Reading group with appreciation to Stacy Barrows
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Ralph Strauch – Musings on Awareness (Feldenkrais Journal No. 19 — 2006)
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☆ 1) Introduction Musings on Awareness, by Ralph Strauch. from The Feldenkrais Journal No. 19 —©2006
Ralph Strauch – Musings on Awareness (Feldenkrais Journal No. 19 — 2006) PDF
☆ Audio:
Musings on Awareness, by Ralph Strauch. from The Feldenkrais Journal No. 19 —2006
Introduction
As Feldenkrais® practitioners we talk a lot about awareness. We see enhancing awareness as a big part of what we do, embodied in the fact that we call what we teach “Awareness Through Movement” rather than “Movement Through Awareness.” We use the term as if its meaning were unambiguous — as if it has a clear operational definition that we all understand and can use to guide our work. In fact, though, that doesn’t really seem to be the case. We all understand the term in some general sense, but what it really means is harder to pin down. So even though we talk about awareness as what’s important and movement as the tool we use to get there, most Feldenkrais teaching focuses primarily on movement — as if the desired awareness will somehow follow automatically.
Awareness Through Movement® (ATM) and Functional Integration® (FI) are powerful tools that can be quite effective even when applied mechanically. But they can be even more effective when their application is based on a good operational understanding of awareness, and of how the Feldenkrais experience can support and enhance it in our students’ ongoing lives. I hope this article will enrich your understanding of awareness and how our work affects it, and suggest ways of using that understanding to make your work more effective.
I see awareness as having to do with the accessibility and use of information. I’ll begin by describing my way of thinking about how we draw on the information that constantly engulfs us to compose our ongoing experience. I call that way of thinking the perceptual process paradigm. I’ll then examine the role awareness plays in the quality of the experience the process produces. Finally I’ll discuss the importance of communicating these kinds of ideas to our students, and describe some of the ways I do that.
☆ 2) Contents: Section Titles. Footnotes, List of Audio readings
List of Section Titles and Footnotes:
Musings on Awareness, by Ralph Strauch. from The Feldenkrais Journal No. 19 —2006
Introduction
Composing experience
The perceptual process paradigm
Footnote 1 The Reality Illusion: How you make the world you experience, by Ralph Strauch. First published by The Theosophical Publishing House, 1983. … by Somatic Options and available at www.somatic.com.
Adding the somatic dimension
Awareness
Movement as pattern
Controlling Attention
Footnote 2 This idea is discussed from a different perspective in my article “Training the Whole Person,” (1984). This and other referenced articles (may become available at www.somatic.com/articles.html). 15
Narrow awareness as a cultural pathology
Footnote 3 See also my article “Tigers and Tunnel Vision: Is our biological adaptation to stress maladaptive in an urban society?” (1985).
The spectrum of awareness
Teaching greater awareness
Footnote 4 See “Functional Integration and the Feeling Sense,” Feldenkrais Journal, Issue 4, Winter 1989, pp 30-35, or “The Somatic Dimensions of Emotional Healing,” (1993).
Ralph Strauch
Footnote 5 This sense of support is discussed in my article “Connecting with the Earth” (1991).
Audio Links:
☆ Audio: 1) Introduction Musings on Awareness, by Ralph Strauch. from The Feldenkrais Journal No. 19 —©2006 informal audio reading Katarina Halm
☆ Audio: 2) Contents and Footnotes
☆ Audio: 3) Composing experience
☆ Audio: 4) The perceptual process paradigm
☆ Audio: 5) Adding the somatic dimension
☆ Audio: 6) Awareness
☆ Audio: 7) Movement as pattern
☆ Audio: 8) Controlling Attention
☆ Audio: 9) The spectrum of awareness
☆ Audio: 10) Teaching greater awareness
☆ Audio: 11) Ralph Strauch
☆ Audio: 12 entire)
☆ 3) Composing experience
Composing experience
People tend to think of experience as something that just happens — the automatic product of the events and situations in which we find ourselves and the actions we take in response. But it’s more complex than that. We each compose our own experience on a moment-to-
moment basis, by filtering and selecting bits of information from the rich stream in which we are constantly immersed. We combine those bits with knowledge from our past experience to create the stream of perceptual images that make up our ongoing experience.
The Feldenkrais Method provides tools for enhancing choice — in particular, the unconscious choices through which we compose our perceptions of and interactions with the world around us. I became interested in this way of thinking about perception before I met Moshe Feldenkrais, and that interest was what led me to study with him. The paradigm presented here grew out of my explorations of body/mind interaction through martial arts, Chinese philosophy and the writings of Carlos Castaneda, and my research as a mathematician concerned with decisionmaking and choice in the face of uncertainty. I was attracted to Moshe by the elegance of the tools he offered for exploring these questions experientially. I wrote about this paradigm in The Reality Illusion1 using the language of “creating your own reality” as a central theme.
More than two decades of Feldenkrais practice have further evolved and refined my thinking. I’m languaging it differently now, around the theme of “composing experience,” and I’m working on a book exploring that theme. This article draws still evolving ideas from that larger project about awareness and its place in the Feldenkrais Method.
☆ 4) The perceptual process paradigm
☆ Audio
The perceptual process paradigm
We are constantly engulfed in a massive stream of information, depicted below as the perceptual stream. This stream includes information coming in through our exterior senses — visual, auditory, tactile, etc. — as well as the proprioceptive sensation generated within the body. It passes through a perceptual lens, schematically representing the neurological processes that filter and select elements from the stream and compose them into the perceptual images that make up our current experience.
I’m using the term image broadly here, to encompass all forms of perceptual representation. This includes not only visual imagery, but also the auditory images we hear and the feelings of texture, mass, and pressure that result
Footnote 1 The Reality Illusion: How you make the world you experience, by Ralph Strauch. First published by The Theosophical Publishing House, 1983. Currently published by Somatic Options and available at www.somatic.com.
Musings on Awareness, by Ralph Strauch! Reprinted from The Feldenkrais Journal No. 19 —2006
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The act of walking across a room drinking a glass of water requires simultaneous control of your gait, of the movement of the glass to your mouth and the contractions necessary for swallowing, of your breathing and its synchrony with your other activities, and more.
Ideally, all components of your motor stream would be coherent and harmonious. That is not always the case. Your intentions may be in conflict — for example, when you have to do something that you don’t want to do — so you may do something and resist it at the same time. You then produce motor commands for both conflicting activities, and you feel “pulled” between them. This type of conflict can make life difficult, and can be the source of stress and fatigue. The effort you feel in “working hard” and the counterproductive actions Moshe described as “parasitic movements” result from tension generated by motor commands in conflict with each other.
Your muscular activity feeds back into your ongoing experience in two ways — through its effects in the external world and through its effects within your body. The expanded model reflects this.
The external effects of your actions are indicated by the arrow on the lower left. Your actions produce change and you perceive that change through vision, hearing, physical contact, etc. You throw a ball and you see where it goes; you speak and you hear the results of your words in your conversational partner’s response, you push open a door and you feel it yield to your pressure.
The internal effects of your motor stream are constantly monitored by proprioceptive sensors that measure and provide feedback about things like joint position and movement, muscle length and tension, etc. This information together with balance signals from the vestibular system and other information about internal processes makes up your proprioceptive stream.
What we earlier called the perceptual stream has now
from physical contact. It further includes emotional responses, our sense of our own power and capability, and other representations we make of ourselves and the world around us.
As experience occurs it is stored in memory for future recall, and it informs our store of knowledge about the world, as indicated in the upper right of the figure. These, in turn, inform the ongoing choices made in the perceptual lens. I’ll refer to this basic model of perception as the perceptual process model.
Footnote 1 The Reality Illusion: How you make the world you experience, by Ralph Strauch. First published by The Theosophical Publishing House, 1983. Currently published by Somatic Options and available at www.somatic.com.
Footnote 1 The Reality Illusion: How you make the world you experience, by Ralph Strauch. First published by The Theosophical Publishing House, 1983. Currently published by Somatic Options and available at www.somatic.com.
(4a) Perceptual Process Model *Ralph Strauch ‘Musings’ ©2006
(4b) The Somatic Dimension *Ralph Strauch ‘Musings’ ©2006
☆ 5) Adding the somatic dimension
Adding the somatic dimension
The model described above focuses on the interpretation of incoming perceptual information. But human experience involves more. You are a physical being. You live in a physical body; you move through space and you interact with the world around you. Your experience involves a variety of perceptual dimensions, including touch and pressure, your movements and positions in space, effort and resistance, your emotional responses, your sense of yourself as a capable being, or not, etc. You assess situations, make choices, and perform actions. These, in turn create changes in you and in the world, and you experience these changes through all the perceptual dimensions available to you. We can incorporate the information flows thus generated as follows.
Your central nervous system (CNS) sends a constant stream of motor commands to muscle fibers throughout your body — telling them when to contract, how strongly, and in what sequence. These motor commands implement conscious actions, such as reaching for a glass or walking across a room. They also manage ongoing background activities such as breathing, balance, digestion, circulation, and hormonal activity. This constant outflow of information is represented by the curved arrow from current experience to the body labeled motor stream.
Your motor stream is the summation of many different (and sometimes conflicting) motor commands.
Musings on Awareness, by Ralph Strauch! Reprinted from The Feldenkrais Journal No. 19 —2006
been split into two components — the exteroceptive stream coming in from the outside world and the proprioceptive stream of information from within your body. The proprioceptive stream commands less attention for most people, lying largely unnoticed in the background. Yet proprioceptive information plays at least as big a role in your experience as does exteroceptive information, possibly even bigger. The volume of proprioceptive information flowing through your nervous system is probably greater than the volume of exteroceptive information. Much of this information serves to keep things running smoothly in ways that hardly rise to consciousness — to regulate your breathing, or to keep you upright in the field of gravity.
Your ongoing conscious experience is a blend of proprioceptive and exteroceptive information, a mixture of external sights, sounds, and smells, together with your internal sense of balance, movement, and body position in space. To pick up a glass of water and move it to your mouth to drink, you must integrate visual information (exteroceptive) about the position of the glass and the movements of your hands with your kinesthetic sense (proprioceptive) of your movements and of the effort required to move the glass.
☆8) Controlling Attention
Controlling Attention
Given its disadvantages, why do we narrow awareness in the first place? How has narrow focus become the norm in contemporary society? This happens because narrowing awareness is a way of managing attention that receives a lot of encouragement and support.
Not everything in your perceptual field is of equal interest. Attention is the faculty that you use to focus on what is important, to separate that from the background that matters less. Right now you’re probably attending more to what you’re reading than to other things going on around you, or within you. If something important occurs, though, if the phone rings, if there’s a loud noise nearby, or if the gradual filling of your bladder passes the threshold of discomfort, your attention will be drawn away from reading and toward that new stimulus.
William Shakespeare wrote that “All the world’s a stage. And all the men and women merely players.” Within this metaphor, we can think of awareness as how you light the stage, and attention as where on the stage you look. Managing attention is critical to functioning in the world. You need to attend to what matters and let the less important stuff fade into the background. To successfully cross the street, you must attend to the traffic; otherwise you may not survive. You can safely ignore the displays in store windows.
Narrowing awareness to a small cone around the focus of attention is common way of managing attention. This is akin to a stage director, in Shakespeare’s metaphor, managing the audience’s attention by lighting the stage with a spotlight aimed where he wants them to
Footnote 2 This idea is discussed from a different perspective in my article “Training the Whole Person,” (1984). This and other referenced articles (may become available at www.somatic.com/articles.html).
Musings on Awareness, by Ralph Strauch! Reprinted from The Feldenkrais Journal No. 19 —2006.
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“perfect storm,” to use a currently popular metaphor.
When I was a kid, early reading provided tunnel vision training, encouraging focus on a small visual area to the exclusion of everything else. Now technology has advanced and we have better tunnel vision trainers — TV, electronic games, and computers. These reinforce the lesson that what really matters is contained an a small visual arc. What lies outside that arc can and should be ignored. We were taught in school to block out distractions and “concentrate” on the task at hand, further reinforcing our learned tunnel vision.
Remember what it was like to be six years old. You knew at six, though you couldn’t articulate it intellectually, that sitting still was an unnatural act. So they put you in a room with a bunch of other six-year- olds and an adult authority figure who told you “Sit still, don’t squirm, don’t look out the window, and raise your hand if you want to go to the bathroom!” That urge to squirm was your awareness that sitting still is an unnatural act attempting to get your attention. Part of what you were learning, then, was not to listen to that internal awareness but to block it out in favor of what external authority was telling you. That wasn’t your first such lesson, and it certainly wasn’t your last, but it is a clear example of the cultural conditioning against awareness.
