Our Little Dips explore a theme of Feldenkrais learning, then illustrate it with one or more lessons. They always include at least one free lesson. Little Dips are first published in our newsletter.
In recent years I’ve been thinking and teaching more about the power of applying a wide-open quality of attention during Feldenkrais study. A prime example is my three “Everything Everywhere All at Once” lessons recorded last fall, soon to be the heart of a new Deep Dive at The FP. This interest was one reason my wife Jen and I studied the embodied nature of attention during our summer sabbatical. Hearing about our curiosity, my friend Dr. Richard Hruby, a Feldenkrais-trained osteopath, introduced me to the Open Focus work of Dr. Les Fehmi.
A pioneer in the field of neurofeedback, Dr. Fehmi was director of the Biofeedback Centre in Princeton, NJ. He spent decades hooking up test subjects – and eventually his psychotherapy patients, and also professional athletes – to EEG machines (electroencephalogram) to study their brainwaves as they performed experimental exercises around learning to modulate their own attention. With the help of “seeing” people’s quality of attention change on the EEGs, Dr. Fehmi learned to guide them toward more flexible and beneficial uses of attention.
He wrote several books laying out his research, exercises, and practical advice. This Little Dip explores his striking conclusions and their relationship to Feldenkrais study:
The misuse and rigidity of attention get most of us into the chronic problems of anxiety, depression, and chronic pain, and the effective use of attention skills can get us out. Flexible attention may not fix everything, but it can do far more than most of us imagine. [Emphasis is mine. -Nick]
Fehmi explains his work in ways that are likely to resonate for Felden-fans, and also meditators – anyone who has noticed the constricting limits of sustained, concentrated attention. He points out that we’ve been culturally conditioned to get stuck in what he calls narrow-objective attention. In this style of attention we limit our focus to one object or task, and all other awareness fades away. He continues:
Narrow-objective focus is an emergency mode of paying attention that quickly and substantially increases the frequency of the brain’s activity and raises other aspects of physiological arousal, such as heart and respiratory rates, which in turn directly affect our perception, emotions, and behavior.
“Narrow-objective focus is an emergency mode of paying attention”
This mode of attending, while useful at times, is expensive. It’s easy to get stuck in narrow-objective loops because of endless to-do lists, and the infinite flood of media, information, and alarming news coming at us. Just “lock in,” as the kids say these days, and do the next thing you have to do, disregarding everything else going on around and inside you. It’s exhausting and isolating, but through embodied attention practices like Feldenkrais or meditation we can learn life-changing techniques to shift ourselves out of this needless fight-or-flight attention.
A major challenge is that most of us are addicted to narrow-focus. We’ve been trained this way because a sustained sharp focus is so prized at school and work. We’re often rewarded even for simply appearing laser-focused! It’s not surprising Dr. Fehmi’s research showed that serious psychological and physical problems arise or are exacerbated when we are stuck in this kind of focus. “Concentrating” in this way – tuning out other people, the space around us, and even our own sensations and emotions – is lonely and dehumanizing. Yet most people think this is the only way we can “pay attention” and get things done.
Four types of attention
According to Dr. Fehmi we actually have four types of attention – as well as the capacity to attend to our attention – and we can learn to combine and shift between the four types at will. Here they are, with my own brief somatic cues to remind you of your experience with them:
- A narrowing attention is what meditation teacher Martin Aylward calls our “spotlight”: we limit our focus to a specific sensory input, object, or task, and lose track of all else, even our own bodily and emotional responses. Like the concentric circles of a target, note the narrowing implication of the word “concentration.” When you’re using a narrowing attention it feels like fixed, staring eyes, especially when combined with objectifying attention (see below).
-
Diffusing attention “is panoramic rather than exclusive or single-pointed,” writes Fehmi. “In its most extreme form it is inclusive and three-dimensional, giving equal attention to all internal and external stimuli simultaneously,” including sensations, thoughts, feelings, and what’s happening in the space around us. Imagine a relaxed spaciousness in your mouth, eyes, brow, and temples.
-
With objectifying attention we create distance in order to evaluate, control, or manipulate what we are attending to. Subject and object are starkly defined. It’s very useful at times, but extremely overused. Observe a nearby object with clinical detachment. What are its objective qualities? What do you feel in your body as you observe like this?
-
With immersing attention we enjoy “union with an object or process to the point of self-forgetfulness.” Think of being lost in a piece of music, or in a sensory-movement experience during Feldenkrais study. Immersed attention reminds me of the language of meditation teacher Charlotte Joko Beck: “become the sensation.” Consider that same object “from the heart,” so to speak, while imagining your chest softening. Notice how the object can permeate your awareness and seem less “other.”
Open Focus, Feldenkrais, and meditation
Open Focus – what Fehmi named his work – refers to being in a state where all types of attention are active and accessible simultaneously. When I first read this surprising concept, I was hooked. His assertion that we can move fluidly among these four attentional styles – and even use two or more at once – is a practical model that maps easily onto my own moment-to-moment experience. For me, his model offers a means of studying and teaching the potent, calm, creative state I experience during and after doing Feldenkrais, or meditating.
With practice, we discover that in most of the narrow-objective moments of regular life (except true emergencies) we can easily shift to or include other types of attention. I’ve found that widening and immersing my attention consciously – or even just remembering that other styles of attention are possible – has had major benefits in my Feldenkrais study, and in life. With a more flexible, conscious attention I’m noticing improvements in how I feel, think, learn, work, and relate to others and the world around me. Months after first reading Fehmi’s work, I continue to find new corners of my life where slightly diffusing or immersing my attention opens doors to more joy, ease, and creativity. I’m working to bring these practices to you through my Feldenkrais teaching.
