In an interview between William Coulson and Linda Ames Nicolosi, titled “Reflections on the Human 
Potential Movement,” published in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy (JMFT) in December 2000, William Coulson said about Carl Rogers: “Rogers’ books gave voice to something that was already brewing in the culture at that time. In his 1961 book, On Becoming a Person, he wrote a chapter called, »To Be That Self Which One Truly Is.« [..] He was a onetime American Psychological Association president, and he received the APA’s first Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. He was a weighty ..read more

John Taylor Gatto, in his book “Dumbing Us Down,” delves into the topic of compulsory schooling: “Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important; force them to plead for the natural right to the toilet and they will become liars and toadies; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even.” This is one of the quotes that stick with ..read more

For a challenging to understand movement instruction, let’s look at the beginning of Feldenkrais lesson AY #541, “Inverting hands including more.” This lesson involves movements of the arms, hands, and shoulders/shoulder-blades, and will be increasing body awareness, flexibility, and comfort in these areas. According to the Copyright Information on the IFF (International Feldenkrais Federation) website, the IFF does not allow for quoting any of their original Feldenkrais materials to any length outside of private study groups and non-profit purposes, not even under Fair Use (to their own demis ..read more

Today I had a lovely chat with a fellow Feldenkrais enthusiast. At some point she was sharing with me her experience of a time where she had some knee (?) pain, and upon rolling about with a Feldenkrais lesson (?) her knee pain resolved, but then she had shoulder pain. I’m sorry I can’t recall the exact details. But we were talking about this in the context of anxiety, body posture and what I clearly remember was that she was talking to her painful shoulder and she asked herself, “Why am I doing this to myself?” And while we were talking I didn’t think too deeply about it, at first, because I ..read more

I was browsing through the book, “The Elusive Obvious,“ by Moshé Feldenkrais, Chapter “Awareness Through Movement”, when this passage stood out to me: “This seemed to me the real gist of my knee trouble. I could repeat a movement with my leg hundreds of times, I could walk for weeks with no inconvenience whatsoever and suddenly doing what I believed to be the identical movement just once more spoiled everything. Obviously, this one movement was done differently from the former ones, and so it seemed to me that how I did a movement was much more important than what the movement consisted of ..read more

Re-reading and flipping through his books, it seems to me as if Moshé Feldenkrais has failed in some areas he wrote about the most. For example, about fostering independence and maturity, including sexual maturity, and encouraging critical thinking rather than blind acceptance of authority. To quote him verbatim, “not taking other people’s sayings for divine and immutable truths,” or from a paragraph written in more recognisable Moshé Feldenkrais style: “Only children must do things just to obey orders no matter how unreasonable; this is called, by some, learning discipline. But grown-up peopl ..read more

To me, Moshé Feldenkrais is one of the most hilarious old school writers in the library. His books are spiked with knee-slappers. For example, I quote from “Body And Mature Behaviour,” chapter “Localisation Of Function And Maturity”: “Psychoanalysis, in Freud’s writings at least, deals solely with psychic life. Only very rarely is there any allusion to the fact that psychic life does take place in a physical body. [..] Any such treatment is therefore bound to spend its usefulness rapidly, as it did.” –  There’s plenty of critique about Freud nowadays, especially with the rise of fields li ..read more

Ah good heavens, metaphors of language, transfer of meaning, what a tool. Postural recession is my new word now, really? You too, Brutus? I always liked to afford ? myself a bit of individual style and variety in my posture—I mean the way in which I hold my body when I stand, sit, or walk. A bit of slouching in my shoulders, a bit of depression of my chest, and a bit less of pulling my shoulders backwards than all the brave men all around me who are so good at following all the rules and jumping through all the hoops and believing all and everything that is on the News… including the ads… to e ..read more

Perhaps I can tackle this question through writing. Just the other day (as so often) I found myself pondering the idea of learning figure drawing… but then, I quickly dismissed the notion, as per usual. Lack of talent and time, being my reasoning. How about digital figure posing then? As an alternative route (my usual go-to thought after dismissing the thought of learning figure drawing), I googled afresh and opened a couple of figure posing apps. However, even now, in the year 2024, I find the available figure posing apps painstakingly cumbersome. It takes me, “like,” forever, to pick and mov ..read more

I’ve never started to seriously learn figure drawing, because I think it’s too big of a task for me. It might take me years of daily drawing before I see decent results, and I just don’t have the time for that. Yet- I keep entertaining the idea of being able to quickly sketch down a figure for reference. And immediately after I discard the idea, because the journey would be too long, too time consuming. Yet- I think it would be a skill that matches my profession as a teacher in Somatics. But then, it just seems too difficult, too much of a commitment to even start. I googled “how to learn fig ..read more