Narrowing of awareness is also an integral part of the flight/fight response, the body’s natural biological response to threat. It serves to quickly focus attention on an immediate threat, but it should reverse itself as the threat is dealt with. The reversal is less automatic than the initial narrowing, though, and contemporary threats tend to be chronic rather than acute. Both these factors encourage the narrowing to become chronic as well.3
We evolved in a natural environment filled with predators and other hazards — dangers necessitating a broad awareness. But these dangers are largely absent in contemporary life, allowing us to survive with an unawareness that would have been fatal to our ancestors. Civilization has created benign conditions where narrowed awareness does not immediately impact survival, and ignoring its more insidious impact on the quality of life is unfortunately all too easy.
Emotional traumas, large and small, also encourage and support perceptual narrowing — particularly in the proprioceptive dimension. Emotional experience
Think of the photo of a fruit stand above as representing the entire stage — the totality of information available to you at a given moment. The photo below represents what you actually take in when you narrow your awareness to focus attention — in this case on the oranges in the center of the picture. The narrowing cuts much of the information and severely attenuates what remains.
Footnote 2 This idea is discussed from a different perspective in my article “Training the Whole Person,” (1984). This and other referenced articles (may become available at www.somatic.com/articles.html).
Footnote 2 This idea is discussed from a different perspective in my article “Training the Whole Person,” (1984). This and other referenced articles (may become available at www.somatic.com/articles.html).
☆ 9) Narrow awareness as a cultural pathology
Narrow awareness as a cultural pathology
The practice of narrowing awareness to control attention is strongly conditioned by contemporary society. People do it habitually and continually, never realizing that there’s an alternative. This keeps us in business as Feldenkrais Teachers. If broader and more open awareness were the norm there would be no need for us. This generalized tunnel vision is one of the major pathologies of civilization. A number of independent factors converge to to support this pathology — a
Footnote 3 See also my article “Tigers and Tunnel Vision: Is our biological adaptation to stress maladaptive in an urban society?” (1985).
Musings on Awareness, by Ralph Strauch! Reprinted from The Feldenkrais Journal No. 19 —2006
manifests somatically through changes in neuromuscular organization, ripples through the musculature, so to speak. Experiences that are too strong get shut down by tensing against them to block those ripples. That tension blocks awareness, and that blockage can become habitual and chronic.4
Footnote 3 See also my article “Tigers and Tunnel Vision: Is our biological adaptation to stress maladaptive in an urban society?” (1985).
Footnote 3 See also my article “Tigers and Tunnel Vision: Is our biological adaptation to stress maladaptive in an urban society?” (1985).
☆ 10) Teaching greater awareness
Teaching greater awareness
Most people won’t ever get close to that end of that spectrum, but everyone can benefit from moving in that direction. We have the means to help our students with that, but to do it well we must go beyond ATM and FI per se, to enhance our students’ understanding of the value of greater awareness in life and to support its integration into the rest of their lives.
ATM and FI can provide experiences of greater awareness. These experiences will, to some extent, generalize without further support, but there’s a strong tendency, as the student leaves a lesson and returns to the “real world,” to move back toward habitual ways of being and to return to habitual perceptual narrowness.
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I received an important lesson about this early in my practice. I gave an FI to a man who was extremely tight and narrow in his everyday life. He responded to the lesson beautifully — softening, opening, and finding freedom in his movement that was wonderful to observe. The being who got off the table at the end of the lesson was totally different from the one who had lain down an hour earlier. Then he picked up his wallet and put it in his pocket, tightening a bit as he did so. He continued preparing to leave — pocketing his change and keys, threading his belt through his belt loops, putting on his glasses and his shoes and socks. With each step he lost some of what he had gained, gradually re-inhabiting the persona he had brought to the lesson. He left my office with a nice experience that he definitely wanted to repeat, but he carried very little of that experience out into the rest of his life.
Some argue that what the student experiences in the lesson will “take” by itself, that once the information is available the nervous system will automatically choose the best way of functioning. That sounds good but the reality is more complex. The nervous system’s choices are influenced by a lifetime of habitual experience. That experience often says that a tight narrow focus and a lot of tension are necessary to get things done — that the softer more open way of being is a great way to relax at the end of the day, but not a way of being that will work in the cold hard world “out there.” The lesson alone won’t change that belief; change will require a conceptual re-education as well.
I sometimes tell students there’s nothing we can do on my FI table that they can’t undo by the the time they get home — maybe even by the time they get out to their car, if they really work at it. If they think that the lesson is something they got from me, and think that now it’s time to go back to the “real world,” they can easily shift back into more familiar ways of being and the change will drift away. I ask them to think instead about what they experience from the lesson as a different way of being — a possibility that was there all the time, that they don’t normally access but can learn to access with practice. It can be something that will change their life, but that will require action on their part.
In talking with students about awareness and the value of developing it in themselves, I look for language that’s appropriate to each student’s experience and way of thinking about the world. I might talk with a basketball player about taking in more of the flow of the game, with a cop about awareness of potential threats, or with a
Footnote 4 See “Functional Integration and the Feeling Sense,” Feldenkrais Journal, Issue 4, Winter 1989, pp 30-35, or “The Somatic Dimensions of Emotional Healing,” (1993).
computer scientist about bandwidth, subroutines, and multitasking. I discuss the importance of noticing, of taking in and registering new information. I sometimes say that what really makes the work effective is the noticing — that the particular movements and manipulations are of secondary importance, there primarily to give them something to notice.
I encourage my students to become more conscious of the changes they experience in lessons, and to incorporate those changes into life. The connection between visual focus and the broader perceptual field can be useful in this. I may ask a student to notice how the room looks different after a lesson; often it is “brighter” or “bigger.” I suggest that this is because she is taking in more information. I might ask her to walk with a soft visual focus and notice how that feels, then to shift to a hard focus and notice how her walking changes. She may notice that she become stiffer and more rigid. I then ask her to shift back and forth, to consolidate the experience of that relationship and to realize that she has a choice about which way of being to manifest in life.
I often point out the greater sense of support from the ground at the end of a lesson, even while lying on the table. I observe that the table hasn’t changed; it still offers the same support it offered at the beginning of the lesson. What changed was the student’s willingness to accept that support, due in part to a greater awareness of its presence. I then ask them to continue to notice the greater support from the ground as they get up and walk around, and to register it at different times during the day.5
I suggest ways of reconnecting with the changes they experienced in the lesson in everyday life, such as consciously registering the support from the ground or softening visual focus and noticing more of their peripheral vision. I point out that they can use commonly occurring events as triggers to remind them to notice — things like waiting at a red light or letting the phone ring one more time before answering it, and using that extra time to reground themselves and soften their visual focus.
I try to understand each student’s life well enough to identify issues or situations that might represent particular challenges or opportunities, and to tailor my suggestions accordingly. With someone who sits at a computer much of the time, I might talk about how easy it is to lose body awareness to computer-induced tunnel vision and suggest ways of retraining habits to retain more self-awareness at the computer. With someone who spends a lot of time behind the wheel, I’ll suggest different ways of organizing awareness and attention while driving. I might offer a musician suggestions about
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things to notice and ways to organize attention while playing.
I first became interested in broadening my own awareness at a time in my life when I frequently attended briefings and other business meetings. I found that those meetings offered wonderful opportunities to play with and explore my own awareness. I further found, to my initial surprise, that when I kept a broader focus, including greater somatic awareness, I was more present in the meeting. I was able to contribute more and to leave with a clearer sense of what had transpired than I was when I tried to focus more narrowly on the speaker and the subject at hand. When it’s appropriate I talk with students about these experiences and what they might learn from them.
I’m not recommending that anyone else adopt these particular strategies, any more than I’d recommend that anyone else necessarily emulate anything else I do. It’s more important, I think, that each of us come from our own authentic selves, sourcing our work in our personal understanding of what it’s about. I do strongly believe, though, that our work can be improved by thinking more clearly about the nature of awareness and about the conversations about it — verbal as well as non-verbal — that we have with our clients, and by giving more attention to supporting the integration of the change into the rest of our clients’ lives.
Footnote 4 See “Functional Integration and the Feeling Sense,” Feldenkrais Journal, Issue 4, Winter 1989, pp 30-35, or “The Somatic Dimensions of Emotional Healing,” (1993).
Footnote 4 See “Functional Integration and the Feeling Sense,” Feldenkrais Journal, Issue 4, Winter 1989, pp 30-35, or “The Somatic Dimensions of Emotional Healing,” (1993).
Ralph Strauch
Ralph Strauch was trained by Moshe Feldenkrais and practices the Feldenkrais Method in Los Angeles. He has a Ph.D. in Statistics from UC Berkeley and was a Senior Mathematician at the Rand Corporation. Ralph has been exploring awareness since the 1960s, drawing on mathematics and martial arts as well as his Feldenkrais experience. He has written two books and numerous articles, some about his work with survivors of emotional trauma. His writings have appeared in the Feldenkrais Journal, Somatics, Training and Development Journal, Sea Frontiers, Critique, and various technical journals. He is working on a book about Composing Experience.
P.O. Box 194, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272 (310)454-8322 [email protected] www.somatic.com
Copyright 2006 by Ralph Strauch. All rights are reserved. You may copy and redistribute this article (including online posting) so long as you do not charge for it and this notice and contact information remain in tact. For permission to reprint the article for sale, please contact the author. The term Functional Integration is a registered service mark of the Feldenkrais Guild.
From Ralph Strauch – Musings on Awareness (Feldenkrais Journal No. 19 — 2006)
Footnote 5 This sense of support is discussed in my article “Connecting with the Earth” (1991).
Footnote 5 This sense of support is discussed in my article “Connecting with the Earth” (1991).
Ralph E. Strauch
May 14, 1937 to December 18, 2024
Celebration of Life Saturday May 24
More Stories June 28, 2025
Invitation ~
Discussion Honouring Ralph Strauch:
Much appreciation for all intriguing topics and inspiration with Ralph over the years since he began FeldyForum ~ we keep the thread glowing with our replies.
Everyone is Welcome to Contribute Pictures, Notes, and Participate In Our Upcoming Gathering:
TRIBUTE PAGE: if you wish to see and add notes or pictures: * Tribute Page Ralph Strauch ~ comments and appreciations
Questions and wishes may be addressed to:
Katarina Halm, Grateful Student and Colleague
[email protected]
1 604 263 9123 (Vancouver B.C. Canada on the ‘unceded’ traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations)
Volunteer for Feldenkrais® Inclusion Initiative.
–– A project of the Feldenkrais Legacy Forum (FLF) including our page: Expansion & Diversification
Ralph Strauch Colleagues June 28, 2025
Notes May 24, 2025
Notes May 24, 2025 to follow soon
Discussion Honouring Ralph Strauch:
Much appreciation for all intriguing topics and inspiration with Ralph over the years since he began FeldyForum ~ let’s keep the thread glowing with our replies.
Everyone is Welcome to Contribute Pictures, Notes, and Participate In Our Upcoming Gathering:
TRIBUTE PAGE: if you wish to see and add notes or pictures: * Tribute Page Ralph Strauch ~ comments and appreciations
Questions and wishes may be addressed to:
Katarina Halm, Grateful Student and Colleague
[email protected]
1 604 263 9123 (Vancouver B.C. Canada on the ‘unceded’ traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations)
Volunteer for Feldenkrais® Inclusion Initiative.
–– A project of the Feldenkrais Legacy Forum (FLF) including our page: Expansion & Diversification
With gratitude to Zack Swartz, Onsite Recordings https://onsiterecording.net/
FGNA 06-001 Cortical & Subcortical Motor Control with Ralph Strauch
With appreciation to Zack Swartz, Onsite Recordings
Cortical & Subcortical Motor Control
with Ralph Strauch
Part One Prelude and First ATM® Until the first Break.
Cortical & Subcortical Motor Control
with Ralph Strauch
Below is a Transcript of the First Session including Awareness Through Movement® Lesson (ATM®) Until the first Break.
RALPH STRAUCH
All the slides I am showing today – and a 20 year old article that is sort of related, although I was not using that terminology. I decided to give out the handouts with some trepidation. I think there are both positives and negatives to giving them to you. I will tell you about those and hopefully that will change the way you use them.
The negative is that there is a tendency when you get something like that to spend your time thumbing through it to see what is coming, which has you giving your attention to some presentation other than what is going on in the moment. And I think it is better if you stay with what is going on right now. So it is better if you do not read… So that is the negative of handouts, that they distract you from what is happening.
The positive is that if I did not give handouts at least some of you would feel a compulsion to write down most everything that appears on the screen here. So if you have the handouts you do not have to do that. If you need to take notes, that is fine, but know that you do not have to take down anything you see on the screen because you have it already.
