Engaging with Original Sources – Note of Intention

Much of what is said about the Method tends to repeat established ideas and familiar formulations, sort of ready-made way of describing it. While internal consistency can be useful, it can also prevent further questioning. What matters most, however, is not what we think we know, but what remains to be explored. As in science, ideas remain valid only as long as they are not challenged by something more accurate or more relevant.

This project aims to restore a degree of movement in how we think and speak about the Feldenkrais Method. The goal is not to reject existing narratives, but to loosen what has become too fixed.

Consulting original sources can help bring out neglected elements, generate new questions, and acknowledge the innovative aspects of the work.

Rather than relying on repeated anecdotes — like the story of ‘Moshe’s knee’ — we suggest turning to other, less visible but equally important dimensions: the theoretical background, the historical context, and the range of influences that shaped the practice. This could allow for a broader and more accurate understanding of the Method.

The archive, the historical source, the original document, in this respect, appear to be the best medium for re-questioning received and sometimes insufficiently articulated notions ^[2] for a transmission of the spirit as well as the letter of what we teach, according to the Feldenkrais Method, and how we refer to it. A simplified or impoverished modality of the Method is sometimes even found in the way we apply it in a reductive way to a set of tricks or manoeuvres, whereas, on the contrary, it is principally and

fundamentally a whole re-education that is at stake. One of the mainsprings of FM as a device is, above all, to become more concerned with the extent of our ignorance, and, even more so, with the search for a possible refutation of what we advance or maintain, rather than being satisfied by the illusion of the inalterability of our knowledge or the immutability of our assertions.

If we say that the Method is an art of problematising in a rigorous way and of directing questioning in order to help people overcome limitations or become aware of them, we are not saying anything incorrect, but we have said nothing about the uniqueness of its vehicle.

My thesis is that the Method informs itself (shapes itself, evolves, develops) on the basis of an enlightened eclectism ^[3], but that it is neither a phenomenology, nor a hermeneutics, nor a maieutics, nor a therapeutics, nor a propaedeutics, nor a somatic technique, nor a catalog of recipes and pathways, nor a physical activity, only or simply; that probably, the disciplinary field which would designate it or the function which would qualify it most accurately has not yet been found, and this, because what it is made of, its properties, its virtues, its identity or specificity have not yet been sufficiently identified, articulated and documented.

For me, it is clear that the Method is closer to a regulation, a calibration or recalibration, a grading or adjustment of means of judgment, evaluation and assessment; perhaps a grammar of discernment (or an activator – booster – of our ‘intelligences’). But this grammar must meet the requirements of allowing each person to express his or her uniqueness without this obliterating his or her ability to communicate, and rather than, on the contrary, facilitating, for each person, the means of interaction according to different factors including self-knowledge and listening and discerning both differences and the plurality of possible perspectives ^[4] and an ability to do the best we can in the face of an irreducible principle of life: the unanticipated, the unforeseen, what is still unknown.

Let us therefore continue together to clarify the specific nature of the Feldenkrais, rather than merely applying what we already know, in order to describe what it consists with, how this ‘practical allagmatics’, this ‘operating perspectivism’ proceeds, and how to bring the Feldenkrais Method forward without reducing or limiting it.

In its operational and structural modality, the Method would perhaps be closer to a manual for ‘learning’ a language ^[5] enabling each person to find and develop their own voice and the means to express it in a meaningful way, and thus to persevere in the relevance of their actions as well as the fruitfulness and impact of their thoughts and accomplishments.

The greater the differentiation in experience, the more nuances can develop in their expression, and the clearer and more adaptable becomes the ability to share their complexity. Hence the importance of confronting one’s thinking and understanding of the Method with the perspectives held on the human being (in its development) by scholars and thinkers, particularly those considered important by Moshe Feldenkrais.

And indeed, through the organized movement of exploratory processes, among other things, the Feldenkrais Method helps us to refine the possibility of differentiation.

In this way, it aims to raise our capacity to perceive to a high level and, in so doing, to cultivate our perfectibility, and through its transcendental (conditions of possibility) or meta-methodological dimension, the Feldenkrais supports and drives the ‘universalizable’ or ‘common to all human beings’^[6] content of our experiences and our inputs.

Let us wager that these authors, chosen by Feldenkrais, may contribute in their own way and through the way we make them resonate with what we have experienced, understood, or know about the Method.