Composing Experience

In May 2008, I presented a five day Feldenkrais advanced training in Composing Experience in Devon, England. The Winter 2008 issue of Functional Information, the Feldenkrais Guild UK Newsletter, included an article on the training and participants’ reactions. A portion of that article is reproduced below. A description of the material presented in that workshop can be found here.

In what follows, “FI” is an abreviation for “Functional Integration,” an individual Feldenkrais lesson, while “ATM” is an abbreviation for “Awareness Through Movement,” a group movement lesson.

Reporting on the COMPOSING EXPERIENCE
Advanced Training with RALPH STRAUCH

by Nikhila Ludlow

In May this year a group of 26 of us gathered in Dartington, Devon, for this Advanced Training, which consisted of three main parts.

• The nature of perception:
• Organizing and managing action
• The somatic nature of emotions

As promised, the training was not typical of it’s kind: we had hand-outs, and slide show presentations – which gave us the opportunity to dive into a lot of detail about certain aspects of the functioning of the human brain and nervous system – in a way that probably only someone like Ralph can.

Comments from participants:

“The whole group felt at ease with itself”

“A great chef who serves up an impeccable meal and then gets out of the way enough that you can truly appreciate the food and fully digest it. Thanks Ralph”

“the forms on touch, connection, and listening (other than “moves”); the sense of center rather than boundary; the soft, subtle, and powerful place between the least resistance and the first hint of collapse; and the level of non-doing we practiced will all, I suspect, have a very significant impact on how I live as well as on my FI and ATM practice.”

“I found the training very inspiring, because it confirmed my own way of working and provided me with new ideas which I am going to use in my practice”

“I found the open attitude to the Method a relief and liberation. To have these theoretical and experiential viewpoints clarified things about the Method and have given me the optimism that I could do FI — from my viewpoint — in my way! (having had little confidence about doing FI before this)”

“Being still at the beginning of my training I had a lot of anticipation about how I could get the FI exercises “right.” Ralph’s openness in encouraging us to experiment and engaging with the group as a whole helped very much with this. I have seldom felt so comfortable throughout a workshop.”

“Amazing, the not doing but feeling, taking time, and becoming aware”

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Article by Victoria Worsley

The next part comes from Victoria Worsley, and begins with a description of her experience of a Functional Integration session with Ralph.

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“I feel like a rag doll’

“Ok. So just let yourself feel what its like not to hold yourself together”

- and in that moment, lying on Ralph’s table near the end of an FI, I shifted another level as I realised just how much I could lose of this organisation even coming up to sit by feeling my habitual experience of the world close in around me again and by making my habitual adjustments to meet it, even slightly. I could feel my diaphragm begin to tighten even thinking about it, and the roof of my mouth and my throat ached. I let go of that and went back into the ragdoll feeling. For a few moments I wondered if I could just stay lying there instead. Maybe for ever if Ralph didn’t have anything else planned. Another layer of the complex process that is ‘integration’ came sharply into focus. I had to get up with this now and take it into my life. Somehow. That’s what its about. Ralph’s way of getting us to notice what we all too often do after an ATM when we start to focus again on what has to be faced or got done (eg narrowing our vision, raising our centre of gravity and/or slightly tightening our musculature) clarified something for me now. But of course the change this organisation – this way of experiencing how I could be in the world – represented had some pretty hefty ramifications for all of my life. But then that’s the Feldenkrais Method of course.

Mine was a very personal journey in that week and I am not going to discuss details. I had obviously decided somewhere in me that I could allow myself to get in touch with some difficult stuff and that’s what happened: the ATMs plugged me right in and then the FI went further and also clarified at least part of where the hell it was coming from. In good Feldenkrais tradition I was using myself to learn – but I certainly hadn’t planned it that way. It was an advanced training for god’s sake, not a therapy group! But what I can say is that if Ralph hadn’t had the skills to ride with me and keep me moving through a pretty turbulent FI, I would have kept most or all of that stuff locked up and, crucially, to a significant degree my organisation would have stayed locked up to keep it there. (and by the way the pain in my arm that has been plaguing me for many months went after and has not come back yet) And if he hadn’t created a place in which I could make some sense of it for myself, the impact of what the ragdoll feeling meant in terms of my life at yet another deeper level would not have been clear either and that was very significant for me in terms of integration. In Ralph’s usually well-timed catch-phrase: ‘is this making sense?’ For me it’s why, contentious as it may be for some, Ralph’s way of working can indeed be ‘what the person needs at the time’ (certainly exactly what this person needed at the time) and this fabulous Feldenkrais Method has some of the most sophisticated tools around for enabling this kind of process.

The understanding of how we block unwanted – especially traumatic – experience through holding and tightening and that somatic change involves emotional change is there both in Feldenkrais and in current newer thinking on trauma in other fields. Ralph’s point that unless the emotional experience is allowed to run its course where needed the somatic change is unlikely to last (as the protective pattern will simply be re-instated) is something I have to agree with from my personal experience and from working with others and seeing them work. And while you can find this understanding very clearly in, e.g., Bio-energetics, Peter Levine’s work, and some very eminent body psychotherapists none of them have as sophisticated a somatic method for working with as the Feldenkrais Method. We really have a gift here. Enabling more practitioners to work in that way if they want – or even to notice the possibility – is, I think, extremely valuable.

So how has it impacted since then?

Well, I have gone in and out of something like that organisation I found on Ralph’s table. But I have some more tools for re-finding and/or ‘playing with it’. The emotional journey is of course not separate and is on-going too, but I am in a much better place now. I thought a lot about the exercises Ralph did about centre and connection versus resistance on the first day. It helped. And about allowing impulses through – although I don’t think I get that yet: I am so well-versed in containment.

Another very important aspect of the week (which goes hand in hand with how to enable people to support themselves and feel safe) was the relationship to gravity and the ground. Again it’s not new – but Ralph brought it home for me in a new way that has really stuck. I use it now in everything I do – from every aspect of my practice to walking down the street – and it makes the biggest difference. I have spent a whole term working with actors in drama school on gravity and their relationship to it – and bought permission to spend all this time on small movements and finding ways to use less effort by judicious use of using Ralph’s understanding of emotion and muscular holding in conjunction with some similar insights Stanislavksy has about effort and the ability to feel emotion (let alone portray it). They really get it.

In FI I touch differently. Well, its not entirely different – conjoined nervous systems is what we do – but this was another level of development for me. I feel much more centred and able in the work I have been doing with those people who do turn up on my table with strong emotional issues, or whose views of the world are on the edge of what we might consider healthy – or even perhaps normal. And I sometimes I have a different kind of presence teaching ATMs: I don’t need them to like it so much.

Half way through the week I had looked at Ralph and despaired. I am simply not enough to do this work. I am simply not enough. But now I go in and out of feeling that that is probably not true. One of my most challenging and confrontational clients suddenly got easy shortly after I got back. Was it him or me? I am not sure. But I feel much more over my centre, much less on the front or back foot – and some days I think its possible that I am enough. So I guess that was a pretty major week for me. Thanks Ralph.

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