Okay. So, what do I mean by talking about the distinction between cortical and subcortical motor control? There are really two ways to make that distinction.
One way is a neurological distinction, in terms of the part of the nervous system we are talking about that is active.
Another way is an experiential distinction, how you experience movement and what you feel from it and so forth.
We are going to be dealing with both. As far as the neurological distinction I think it is quite likely there are people here who know more about the neurology than I do, so if that is the case please do not hesitate to correct me if I am wrong or to add anything you think is useful.
It is not totally clear to me that the neurological and experiential distinctions really totally track. In other words, not everything experiential I will describe as subcortical happens below the cortex or everything I describe as cortical happens in the cortex.
I still think it is a useful way to make the distinction though, so with that we want to look at the role of each form of control, what each of them does and the balance between them.
Sometimes people talk about cortical or subcortical control as though it were an either/or, one thing is happening or the other. But everything is always going on. The entire nervous system is always at work in everything we do, so the question is how these different parts of the system are balanced in terms of the way we organize our movements and our perceptions and so forth.
Then we want to look at how we as Feldenkrais practitioners can use that balance between cortical and subcortical activity.
ATM BEGINS
First I want to play a little bit with the experiential distinction between the two.
So find a comfortable place on the floor and stretch out. Feel the floor, let it support you. Do whatever kind of body scan you are used to and comfortable with, you do not need as much detail as I might give to a naive audience. You are all very used to exploring yourselves.
Then begin to gently press the back of your head into the floor a little bit and let it go. Just press and release. Press and release. Notice what that feels like and how the sensations of pressure and release spread through your body. Can you press and release without holding your breath or do you hold your breath when you do it? What is it like if you press as hard as you can and how is that different from almost just imagining the press, just getting a very light sensation. As we know, light pressure is actually better for this sort of thing because if you really work hard at it then you create a lot of tensions in your body that block other things and your sense of what is going on and so forth.
Okay, let go of that and rest for a moment.
Now gently press your heels into the floor and then release. Notice those sensations. Notice what you feel in your pelvis, in your back, in your head as you gently press your heels into the floor and release. This really works better if your legs are outstretched long, but if you are not comfortable with that it is fine to keep them up. So just press and release, press and release.
Now, begin to do both at the same time. Press your head and heels into the floor, then release. Press both and then release both. Vary the effort you put into this and notice how the information you get changes. You get more information with less effort. Notice your breathing. If you are holding your breath as you press you are working too hard.
Let go of that and rest. As always the rests are not a break from the process but a continuation of it in another form, giving the nervous system a chance to process some of the information you have been generating. They give you a chance to sense change.
Do not talk to yourself about the changes you feel. Just feel them. Once you begin to put it into words, even silent words internally, you have left the experience and are moving to the verbal description. So just stay in the experience.
Now gently begin to alternate, pressing and releasing the head and then the heels. This can be a very hard lesson for people who have no worked with themselves a lot because it requires so little movement. People like to make things happen and you cannot really make much happen here. It is just a question of letting things be very gentle and noticing.
Let go of that and rest.
Note your sacrum now, the triangular bone lying at the base of your spine that connects with the two ilia on either side of it. Press that into the floor a little bit and release. Gently press and release. As you do, see if you can sense movement in the sacroiliac joints. The joints widen slightly as you press or as you release. Sense what happens to your sacroiliac joints as you press your sacrum into the floor. Does the sacroiliac widen a little bit or does it narrow? Are you changing the whole configuration of the sacrum and the two ilia with that pressure.
Again, do not answer that question in words. Just allow yourself to be with whatever is happening in that area. The sacroiliac joints are very important to our mobility, to our strength and our power, yet many people have almost no sense of them because we tend to make our pelvis into one big lump rather than into this flexible fluid structure that it really is.
Let go of that and rest.
Press your head and heels into the floor again, both together, and then let go. Continue doing that for a while. Then as your head and heels release, press your sacrum slightly into the floor so that you are alternating between pressing the sacrum and pressing the head and heels.
If you have a good imagination you can imagine that you are bridging with your head and heels, lifting your body into the air and then letting your body come down and lifting the two ends. So you are alternating the principle point of support, between the head/heel split, and the sacrum.
Just let yourself sense that alternation. Try different speeds. Speed it up a little faster. Slow it down. Do it a little slower. See if you can apply the Goldilocks test – you will find a speed that is too fast and one that is too slow and somewhere in the middle there is one that is just right. There are a lot of things we do that the Goldilocks test is very useful for.
Let go of that and rest.
How did your breathing change when you stopped? If there was a big change in your breathing when you let go and rest then you are working too hard. Do not work hard. You do not get points for working hard.
Now alternate between your head and your pelvis. Press your head into the floor and release and then your sacrum.
Then alternate just between your feet and your sacrum. Press your heels into the floor and release and then your sacrum.
Now add the head so you are going in sequence. Pressing the heels, sacrum, head, sacrum, heels. Just go back and forth, kind of up and down your body that way. See what that feels like.
Then let go of that and rest.
Notice somewhere in the middle of your back, maybe down around T8 and T9. There is a variant that kind of feels like the middle of your back. Press that area gently into the floor and release. Notice as you do, how the rest of your spine responds, what happens to the pressure between your pelvis and the floor.
Then let go of that and rest.
Notice now the spaces behind your knees. Sense how large those spaces are, whether both are the same or if there is a bigger space behind one knee than the other.
Very gently make that space a little smaller. The backs of your knees will not touch the floor so you cannot press them against it very well, but you can flatten your legs a little more to just slightly reduce the space and then allow it to come back to its natural size. So very gently pressing and releasing the backs of the knees.
What happens in your torso when you do this? What happens in the contact between your spine and rib cage and the floor as you flatten your knees a little bit?
Then begin to explore doing both of those things at the same time, pressing with the middle of your back and flattening your knees. Do both both things and let go, both and let go.
The begin to alternate between the two. Press your back into the floor. Then let go of that and press the back of your knees into the floor. Back, then knees. Then let go of that and rest.
Notice your breathing. Notice your sense of yourself. Go through the scan you went through when you first lay down. See what changes there may be in your image of yourself through the lesson.
Sense the space under your neck. Notice the curve of your neck, the space between it and the floor, and make that space a little smaller. Flatten your neck gently against the floor, then let it come back to its natural curve.
Let that go and rest.
Now notice the spaces under your ankles. Make that space a little smaller – flatten your ankles slightly against the floor then let them come up.
And gently begin to combine those two movements at the same time, flattening your neck and your ankles. How does that stretch you out? How much longer do you get when you do that? You might feel a slight sense of elongation as you flatten and a slight compression as you let go.
Now alternate, first flatten your neck and as it comes up then flatten your ankles. Neck, ankles, neck, ankles. Okay, let go of that and rest.
Now sense the curve under the small of your back, the lumbar curve. The spine may come completely off the floor, may have a space there that some little insect or small animal could crawl through, or if it is against the floor that place has less pressure. Then slowly gently flattening and releasing the small of your back against the floor. Then let go and rest.
Press your head against the floor and release a few times. Then press your heels as your head releases, going back and forth between them. Then add the sacrum, so you are alternating between the head and the sacrum and the heels and the sacrum and the head. Up and down.
Next time you go up and down, add the spaces under the middle of your back and your knees. So now you press with your heels, then decreasing the space behind your knees, then the sacrum, then behind the middle of your back and then pressing the back of your head.
As you do this gradually begin to add the other places we have looked at. From your head you flatten your spine a little bit before you go to the middle of your back. Then you flatten your lumbar curve a little bit before you go to your sacrum.
Then maybe something we have not done is to flatten your upper thighs a little bit before you go to the knees.
Eventually you are just going up and down your body, pressing slightly into the floor and releasing and each time you release one you move to the next spot. Any other spots you find as you are doing this that may feel like they ought to be included, then include them. Just move up and down your body at whatever pace feels like a good pace to you.
At some point, as you are doing that, you may find that the movement almost takes over and is almost happening by itself. When that happens allow it. Then you do not have to keep intentionally pressing, but let yourself go into a sense of feeling a wave going up and down your body, from your feet to your head and back down. And just allow that wave to flow, just observing it go.
See if you can imagine that somewhere in the recesses of your skull there is a volume knob. Without doing anything in particular if you turn the volume up the wave will get a little bigger and if you turn it down a bit the wave will get a little bit smaller.
If you just imagine a knob in your head that controls the volume of the wave, you are not going to be doing something. You are just going to think about it getting bigger or smaller and see how that might change your experience.
Now gradually turn the volume knob down so that the actual movement in your body becomes less and less, down to almost imperceptible but where you can still sense a movement, a sense of a wave moving up and down your body even with nothing actually moving.
Now turn the volume knob up slow and see if you can amplify that sense of movement to the point where you feel the wave, from your head down through your body, getting larger.
Notice there are different ways you can watch the wave. You can kind of from some outside perspective you can just watch the whole thing. You can see it going up and down the way you might stand at the beach and watch the waves.
Or you can ride it. You can get on it. So you are always feeling the point of pressure and riding it as it goes up and down your body. As you are doing that you can step off at some point.
So you are riding it for a while and then you can step off the next time it goes past your pelvis and just sit there and just sit there and watch the pelvis rise and fall by itself in the wave.
So it is all the same activity with a lot of different ways of taking it in. Just do whatever feels interesting to you. Just spend a few minutes exploring what you find interesting about this wave movement – either changing its amplitude, letting it go up and down, watching it from different perspectives..
Or, if you feel like you’ve had enough, just letting it go altogether and just being with who you are and how you feel right now.
Gradually turn the volume down and let the wave subside. If you are imagining watching the surface of a wave moving back and forth on water then imagine it gets less and less until the surface becomes flat.
Sense who you are in that flatness. Are you the same person now who laid down on the floor at the beginning of the lesson or are you somebody different? Just register that.
When you are ready, just think about coming back up to sitting and standing, to coming back into the world and moving around. Stay in this place as you do that as much as it seems feasible.
Part Two Follow up Discussion of ATM #1
Cortical & Subcortical Motor Control with Ralph Strauch FGNA 2006-001
FOLLOW-UP DISCUSSION of ATM #1
RALPH STRAUCH
For the recording: she just said she injured her back in the T7 area from an accident and has somehow discovered a DIFFERENT way of moving.
This is the core of what we do. If you are not very gentle and try to do something hard then all of these tensions that hold things in place come up and get to work. But if you can go very GENTLY then they do not get triggered and you get to find out WHAT ELSE is there.
COMMENT
To me the intriguing part of the lesson was the non-verbal part, where you said not to talk to yourself about what you are doing, to just let it happen. And then also suggesting that we NOT be VERBAL during the break.
That took me back to being a very young child at the point where I was learning to be verbal but not quite there.
RALPH
That is interesting.
C
Yes, actually during that period of time my not being able to be as verbal as other people thought I should be, created family problems.
RALPH
Yes.
C
So, the memory of the anxiety that came up because my mother thought I was being insolent when it just took me a while to come up with the words to answer her immediately. So it was a very interesting experience for me to bring up that whole edge between verbal and non-verbal.
RALPH
We have in this culture a very strong urge to FILL SPACE with verbalization and to talk about things and to think in fact that knowledge only exists when we have verbalized it. If you cannot describe something it is not true.
There is a really interesting thing… I wish I could remember the citation more, but one of the things about Native American cultures is they tend to talk much less and are much more comfortable with silence. Other cultures, too but I read somewhere a wonderful description of I think it was a Navajo comedy skit putting down whites in their tendency to talk all the time. You know, somebody comes in and they gotta keep talking and finding things to say. It is uproaring for the audience because it is really making fun of these duffo whites.
Another thing I want to say by the way about that lesson is that a longer version of it is on a tape on my website. I think it is tape 611 (?6-11) and it is called Making Waves. The lesson on the other side of the tape is called Feeling Your Cerebral-Spinal pulse. That one involves essentially the same process, starting out with consciously directed movements and getting into allowing a flow of pattern to happen, except the pattern in that case is opening and closing rather than a horizontal wave.
In terms of the ‘not verbalizing’, there is a famous painting. It is a picture of a pipe, smoking, curved – and the name of the painting is This is Not a Pipe. The idea behind it, the thing he is trying to get across is that the depiction of it is not the thing. Again, we tend to lose that distinction.
The same is true with verbal descriptions. The verbal description is not the thing. So when you are doing movement processes and start to talk to yourself about them, your attention shifts from the movement to the verbal description. it is as if the movement process is here and the verbal description is over there, so to when you are asked which leg is longer, when you think ‘Oh it is my right one’ you are interrupting the sense that the question should not induce verbal responses, even sub-vocalized ones.
