“The image precedes the action.”
— Yochanan Rywerant, 1983
“…for it is with reference to the clarity or lack of clarity of concepts that existence is largely determined by consciousness.”
— Martin Buber, A New Venture in Adult Education, 1950
“There is no ground for assuming that “thinking” is a special, isolated natural tendency that will bloom inevitably in due season simply because various sense and motor activities have been freely manifested before; or because observation, memory, imagination, and manual skill have been previously exercised without thought. Only when thinking is constantly employed in using the senses and the muscles for the guidance and application of observations and movements, is the way prepared for subsequent higher types of thinking.”
— John Dewey, How We Think, 1910
This Sunday afternoon seminar with Swedish Feldenkrais teacher Eva Laser is an introduction to the Feldenkrais model of learning to learn – again, based on the innate human predispositions for learning and being.
The lessons we will explore are described in Moshe Feldenkrais’ comprehensive textbook that became known under the name of the English translation Awareness Through Movement but was originally published in Hebrew under the profounder title Improving the Ability. The lessons are based on simple actions and revolve around the concept of biological posture as a transitional state of behavioural action. They exploit the curiosity mechanisms that come along with the human orienting response for the exploration of these simple actions. They build awareness as a heuristic measurement tool for the correlation between intention and achievement. They practice the inhibition of parasitic behaviours. That is how the lessons, from a high resolution level of tiny behavioural units, aim to develop the skill of reflective consciousness, to which the ability to think abstractly in a Sunday mood is key.
The seminar allows for participation in person and online.
Read more about the Feldenkrais model.
Moshe Feldenkrais
Moshe Feldenkrais (1904-1984) was an Israeli PhD engineer. He grew up in Baranowicz, today Belarus and emigrated to Tel Aviv in 1919. He was engaged in self-defense methods and in self-hypnosis. He studied at Sorbonne University in Paris, and he worked at the lab of Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie at the time when they made their discovery resulting in a Nobel prize in chemistry. He fled to England in 1940. During World War II he worked in British submarine defense research at Fairlie, Scotland. At that time he lectured at the British Association of Scientific Workers, which led to his book “Body and Mature Behaviour – A Study of Anxiety, Sex, Gravitation and Learning”. He returned to Israel in 1951. Elicited by the life incident of an irreparable knee injury he developed a learning model using movement as an observable parameter of behaviour that allows to monitor the degree of control people have over their actions, opening up a path for individual and non-normative development towards self-respons-ability.
Eva Laser
Eva Laser (born 1952) is a Swedish Feldenkrais teacher and physiotherapist. She studied physiotherapy at Wingate Institute, Israel. 1974-1975 she participated in Feldenkrais’ open classes in Alexander Yanai Street, Tel Aviv. From 1978 she worked as a physiotherapist in Sweden. From 1988 she studied with Moshe Feldenkrais’ assistant Yochanan Rywerant in Stockholm and graduated with the highest possible authorization, to educate future Feldenkrais teachers. She has run a Feldenkrais practice since 1991, integrating physiotherapy in a rehabilitation setting with the principles of Feldenkrais pedagogy. She has translated two of Feldenkrais’ books to Swedish. Being partly retired she continues to teach and write about the Feldenkrais path, with a clear emphasis on the theoretical and the ethical background.
Yochanan Rywerant
Yochanan Rywerant (1922-2010) was a Romanian mathematician and physicist. He spent World War II in labor camps, after the war he studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and later taught mathematics and physics at high school level. He joined the open classes Feldenkrais was teaching at Alexander Yanai Street, Tel Aviv in 1952 and continued three times a week for 15 years. 1969-71 he was one of the 13 students selected for Feldenkrais’ first professional training. In connection with this, he began working at the Feldenkrais “Institute For Inquiry Of The Action And Its Improvement” and became Feldenkrais’ assistant and colleague. He wrote three theoretical books on the Feldenkrais model of learning. After Feldenkrais’ death, he established his own independent curriculum and taught basic, advanced, and meta teacher trainings until his death.