Composing Experience

I’ve taught the Feldenkrais Method^® in Pacific Palisades, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, for the past quarter-century. Beyond my study with Moshe Feldenkrais, the founder of the Method, my work has been influenced by various other streams of experience. A Ph.D. in Statistics from UC Berkeley led to my first career as a Senior Mathematician with the Rand Corporation, where my research focused human and organizational decisionmaking processes. I began exploring the relationship between body and mind through T’ai Chi, Aikido and related disciplines in the late 1960s, and developed a personal form of body/mind practice that I call refocusing in the mid-1970s.

My interest in issues related to choice and human experience has evolved throughout the course of my adult life. As a UC Berkeley graduate student in the 1960s I studied probability theory, statistical decision theory, and related fields. I was lucky enough to have a mentor who taught me to think of mathematical knowledge as something that grows out of an intuitive understanding of the problem being addressed, and the formal structure that knowledge eventually takes on as a way to record and communicate it that plays only a secondary role in its creation. That way of thinking has served me well in areas far afield from the mathematics where I first learned it.

After receiving my Ph.D. I was drawn to the Rand Corporation, a “think tank” working primarily for the US Air Force and Department of Defense, to work on issues of choice related to national security. My research interests at Rand eventually came to focus on the ways that military and other governmental organizations construct and respond to their perceptions of the choices facing them, I was particularly interested in the biases and distortions introduced by the analytic methodologies and decisionmaking tools that I was trained to apply. An example of the way I addressed these issues can be found in in my 1975 article on “‘Squishy’ Problems and Quantitative Methods.”

My interests in the martial arts of T’ai Chi and Aikido began as a separate track in my life. These internal arts can be seen as being more about awareness and the control of perception than about physical strength, speed, and skill as those attributes are normally conceived. I gradually came to see my martial arts practice as concerned with issues of choice similar to those I explored in my Rand research, but in the context of how individual human beings interact with the world rather than how larger organizations do it. This led me to meditative practices and Chinese philosophy, and the writings of Carlos Castenada. The western intellectual worldview which I held up until then could not adequately explain some of my new experiences so I was searching for a broader understanding.

A major shift in my understanding of how life works came though a practice I call refocusing, which a friend and I developed in the mid-1970s from our Aikido practice. I’ll write about refocusing in greater depth later on, but basically, it involves shifting your perception of physical interactions with the external world in ways that alter the outcome in unexpected ways. What initially seem to be physical limitations imposed by the situation turn out to really be caused by unconscious choices you make in response to the situation. What happens when someone holds you down in a chair, for example, is explored here.

These experiences completely altered my worldview. I could no longer accept the conventional explanation of a reality that sees experience as ultimately governed by known laws of physics. Instead, I was coming to understand “reality” as something much more malleable, strongly affected by the (largely unconscious) choices we make as we interact with the world. The ordinary reality that most of us encounter for most of our lives is not what’s really “out there.” Rather, it is the product of a collective learned agreement about how we perceive and interact with the world — a collective illusion we call reality.

Perhaps I like theoretical explanations because I’m a mathematician, or perhaps I became a mathematician because I like theoretical explanations. In either case, my need to understand my experiences led me to think theoretically about the nature of perception, reality, and the interactions between the two. My book, The Reality Illusion, describes my understanding at the time it was written in the early 1980s. My understanding has deepened and become richer, but I still agree with what I wrote then.

In 1980 I attended a workshop with Moshe Feldenkrais, the founder of the Feldenkrais Method, and discovered that he had a marvelous set of tools with which to explore these questions. I began training with him three months later. I have worked as a Feldenkrais Practitioner for the past quarter century, integrating what I learned from him with understanding gained from the experiences described above, and the ongoing experience I encountered along the way.

I’ve worked with thousands of people over that time, with a wide range of presenting issues and objectives. Some have had health-related issues, including muscular-skeletal problems such as back pain, neurological problems such as stroke or Cerebral Palsy, chronic pain, and in some cases, terminal illness. Others have wanted to enhance their abilities in some way — to improve their tennis or golf, to move more easily, or to perform better in their profession. Some needed help in dealing with the consequences of severe emotional trauma, including sexual, physical, or emotional abuse as a child or as an adult, or trauma stemming from combat experience, as a combatant or as a civilian. Others have simply wanted to know themselves more deeply, to become more of who they were under the learned veneer behind which we all hide. I’ve been able to help most of them, and in the process, I’ve learned as much from them as they’ve learned from me.

Along the way I’ve dabbled at writing another book, or books, updating and extending what I said in The Reality Illusion. My hard drive is littered with incomplete drafts that have never seen the light of day. I’m giving this blog format a try to see if it’s easier to put my ideas out a bit at a time, rather than trying to get them organized into book length format.