It is perhaps not too bold to introduce here the idea of thinking in terms of movement as contrasted with thinking in words. Movement-thinking could be considered as a gathering of impressions of happenings in one’s own mind, for which nomenclature is lacking. (Rudolf Laban, 1950, The Mastery of Movement, Introduction, p. 15)
The primary goal of gymnastics is the development, maintenance, and care of all of the resources of the body.1 It consists above all of working on the muscle tone, the fascia and tendons, and the skeletal alignment and the coordination of the segments of the body. But in the background, gymnastics also tries to create exercises that allow the whole of the organism to support the healthy functioning of the body. This generally implies the mobilization of the global physiological systems, behavior (as in throwing a javelin), and psychic resources. This endeavor implies that each dimension of the organism is analyzed and evaluated in terms of its capacity to sustain the activity of the body. This endeavor conflicts with the goals of the psychotherapist when the psychic and behavioral dynamics that enter into a conflict with the exigencies of the body are automatically seen as pathological. There is then, in effect, a reduction in the needs of each dimension of the organism in favor of the needs of a single dimension. That is what often happens in methods that require the soul to harmonize itself with the laws of the body. This enterprise opposes itself to certain ascetic movements that want to reduce the needs of the organism to the exigencies of a spiritual inquiry.
Like the other techniques discussed in this part of the book, all kinds of gymnastics have existed since time out of memory. In Europe, gymnastics was already a refined practice in ancient Greece, closely related to medicine and sports (hallowed today in the Olympic Games). It was part of what the Greek and Roman elite called a complete education: one that related the development of philosophy and the body, according to the adage “mens sana in corpore sano” (a sound mind in a sound body). This relationship is evidently important in those warring nations in which superior military officers had to be skilled tacticians and able combatants.
Even when a gymnast holds a respectful view of the demands of each dimension of the organism, and has engaged in a course of psychotherapy, he necessarily has the atlases of anatomy as his reference model. Alignment, the strengthening of the musculature of the back, the flexibility of the joints, the respiratory movement remain his first goal. It is often useful to consult an expert who knows how to analyze this aspect of the organism. The difficulty lies in situating the impact of this bodily endeavor on the organism. As we have already seen many times, approaching the body necessarily has an impact on all the dimensions of the organism, but evaluating the nature of the impact on the dimensions is complex and varies from one individual to another.
In the following sections, I focus on certain gymnasts and psychotherapists who have particularly influenced the first body psychotherapists. My principal examples are Elsa Gindler and Moshe Feldenkrais. In both cases, we see that their understanding synthesizes a European discussion of their time, concerning the body, with important contributions from Asia. It would seem that in these professions, Asia is revisited differently in each generation. Consequently, students have the impression of learning a technique conceived by the pioneer, when such an individual had a particularly interesting way of synthesizing heterogeneous practices he had learned when young. An analogous phenomenon is found in the schools of psychotherapy. I have chosen two particularly important examples, but the history of the domain of body psychotherapy contains many others that would be interesting to discuss.
In the eighteenth century, Swede Per Henrik Ling (1776–1839) imported from the Turkish Empire (which extended to the China of today, Persia, and Egypt) a new form of gymnastics that had an important influence on the development of European gymnastics. He is generally considered the founder of gymnastics compatible with the goals of orthopedic scientific medicine. This contribution was manifestly part of a new style in the Christian world, greatly influenced by the philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment, who openly integrated Asian knowledge. Its method is inspired by two trends:
Ling integrated these two trends by relating them to the laws of Galileo’s and Newton’s mechanics. This analysis from physics of the postural dynamic forms the basis of the biomechanics of the physical therapists of today. It consists above all of understanding the influence of muscular contractions and extensions on the skeleton in the gravity field.
Ling shows that it is necessary to have a tight abdomen and an open chest to help the spinal column carry its daily load.2 His approach relates gymnastics, massage, and diverse forms of mobilization that are used by physical therapists. He also introduced gymnastic equipment, like the ladder. One of his students, Georg Mezger (1838–1909), detailed the massage methods used by Ling that constitute the bases of what became the Swedish massage: effleurage, kneading, percussion, and vibration.
Also in Sweden, this movement was pursued by Gustav Zander (1835–1920) who developed methods based on the use of weights and springs capable of making the mobilization of certain bodily structures even more precise.3 The Swedish gymnastics of that time was principally centered on a differentiated development of the large masses of the body (for example, the thorax, the abdomen, and the back are developed with the use of different exercises), equilibrium and mobility of the segments of the body in the gravity field, straightening the spinal column, and full use of external respiration.
Psychology works with words. Breathing is a physical experience. Also psychology often elucidates the past, while breath therapy takes place exclusively in the present, because it is grounded in sensory perception. Breath work originates in the physical and influences the soul, whereas in psychology it is the other way around. . . . Breath work and psychology can overlap and be similar, yet they can also interfere with each other. (Ilse Middendorf, 1998, quoted and translated by Thea Rytz, 2009, p. 351f)
From this chapter onward, I approach more directly the way a dimension of the organism mobilizes the other dimensions of the individual system. I distinguish two types of interventions:
There are many variations between these two poles. There are, for example, few gymnastics that are not also interested in the external respiration, such that it can be apprehended by the mobilization of the thoracic cage and abdominal muscles. Hatha yoga is not really an organismic gymnastics in the sense that it consists of an approach to the body that is conjointly used with other methods (pranayama, meditation, etc.) that aim at other dimensions of the organism. Organismic gymnastics attempts to influence the rest of the organism in a direct way. It is thus possible to say that the more a form of gymnastics tries to influence all the dimensions of the organism, without seeking to ally itself with other disciplines, the more it has an organismic ambition.