In fact, this is something I talk about when I teach ATM. Do not answer the question verbally to yourself, just notice. It is to direct your attention to a different part of your experience and to let you respond to that experience.
Does that make sense?
COMMENT
The difference between the preference to form vs process.
RALPH
Yes.
COMMENT
I was pleasantly surprised when I had maybe two seconds the wave doing it itself.
RALPH
Okay, so then the question is what do you do after that happens. How many people have read ‘The Crack in the Cosmic Egg’ – Joseph Chilton Pearce. It was written more than thirty years ago. Pearce has written many more books since then, that was his first. The title is the metaphor, which is we think we are looking at this world out here that is outside of us, but you are really inside this cosmic egg (in his terminology) and what you see when you look out is the inside shell of the egg, the way you have constructed it. And sometimes the egg cracks and you get to see through the shell into something beyond. That is what we call mystical and religious experiences or ‘I could feel it happening for a couple of seconds’ or whatever.
One of the things Joe said that I found really interesting was that this is not a rare event. Cracks happen all the time. Almost everybody experiences cracks. The question is what do you do when you experience them. If you leave a crack alone it will close. It is self-healing. Now, many people do not even wait for that. They grab a metaphorical roll of duct tape and quickly tape over the experience so this vision from outside does not get in.
But he says there is another possibility, which is that even if it does close very quickly if you recognize it for what it is then you know there is something else out there and can look for more cracks. Once you start looking for them they get easier to find.
COMMENT
I went outside after the lesson and experienced sort of floating, almost like I had meditated but a little bit different, and the sensations around me were so strong it was almost uncomfortable. The feeling of just the wind on my skin and the colours. It was so intense that my first impulse was to shut it off because it was too much. So, to kind of speak to what you are saying.
RALPH
That is the first impulse. How many people here read Feldy Forum, the internet mailing list that I run for Feldenkrais practitioners. There was an interesting thread on it recently, sort of around this point.
Somebody was talking about feeling where in her brain different sensations resided and particular feeling where pain lived for a headache, then moving where it was a little bit and having it go away. So that was a way of getting rid of the headaches. Somebody else came in and said they had done things like that.
In fact I had a client recently who came in with a headache and I talked him through doing that. He moved it and said, “Oh yeah, it’s gone now. That’s wonderful.” And he was just really turned on by it.
As he was driving home from the lesson he stopped to get petrol and was talking to attendant in the station who also had a headache. He said, “Hey, I just found this great thing, do you wanna try it?” And the petrol attendant said, “Sure, that’s great”, so he talked him through it and the guy said, “Whoa, it’s gone. Where is it? Oh. There it is. That’s all right.”
COMMENT
That’s what people do after an ATM when their pain is gone.
RALPH
Right, how do you find the edge again?
Okay, so if we think about everything we do what are the different things we can do. There really is only one thing we can do and everything else stems out of variations, different patterns of the simple act, and that is contracting muscles. You cannot relax muscles. All you can do is tell them to stop contracting. So the only thing we really do is muscle contraction.
We use muscle contraction for a lot of different functions in the world. We use it to move. You contract a muscle that goes between two bones and the bones move and that creates movement. We also use it to apply force to external objects – to push on a door and open it to get out – and to resist external forces. Those I think are kind of basically pretty much what that set of things characterizes what we do in the world in terms of our interactions with the external world.
Now we talk about contracting muscles, but we do not actually control named muscles. We think of the body as a set of muscles and think of the muscles as sort of independent actors. You have your biceps and your triceps and your quads and so forth, all these muscles we think about as the things that are controlling.
And again, this is another place where there is this tendency to verbalize, to label, which gets us in trouble because we get mixed up between the label and the actual system we are talking about.
What we actually do control though are much smaller things called ‘motor units’. A motor unit consists of a single neuron running from the spinal cord and all the muscle fibres that single neuron causes to fire. A motor unit may consist of just a few muscle fibres in places where you need a lot of fine control, say in your fingers, or it may consist of hundreds and maybe even thousands of muscle fibres that all fire at the same time in areas where power is more important than fine control, like your leg and postural muscles and so forth.
What happens then is that the muscles fibres contract when the motor neuron fires and the neuron fires when its excitatory input exceeds some threshold. What I mean by that is the way neuron work. Neurons are the basic cells in your nervous system that do the processing of information and control things and tell you what is going on and so forth. So they are all interconnected.
You have all seen these things on PBS or other places of these intricate networks of neurons connecting to each other and messages flying back and forth.
So what happens is there are two kinds of messages that a neuron can get. There is what is called an ‘excitatory impulse’, which basically tells it to fire. And there is an ‘inhibitory impulse’ which tells it not to fire.
It is getting a lot of these all the time so what happens is if it gets enough excitatory impulses it fires, and it does not when it gets inhibitory impulses.
You do not have to remember all this for some test at the end, but the question in terms of the cortical and sub-cortical movement is where does the impulse originate. The impulse that fires is going to come down the motor neurons, which come from the spinal cord down to the muscles into the muscle fibres.
Now where do they get the impulses that tell them to fire? There are different places in the nervous system where that impulse can originate: the cerebral cortex – the part of the brain you think of when you think about seeing a picture of the brain and that outer covering that humans have more than most other animals – or from down deeper in the brain stem or the spinal cord.
Some impulses originate is in the cortex. When you think about doing something, like picking your hand up, that impulse originated in the cortex – the things you think of as voluntary movement start there.
Other impulses can originate in the brain stem or spinal cord. That is the neurological distinction between cortical and subcortical.
If you look at the anatomy of the nervous system, the cerebral cortex is this outer layer of the brain that has all the folds in it and so forth, where a lot of our higher mental functions take place, including thinking and planning and directing and fine motor control and voluntary action and so forth.
Then below that there is a whole lot of other structures, from the brain stem and the spinal cord and the cerebellum. Now I am not differentiated those; I am lumping the together as the subcortical. So we are sort of looking at the top and then everything underneath it. But they are both part of the anatomy of the nervous system.
Then the question is the experiential distinction. How do we experience these two kinds of initiated movement differently? The way we experience cortical movement is as doing, something I do. The distinction that is often made between voluntary and involuntary movement is a totally inadequate distinction for a lot of reasons, but voluntary movement is cortically directed – it starts in the cortex.
Things that do not start in the cortex you experience as flow, as happening. So this ATM was starting you off in a cortical place where you were telling your body to do things. I was telling you what to tell your body to do, but you were the one who actually telling it to press here and there and so forth. And that direction originated in your cortex.
After a while, once that pattern got set up, you could let the cortex get out of the way and just let it happen. Then instead of being cortically directed – and we will get more into the mechanics of this – your experience was ‘Oh, it is just sort of flowing along. I do not have to do anything. It is just happening.’
So one interesting question then is why is it the sense of not doing. And the reason I think is because the ego lives in the cortex. You can think of your ego as the part of yourself that is basically responsible for the distinction between ‘me’ and ‘not me’. Where do I end and where does the outside world begin? And responsible for managing my interaction with the outside world.
So at some level the ego is sort of my chief bureaucrat, my chief of staff between me and the world. From the ego’s point of view something that is initiated outside the cortex is as much other as something that is initiated from across the world. If I pick up Lester’s hand, his ego experiences that as happening to him because it did not direct that to happen. If his hand comes up because of something that was initiated totally inside his body but the cortex had nothing to do with it, then the cortex would make the same interpretation – it ain’t me, it is happening outside me.
COMMENT
What if he did not think about doing it, if his arm came up without thought at all?
RALPH
Yes, his experience would be oh that just kinda happened. He would intellectually say ‘I did it’. That is subcortical. But when it happens more slowly and you are more aware of the experience, you get the feeling of flow and not doing.
So, in terms of looking at how things happen subcortically, one very important mechanical piece of subcortical activity is called the Stretch Reflex. What happens in a muscle, in addition to the muscle fibres themselves which do the contraction, you also have other fibres called Muscle Spindles. They do not produce power, but are sensors. They provide information about how long the muscle is.
When the spindle is stretched it sends a signal on another neuron, an Axon. This is sort of a long transmission line. It will come back and connect with the Alpha Motor Neuron which causes the muscle to contract, and it will contract it.
One way you have all experienced this is with the knee jerk reflex. The doctor comes with this little rubber hammer and he hits your patellar tendon and your leg jumps. What is happening there is that all of the muscles in the front of the thigh, the quadriceps, all come down and join together at the kneecap into a common tendon that goes from the patella down to the tibia. So when the doctor hit the tendon that deflects it and stretches it, which then pulls on the muscle fibres associated with it and when those are pulled the muscle spindles get stretched and send out this signal saying hey I am getting long, and they cause a contraction which produces the knee jerk.
If you ask the doctor what that is about, he may tell you something like that shows that the nerve pathway is intact. That would be a typical answer you would get. It is true, but it is not the function of a stretch reflex. It is not a test circuit. God did not put it in to sell little rubber hammers.
Comments inserting jokes…
My anatomy teacher used to constantly refer to the celestial design committee, talking about how particular things function and came together and so forth. I think it started with stone axes, cut off too many legs that way.
Let us look at some examples of stretch reflex working. The knee jerk reflex is one, but what that action is really about is postural support. That knee jerk reflex allows you to stand and not have your legs collapse without having to have your brain constantly monitoring what is going on.
At a local level… if I bend a bit I am lengthen those muscles, so the constant activity of the stretch reflex in the same muscles that give me the knee jerk reflex provides the postural support I need for ongoing postural activity.
Carrying a load. If I have a bag of groceries to carry in from the car I, again, do not want my brain, sort of the upper parts of the system, to have to keep worrying about how much pressure do I need to hold the bag up. So the stretch reflex provides the answer. It keeps a constant amount of contraction that will allow me to support the load.
Response to disturbance. I am going through a crowded area and somebody bumps me. Well, if nothing else happened that bump might be enough to throw me off, but the stretch reflexes will automatically bring me back to where I was and serve to right me.
Another example that lots of people experience: When you were a kid did you ever play the game of standing in the doorway and pressing your hands against the frame for a while and then walk away and your arms kind of float up. That is another activation of the stretch reflex.
Also stiffness and rigidity. When you first get up and you are feeling stiff or when you try to reach and everything is making you stiff. It is the stretch reflexes throughout your body saying your ribs are not part of this movement, they shouldn’t be moved by this movement, they would otherwise hold you back.
So there are both uses and detrimental examples. Then the question is what determines when the stretch reflex triggers, because if they triggered all the time we would be totally immobile. If they all triggered when I try to bend my arm, the stretch reflexes in my triceps would keep that from happening. If I tried to straighten it the stretch reflexes in my biceps would keep that from happening.
So while these sorts of things are often described as a monosynaptic reflex that is just part of the circuitry and it just happens by itself, it does not. It is actually moderated and controlled by what are called gamma motor neurons. There was one shown on the little chart I gave you.
Like the alpha motor neurons, the gamma motor neurons run from the spinal cord out to the muscle. But instead of going to contract muscle fibres, they go to contract muscle spindles and basically set the length at which the spindle will trigger.
So if you think about the circuitry in a stretch receptor/reflex as being akin to the circuity in say a thermostat, you turn the furnace on it gets hot. But one way of controlling the furnace is to have a switch that turns it on when you get to a certain level.
The gamma motor neuron is like you going up and deciding where to set that the level of the signal that comes down over the neuron.
Now, the circuits that do that are moderated through the brain stem. They do not come from the cortex, but from lower in the system – probably the cerebellum as well and others, but they are basically subcortical circuitry. The interesting thing is when you think about that it also provides an alternate pathway for motor control. If I want to do something like raise my arm, one way I can do it is send a signal from the cortex to just raise it. Another way I could do it, if I had a way of affecting the gamma circuits, is by gradually moderating the stretch reflex, telling it that muscle is a bit too long already and it would contract a bit more until it is where we want it.
COMMENT
So, alpha motor neurons are controlled both cortically or subcortically but gamma motor neurons are only controlled subcortically?
RALPH
Right. And alpha motor neurons are basically the ones that contract the muscles. The gamma motor neurons are the ones who control the control system.
COMMENT
If I understand correctly, when the muscle spindle stretches it sends an impulse from the muscle area to the spinal cord.
RALPH
Yes, and the question then is at what length, what degree of stretch causes that impulse to be sent. That is what the gamma motor neuron controls.
C
With input from the spinal column?
RALPH
Yes. The gamma motor neuron gets its information from circuits in the spinal cord that do not go up to the cortex. They just run from the brain stem on down. There is a feedback loop, yes, but the gamma motor neuron is just the stuff going on. It is the sensory neuron from the spindle itself that is the one coming back.
C
That is neither alpha nor gamma?
