This is the only one of the 12 lessons in Moshe Feldenkrais’s seminal book Awareness Through Movement that’s a lecture, not a movement lesson. You’ll learn about
- continual refinement
- “reversible” action
- finding ease in strenuous actions (see the Curiosities tab)
- sensing skeletal mechanics and shearing forces
- proportional use of musculature
- the effects of self-limiting labels
- Moshe Feldenkrais’s explanation of what Nick calls the “positive snowball effect” of longterm Feldenkrais study
Regarding finding ease in strenuous actions, there’s an amazing Moshe Feldenkrais quote from another of his books, The Potent Self, that could have been included in this talk:
In good action, the sensation of effort is absent [my emphasis] no matter what the actual expenditure of energy is. Much of our action is so poor that this assertion sounds utterly preposterous.
He ends this passage by brutally resolving the questions most of us have about what sense of effort is “good” and what sense of effort is “bad”:
…convince oneself that the sensation of effort is the subjective feeling of wasted movement. [my emphasis]
Note Feldenkrais uses “sensation of effort” unequivocally: he’s saying the sensation of ANY effort implies the biomechanics could be better. In other words, we have evolved not to experience effort when we’re moving in an ideal way.
“Utterly preposterous”?
If this seems “utterly preposterous,” picture your favorite athlete, musician, or dancer at the peak of their game: do they look like they’re experiencing effort? Of course there is immense expenditure of energy, but is effort what they’re experiencing subjectively?
It sure doesn’t look like it. It’s far more likely they’re experiencing the deep satisfaction of enacting their intentions clearly and effectively, and perhaps the simple joy of personal expression that comes with exercising highly refined skills – or maybe just what’s commonly called “flow state.” Whatever it is, the subjective experience probably isn’t about effort.
As we study Feldenkrais lessons, we’re asked to continually “reduce the effort” – reorganize and refine our movements and our transmission of force – until even powerful actions are available with no feeling of effort. You may have experienced this many times.
As we think about all this, it’s necessary to make a distinction between the subjective feeling of effort, which for our purposes has a tinge of trying hard, willpower, or unpleasantness, and sensing muscular contractions, which is an emotionally neutral or pleasant sensory experience of ourselves that’s available whenever we choose to tune into it.
About exercise
But what about when we’re moving for exercise, when we’re intending to overload our musculature? Or when we’re doing something else that’s very physically demanding? We might need to translate familiar Feldenkrais phrases like “reduce the effort” and “make it easy” into language more appropriate to that context, like “direct the force more clearly” or “find a more efficient way”. Other helpful hint phrases that overlap both Feldenkais study and exercise are “use your whole self” and, quite simply, “breathe”.
Even when there’s a lot of work to be done – and I mean work in the physics sense: moving mass over distance – we can learn to organize our bodies to do it without shearing, and with a sense of wholeness, of precise skeletal organization and well-distributed muscular contractions. As we get closer and closer to this kind of ideal function, the subjective sense of strain and effort diminish to zero.
Moshe Feldenkrais’s method invites us to use this knowledge to continually seek more and more accurate and efficient delivery of musculoskeletal force in everything that we do, using his lessons to practice.
Learning by doing
Test this out for yourself, using “effort is the subjective feeling of wasted movement” as a mantra in Feldenkrais lessons, and in life! Or change it to something more positive, like “if it feels like effort there must be a better way.”
When you experience effort, notice the details of it, then slow down and reduce the load until you find a way to do a version of what you’re doing with no sense of effort – or at least much less. Then you can increase your engagement again. As you do, notice if your task is more satisfying and effective, or your exercise is more enjoyable.
Taking a few moments to bring this simple wisdom from Feldenkrais into whatever you’re doing is great for avoiding injury, recovering from injury, and learning to genuinely enjoy and get more benefits from the big muscular activities of our lives!
This lesson is the only one of the lessons in Moshe Feldenkrais’s 1972 book Awareness Through Movement that is actually a lecture, not a movement lesson.
The Feldenkrais Project has a collection of all 12 lessons from this source.
The talk was recorded in The FP’s 5th Anniversary Donor Event on April 7, 2024.
See the Related Lessons tab: this event included an ATM lesson paired with the talk.
I designed an ATM lesson to illustrate many of the principles covered in this talk. It’s recommended study before or after, as it’s useful to attach experiential learning to the conceptual descriptions of the talk.
It’s called Reversible Diagonal Lengthening and Lifting (Members & Patrons) and it’s part of our bonus video content for all donors.
My Reversible Diagonal lesson is a variation on Feldenkrais’s Lesson #3 from his book, which he called Some Fundamental Properties of Movement (Patrons). That one is also a good followup, as it too flows out of the ideas Feldenkrais writes about in lesson #2.
This talk is my interpretation of lesson #2 in Moshe Feldenkrais’s 1972 book Awareness Through Movement, in my own words with marked quotes.
This was the best I have ever heard about FK! I have done FK back-and-forth a little, but this gives me hope. I asked my practitioners for a beginners guide and have never received an answer, doesn’t exist, But now I think I have to start with these lessons from his book. Thank you so much for explaining it so clearly!!! Although it’s best and I need to listen again to learn more.