We can now specify the advantage and the limits of approaching a dimension in an organismic perspective. The advantage of focusing on a single dimension is that it is easier to acquire an expertise on a specific aspect of reality. However, the organism is approached only from one point of view. An organismic gymnastic allows one to study the ways the body interacts with the other dimensions and which contributions from the other dimensions are necessary for its proper functioning. But even an organismic gymnast does not always understand why a person smokes, why certain professions and occupations require postures that are detrimental to the back, and so on. In other words, he has difficulty understanding that the other dimensions have demands that are markedly incompatible with the needs of the body. Here is a summary (somewhat of a caricature but still useful) of the way a classical gymnast situates his work with regard to the organismic dimensions:
The advantage of this point of view allows others to be able to understand the demands that bodywork imposes on the dimensions of the organism. The psychotherapist can then differentiate the demands the body would like to impose on the psyche from the demands of the psyche.
Gindler was greatly impressed by Isadora Duncan, the only dancer at that time who was consciously feeling out the effect of gravity on movement—so different from all the other dancers who were fighting the pull of the earth. Isadora Duncan worked with gravity in dance as Gindler did in everyday life. (Charlotte Selver, 1978, letter)
Having summarized a few bases of the world of gymnastics, I now jump into the world of Berlin gymnast Elsa Gindler (1885–1961).4 I use Gindler as a concrete example to open up a discussion about gymnastics and psychotherapy.
Gindler influenced many body psychotherapists either directly or indirectly. By indirectly, I mean that some students learned exercises from an instructor who had learned them from one of Gindler’s students. As practitioners often have little historical understanding, they rarely know the origin and the course of what they are learning in a series of programs. For example, an exercise taught by Elsa Gindler was taught to Moshe Feldenkrais, who taught it to one of George Downing’s teachers, who then taught it to a student who is today trained in body psychotherapy. This exercise was probably transformed on such a journey, and the last colleague in this chain rarely knows that he does exercise originally designed by Gindler.
One of the great tendencies of European art is to represent gods and heroes as having perfectly balanced bodies. In the nineteenth century, this aesthetic perspective went to extremes in the schools of the academic painters such as Albert Joseph Moore (1841–1893) or Hans Makart (1840–1884), who was one of Gustav Klimt’s teachers. In Vienna, different movements influenced by the Academic painters try to represent forms of eroticism, which put into question the habits of the period while remaining extremely stylized. They created a movement called Jugendstil (the style of the young), which mixes ideas inspired by Rousseau, Romanticism, and “revolutionary” ideas on society.5 It was one of the first youth movements. For these painters, youth had all the rights because in them the recklessness and genius of nature manifested itself in the most spontaneous way. Like nature, the young want to create without being preoccupied with social conventions.
This new way of speaking of creativity opened up an aesthetic change that above all defended the beautiful and sexually attractive bodies, which guaranteed a part of the commercial success of this movement. The Austrian painter Gustav Klimt, French sculptor Auguste Rodin, and the Californian dancer Isadora Duncan6 are today the most known representatives of this movement, which began in the 1880s.
Around 1900, this movement became fashionable and influenced Art Nouveau, which invaded the world of objects as well as the facades of buildings and graphic design in advertising posters. In dance, Isadora Duncan wore thin veils and ran barefoot on the scene, making apparently natural and spontaneous movements. She left behind the tutus and the classical ballet slippers. Her dance was felt to express a form of beauty associated with joie de vivre. This trend rapidly spread into the world of fashion. Already in 1905 in Berlin, women no longer felt obliged to wear corsets. They suddenly dared to publicly wear cotton and linen clothing. Nature, such as it is understood by these movements, is Idealistic to the extent that it is necessarily good and beautiful, healthy and creative. Everything happens as if individuals who are ugly, prudish, or stupid have little contact with this profound nature and inadequately express it. All would have an urgent need to support the only form of existing vitality in a society: youth.
The contact between the forces of nature and social creativity necessarily passes through the flesh, which is situated at the intersection between the appearance of the organism and a form of philosophical depth that permits it to root itself in the dynamics of nature. Richard Shusterman (2008) summarizes this thought well when he speaks of a consciousness born of the flesh, a way of thinking with the flesh, which he calls somaesthetic. From this thought rooted in the flesh, the data from the senses, intellectual capacities, and needs of the soul can bloom into new rituals that promote a need to feel alive.7 This consciousness, nourished by the dynamics of the soma, would permit a form of thought distinct from the intellect and reasoning. This ideology favored the coming of schools centered on the body and the psyche, like Gurdjieff’s schools and the Eurhythmy of the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, the gymnastics like those of Jacques Dalcroze or Elsa Gindler, the dancers of the Russian ballet of Sergei Diaghilev (especially dancer Vaslav Nijinsky), students of choreographer Rudolf Laban, and many others.8 A leading center for this movement was the Monte Verita school for art, near Ascona, Switzerland, which promoted an ideology that believed in harmonization of spirit, mind, body, sexual genders, and nature.9 This way of associating flesh, aesthetics, revolutionary politics and spirit form a glowing cloud of representations that manifestly influenced the pioneers who participated in the birth of body psychotherapy. Reich’s impression that each one of us is animated by the energy of the galaxies takes up this aesthetic. Similarly, for Alexander Lowen,10 student of Wilhelm Reich, the consciousness of the body dynamics is the basis on which other forms of consciousness are constructed. It is the consciousness of the respiratory rhythms, the muscular vibrations, the spontaneous involuntary actions, the tingling, and the pulsations of the cardiovascular system. This level of the psyche only becomes explicitly conscious in moments of ecstasy and crisis. An individual then has the impression of being able to identify with the living forces of nature.