RALPH
No, that is a sensory rather than a motor neuron. Sensory neurons mean information flowing in. Motor neurons mean information flowing out.
COMMENT
According to certain methods of body work there is a theory that by moving people into positions of comfort you reset the gamma motor neuron to its more functional setting. In FI, whenever we are doing the thing of going with a pattern we are working in accordance with that theory.
RALPH
Yes. A lot of what we do is in fact about influencing that subcortical organization.
So in terms of these alternate pathways then, who would use something like that. Some examples are like Tai Chi. The Chinese talk about the feeling of the chi moves me. There is a feeling of flow that you get into where it feels like oh it is just happening and their description of it is the chi is moving me.
Neurologically I think what is happening is that the movement is being controlled through the subcortical flow rather than by telling it what to happen.
Another example that many of you may have experienced is hand levitation. It is a common technique that is used in hypnosis, both hypnosis and self-hypnosis. Let one arm relax for a minute and see if you can give yourself the sense of your arm getting lighter. Maybe sometimes people will use visualizations like there is a string around my wrist attached to a helium balloon and I can feel it tugging. See if you can feel your arm just beginning to come up slightly. Just play with that for a few minutes and see what happens.
Another image could be sitting in a hot tub that is filling and as the water level rises over your arm it becomes more buoyant & begins to come up a little bit. See if you can begin to sense that a little bit.
Okay, that is enough for that now. We can look at that in a bit more detail later.
A third example is the ATM we just did. That ATM was to move you into this subcortical control space. Now what goes on subcortically is not something we have no access to. We have access to it, but not in the way we think of voluntary motor activity. It is what you get at through imagery, through imagining and allowing. When we allow something to happen we are allowing the subcortical processes to take over. This is where the experience is one of not doing. That term, ‘not doing’, is one that pops up in various places in the esoteric literature. Tai Chi masters talk about not doing when the chi is moving.
Continued Recording # 3
There is more to the phenomena that fall under that term than just this, because as the guy said last night there are things that happen that we cannot really explain with our mechanical models of the world. But this is a part of it.
COMMENT
When I drive the car, sometimes I am very conscious of the other cars and other times I am completely not conscious, because I was singing in the car or whatever, and I just get there. Is driving on automatic an example of subcortical activity?
RALPH
There are not clear lines here. The awareness/consciousness distinction is a useful one, but I do not know if we are really going to be able to get into that totally today. That takes us further than I think we can go today.
So, these examples that I have give so far are all kind of positive ones, that sound like things I would like to be able to do. Another example is what I call making yourself solid or locking up.
Try the following – some of you have done this with me before: Hold your right arm up and put your left hand on top of it and lift the arm up while holding it down with your hand. Analyze what you are experience. You have a sense of trying to make your right arm go up but it cannot because the left hand is holding it down. Can everyone agree that is what it feels like?
Notice what is happening when you do that. Then do it again. Then take your hand away and notice how the arm goes up.
But if you really look at what you are doing, pay attention when you are trying to lift your arm to what is going on in your shoulder and your upper arm. And notice how that changes when you take your hand away and the arm goes up. It changes in response to the sense of pressure changing in your wrist.
So now instead of attending to your wrist, keep attending to what is going on in your upper arm and shoulder but keep that the same as you take your hand away. What happens to your arm? It does not go anywhere, because you were not actually trying to lift it. You were actually trying to keep it from being moved. You were stabilizing it against the downward pressure and then blaming that pressure for the fact that the arm did not move.
This is a good example of what Moshe talked about as ‘if you do not know what you are doing, you cannot do what you want.’
Now, put your arm out and really make it as stiff as possible while still thinking you are wanting it to go up. That of course feels like a really stupid way to make it go up.
So keep doing that and while you are feeling how stupid that is take your left hand and put it on top – suddenly the same action that felt stupid now feels like the most natural thing you would do to make your arm go up except now this outside force is holding it down so you cannot do it.
A little story about this. This was well before I got into Feldenkrais, when I was still a mathematician.
I have a book called The Reality Illusion which talks about the nature of perception and how we put together the illusion that we think of as external reality. This little exploration is in that book.
At the time I was writing it I had done this sort of thing in classes and so forth talking people through it. But I had never tried to put this sort of experience into writing in ways that people would get it just by reading it.
So a friend of mine had a draft copy of the book and I was having him read the description I’d written to see what his reactions were and get a response from somebody who was not into the kind of esoteric stuff I was dealing with.
I asked him at one point if he tried that. He said he had, but said he didn’t know, it did not work for him. So I thought let’s see why not and I talked him through it, much the way I am talking you through it right now. He took his hand away and his arm was just there and I said, “What do you mean it wouldn’t work, it is working.” And he said, “Oh, but what would really happen is that.” [Showing?] And we did it two or three times and that was his response.
I do other things in workshops that also violate people’s expectations of how reality works and I have had that reaction a number of times. People will see something and experience it but then say that is not what would really happen. That is when our models and our expectations are stronger than our actual experience.
A historian of science named Thomas Kuhn wrote a wonderful book in the late 60s called The Structure of Scientific Revolution. He talks about the general process of science in this way. He says we have this myth about science testing hypothesis against experiments, and if data comes along that contradicts the hypothesis then we throw it out and get something new.
He said that was a nice myth but if you look at the history of science what really happens more often is if an experiment contradicts the theory we throw out the experiment and keep the theory. So after a while, when enough experiments come along and enough anomalous data starts to accumulate people will start thinking about it in different ways and a new theory will emerge.
But it does not happen on one time, because the human mind is quite willing to totally ignore direct experience or other fact that contradicts past experience and the models that we have built from it.
Now that is a reasonable way to run your life. You should not jump around at every new experience. But it does get in the way.
A speaker last night talked about studies of distance healing being totally rejected it just could not happen so there must be something wrong with a study that has that conclusion.
There was also a study published a number of years ago in the scientific journal Nature, again a very well done, fine controlled, study of homeopathy, using homeopathic remedies that had a measurable demonstrable effect. Well, the thing about homeopathic remedies is that they take an active ingredient and dilute it many times over to the point where there is a good statistical chance that the dose given of the remedy does not contain any molecules of the active ingredient at all, that it is just water. Yet it works, so it again does not fit our conventional models of reality.
COMMENT
The placebo effect.
RALPH
Except it is not a placebo if it is a double-blind experiment and the person does not know what they are getting.
C
But they do not know that with a placebo either.
RALPH
I am saying that in these experiments they found a difference between the placebo which actually was just plain water and the homeopathic remedy which was only statistically plain water. Nature eventually decided to publish that, because they had a number of reviewers look at it who found nothing wrong with the methodology or the people who did it. But they got an enormous amount of criticism, that it cannot possibly be true.
COMMENT
When I talk about remote healing I say would you have ever expected when you were young that there would be such a thing as a picture coming through a box in your living room? We have lived so long that the time frame of all the things that were way beyond our expectations have come to be.
[blank space in recording, back to the exercise…]
RALPH
So, when you come in contact with this external pressure you shift into a mode that says let’s protect everything, let’s keep from being moved. You do that unconsciously so you cannot move now, even if that arm is not there holding you down.
COMMENT
But the difference between when we brought our attention to our shoulders….
RALPH
Okay, when you do that, focusing here, when you take your hand away you are getting information that pressure is going away and you are automatically shifting out of that lockdown mode into one that says let the hand move.
When I had you focus your attention on your arm I was directing you away from paying attention to this information just to keep looking at what you are actually doing so that you do not change it. That is how you can see you have been stuck. It is just making you more aware of what you are actually doing.
Okay, stand up. We will move on to the next one and you will be a good subject. This phenomenon of making yourself tight to stave off the external world also happens at much lower levels. So sense your wrist here (for the recording, she is just standing there with her right arm down at her side) and just notice what it feels like. Now notice when I grab it that it feels different. When I grab it you have a feeling of being held. So being held, not being held, being held, not being held – I will go back and forth a few times and just differentiate. Do you feel a difference?
Now, the last time I did not actually grab her. I only reached for her. At that point she had gotten conditioned enough that just my reaching triggered the contractions inside. Part of what she was feeling with the sense of being held was the pressure she herself was creating out against me. We think of touch as just information coming in, but you will never ( without a lot of very careful work) differentiate the touch information coming in because you are always pushing back against whatever is touching.
If I have a dime sitting in the palm of my hand I am pushing up against it. Otherwise, my hand would fall. I am not pushing up against it very much and I wipe out that sensation in my normal interpretation of my experience, but I am doing it a little bit.
So with the grabbing I am triggering her reaction to keep me out even when she does not think she is pushing to keep me out and protect her space. And that, is the sense of being held.
This is not triggered only by the actual experience but also by the anticipation. It is part of a general phenomena. In The Reality Illusion I call that the ‘contraction response’. Now I think of it more generally as a making solid. Again, our model says we are these solid beings. You can find other writings that say that is not really true. You are not so much a solid being as you are fluid, but we do not experience that enough because before we get around to making contact with something else we make ourselves solid. It is part of the low level background stuff we do.
Some of what I say today you will walk away thinking what the hell was he talking about. That is fine. You do not have to get it all. Just remember sometimes when things come up that hey maybe things are just not all the way they seem.
Again, I suggest that some of the stories about what martial arts masters can do that seem very unreal are true and what arts like Tai Chi and Bagua and so forth are really about is not strength, speed and skill in the conventional senses of those terms but it is the control of perception, the way you organize your reality. By changing that control you can make very different things happen.
So grab a partner now and spend a few minutes just playing with this.
One person just hold your arm at your side and the other person just grab that arm fairly firmly without moving the arm too much and squeeze and then release. Do that a few times.
Th person who is being held, register your experiences – there are two states there, one of being free and one of being held. There is a distinction in how those states feel. You can tell when you are going to hold on.
Once the passive partner who is being held gets a good ability to distinguish these states, then the person holding can just reach without actually grabbing to enable your partner to sense that they will involuntarily react before any physical contact happens.
Okay, after you have done that, switch over to give your partner the same experience.
COMMENT
Why do you say it is about danger? When you did that to me I did not felt like oh good he is going to lift my arm again.
RALPH
Yes, you felt that at a conscious level, but underneath that is a sense of something potentially invading your space.
C
So you say we are reacting that lower level kind of brain stem, but how do we know we are not reacting to something positive, or both?
RALPH
Oh yes, again everything is both. I do not with this want to overdo the cortical subcortical distinction. I am just trying to show you phenomena that I think play with that.
COMMENT
We did it both ways. Once not moving the arm and once moving it. It was more responsive when we did not move the arm and just held it.
RALPH
Your reaction. I do not really want to get into detail at the moment, that famous phrase ‘beyond the scope of this workshop’. I just want to show you we are always operating at a lot of different levels and there is a lot of complex stuff going on and the more we become aware of that and are in tune with what we are responding to the more possibilities we have for response.
C
So the second one, where they move without being grabbed, was subcortical?
RALPH
Yes, that reaction. That tension is subcortical. Things are learned and happen at different levels, so part of what triggered that is you have a cortical belief that the world is made up of solid things so two of them cannot occupy the same space at the same time.
C
Ri-i-i-ight…
RALPH
That cortical belief gets instantiated in all of your interactions with the physical world. You will do things to maintain that belief and that is one way of doing that.
C
So if I could really let go of that belief could I walk through that wall.
RALPH
I have not been able to do it yet, but I have been working on it. My answer is yes I believe you could, but I cannot say for sure as I cannot do it yet. Hopefully in three or four years I will be able to say yes, but I have been trying for thirty years I still find walls are very hard to walk through.
C
Robert Heinlein thought you needed Beginner’s Mind, in the book The Cat Who Walked Through Walls, you can be too young to know you cannot do it.
RALPH
Yes, you need not have this model which says I have to react this way. Heinlein is very good in writing about things like that.
His Stranger in a Strange Land is about a time in the future when space travel is regularized and this character who is the sole survivor of the first Mars colony all of whom died out except for an infant who I think was born after the colonists got to Mars.
He was raised by Martians and comes back to earth as a 30 year old and tries to re-integrate with his species. But he had not had exactly the same socialization we have about the outside world and could do things like walk through walls because he did not know any better.
Obviously it is speculative fiction, but an interesting exploration.
There is a tribe in South America in the Peruvian Andes called the Q’eros which was written about a few years ago. They think of themselves as big brothers and the rest of us as the little brothers and their job is to keep us from fucking up the planet by teaching us more about how things really ought to be.
I have read about them. There was a movie and also a book. One of the things I read is that the shamans in that culture are basically taken at birth by the other shamans and raised in caves so they do not have any experience of the world outside the cave until puberty or thereabouts. So they are very consciously socialized into a very different reality.
