FeldSciNet for Researchers and Practitioners

I recently gave a Functional Integration® lesson to a young woman who was in distress. I knew her briefly as a student in a Feldenkrais training group where I was a guest trainer, and had given a lesson to her once before in connection with the training. After the lesson she wrote me the following:

"Thank you for the FI on Saturday. It was a return to my home (myself) and I recognized I’m on the right way. It was a liberation and the feeling for gladness. I believe the power I felt will help me to find the right solution."

The experiential consequences of the lesson while personal to her situation and expressed in relation to her path in life in feeling terms was not an accidental outcome of the lesson. Observably, the shifts in her structure and functioning as measured by visual and touch observation at the end of the lesson, led me to predict to myself that she would have a different self-perception and self-feeling as a consequence of the lesson. The lesson itself was predicated on my ability to make precise contact with her in such a way that the small movements I made in this contact would evoke in her the necessary neuromuscular and structural skeletal shifts that were necessary to a resolution of her discomfort.

The result of any lesson does not of course mean that the new state is permanent. Life is full of contingencies and the new learning needs to be used in daily life. Further learning is also important. Nevertheless, shifts of a person’s embodied state seem a common outcome of an effective lesson.

In the Psychophysiology of Self-Awareness, Alan Fogel, PhD shares his expertise as a developmental psychologist and embodied self-awareness practitioner (Rosen Method Bodywork) in a manner that restores key concepts to the foreground for more expert readers while simultaneously preparing newcomers to delve deeper. He was a colleague and friend of Esther Thelen, PhD, GCFP for over twenty years, and began his interactions with the Feldenkrais Method® community in the early 1990s at the invitation of Mark Reese. Fogel has searched the literature of neuroscience and neurology, clinical psychology and psychiatry, immunology, cognitive science, linguistics, exercise science, evolutionary science, and developmental psychology to provide discipline-specific insights with common ground in human anatomy and physiology. Woven throughout his descriptions of the neurophysiology of posture, emotions, and chronic tension are practice examples, occasional experiential sidebars, and case reports that illustrate the scientific themes. He offers Feldenkrais practitioners foundational information to enhance their work and to answer students’ questions. Fogel hopes practitioners will see and make use of the common ground he lays before us in the Psychophysiology of Self-Awareness. (revised 4-12-10)

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