The age of sexual maturity varies according to the cultures and the epochs. In most of the cultures and in most of the periods in Europe, a person is considered sexually mature as soon as he or she is biologically capable of fathering or giving birth to a child. This was, in most cases, true in the cultures in which the couple was part of an extended family that structured the behavior of the adolescents. A well-known example is what the mother of Juliet Capulet says to her thirteen-year-old daughter: “Younger than you here in Verona, ladies of esteem, are made already mothers. By my count I was your mother much upon these years” (Shakespeare, 1595, Romeo and Juliette, 1.3.70–80, p. 549). In Europe, only in the nineteenth century was the advent of sexuality clearly dissociated from the idea of adulthood. It is therefore not astonishing that a series of youth movements arose that refused to be disempowered by the emergence of the cultural reforms (often qualified as “bourgeois”).11 After the Viennese Jugendstill, analogous movements appeared a bit everywhere in Europe. One of the first to establish itself in Berlin was the group Wandervogel (migrating birds). This group was founded by Hermann Hoffmann and was taken up by Karl Fischer in Steglitz, near Berlin. They proposed an education close to nature and as far away as possible from the rigidities of the bourgeoisie and the mannerisms of elegance. This organized movement created youth hostels. Also in 1901, the first German “Light-Air-Swimming-Bath” opened in Berlin, in which visitors went swimming without bathing suits. Young people aimed to free their body from the stiffness of the Wilhelminian12 (Victorian) society and from the constraints of industrialization. While the electric train conquered Berlin in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, these people wanted to live in the natural surroundings of fields and woods, which then still separated Berlin from Steglitz.13 The discipline of this movement wanted to be as far away as possible from military discipline, which was not the case of the Scouts movement, founded in England a few years later by Robert Baden-Powell. In Austria, there were numerous and varied youth movements. Adults who directed these movements were close to psychoanalysis, like Siegfried Benfeld. This connection structured itself especially around projects to improve the sexual education of the young.
These youth movements had a marked influence on a number of intellectuals, like the psychoanalysts Otto Fenichel and Wilhelm Reich, and on some of Gindler’s gymnastics students, like Clare Nathansonhn-Fenichel.
In this tumultuous atmosphere, a movement of reform in gymnastics developed—one that sought to liberate the truth of the soul, emotions, and movement by oscillating between anarchic, socialistic, and spiritual tendencies. This trend aimed to develop a gymnastic compatible with the new principles proposed by artists like Isadora Duncan. These gymnasts refused to use the gymnastic apparatus like those developed by the Swedes. The goal of the approach was to help the students find the gestures they need in accordance with the profound rhythms of their being.
They were invited to undertake this exploration by making felt gestures in a slow and gentle fashion. Even if both men and women attended these courses, this gymnastics aimed at forces that were often associated with women. Emile Jacques-Dalcroze (1865–1950), born in Vienna, had created in Geneva, Switzerland, the Eurythmie method.14 This gymnastics was less ideologically engaged than others, but it already had the explicit goal of harmonizing the dimensions of the organism by proposing harmonious gestures, while being respectful of the needs of the body, the physiological vitality, and the beauty of the soul. He taught his method in Germany, Russia, and France and collaborated with famous artists of the period, especially in the French-speaking areas of Europe who epitomized what followed Art Nouveau.15 He worked with Rudolf Laban in Germany. Some students educated in this method joined Elsa Gindler in Berlin.16 Alexander Lowen, the founder of Bioenergetic analysis, was also educated in the eurythmic method.
In 1911, Elsa Gindler came across a book by Hedwig Kallmeyer on harmonizing gymnastics. Kallmeyer was a German gymnastics teacher who had studied with Genevieve Stebbins in New York and had also studied Calisthenics in England.17 She discovered in Kallmeyer’s book the alpha and the omega of all beautiful movements.18 She started to study at the Seminar fur Harmonische Gymanistik (school for harmonizing gymnastics) with Hedwig Kallmeyer in the little village of Steglitz, which later became part of Berlin. It was also the village of the Wandervogel. In spite of the apparent freedom of this work, the teachers were obliged to follow a full-time three-year training program before being recognized.19 More extremist than Jacques-Dalcroze, these gymnasts refused to impose an exterior rhythm on the students (like a teacher who counts for everyone or imposes some music). Each person had to learn to move by following the rhythm that emanated from her organic depth.
The specialists associated with the mind-body axis in the 1930s were influenced by the traditional methods of the Far East (yoga, judo, etc.) but also by masters more difficult to situate, like Ottoman Zar-Abdusht Hanish (1844–1936)20 and George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. Their knowledge surpasses what is taught in European yoga schools because they would have been trained by the masters of the Far East, who had taught them knowledge rarely disseminated because it was profound, secret, and delicate to handle. As Europeans, they set about to adapt this knowledge according to what a European or an American is able to integrate. Hanish’s influence is above all due to his way of coordinating postural work and breathing exercises. He was a reference not only for gymnasts like Elsa Gindler but also for physical therapists and orthopedists like Andre de Sambucy, in France.
Hanish would have been initiated in Iran into a sort of yoga inspired by two sources:
For Hanish, the organism is a complex mix of indirect and direct links between the centers of the organism. This explains in part how his system was able to influence so many schools of mind-body work. Each school could take what was convenient. Here are a few examples:
a. There would be some direct links between the feet and the ears that would render the massage of the feet useful for the development ofhearing.21
b. Thoracic breathing develops the intellect and spirituality, while abdominal breathing develops the body and instinctual impulses. Superficial respiration generates superficial thoughts and deep respiration, deep thoughts.22
c. There is a “relationship between supple fingers and a supple mind.”23 Every time that I attended a course in a body/mind discipline, I had access to a list of this type: whether it was in acupuncture, in tai chi chuan, in the Mathias Alexander method, or in Biodynamic psychology. Every time, the list is different, and sometimes contradictory.24 Every time, the link mentioned seems to have a certain relevance that becomes increasingly vague as soon as I try to organize and define these connections in an explicit way.