I do not know about that reality and I imagine the anthropologists who saw enough of the culture to know that was happening do not know anything about it either in terms of what was going on in those caves.
So, here we have been talking about stretch reflexes but there are also a lot of other subcortical reflexes that do different things:
There is something in tendons called the Golgi Tension Receptors which measure tension. Your muscles cannot tell how tense they are. The tendon receptors do that. So there are different reflexes that involve the tendon receptors that limit contraction, how much you can contract.
For instance, the amount of tension used to hold a pen is probably being controlled by the Golgi cells. They are set differently to hold a pen than it would be if you were trying to throw or hit something.
They also limit excessive contraction. Many of the muscles in your body are strong enough to rip themselves loose from the bones they connect to or to break those bones if they fully contract.
COMMENT
~inaudible~
RALPH
Probably it can get done experimentally. People measure contractibility in muscle cells when they are artificially stimulated and so forth, so then you can extrapolate from the number of cells and the mass.
So when you try to contract too much, the tension in the tendon tells the muscle to back off. That is what I said before about inhibitory impulses. So the stretch reflex sends an excitatory impulse to the motor neuron, telling it to contract while the tendon reflex sends an inhibitory impulse saying how much to contract, limiting no more.
Collateral Inhibition.
Moshe talked about the Mexican Hat phenomenon in the nervous system. If you keep contracting motor cells, then after a while they will inhibit themselves. They say do not do any more. So if you sustain muscle contraction you are not contracting the same motor units all the time – the motor units within the muscle are varying. The collateral inhibition says ‘you have been doing it long enough, take a rest, and you over here come and take part of the load’. That is how we organize the production of sustained effort.
Reciprocal Inhibition
This is another reflex. When you voluntarily contract a muscle, like bending your elbow, the antagonists pull against what is in that case the triceps. When the muscle says it wants to contract, the antagonist gets a signal that relaxes it to allow the contraction to take place. That is the reason why the stretch reflexes in the triceps do not automatically stop you.
Again, know that these are all possibilities – what actually happens depends on the pattern of activation. When we made our arms stiff we were inhibiting reciprocal inhibition, because both the agonist and the antagonist are contracting. Now people will tell you this cannot happen because the reflex stops it. But the reflex only stops it under some conditions.
COMMENT
So in other words we are able to inhibit that reflex consciously, cortically.
RALPH
Well, sometimes we do it cortically and sometimes we do it subcortically. Again, I do not want to get into exactly where these things happen, partly because I have no idea. What is important is to understand the complexity of the system and some of the components that are there working on it.
You have an idea how General Motors makes cars. You do not need to know what every particular worker does to have a good idea of how they do that.
That is the level at which we are looking at this today.
Grasping Reflex
This is most prominent in infancy. It tends to go away in adults, but basically it tends to close on something in the hand. The interesting thing about this…. Try this. Put one hand in the other and hold it. Get a sense that you begin to alert that reflex…
Writings by Ralph Strauch
Please click on a topic to see Ralphs writings
About Ralph Strauch, Ph.D, Feldenkrais Method®
Ralph Strauch, Ph.D., practiced the Feldenkrais Method® in Los Angeles, California. He trained with the founder of the Method, Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais, and brings to his practice a wide range of insight and experience. He was formerly a Senior Mathematician with the Rand Corporation where his research focused on choice in the face of uncertainty, and has been exploring the mind-body relationship through the internal martial arts and related practices since the late 1960s. He presented advanced training for Feldenkrais Practitioners in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Great Britain. A more complete description of his background is quoted below:
“I practice the Feldenkrais Method in Pacific Palisades, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, and I write and teach about the importance of self-awareness in being fully human. Some of my teaching and writing can be found elsewhere in this website.
I was trained in the Feldenkrais Method by Moshe Feldenkrais, the originator of the Method, and have been in practice since 1983. My academic training was as a theoretical mathematician specializing in probability theory, with a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of California at Berkeley. Before going into the Feldenkrais work, I was a senior mathematician at the Rand Corporation, where my research focused on defense policy, public policy analysis and decision making, and military command and control. I’ve been exploring the bodymind relationship since the late 1960s, through T’ai Chi and other martial arts, meditation, the Feldenkrais Method, and other tools I developed myself.
I have written two books, THE REALITY ILLUSION: How you make the world you experience, and LOW-STRESS COMPUTING: Using awareness to avoid RSI. I have also written a number of articles relating to the role of awareness in being human. I am currently working on another book on COMPOSING EXPERIENCE, which will update the ideas I first explored in THE REALITY ILLUSION in light of my own growth and development since I wrote it.
That’s the basics, so you can return to the Table of Contents if you’ve read enough, or read on to find out how I made the transition from mathematician to movement teacher.
Some people are surprised to find a former mathematician teaching the Feldenkrais Method, and see the two vocations as very different. In some ways they are, but in other ways my Feldenkrais work is a natural extension of my career as a mathematician.
My mathematical training focused on decisionmaking with incomplete information in the face of uncertainty. It gave me a conceptual framework for way of thinking about these issues that carries over into my current vocation.
My research at Rand involved studying how government organizations structure their perceptions of the world and use those perceptions to make decisions and to act. That theme eventually became my major research interest. Some of the ideas about perception that later played a central role in THE REALITY ILLUSION first germinated as ideas about systems analysis and other aspects of bureaucratic decisionmaking.
In the late 1960s I became interested in the martial arts, initially as a way of keeping in shape and developing some self-defence skills. I moved from karate into judo and jujitsu, and eventually into T’ai Chi and Aikido. These “internal” arts ultimately depend more on awareness and on the control of perception than they do on strength/speed/skill in the conventional sense. They led me further — into Taoist philosophy, meditation, the writings of Carlos Castaneda, and a fascination with the body/mind relationship. I developed a very personal form of martial arts practice, focusing on the understanding of physical interaction and conflict at very basic levels.
Eventually, I came to see that the core questions underlying my personal quest were the same questions I was asking in my work at Rand, simply applied to a different domain.
- How do we construct our perception of the world, and then function within the context of that construction?
- What are the ways we distort our perceptions and how do they interfere with achieving what we want?
- How can we achieve a better understanding of the underlying reality within which we function?
At Rand I explored these questions in the context of the perceptions and actions of bureaucratic organizations. My personal explorations concerned the same questions as they applied to my own life.
In 1976 I left Rand, and with my wife and kids, spent a year living in a motor home. We wandered around the western U.S. and Canada, living in National Park and Forest Service campgrounds. I thought a lot about these core questions, and wrote the first draft of THE REALITY ILLUSION. After a year we returned to Los Angeles and I supported myself with consulting work on command and control and other defense issues, for Rand and for other clients as well.
In 1980 Moshe Feldenkrais gave a workshop in Los Angeles. I had heard of him and his work sounded interesting, so I went to the workshop to see what he was about. He offered a set of tools to explore my core questions that was as good as any I’d found, and far better than most. He was starting a professional training several months later. He was in his late 70s, so this training would probably be his last. I signed up for the training with no intention of becoming a Feldenkrais Teacher; at the time I didn’t even know what one was. I simply wanted to pick his brains and learn what he knew, to apply it in my own life.
The recession in the early 1980’s dried up my defence consulting practice, so I had to decide whether I still enjoyed that work enough to invest the time and effort to keep it going. I didn’t, and the Feldenkrais work seemed like a more natural and rewarding way to go. I’ve been doing it since.”
Managing Action by Ralph Strauch (Notes for an Advanced Training)
Managing Action by Ralph Strauch
(Notes for an Advanced Training)
Action is what you do — how you interact with the world around you. Intention is what you want to do. Action is the manifestation of intention. This workshop will explore the relationship between intention and action, and influences that facilitate or impede that relationship.
The processes through which we shape our actions are complex, multi-faceted, and distributed throughout the nervous system. Conscious voluntary action is directed primarily from the cerebral cortex, but is heavily supplemented by subcortical control of supporting activities such as coordination, balance and, overall organization. We will examine these two components of motor control and the interactions between them. Well-coordinated cortical and subcortical control results in integrated and effective action, while poor cortical/subcortical coordination leads to inefficiency and cross-motivation. Awareness provides a major integrating agent, so Feldenkrais work can significantly improve integration.
The training included Awareness Through Movement lessons and other experiential explorations to clarify these concepts and Functional Integration practices that utilize them, as well as lecture and discussion. You will learn to deepen skills and sensitivities you may not even have realized you possess. You will leave the workshop knowing what you are doing, as well as being able to do it, with a new sense of confidence in your ability to work at ever deeper levels!
Ralph Strauch, Ph.D., practiced the Feldenkrais Method in Los Angeles, California. He trained with the founder of the Method, Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais, and brings to his practice a wide range of insight and experience. He was formerly a Senior Mathematician with the Rand Corporation where his research focused on choice in the face of uncertainty, and has been exploring the mind-body relationship through the internal martial arts and related practices since the late 1960s. He presented advanced training for Feldenkrais Practitioners in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Great Britain. A more complete description of his background is quoted below:
“I practice the Feldenkrais Method in Pacific Palisades, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, and I write and teach about the importance of self-awareness in being fully human. Some of my teaching and writing can be found elsewhere in this website.
I was trained in the Feldenkrais Method by Moshe Feldenkrais, the originator of the Method, and have been in practice since 1983. My academic training was as a theoretical mathematician specializing in probability theory, with a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of California at Berkeley. Before going into the Feldenkrais work, I was a senior mathematician at the Rand Corporation, where my research focused on defense policy, public policy analysis and decision making, and military command and control. I’ve been exploring the bodymind relationship since the late 1960s, through T’ai Chi and other martial arts, meditation, the Feldenkrais Method, and other tools I developed myself.
I have written two books, THE REALITY ILLUSION: How you make the world you experience, and LOW-STRESS COMPUTING: Using awareness to avoid RSI. I have also written a number of articles relating to the role of awareness in being human. I am currently working on another book on COMPOSING EXPERIENCE, which will update the ideas I first explored in THE REALITY ILLUSION in light of my own growth and development since I wrote it.
That’s the basics, so you can return to the Table of Contents if you’ve read enough, or read on to find out how I made the transition from mathematician to movement teacher
Some people are surprised to find a former mathematician teaching the Feldenkrais Method, and see the two vocations as very different. In some ways they are, but in other ways my Feldenkrais work is a natural extension of my career as a mathematician.
My mathematical training focused on decisionmaking with incomplete information in the face of uncertainty. It gave me a conceptual framework for way of thinking about these issues that carries over into my current vocation.
My research at Rand involved studying how government organizations structure their perceptions of the world and use those perceptions to make decisions and to act. That theme eventually became my major research interest. Some of the ideas about perception that later played a central role in THE REALITY ILLUSION first germinated as ideas about systems analysis and other aspects of bureaucratic decisionmaking.
In the late 1960s I became interested in the martial arts, initially as a way of keeping in shape and developing some self-defence skills. I moved from karate into judo and jujitsu, and eventually into T’ai Chi and Aikido. These “internal” arts ultimately depend more on awareness and on the control of perception than they do on strength/speed/skill in the conventional sense. They led me further — into Taoist philosophy, meditation, the writings of Carlos Castaneda, and a fascination with the body/mind relationship. I developed a very personal form of martial arts practice, focusing on the understanding of physical interaction and conflict at very basic levels.
Eventually, I came to see that the core questions underlying my personal quest were the same questions I was asking in my work at Rand, simply applied to a different domain.
- How do we construct our perception of the world, and then function within the context of that construction?
- What are the ways we distort our perceptions and how do they interfere with achieving what we want?
- How can we achieve a better understanding of the underlying reality within which we function?
At Rand I explored these questions in the context of the perceptions and actions of bureaucratic organizations. My personal explorations concerned the same questions as they applied to my own life.
In 1976 I left Rand, and with my wife and kids, spent a year living in a motor home. We wandered around the western U.S. and Canada, living in National Park and Forest Service campgrounds. I thought a lot about these core questions, and wrote the first draft of THE REALITY ILLUSION. After a year we returned to Los Angeles and I supported myself with consulting work on command and control and other defense issues, for Rand and for other clients as well.
In 1980 Moshe Feldenkrais gave a workshop in Los Angeles. I had heard of him and his work sounded interesting, so I went to the workshop to see what he was about. He offered a set of tools to explore my core questions that was as good as any I’d found, and far better than most. He was starting a professional training several months later. He was in his late 70s, so this training would probably be his last. I signed up for the training with no intention of becoming a Feldenkrais Teacher; at the time I didn’t even know what one was. I simply wanted to pick his brains and learn what he knew, to apply it in my own life.