Curiously, Dr. Fehmi’s Open Focus exercises invoke our attention almost exclusively with phrases such as “Can you imagine…”. Like Dr. Feldenkrais, Fehmi didn’t think of attention as a passive listening process. Rather, attending is opening ourselves to active self-imaging. When we hear the word “imagine” we tend to soften our bodies and minds. We make ourselves ready to observe and learn from possibilities of action and self-perception not yet experienced. A skillful use of attention and imagination, in fact, creates those possibilities. They appear spontaneously, as if conjured out of thin air, as we sense and move.
You may have heard me say in Feldenkrais lessons, “Listen just over the horizon of awareness.” When we attend there, self-imaging, waiting and wide open to novelty, we often spontaneously begin to notice or do something new. Well-worn habits of sensing, moving, thinking, and feeling lose their grip, and we can truly learn and change.
“Can you imagine that your opening and expanding awareness of your emerging experience is a continuing process?”
Are we talking about Feldenkrais, or Fehmi’s exercises…or meditation?! In all three practices guided attention is key. Meditation arguably is attending to our own attention, while in Feldenkrais lessons your gently directed attention is the crucial process that gives movement the power to change us.
All three practices harness the same fundamental properties of human attention and imagination. And it’s fascinating how, in all three practices, we easily tumble toward moments of non-dual experiencing. We can lose track of the ego – of subject and object, mind and body – and end up resting or exploring as our present awareness.
I’m willing to bet most Felden-fans, during or after Feldenkrais lessons, have at times experienced dreamy moments that resonate in this way. Making space for these possibilities is one of the reasons I sometimes say in and after lessons, “Don’t shake off the weird,” or “Notice the blurry boundaries of the inside world and the outside world.”
What are Open Focus exercises? Dr. Fehmi invites us to notice our responses to spatial imagination tasks, and to reflect on ongoing changes in our experience as we do so. His language is not so different than the cues of attention and imagination you might hear in Feldenkrais lessons.
Here are few examples. You could pause for 10-15 seconds after reading each, to sense and feel nonverbal responses:
- Can you imagine that the ideal response [to these questions] is whatever spontaneously happens to your imagery or experience?
- Can you imagine that your opening and expanding awareness of your emerging experience is a continuing process?
- Can you imagine the distance between your eyes?
- Is it possible for you to imagine the surface of your tongue?
- Is it possible for you to imagine the entire region contained within the surface of your tongue? That is, can you imagine the volume of your tongue?
On spatial self-imaging
According to Fehmi’s EEGs, imagining internal spaces – what I call spatial self-imaging – was consistently the most effective prompt he found to lead people to positive changes in brain activity and more flexible uses of attention. Fehmi’s research demonstrated that spatial self-imaging is particularly potent for moving the nervous system away from narrow-objective, “fight or flight” attention and toward more diffuse, immersed, relaxing, and sustainable qualities of attention.
Observing wide-ranging mental and physical improvements in his test subjects as they developed their attentional skills, Dr. Fehmi began to explore Open Focus with his psychotherapy patients, in sports psychology work with the Dallas Cowboys, and in public workshops. Here’s my friend Richard hooked up to an EEG at one of Dr. Fehmi’s workshops in 2019.
As a Feldenkrais Practitioner, it’s gratifying to learn that our spatial imagination is Fehmi’s well-researched key to developing more flexible attention, and to enjoying its benefits. Working long before EEG machines, Moshe Feldenkrais intuited that widening your attention and attending spatially are powerful tools for improving how you function. These kinds of prompts are found throughout his lessons, and they are increasingly present in mine, especially since I’ve learned about Fehmi’s work.
Dr. Fehmi passed away in 2021. Fascinatingly, his daughter Emy, who I tracked down and consulted in writing this, has herself completed a Feldenkrais professional training! She enthusiastically echoed the connections I’ve sensed between her father’s work and the Feldenkrais Method. She is currently a clinical social worker in California.
Dr. Fehmi’s model of working with attention has been immensely practical for me, and it has naturally found its way into my Feldenkrais teaching. The influence is obvious in the first Patrons lesson below, recorded right after my July sabbatical. I’ve also included three older lessons that work with attention and spatial imagination in unique ways.
Explore one or more of these lessons, and test Fehmi’s research about the power of attention in the laboratory of your own experience!
– Nick Strauss-Klein
As you do these Feldenkrais lessons, you might play extra games of attention:
- If you notice yourself attending narrowly, imagine a more panoramic, diffuse self-imaging.
- When your ATM self-observations are clinical and objectifying, imagine immersing yourself more in the sensations and feelings produced by the lesson.
Free Lesson
Arms Like a Skeleton, with a Bias
Experience how attending spatially to different aspects of your spine changes your ability to reach into the world.
Patron Lessons
Spinal Rotation, with Scapulas, Sacrum, and Spatial Self-Imaging
Recorded right after my sabbatical, and heavily influenced by Dr. Fehmi’s work.
NOTE: All users can open ALL lesson pages at The FP to learn about them. Only the audio and some lesson notes are locked.
Spatial Relationships as a Means to Coordinated Action
This lesson from Moshe Feldenkrais’s Awareness Through Movement book cleverly and powerfully demonstrates how spatial self-imaging changes our perception and action.
Turning from a Spacious Center, Connecting Torso and Legs
Cultivate and sustain an almost meditative awareness of breath and spaciousness in the what the martial arts call the tanden (lower abdomen). Then expand gradually into large actions that led one participant to say her “hips are really ready for the Olympic games….”