The way to feel from the inside is a common aspect among most schools of body psychotherapy and of the humanistic ones, such as Gestalt therapy. It was often transmitted to these schools by some of Elsa Gindler’s students.
In the 1920s, the gymnastics teacher Elsa Gindler observed how important proprioceptive awareness training is for well-rounded personal development. The German educator pioneered a paradigm shift, without which many of the approaches that focus on awareness of the body and the mind would be inconceivable today. (Thea Rytz, 2009, Centered and Connected, p. 30)
Elsa Gindler opened her school in Berlin in 1917.27 She called it Seminar fur Harmonische Korperausbildung (School for the Harmonizing of Body Training). The students and the collaborators of this school were, first, all women. Later on, she conducted courses with men and had male collaborators, of whom the most famous is Heinrich Jacoby (1983). Jacoby explored different forms of music associated to various ways of moving as an educational device.28 Their collaboration developed into a way to work that is sometimes designated as the Jacoby-Gindler work. Jacoby was greatly interested in psychoanalysis. This was also the case for other students of Gindler, like Clare Nathansohn, who was living with psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel at the time. By 1925,29 they attract several psychoanalysts to the courses given by Gindler or by some of her students like Laura Perls and Annie Reich.
Gindler became interested in psychoanalysis and advised some of her students to follow a psychoanalytic treatment.30 But neither Gindler nor her principal students tried to integrate psychoanalysis into Gindler’s method or Gindler’s method to psychoanalytic work. Elsa Gindler did not interest herself, for example, in the psychoanalytical discourse on the symbolic aspect of muscular tension. For example, she did not take up the analysis of Otto Fenichel (1928), according to which muscular tension is often associated to the retention of anal pleasure or the sensation of an erection.31 She preferred to concentrate on the analysis of the dysfunctional motor aspects of a movement so that it might be carried out in a more relaxed manner or on the internal sensations activated by a gesture. However, I notice that Gindler gradually included more talking in her courses. She now asks that her students learn to speak of their inner sensations, and tends to spend more time giving verbal explanations. She would have become long-winded at the end of her life. I again take up the discussion on the interaction between her students and psychoanalysis once I have presented the other protagonists related to this encounter.32
Elsa Gindler’s encounter with Heinrich Jacoby and the young psychoanalysts of the 1920s seems to have helped her refine her teaching. One of the longterm goals of this school was to help the students build themselves up as human beings by taking bodywork as a starting point or a lever to harmonize the dimensions of the organism. It consisted mostly about learning how to feel. A gesture is like a stone that creates circles of waves on the water. By noticing the waves propagating themselves in the organism by a movement, the student learns to discover the gestures that are personally agreeable. An admirer of Hanish, Gindler advised her students to seek first the gesture that liberates their breathing, and then observe what this liberation opens up in the world of their sensations and of their thoughts. When a student is suffering from some illness, the same method is used to discover the chain of gestures, respiration, and sensations that allow for relief. Many of Gindler’s students have used her method to relieve various forms of infirmities: invalids, persons with communication problems, children with severe motor problems (going all the way to paralysis), children crippled by polio, and so on.33
At the beginning, Gindler’s work focused on the beauty of the students’ gestures.34 In 1917, she would demonstrate a gesture and the students would try to make the same gesture. These gestures were beautiful, close to those we could reconstruct by observing the statues of ancient Greece. They ought not only to appear beautiful; it had to be felt as beautiful and evoke feelings of beauty in the student’s sensations. Everything a student could experience ought to animate and be animated by this gesture.
At the time of her encounter with psychoanalysts, Elsa Gindler left aesthetics aside and focused on the real organism. She integrated into her approach the parts of the body she had not dared to take on, such as the tensions of the anus. She set about asking her students to discover ways of relaxing it. She also worked on the fork between the legs. After meeting Jacoby, she deepened her way of integrating voice into her work.
Gradually, Gindler began the work of training individuals capable of teaching her work. This more focused work obliged her to be more attentive to the strengths and limits of each person. She began to reflect on what such an individual needed to develop to be able to teach the Gindler method well. She became more demanding and wanted that her future collaborators learn to feel, in as precise a manner as possible, who they were and who they could become. She then focused on what a person can do, what she can conceive of being able to do, and what she refuses to imagine or want. In this teaching process, Elsa Gindler gradually distanced herself from a demand for somatoesthetic experiences to interest herself in a more direct way in the mind-body dynamics of a real person, while continuing to demand that the gestures express an interior truth. This expression of the deep sensation of the being is, for her, necessarily a precise coordination between the qualities of movement, respiration, and body sensations. At the end of a long life, a student could learn to use her sensations as a hand that moves with the glove it wears. A student could have the inner impression of a greater and greater expansion while the members of her body unfolded.
The world of bodywork and psychotherapy is full of brilliant and competent individuals who do not publish, publish little, or write poorly.35 Their knowledge is transmitted through practice. On the other hand, those who write much and well are not always those who are the best practitioners. Writing demands of them a time to explore the expressions of a practice and thus takes away the very time necessary to continue to explore in practice. Elsa Gindler was one of those practitioners who had many students who were particularly brilliant personalities. She did not publicize her work, but she was recognized by most of the gymnasts and some psychotherapists as a particularly brilliant professional. Her classes were full (between thirty and forty people in her Berlin school before World War II). She only wrote one small article, published in 1926 in the Journal of the German Federation of Gymnastics, “Gymnastics for Busy Persons.” Wanting absolutely that her students learn to feel what they were doing and discover the gestures that fit, Gindler was wary of manuals or books that imposed a technique.