The recession in the early 1980’s dried up my defence consulting practice, so I had to decide whether I still enjoyed that work enough to invest the time and effort to keep it going. I didn’t, and the Feldenkrais work seemed like a more natural and rewarding way to go. I’ve been doing it since.”
Books THE REALITY ILLUSION: How you make the world you experience, and LOW-STRESS COMPUTING: Using awareness to avoid RSI.
I have written two books, THE REALITY ILLUSION: How you make the world you experience, and LOW-STRESS COMPUTING: Using awareness to avoid RSI. I have also written a number of articles relating to the role of awareness in being human. I am currently working on another book on COMPOSING EXPERIENCE, which will update the ideas I first explored in THE REALITY ILLUSION in light of my own growth and development since I wrote it.
That’s the basics, so you can return to the Table of Contents if you’ve read enough, or read on to find out how I made the transition from mathematician to movement teacher.
How Ralph Strauch made the transition from mathematician to Feldenkrais® Practitioner and teacher.
Here is a Table of Contents
if you wish to read about how Ralph Strauch made the transition
from mathematician to Feldenkrais® Practitioner and teacher.
Ralph Strauch - Musings on Awareness (Feldenkrais Journal No. 19 — 2006)
“I see the core of Moshe’s teaching as encouraging autonomy" Ralph Strauch 4 Nov, 2013
“I see the core of Moshe’s teaching as encouraging autonomy — teaching us to look within ourselves for answers rather than seeking them from any external authority, including him, and guiding us to acquire the skills needed to assure that the answers we find in ourselves will be good ones. The objective of ATM, for example, is not to learn the “right” way to act, but to become aware and sensitive enough to allow appropriate forms of action to emerge organically for us. We should explore ways of more fully applying this principle in other aspects of our work and lives, and in the ways we train others to continue that work.“
Ralph Strauch 4 Nov, 2013, email to participants in the seminar with Maxine Sheets-Johnstone Yachat’s January 2014. Ralph explores this idea in somewhat greater depth at http://somatic.com/blog/2009/06/empowering-autonomy/
Selected Article Reprints
Selected Article Reprints
This page contains abstracts of some of my articles related to the Feldenkrais Method® and to various aspects of self-awareness and the bodymind system. These articles may be downloaded in Adobe Acrobat portable document format (pdf).
- “The Somatic Dimensions of Emotional Healing” [12pp illus.]
- We have a contemporary myth that body and mind are separate, but the bodymind is really an integrated system. This 10,000 word illustrated article explores the way that system experiences emotion as both a somatic and a psychological process. It examines the effects of emotional trauma on the bodymind, and looks at how that trauma can be healed somatically as well as psychologically. A printed version of this article may be purchased for $3.
- “An overview of the Feldenkrais Method” [4pp]
- The Feldenkrais Method is a way of learning — learning to move more freely and easily, to carry less stress in your body, to stop doing the things that cause you pain. This article explains the philosophy behind the Method, its history, and tells you when you should consider it and how to get the most from your Feldenkrais experience.
- Epistemology and the Feldenkrais Method [6pp]
- Research takes place within a paradigm, which rests, in turn, on an epistemology, or theory of knowledge. Good research paradigms for the Feldenkrais Method do not exist, in part because conventional scientific epistemology does not adequately represent forms of knowledge important to the Method. This article discusses this inadequacy and explores one possible approach to developing a non- conventional epistemology to address it.
- “Musings on Awareness” [7pp]
- William Shakespeare observed that “all the world’s a stage.” Within that metaphor awareness can be seen as how we light that stage. Narrowly focused spotlights seem to work in some situations, but we are generally better off with broader more diffuse lighting that lets us see more of the world around (and within) us. The effectiveness of the Feldenkrais Method in enhancing awareness can be increased when practitioners pay greater attention to that aspect of their work.
- “The Process of Functional Integration” [1p]
- Clients who experience Feldenkrais Functional Integration are often surprised that such a gentle and non-intrusive intervention can so effective. This article explains that effectiveness in terms of learning resulting from the feedback provided by the practitioner to the client.
- “Emotional stress and body organization” [1p]
- Feeling states and body organization are intimately intertwined. Your body is a sense organ for feeling the same as your eyes are for vision. Emotional stress and trauma shut down the processing of experience with stress and tension in the body. The use of Functional Integration to reduce that stress is discussed.
- “A Crisis in Perception” [2pp]
- We are faced with an interlocking array of crises affecting us as individuals, a larger society, and a species. Underlying all these crises is an unrecognized “crisis in perception,” resulting from the narrow perceptual focus that both shapes and is shaped by contemporary society. This article explores the nature of that perceptual narrowing, and how it contributes to the other crises that fill our lives.
- “Connecting with the Earth” [2pp]
- Our ancestors moved freely across natural terrain, in a continuing intimate relationship with the Earth beneath their feet. Today, that close and intimate contact with the Earth is gone, and with it, much of our natural grace and agility. This article explores what happened to us and how we can reverse that process and regain our ground, psychologically and spiritually as well as physically.
- “T’ai Chi and the Feldenkrais Method“ [4pp]
- Though based on very different explanatory models (energetic for T’ai Chi and neurological learning for Feldenkrais), T’ai Chi and the Feldenkrais Method have much in common. Both use gentle, repetitive, attentive movement to enhance self-awareness and improve self-understanding, resulting in healthier, more fluid, and more efficient functioning.
- “Training the Whole Person” [3pp]
- Training often involves breaking the activity being trained down into logically distinct pieces and training each individually. This article discusses an alternative approach which uses increasingly complex approximations to the activity being trained, each involving the student as a full human being. Tennis instruction and the Feldenkrais Method are discussed as examples.
- “Tigers and Tunnel Vision” [2pp]
- When a tiger steps on the path in front of you, your perceptual focus narrows, as part of your body’s automatic “flight/fight” to threats. This is an appropriate and effective response to the tiger. In contemporary urban society it has become maladaptive, however, and it contributes to personal and social ills ranging from bad backs to environmental pollution.
- “Do Dolphins Think without Language?” [2pp]
- Dolphins and whales communicate using complex patterns of sound — the same modality through which they perceive and understand their surroundings. This allows direct communication of experience from one to another — something we could achieve only through telepathy, if at all. This article explores the dolphins’ perception through echolocation and the communications possibilities it offers.
- “Good Posture Flows from Self-awareness” [1p]
- Good posture involves a fluid balance and lack of effort, and should grow organically out of our innate sense of ourselves as we move through and function in the world. The key to improving posture lies not in effortful adherence to an external ideal, but in the ease and balance that flow from increasing self-awareness.
- “Introduction to Low-Stress Computing “ [14pp illus.]
- This document contains the introductory chapter and table of contents from the preliminary version of my book Low-Stress Computing: Using awareness to avoid RSI. The introduction lays out the basic conceptual framework on which Low-Stress Computing is based and outlines the content of the remainder of the book. The preliminary version may be purchased for $11.95.
Rand Corporation Reports and Papers
Before I became a Feldenkrais Teacher I was a Senior Mathematician for the Rand Corporation, where I worked on a variety of problems related to defense policy and decisionmaking.
My research at Rand included critiques of the methodology then used in systems analysis, and exploration of the processes by which organizations perceive the world around them and the act in accordance with those perceptions. Two of those critiques are available below. That work formed the intellectual foundations for what later became my book The Reality Illusion, and for my ongoing interests in the nature of perception and reality. Abstracts of some of my other writings at Rand can be found in Rand’s publications listings.
- “Risk Assessment as a Subjective Process” [14pp illus.]
- Most extant approaches to risk assessment stress methodological and procedural solutions to the problem, in part because method and procedure are viewed as bulwarks against the fallibilities and limitations of human judgment. This paper examines the other side of that coin, the use of judgment and intuition as bulwarks against the fallibilities and limitations of formal methodology. Those limitations are described, and capabilities which judgment and intuition provide to compensate for them discussed. The paper calls for a greater synthesis of judgment and methodology, in which they aid and support each other instead of competing.
- “‘Squishy’ Problems and Quantitative Methods” [10pp illus.]
- The edited text of a talk on potential hazards in the application of quantitative methods to “squishy” problems without well-defined structure, of the type frequently encountered in government policy and decisionmaking. Squishy problems are defined, and a three-level conceptual model of analysis which displays the relative roles of logical inference and qualitative human judgment is described. Two ways in which people use models of all types, as a surrogate for the substantive problem (e.g., Newtonian mechanics as a surrogate for “real” mechanics), and as a perspective on the problem (e.g., two-dimensional perspective drawing) are described and contrasted, and some of the implications of the difference for the analysis of squishy problems are discussed.
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Tributes to Ralph Strauch
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Reflections from Feldenkrais® Community Forum
Remembrances by Beth Rubenstein and Stacy Barrows:
Remembrances by Beth Rubenstein and Stacy Barrows:
Beth Rubenstein Remembrance
I had taken a weekend workshop in Los Angeles in the late 1980’s and was sold on the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education. I wanted to learn more and experience more. I contacted every practitioner in the greater LA area and only one returned my phone call. It was Ralph. He became my first teacher. It was my lucky day. He did not live far from me (in Los Angeles terms) and he had availability. Long story short, I got lessons from Ralph every week for probably two years, until one day he told me that there was a new training starting in Northern California and that I needed to be in it. Ralph had become my mentor, my teacher, and my friend. I did so much exploration and growing with him. He was just that kind of person, brilliant, warm, and caring. And, he laughed at my jokes. I trusted him. Stacy Barrows and I visited with him shortly before he died. We brought him food he wasn’t supposed to eat and laughed with him. It was so lovely to spend the time with him and his wife Merna. He was so special. I cherish the time I had with him, both in the early days and later.
Stacy Barrows Remembrance
There are many stories I have with Ralph. He was my first Feldenkrais teacher, thanks to Beth. And he also became our family practitioner. He gave me a lesson while I was delivering my first child. But my favorite Ralph story is about my mother-in-law, Mary.
Mary had just lost her husband, meaning she was widowed twice. When she visited us, she suffered a severe neck injury that put her on heavy narcotics, and into the hospital. The doctors sent her home, saying there was nothing they could do. I convinced my husband to take her to Ralph. This was not going to be easy. He had to get her into his car, which was a Porsche, and drive an hour to Ralph’s home. I was at work and got a call from my husband. He asked me if I would like to talk to Mary. She was giddy and laughing, and said it is time for her to fly home. Ralph treated this grieving widow with his deep understanding of how one holds pain in the body. This had not yet been recognized in the pain science world. His session didn’t fix her pathology but allowed her to sense herself in a way that she could hold space for her grief. That was the genius behind Ralph.
Ralph Strauch: In Memoriam Feldenkrais® Guild of North America (FGNA)
Ralph Strauch: In Memoriam
Ralph Strauch died on December 18, 2024. Ralph was an early member of the Feldenkrais Guild Board of Directors and Ethics Committee, and a frequent presenter at Guild conferences. Ralph introduced the Feldenkrais® community to email in the 1980’s, and created our first online forum. Ralph will be fondly remembered and deeply missed by many members of our community.
More About Ralph
Ralph E. Strauch was born on May 14, 1937. He had a PhD in statistics from UC Berkeley and was senior mathematician at the Rand Corporation. His research focused on human and organizational decision making processes. He studied Tai Chi, Aikido and related disciplines in the late 1960’s. He later developed his own personal form of body/mind practice that he called refocusing. He was in the Amherst Feldenkrais training, traveling with Merna and their two children, David and Shar. He was devoted to his family. Ralph taught the public and practitioners here in LA, and was a frequent presenter at Guild conferences. He was so very gifted. His calm, brilliance, and unassuming manner made him shine. He served on the Guild Board of Directors from 1985-97, and was an early Chair of the Ethics Committee. He is remembered for his early technical skills and starting and running the Feldyforum, the first platform for the Feldenkrais community to communicate online.
Ralph was also an author, and in 1983 he wrote The Reality Illusion, about the nature of perception, reality, and the interactions between the two. He wrote, “My book, The Reality Illusion, describes my understanding at the time it was written in the early 1980s.” He stated that his understanding only deepened and became richer as he grew and learned. Ralph passed away on December 18, 2024. So many Feldenkrais teachers and students knew, respected, and resonated with him. Those of us who knew him well loved him. He will be
missed by so many.
