually confine yourself. This facilitates learning
and change, at a deep nonverbal level.
The changes you experience result from this learning. You organize
your bodymind system in an easier, more efficient way. You might
learn to reduce the tension in your chest and breathe more easily,
for example, to reduce the chronic tension that produces pain and
stiffness in your lower back, or to turn your head without
triggering pain in your neck. You move more fluidly, with less
tension and stress than you habitually carry. You feel lighter, as
you learn to feel the path of support through your skeleton more
clearly and allow your skeleton to provide effortless, balanced
support. Pain may diminish, as you release the restrictive patterns
that create the pain.
Functional Integration is not a process in which the practitioner
does things to you, or imposes change on you. The commodity which
passes between practitioner and client is information; the one who
actually makes the changes is you. Gentleness is an important facet
of the work, because it facilitates that transfer of information.
Ralph Strauch, Ph.D. , teaches the Feldenkrais Method in Pacific
Palisades, California. He is the author of THE REALITY ILLUSION: How
you make the world you experience and LOW-STRESS COMPUTING: Using
Awareness to Avoid RSI.
Ralph Strauch, Ph.D.
Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner®
P.O. Box 194
Pacific Palisades, CA 90272
(310)454-8322
rstrauch@somatic.com
www.somatic.comCopyright 1987, 1994 by Ralph Strauch. All rights are reserved. You
may copy and redistribute this article (including online posting) so
long as you do not charge for it and this notice and contact
information remain intact. For permission to reprint the article for
sale, please contact the author. LOW-STRESS COMPUTING: Using
Awareness to Integration are registered service marks of the
Feldenkrais Guild.
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