PERCEIVING A GESTURE FROM THE INSIDE (TASTEN)
Penetration into the mysteries of life is intimately connected with the acquisition of well-defined qualities of the feel of movement. (Laban, The Mastery of Movement, 1950, VI, p. 143)
We see to it that our students do not learn an exercise: rather, the Gymnastic exercises are a means by which we attempt to increase intelligence. (Gindler, Gymnastik for People Whose Lives Are Full of Activity, 1926, p. 37)
In her article, Elsa Gindler insists on the fact that her objective is not especially learning gestures but the type of concentration the learning permits. In this way, Gindler hoped to develop a form of intelligence that can only come when movements and thoughts are coordinated in a particular way.36 The student self-explores when he learns new ways of moving.37 The student thus develops Hanish’s “sixth sense”: a way of feeling a movement from the inside and letting movements generate inner sensations. This form of exploration (tasten in German) allows for the development of the ability to listen to oneself and others. Body sensations, an imaginative form of curiosity, and a need to discover all that exists within one’s organismic space are the building blocks of a particular form of intelligence.
In body psychotherapy, the therapist, for example, asks the patient to associate a feeling to parts of the body and use the movement of these body parts to define the boundaries of this affect.38 Thus, when the patient complains of feeling a ball of anxiety in the belly, the body psychotherapist may ask him to explore this ball by moving it with his breath or movements of the belly. The therapist may also place his hand on that part of the abdomen and ask the patient to feel from the inside the impact of this touch on the belly and on the ball of anxiety. It often occurs, for example, that this anxiety seems to move to the thoracic region or the throat. The patient learns to follow these internal movements and follow the sensations, images, thoughts (eventually memories), breathing, and movements activated at the occasion of this exploration. This exploration is carried out by associating the awareness of what happens inside the organism with what the teacher perceives from the outside.
Some use a Gindler type of work in psychiatric milieus. Thea Rytz (2009, p. 18f), for example, had a student of Elsa Gindler (Sophie Ludwig) as one of her teachers. She proposes a form of “therapeutic approach to mind-body awareness” to patients who are treated for eating disorders at the University Hospital in Bern, Switzerland.39 The relevance of this approach is evident as soon as we admit that patients who suffer from eating disorders may have an impoverished awareness of their body. They often need to build up psychological tools for themselves that would permit them to better integrate their body sensations. Thea Rytz’s approach has a manifest therapeutic impact on her patients. Yet a number of psychotherapeutic associations ask themselves whether a body-mind therapy can ever be assimilated into the notion of psychotherapy. We are here in an undefined zone of body psychotherapy that would benefit from acquiring a more explicit delineation and institutional recognition.
WORK ON BREATHING
To Each His Own Way of Breathing. Gindler’s approach to breathing exercises is a good example of exploration from the inside. She does not teach breathing exercises that everyone must learn. She asks each one to explore their own way of breathing when they hold their breath or release an artificially induced tension. It consists, for example, in becoming conscious that a tension in the shoulders inhibits certain forms of respiration. Once this is felt, the gymnast explores gestures and sensations that make it possible to release this tension in such a way that the previously blocked breath might almost spontaneously find a new space for itself. This work is accompanied with a course in anatomy, on the way the muscles and bones of the shoulders are linked. The student compares the movements a skeleton can make to those that he can carry out. Often, people cannot execute the movements the skeleton can. Gindler continues this work by blindfolding the student and asks the gymnast to explore from the inside what stops her from making certain gestures and to notice the impact this blockage has on her breathing. From the moment when all the members of the class are blindfolded, no one can see how the others are carrying on their exploration, and each must seek his own solution by following a path that is often the only one the gymnast can imagine. The teacher, on the other hand, is able to compare the methods of the students and see which ones have the tendency to seek out the most complicated solutions possible to solve a relatively simple biomechanical problem. The teacher and the students discuss all of this after the exercise.
The Effect of Constriction. Gindler thinks that there is an automatic connection between gesture and breath that flows from the biomechanics of the body. With most mammals and the young human infant, this connection is activated automatically. But with adult humans, these connections are often inhibited. Education and social customs break up the biological unity of the organism. The gestures lose their spontaneous connections with respiration, and consciousness inserts itself with difficulty into the dynamics of the organism. In this, there is an analogy between two analyses:
Elsa Gindler therefore attempts to repair the fragmentation that inhibits the dialogue between the dimensions of the organism so the individual might create, for his awareness, an interior space with volume, density, transparency, and flexibility. She remarks, for example, that most of the time, when individual speaks or wants to make a small precise gesture, he blocks his respiration. Among many people, she observes a neck shortened by muscular tension that is already anchored around the diaphragm. This shortening is not functional because as soon as exercises nullify it, the body functions better, respiration becomes deeper, and the individual feels liberated from a constraint and a weight. Gindler refers to this kind of shortening that influences not only the muscles but also the shape of the spinal column and the circulation of air in the throat as a constriction.40 The effect of constriction is an example of the mechanisms that the behavioral dimension imposes on the rest of the organism to guarantee a reliable and controllable integration into crucial social practices, such as professional demands. In the sections on postural dynamics, we will see other examples where the behaviors necessary for the exercise of a profession can encumber blood circulation in a lasting way.41
For Elsa Gindler, the crux of what she calls the effect of constriction is situated in what the lungs need to accomplish in deep breathing. It consists of a mechanical and physiological necessity. The four phases of a complete respiration (pause, inhalation, pause, exhalation) do not happen any old way.42 An apnea ought not to be without life, but instead be a pause between two notes of music that have a function in the development of harmonics. Gindler distinguishes the large and smaller bronchi of the lungs (she does not speak of bronchioles). The air cannot freely enter the lungs if both types of bronchi are not open. Access to the smaller bronchi “is provided by vessels more delicate than hair.”
