“During my doctoral studies, I began taking Feldenkrais awareness through movement lessons with my friend Anat Baniel. I found that in every lesson I learn something new – a new movement, or a general insight to the process of learning. Sometimes I was surprised by the instantaneous nature of this process – you could almost identify the exact moment the nervous system learns. As a neuroscientist, the Feldenkrais method greatly appealed to me.

Even before completing my Ph.D, I joined the Feldenkrais training in Amherst. The course was, to me, a revolution in the ways of learning and thinking, in the movement ability, and in my self-image. Moshe Feldenkrais’ lectures shone a new, unexpected, light on every topic. I was surprised to discover that one can learn professionally, but without effort”.

Eilat Almagor
www.restalittle.com/about-eilat

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“Eilat Almagor, Ph.D. Eilat Almagor is a senior Trainer in the Feldenkrais Method. She graduated from Moshe Feldenkrais’ training in Amherst in 1983.”
Eilat Almagor is a senior Trainer in the Feldenkrais Method. She graduated from Moshe Feldenkrais’ training in Amherst in 1983.

Eilat has a Ph.D in neurobiology, an M.Sc in environmental science, and a B.Sc in Mathematics and Physics, from the Hebrew University.

Since 1984, Eilat teaches “Awareness through movement” classes in the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, under the Dance faculty.

Since 1990, Eilat directs professional Feldenkrais trainings in Israel, Italy, and Japan.

Eilat works with babies and children with special needs, as well as adults who use the method to relieve pain, or to improve abilities.

In recent years, Eilat leads a project to incorporate Feldenkrais lessons in schools, and collaborates with neuroscientists in Israel and Germany in a scientific researched aimed at studying the effects of the Feldenkrais method on brain activity.”

“Lyel’s abrupt conversion was more an act of recognition than a feat of reasoning.”
 
‘Agassiz himself, Buckland and Lyel All of these early believers in the glacier theory had been changed by this double process of looking and then seeing. Agassiz himself, Buckland and Lyel had been doubters and markers. Then suddenly, like the secret image hidden in a child’s puzzle the truth popped out at them and they could recognize what had been before their eyes all along. I was once blind but now I see. After that change, their recognition became as impossible to deny as the roar of the ocean or the brightness of the sun. Glacier remains simply became a given of the landscape.”  [emphasis added]
 
Page 124. Bolles, Edmund Blair. Ice Age Finders. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999.

“The initial degrees of fatigue pass off with rest. The question is essentially that of the rest of cortical cells, and not of muscle cells. The latter never fatigue in practice to the extent of not contracting when impulses of normal intensity arrive in the normal way. Thus change is as good as rest. When changing action, we do not necessarily change over to other muscles; only the pattern of cells that issue the impulses to the muscles changes. This is sufficient, as the fatigued cells are not called on to produce excitations, and this alone matters.”
––  89 Chapter 10. Action, Inhibition, and Fatigue. The Potent Self: copyright © 1985 by Moshe Feldenkrais, copyright © 2002 by Michel Silice. Original Title The Potent Self: A Guide to Spontaneity by Moshe Feldenkrais, D.Sc. ISBN 0062503243 (ISBN13: 9780062503244)

Quoting from the current chapter of our book club: “the ability to LEARN corresponds to the FREEDOM of making INDIVIDUAL PATTERNS” [emphasis added]

“For the specifically human acts, we may think of the leads or wires to the executive organs as connected to multiple-pin plugs. The environment and personal experience fixes the individual wires to the pins, and the voluntary act plugs the plug onto the switchboard. This unique human capacity for adjustment corresponds to the great number of path combinations possible, and the ability to learn corresponds to the freedom of making individual patterns.”

–– bottom of page 75 top of page 76  Chapter 9. Body and Mind A Clearer Picture The Potent Self: copyright © 1985 by Moshe Feldenkrais, copyright © 2002 by Michel Silice. Original Title The Potent Self: A Guide to Spontaneity by Moshe Feldenkrais, D.Sc. ISBN 0062503243 (ISBN13: 9780062503244)

” The elements of thoughts, dreams, and other mental manifestations are extremely diverse in individuals belonging to widely differing social groups; for instance, between a Zulu and a European surrealist painter. In short, the use and experience of the body are necessary in order to form the mental functions. After the formation of a sufficient number of paths and patterns, the somatic support becomes less and less essential; we can think—that is, reexcite the formed patterns, regrouping them into new ones. This common experience of the gradual liberation of the cerebral functions from the somatic support, although perhaps not so clearly formulated, may have provided the clue for the idea of a soul or a mind altogether free from material support. We must beware of FALLING into a similar trap; we must not imagine that such liberation really occurs. It does not. In practice, the state of the envelope of the nervous system is of paramount importance. The functioning of the higher nervous centers is extremely sensitive to what happens to the body for the simple reason that there is no separate existence of these parts in a living individual. How great this interdependence is, and to what extent the one can be affected through the other, are the main subjects of the following chapters.” [emphasis added]

Page 79 Chapter 9. Body and Mind A Clearer Picture The Potent Self: copyright © 1985 by Moshe Feldenkrais, copyright © 2002 by Michel Silice. Original Title The Potent Self: A Guide to Spontaneity by Moshe Feldenkrais, D.Sc. ISBN 0062503243 (ISBN13: 9780062503244)