Thanks! It can be very challenging to speak plainly about the neurology and physics of neuromotor learning. The ATM book lessons are fascinating and some of them are very accessible. Others are not so good for beginners. I’ve got a recommended order you’ll see on our collection of all 12 ATM book lessons.
The principles I was speaking about are present in all Feldenkrais lessons, so you’re also invited to dive in with Getting Oriented if you are a beginner. You might like the talks in that series, too.
I had the great good fortune to hear this talk directly from Moshe at a retreat I attended in the summer of 1975. I recall him asking the group of attendees to stand and touch their toes (he may also do this in the book). Most of the attendees struggled to bend over and touch their toes without bending their knees. He then pointed out that he made no demands on us as to how we might accomplish this task and from there, he launched into his talk about what action is good. Through the decades since that experience, I have thought about the pearls this lesson contains. Your teaching of the materials works well for me. I especially like that you ended with the part about how we limit our personal growth at an early age by labeling ourselves as unable to do certain thing and the way that ties in to our self image. I agree with Anna that this is a very valuable lesson for understanding what ATM and the Feldenkrais technique is about.
This is a really good description of what Feldenkrais does for me. I only discovered Feldenkrais a few months ago trying to recover from severe ME/long covid. I’ve always been a very analytical person, always wanting to understand things at a cognitive level. But also being a midwife and seeing how babies develop, have always thought there has to be a “bottom up” way to heal and “recalibrate” my system. So after discovering Feldenkrais I decided to get out of my head and into my body and started doing a lot of the free lessons on this website. It has played a big role in going from bedridden to now able to take care of myself again and able to go for daily short walks. The snowball effect :). Now that I’ve a become a patron level donor, I’m looking forward to all these extra lessons and what they will bring me.
What a clear talk! Thinking about the physics of body movement is helpful. It’s another way to gain greater awareness.
In the 80’s and ‘90 Feldenkrais ATM ‘s were central in my life after completing my Masters in Somatic psychology in San Francisco in 1984 .
I’ve lived I Copenhagen since , worked as a school psychologist, now retired and have grandchildren .
Since cassette tapes become obsolete in the end of the 90’s , without any possibility of sharing them, ATMs and the Feldenkrais ideas faded into my background.
I experienced this isolation somatically – feeling chaos , chronic pain and trauma as I reverted to tension and blasting through for the next 2 decades .
However , in 2020 when Covid shut down the schools , workplaces and cities , the internet brought Feldenkrais’s back into my life and since joining the Feldenkrais project. I feel so grateful and no longer feel isolated . I’m gradually finding my way back to my self through somatic awareness . Each day , I look forward to doing a FP ATM and I’ve even found a young German dancer , feldenkrais practitioner, who lives here in Copenhagen , Whois also joined FP and can do FI .
I’m finding my way back to my dreams.
Thank you Nick and the Feldenkraisproject team 🙏
Love this story, thank you. In the 80’s Moshe Feldenkrais was convinced that people all over the world would eventually get to do ATM lessons via satellite TV. It took a different technology and a few decades longer, but I’m so glad to be able to study Feldenkrais whenever I want to on the internet, and honored that our website is a valued resource for you and your FI teacher!
If i were to improve this talk, I.would include the brilliant additional comments in the curiosities section….they are brilliant. The analogy with the dancer and the gymnast, the description of “effort”,….and I’d like to have the story of how he used these principles to teach his mother to do martial arts at eighty odd years old…and that prime minister!! Anecdotes are hugely powerful….include more I reckon…
Siobhan, I really enjoyed reading your story. It resonates with me and is similar to my own. Like you, I am very happy to have feldenkrais lessons return to my life and I share your gratitude for Nick and this incredible platform that he offers. Enjoy your journey!
This talk is so interesting. I like how he really emphasizes that movement should be easy. In a fitness class I regularly attend, the instructor is always cueing us to squeeze areas that don’t seem right to me. Instead of following her directions, I trust my body to tense the appropriate muscles she needs to do the action. I have started to pull back on my habit of pushing through pain and discomfort, which I’m sure my body appreciates. One of the parts that really stood out to me that Mosche said was that we believe what we are told over our own experience. What we SHOULD believe. No wonder we don’t trust our own bodies and the felt sense they bring to us! There was a lot of talk about the skeleton and muscles, and I wonder what Mosche would have to say about all the new discoveries we are making about our fascia and connective tissues and how important they are in our movement and body pain. Something tells me he would have been at the forefront of understanding these discoveries!
Thank you. Listening to this as someone who is familiar with Feldenkrais, it was extraordinarily helpful. A “good” balance of information and facts with experiential learning is crucial. I find this theory after the experience really useful. The whole idea of physics and using the body, thinking about only the.mechanics of the skeleton, is brilliant. The concept of “shearing” makes such good sense…especially vis a vis my arthritis etc….how did I create this wear and tear in the first place!! I want to hear a similar ( short) talk that i could let my non-Feldenkrais-practising daughter hear….and for that, I would like the talk to include maybe two more practical examples to make Moshe’s point….I like the reversible hand, I like the piano story ( but would it make sense to a sceptic?) And especially I like the mini van story. Which makes huge sense. I loved it. I had helped me reflect on my movements a little more…much more..thank you