An abrupt and voluntary (and often rapid) inspiration does not mobilize the bronchioles. When an individual voluntarily breathes, he is not listening to the needs of his lungs. He only thinks of the large bronchi. He does not give the bronchioles the time to open up. Filling the lungs ends up being awkward and uncomfortable. A thick sensation forms itself around the sternum; the air accumulates in the large bronchi while the bronchioles remain folded and empty. There is then a conflict between the large bronchi, which fill up while the bronchioles struggle to empty out. Most of those who learn to breathe deeply complain about this conflict, which engenders the impression of constriction and compression, which leads to hyperventilation. However, if one has learned to be on the lookout for the pleasure of breathing, one feels the need of the pulmonary tissues to fully deploy. At the pause at the end of the expiration, the little bronchioles have the time to empty themselves by contracting. At that moment the air can infiltrate space sometimes as fine as a strand of hair. When this movement is allowed to be, complete respiration can unfold comfortably and naturally.
Gindler remained in Berlin during World War II. She did not like Hitler’s regime and spent much energy protecting and hiding her Jewish students who had not emigrated (mostly to Israel and the United States). All those students who stayed were ultimately killed.43 In these circumstances, Johanna Kulbach, who was finally able to leave for the United States, lived through the following situation, related to the effect of constriction.
Vignette on constriction and fear.44 The effect of the work was that I lost the fear. I was very much afraid. They were terrible times; we had bomb attacks and besides that we never knew when we were going to be put in a concentration camp—you never knew. I learned instead of staying in fear, to live in spite of it. That’s what I learned. So I got stronger and healthier, instead of really ill, as so many people did. I remember one time we experimented in making a fist and feeling out what it did to us. It was not only the fist that was tight; my stomach was in knots, my breathing was tight—it was total tightness. If you hold this for a while and are aware how tight you are, you yearn for letting go. Gindler kept us at this until I had a good sensation of what it is to be tight.45 Then slowly, slowly, the fist came open, and I tried to feel what changes happened. For the first time I experienced what it means to change after being afraid. . . . That is what the work is: that you learn to sense where you hold, where living processes are not permitted to function. And when you are aware of the holding—where you are not allowing yourself to function—then it’s possible to let it go. But you have to sense it. . . . “(Kulbach, 1977, p. 15)
According to Gindler, only when the coordination of the phases of the respiratory cycle respects the laws of deep respiration (the integration of the large and small bronchi in a respiratory movement) can the gestures become alive and graceful. Only in working in this way are we able to help people in a state of constriction. If the coordination between gesture and respiration does not respect this requirement of the organism, the work on a gesture can reinforce the constriction instead of dissolving it.46 This is what often happens when someone runs. The emphasis is then mostly on the in-breath, which leaves little space for an effective exhalation. Learning to run while maintaining a full respiration was part of the exercises Gindler taught.
In her analysis of respiration and of constriction, Gindler demonstrates the necessity to include in gymnastics the development of different forms of the self-awareness of relaxation while the gymnast carries out an exercise. This form of gymnastics has such a profound impact on the coordination of the dimensions of the organism that Gindler’s personal students do not talk of gymnastics. They speak of “the work.” They do not see how her way of working at the end of her life could be reduced to the notion of gymnastics.47
Deep Voluntary Breathing That Leads to States of Constriction and Retraumatization. In the first decades of the development of breathing exercises in body psychotherapy, (Holotropic breathing, Rebirthing, Bioenergetics, Primal scream, etc.) and in fashionable tantric schools in the 1970s,48 some practitioners had observed that deep voluntary breathing could quickly bring about euphoric states, leading to spectacular emotional discharges. The observation remains useful and interesting, but in a number of cases, the practitioners did not sufficiently understand the mechanics of respiration. They used these exercises without having enough knowledge to have other options. Having only this kind of technique in their tool box, which often led to crises of tetany, they were not able to adapt these breathing exercises to the needs of everyone. These techniques often provoked various forms of retraumatization by bringing people into states they were not able to integrate into the dynamics of their psyche. They could reinforced the capacity to engender states of constriction.
The respiratory mechanics are relatively complex.49 Only a slow and regular respiration, one that is not forced, permits a complete participation of the bronchioles. This requires a relaxed glottis in which air can circulate comfortably. Where Elsa Gindler speaks of constriction, Guy Postiaux speaks of the “sequestration of air” (Postiaux, 2003, 6.1.1b, pp. 135f and 153). These negative effects are particularly striking when deep breathing exercises are conducted with infants less than a year old. When working with the breathing of small children, it is particularly manifest that the forced exhalation mobilizes the fluids in the bronchi, which provoke the coughing that seeks to decongest the bronchi50 and a closure of the glottis. In yoga as in Gindler’s work, the alliance of attention and respiration permits the air to have a global impact on the functioning of the organism. Being on the lookout for the discomfort felt at the occasion of a breathing exercise and by abstaining from encouraging patients to go beyond their psychic and organic limits, the body psychotherapist can prevent the activation of constrictions.