You can find more of Ralph’s writings on his website at www.somatic.com
Read remembrances by Beth Rubenstein and Stacy Barrows:
Beth Rubenstein Remembrance
I had taken a weekend workshop in Los Angeles in the late 1980’s and was sold on the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education. I wanted to learn more and experience more. I contacted every practitioner in the greater LA area and only one returned my phone call. It was Ralph. He became my first teacher. It was my lucky day. He did not live far from me (in Los Angeles terms) and he had availability. Long story short, I got lessons from Ralph every week for probably two years, until one day he told me that there was a new training starting in Northern California and that I needed to be in it. Ralph had become my mentor, my teacher, and my friend. I did so much exploration and growing with him. He was just that kind of person, brilliant, warm, and caring. And, he laughed at my jokes. I trusted him. Stacy Barrows and I visited with him shortly before he died. We brought him food he wasn’t supposed to eat and laughed with him. It was so lovely to spend the time with him and his wife Merna. He was so special. I cherish the time I had with him, both in the early days and later.
Stacy Barrows Remembrance
There are many stories I have with Ralph. He was my first Feldenkrais teacher, thanks to Beth. And he also became our family practitioner. He gave me a lesson while I was delivering my first child. But my favorite Ralph story is about my mother-in-law, Mary.
Mary had just lost her husband, meaning she was widowed twice. When she visited us, she suffered a severe neck injury that put her on heavy narcotics, and into the hospital. The doctors sent her home, saying there was nothing they could do. I convinced my husband to take her to Ralph. This was not going to be easy. He had to get her into his car, which was a Porsche, and drive an hour to Ralph’s home. I was at work and got a call from my husband. He asked me if I would like to talk to Mary. She was giddy and laughing, and said it is time for her to fly home. Ralph treated this grieving widow with his deep understanding of how one holds pain in the body. This had not yet been recognized in the pain science world. His session didn’t fix her pathology but allowed her to sense herself in a way that she could hold space for her grief. That was the genius behind Ralph.
Reflections from Lavinia Plonka
I remember when Ralph was promoting his book The Reality Illusion, and people didn’t understand what he was talking about – but he was a prophet, way ahead of his time. His work creating Feldy Forum when the internet was in its infancy helped create our online community. And I still remember a conference workshop, a million years ago, when he taught how to feel the spine wanting to move when you applied resistance, something I had somehow missed in my training and have thanked him silently ever since. I’m sorry I won’t be able to attend the event, but my heart will be there!
Another Reflection from Stacy
There are many stories I have with Ralph. He was my first Feldenkrais teacher, thanks to Beth. And he also became our family practitioner. He gave me a lesson while I was delivering my first child. But my favorite Ralph story is about my mother-in-law, Mary.
Mary had just lost her husband, meaning she was widowed x2. When she visited us, she suffered a severe neck injury that put her on heavy narcotics, and into the hospital. The doctors sent her home, saying there was nothing they could do. I convinced my husband to take her to Ralph. This was not going to be easy. He had to get her into his car which was a Porsche and drive an hour to Ralph’s home.
Needless to say, I was at work and got a call from my husband. He asked me if I would like to talk to Mary. She was giddy and laughing, and said it is time for her to fly home. Ralph treated this grieving widow with his deep understanding of how one holds pain in the body. This had not yet been recognized in the pain science world. His session didn’t fix her pathology but allowed her to sense herself in a way she could hold space for her grief. That was the genius behind Ralph.
Some Testimonials from Advanced Trainings
Some Testimonials from Participants
in Advanced Trainings with Ralph Strauch
“The whole training was led in a sensitive, balanced, and encouraging way — highly conducive to learning.The chunks of time alloted for peer work were just right to encourage experimentation. I appreciated the approach, and the whole group felt at ease with itself”
“…the forms with touch, connection, and listening (other than “moves”); the sense of centre rather than boundary; the soft, subtle, and powerful place between the least resistance and the first hint of collapse; and the level of non-doing we practiced will all, I suspect, have a very significant impact on how I live as well as on my FI and ATM practice.”
“I found the training very inspiring, because it confirmed my own way of working and provided me with new ideas which I am going to use in my practice”
“I found the open attitude to the Method a relief and liberation. To have these theoretical and experiential viewpoints on the Method clarified things about the Method and have given me the optimism that I could do FI — from my viewpoint — in my way! (having had little confidence about doing FI before this)”
“Being still at the beginning of my training I had a lot of anticipation about how I could get the FI exercises “right.” Ralph’s openness in encouraging us to experiment and engaging with the group as a whole helped very much with this. I have seldom felt so comfortable throughout a workshop.”
“Thanks for the relaxed, supportive environment. I think it allowed us better learning and practice.”
It was a well designed, facilitated and shared learning experience — a learning space which led participants into an engagement to a practical and self-reflective learning work I rarely had come across. Ralph’s expertise and organization became an invitation to join him on this continuous adventure of somatic learning, integration and sharing. Ralph’s open-listening attitude to students was a special gift in the dancing dialogue.
Ralph has a gift to allow the expression of diverse viewpoints, quietly hold his initial reactions to those viewpoints, and guide each participant to opening to alternate slices of reality. And then he manages to express those “cracks in the cosmic egg” in the form of ATMs
The training provided an in-depth exploration of this aspect of the Feldenkrais Method. It was interesting, fun, and my personal & professional growth was actively stimulated & inspired.
This training is key to taking my practice of the Feldenkrais Method towards being more elegant and my life more joyful. The simplicity and authenticity of Ralph’s teaching encourage confidence in his students.
“Amazing, the “not-doing” but feeling & taking time & becoming aware”
“A great chef who serves up an impeccable meal and then gets out of the way enough that you can truly appreciate the food and fully digest it. Thanks Ralph”
Ralph Strauch, Ph.D., practiced the Feldenkrais Method in Los Angeles, California. He trained with the founder of the Method, Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais, and brought to his practice a wide range of insight and experience. He was formerly a Senior Mathematician with the Rand Corporation where his research focused on choice in the face of uncertainty, and exploring the mind-body relationship through the internal martial arts and related practices since the late 1960s. He presented advanced training for Feldenkrais Practitioners offering lessons that continue to be cherished and developed by colleagues in ongoing projects.
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There are many stories I have with Ralph. He was my first Feldenkrais teacher, thanks to Beth. And he also became our family practitioner. He gave me a lesson while I was delivering my first child. But my favorite Ralph story is about my mother-in-law, Mary.
Mary had just lost her husband, meaning she was widowed x2. When she visited us, she suffered a severe neck injury that put her on heavy narcotics, and into the hospital. The doctors sent her home, saying there was nothing they could do. I convinced my husband to take her to Ralph. This was not going to be easy. He had to get her into his car which was a Porsche and drive an hour to Ralph’s home.
Needless to say, I was at work and got a call from my husband. He asked me if I would like to talk to Mary. She was giddy and laughing, and said it is time for her to fly home. Ralph treated this grieving widow with his deep understanding of how one holds pain in the body. This had not yet been recognized in the pain science world. His session didn’t fix her pathology but allowed her to sense herself in a way she could hold space for her grief. That was the genius behind Ralph.
** Direct ZOOM LINK
Dear Stacy,
We are grateful that you will be introducing Ralph’s projects including ‘Wave
Topic: Honouring Ralph Strauch Celebration of Life
( May 14, 1937 to December 18, 2024 )
Time: May 24, 2025 08:30 a.m. PDT which will be 11:30 a.m. EDT
Here is the DIRECT ZOOM LINK
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89740308032?pwd=2DPlE4jHbf1mMXB5EP3abxXzYhunWA.1
Meeting ID: 897 4030 8032
Passcode: Saturday
I remember when Ralph was promoting his book The Reality Illusion, and people didn’t understand what he was talking about – but he was a prophet, way ahead of his time. His work creating Feldy Forum when the internet was in its infancy helped create our online community. And I still remember a conference workshop, a million years ago, when he taught how to feel the spine wanting to move when you applied resistance, something I had somehow missed in my training and have thanked him silently ever since. I’m sorry I won’t be able to attend the event, but my heart will be there!
** Direct ZOOM LINK
Dear Lavinia,
WE WILL LOVE TO SEE YOU IF YOU CAN BE WITH US:
Topic: Honouring Ralph Strauch Celebration of Life
( May 14, 1937 to December 18, 2024 )
Time: May 24, 2025 08:30 a.m. PDT which will be 11:30 a.m. EDT
Here is the DIRECT ZOOM LINK
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89740308032?pwd=2DPlE4jHbf1mMXB5EP3abxXzYhunWA.1
Meeting ID: 897 4030 8032
Passcode: Saturday
Ralph was my first Feldenkrais teacher. I studied mathematics and computer science in college and I could dig the fascinating analysis he described to me, at the same time our work was focused on the body and feelings. I went to him 5 times a year, on average, over the period 1995 to 2018. I still do ATM from his tapes and it always gives a lovely experience. His voice lives on in my house.
** Direct ZOOM LINK
Dear Mike,
WE WILL LOVE TO SEE YOU IF YOU CAN BE WITH US:
Topic: Honouring Ralph Strauch Celebration of Life
( May 14, 1937 to December 18, 2024 )
Time: May 24, 2025 08:30 a.m. PDT which will be 11:30 a.m. EDT
Here is the DIRECT ZOOM LINK
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89740308032?pwd=2DPlE4jHbf1mMXB5EP3abxXzYhunWA.1
Meeting ID: 897 4030 8032
Passcode: Saturday
I had the pleasure of meeting Ralph at several conferences and even chatting on flights or in airports. He was quite delightful in those few interactions. But he influenced me most through the Feldy Forum.
Sometimes someone comes along that is aware of how to use the changing world to great advantage. Ralph did just that. Feldy Forum became an incredible force for creating community across the miles and between conferences. Diverse voices could be heard. Questions asked. Ideas and knowledge exchanged. Ralph rode the sometimes complaining and even arguing or down right mean posts with an incredible strength of character for a very long time. I appreciated his service then but I appreciate them even more now as my own experience in navigating a wide range of voices has grown.
Ralph also pushed the edges of how we saw reality. Offered an approach to trauma. And more. He supported new and developing practitioners.
We were all blessed by Ralph’s contributions and built off of them as technology changed but with his example of vision in our DNA.
** Direct ZOOM LINK
Dear Cynthia,
WE WILL LOVE TO SEE YOU IF YOU CAN BE WITH US:
Topic: Honouring Ralph Strauch Celebration of Life
( May 14, 1937 to December 18, 2024 )
Time: May 24, 2025 08:30 a.m. PDT which will be 11:30 a.m. EDT
Here is the DIRECT ZOOM LINK
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89740308032?pwd=2DPlE4jHbf1mMXB5EP3abxXzYhunWA.1
Meeting ID: 897 4030 8032
Passcode: Saturday
I met Ralph via Feldyforum in 2006 when I was in my first year as a practitioner and seeking help and advice about how much Feldenkrais could help with working with trauma. Our meeting led on to several years of my working with Ralph, initially by telephone – skype had only just been invented, we used a software called Gizmo. I remember being astonished in our first phone session how powerful an effect he could have on my internal state just by the use of his voice and languaging. He later taught me about how we often lean toward the person we are talking to, and to question in which situations this was useful. Like, not, with traumatised clients! Many sessions and many emails later I went to LA and spent 3 weeks studying with him, and then the following year I hosted him and Merna here in the UK where he gave a 5 day advanced training ‘Composing Experience’ which I am sure many of my UK colleagues will remember. During that training Ralph gave everyone who wanted and FI. When it was my turn a cat showed up and sat on my belly throughout, and kneeded – or, as I’ve called it since, done Bell Hand! Ralph helped me personally so very much, when I was navigating a difficult relationship with my parents, and a big relationship breakup. And, I kept getting very traumatized clients and didn’t yet really know how to cope with their tears and strong emotions, or how to help them feel safe. He helped me with that. As I had done alot of Tai Chi our connecting point was often about how Feldenkrais embodied many martial arts principles. And he’d often refer to ‘my work with Bob’ – he and Bob had met regularly for years, both being keen Aikidists, and the idea was that one get the other into some kind of ‘lock’ and the one in the lock would have to figure out how to get out of that lock without using any force just softening and softening. It helped me alot with FI, and alot with coping with my own emotional trauma too. I had had a car accident some years before. He introduced me to many ideas about perception that he goes deeply into in his book ‘The Reality Illusion’ – I learned when driving to catch myself narrowing my focus when I became anxious and instead to broaden it, by looking for patterns of colour within the environment ahead. I remember that in his office in Pacific Palisades he kept a small model black rubber cat – to remind his students that if only we could move like cats! that when one part moves the whole moves too. Ralph was a very precious person to me. He asked me to give him an FI once, and when I asked him what he would like from it, he said “I want to be able to walk through walls!” which I knew meant being able to soften enough to just slide through them. I am sure that he is around now somehow, and probably can do that quite easily in his current form! Who knows. Latterly in our work he’d talk about his work with David and Monocles. So I have a hunch I am not far wrong here. It is so wonderful to have this gathering today to celebrate his life. Thank you and blessings to all who have created it.