For Elsa Gindler, relaxation is not one of the disconnections experienced as sleep approaches or of a hypnotic dissociation. On the contrary, a state of apparent internal immobility renders the individual capable of responding to everything that is going on. The mind is transparent, actively trying to perceive all that is happening without any deformation. Gindler had been able to observe this state in individuals who held important responsible positions in business or in politics (the “busy people” in the title of her article)
It is a stillness within us, a readiness to respond appropriately to any stimulus. . . . We hear that top businessmen often remain utterly motionless for a moment while directing all their senses inward. Then, suddenly, they seem to awaken and make decision that are uniquely right. It is clear that in this moment of being in themselves relaxation has taken place. (Elsa Gindler, 1926, p. 40)
The approaches influenced by Isadora Duncan and Elsa Gindler are attempts to increase harmony and coherence. They are influenced by Plato’s Symposium. For Heraclitus, harmonizing elements mostly creates coherence at the level you are working on. If you want to harmonize deeper levels of reality, you sometimes need to create frictions and dissonances at the level of perceivable phenomena. An example of such an approach was taught in Gurdjieff’s school. One can also find traces of this way of thinking in the approach proposed by Feldenkrais, who was inspired by Gindler, martial arts, and contemporary orthopedics. His body-mind approach is yet another way of developing one’s mind by helping it refine awareness of postural dynamics.
You have to bake bread. For this you must first of all prepare the dough. But to make dough you must take definite proportions of flour and water. If there is too little water, you will get, instead of dough, something that will crumble at first touch. If you take too much water, you will simply get a mash, such as it is used for feeding cattle. It is the same in either case. You will not get the dough necessary for baking bread.
The same thing occurs in the formation of every substance necessary for the organism. The parts composing these substances must be combined in strict proportions, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
When you breathe in the ordinary way, you breathe mechanically. The organism, without you, takes from the air the quantity of substances that it needs. The lungs are so constructed that they are accustomed to work with a definite amount of air. But if you increase the amount of air, the composition of what passes through the lungs is changed, and the further inner processes of mixing and balancing must also inevitably be changed.
Without the knowledge of the fundamental laws of breathing in all particulars, the practice of artificial breathing must inevitably lead, very slowly but nonetheless surely, to self-destruction. (Gurdjieff, 1960, Meetings with Remarkable Men, VIII. p. 18751)
Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866–1949) (1960, 1978)52 is one of those masters who is difficult to situate and who influenced the body psychotherapeutic thinking of the twentieth century.53 Like Hanish, he “translated” the knowledge of the wise men from the Far East into a language available to Westerners. Gurdjieff studied with masters, mostly Sufi, in the regions that extend from China, the Gobi Desert, Russia, and Turkey.54 He then attempted to create a useful way to teach the knowledge of his masters in Moscow (Russia), Tiflis (Georgia), then France (Fontainebleau and Paris), and the United States. His thought rejoins the movements about which I have just spoken, movements that wanted to create a new man in Europe, liberated from the irrational constraints imposed by the traditional morality of the day. Gurdjieff influenced many personalities who work with the body in disciplines as diverse as dance (from Isadora Duncan to Maurice Bejart), theater (from Arthur Gordon Craig to Bob Wilson and Peter Brook55), gymnastics (Jacques Dalcroze and Sophrology56), and even fashion (for example, Coco Chanel). His influence on body psychotherapy is mostly indirect.57 I content myself to extract from the publications of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky a few useful points to understand certain aspects of the organismic gymnastics of the twentieth century that can become useful for body psychotherapists.
Certain of Gurdjieff’s students continue to work with personalities from the East (Sufis, Turks, yogi from India, Chinese tai chi chuan masters, etc.).58 They sometimes spend a lot of time learning what these personalities are willing to teach them with as much meticulousness and respect as possible, all the while questioning themselves on the impact of disciplines heavily anchored in one culture and exported into another cultural context. A European is not able to learn and integrate tai chi chuan as does a Chinese; what is good for one is not good always good for the other. One of the first students, Piotr Demianovitch Ouspensky (1949), developed a particularly clear language with regard to Gurdjieff’s first formulations, when he was still teaching in Russia.
Gurdjieff’s techniques and models were taught in a school.59 Only part of his teaching is available for those who do not belong to a Gurdjieff school. Since I have not participated in any Gurdjieff workshop, I limit myself to select notions that I have learned of this movement that may be useful for body psychotherapeutic work. I am not always able to provide clear references, as some writings were discussed with me by members of a Gurdjieff school without being available to the noninitiate. Other aspects are taught through practical exercises that cannot be described in a written text. It is assumed that the exercises can be dangerous when they are not taught in a proper context.60
A vignette on the simplistic interventions that sometimes do more harm than good.61 It consisted of a beautiful passage in which one of Gurdjieff’s Sufi masters, Ekim Bey, ridicules those who follow the schools of yoga that propose eating regimens and obligatory breathing techniques poorly adapted to a European lifestyle. For this master, a vegetarian regime and standard breathing exercises have a profound influence on the coordination between psyche, physiology, and metabolism. When they are not properly utilized, these techniques can have a harmful effect on the organism. In effect, the coordination of the dynamics of the organism is so complex that it requires a prudent approach, particularly adapted to the particular needs of each person. According to this master, an organism is an amalgam of millions of chemical activities. To propose a standard selection of foods or a specific way to breathe necessarily has unforeseeable impact on this complexity. Thus, to fully chew every mouthful before swallowing deprives the muscles of the digestive tract of their necessary exercise. This injunction to chew well is therefore useful for individuals who have some digestive problems, like some elderly people; but if followed by younger people, chewing everything as much as possible prevents a proper calibration of the chemical and physical processes of digestion.
In the sections dedicated to Plato’s Idealism, I evoked the idea that a human being ought to seek to harmonize fire and water as well as the whole of the heteroclite mechanisms of the organism. The physician Eryximachus, a character in Plato’s Symposium, thought that all sicknesses came about when a disharmony installed itself into the forces of the organism. I then showed that philosophers like Heraclitus thought differently. For them, the disharmony between the mechanisms of an organism, or between the members of a society, is what permits a system to surpass itself and find a profound harmony. Gurdjieff is one of the rare authors I know who inspires himself as much from Heraclitus as from Plato and Pythagoras in his approach to an individual. Thus, Gurdjieff shows that certain experiences like a shock, startle responses, or friction between centers of the organism, can have the beneficial effect of waking someone up. An incident of panic affecting set modes of functioning sometimes allows for a profound modification of the individual’s organism.62 Gurdjieff’s way of speaking about frictions, it seems to me, is a useful metaphor to help readers imagine something other than Plato’s proposition and to learn to play, in a creative fashion, with the heterogeneity of the regulators of thought and of the whole organism.63
CHARGE, TENSION, AND FRICTION GENERATES AS A SOURCE OF LIFE
In this section, it is my intent to show that working on polarizing heterogeneous mechanisms can be creative. Two metaphors summarize this point:
In the last example, it is evident that a polarization follows laws that should be understood; too great a difference in a polarity can create a short-circuit capable of starting a fire. It is the same when this notion is used for work on oneself. That is why it is always recommended to proceed with caution. This danger exists with all the effective therapeutic techniques. A scalpel must be extremely sharp to be of use to the surgeon. However, when it is used inappropriately, it can create significant damage. The same is true for taking potent medications. Taking more medication than prescribed is a common way of committing suicide. In talking about the physiological bases of stress, we have seen that the mechanisms conceived to promote the survival of the organism could also destroy the organism when they are overstimulated.
THE HETEROGENEITY OF THE CENTERS OF THE ORGANISM
Gurdjieff’s teaching is similar to yoga when it proposes work on the organismic system from a reflection on the way the dimensions of the organism differentiate and coordinate. Gurdjieff speaks of centers around which a set of automatic reactions organize in a relatively independent fashion.64 These centers somewhat resemble the Hindu chakras.65 According to Gurdjieff, for most people, these centers have not received an appropriate education. They are underutilized and poorly used. To develop the latent possibilities that sleep within him, the student attempts to calibrate the functioning of each center by a regular practice that seeks to transform and develop these centers and ameliorate their coordination.
Gurdjieff identifies three main centers: the intellectual, the emotional, and the motor centers. Each one of these centers is composed of subcenters that also function relatively independently from each other. They generally fulfill, somewhat automatically, functions that are proper to them. Most of these centers generally function in association with other centers. For example, to influence the behavior of the organism, the sexual center needs to associate itself to the intellectual, emotional, and motor centers. These centers function like different brains: “The activity of the human machine . . . is regulated, not by one, but by many brains, entirely independent one from the other, having distinct functions, and distinct domains of manifestations” (Ouspensky, 1949, III, p. 89, translated by Marcel Duclos).66 Each center has a particular functioning, energetic modality, and type of food. The intellect does not nourish itself from the same stimulations as the motor and instinctive centers. The organism thus requires a variety of inputs, such as matter, air, and impressions. Nutritional and sexual activities are associated to different forms of pleasure. There is dysfunction when one center dips into the energy of another. Thus, many centers dip into the energy of the sexual center, which overflows with energy. This creates useless excitations in the functioning of the emotional, intellectual, and body dynamics, which impoverishes the sexual center. In a concrete way, this implies that each student learns to recognize, through self-observation, how one of his inner dynamics relates to which centers and which ways of acting are associated to them. He then learns to identify his practices more clearly. Each center functions at a different speed:
If the intellect can be experienced as a rapid and incessant flow of impressions, the capacity to understand is something that functions more slowly. To perceive impressions and be able to understand activates different dynamics of the intellect. This is particularly clear if, as I have often showed in this book, the understanding of a phenomenon is a collective work that could have taken thousands of years. This capacity is different than the one that allows for the assimilation of a current thought.
What we find of these ideas in the writings of Moshe Feldenkrais and George Downing, of whom I speak later, is the observation that the motor functions often act without the mind being aware of what is afoot. Everything happens as if the motor, affective, and mental centers were each activated by a different organization. The interaction between the mental and the motor dynamics often seem fortuitous and generally require a particular attention (an exhausting one) to get along. This analysis becomes particularly evident when I describe the video analysis of nonverbal behavior at the end of the book.
Gurdjieff regularly distinguishes between the ordinary man and the man who has given himself the means to become who he “really” is.68 With the ordinary man, the centers function automatically and are mostly organized by reflex mechanisms. His centers are insufficiently (a) utilized, (b) mobilized, (c) nourished, (d) educated, and (e) poorly integrated into the functioning of the organism. For Gurdjieff, most people do not really know who they are, what they want, and where they are going. They are not within themselves.
Everyone can sing or throw a punch. However, even among the most gifted, these skills must be honed through training if an individual wants to master them and transform them into effective tools. Even a function as instinctive as sexual activity requires a long practice before becoming associated to the dimensions of the organism in such a way as to reach an organismic and relational functioning capable of promoting satisfaction. The goal of Gurdjieff’s teaching brings us back to Plato’s metaphor of the charioteer.69
In Plato’s fable, the human soul is the driver of a chariot drawn by a team of two horses: a white one and a black one. This scene describes the soul. The white horse represents that aspect of the soul that wants to rise to the world of Ideas. The black horse represents the aspect that wants to descend into the material world. The chariot is the envelope of the soul—the body—and the driver is the part of the soul that can direct the chariot. A soul can be more or less well integrated in the psyche of the driver. The mind often panics because it is not able to manage both mounts.
Gurdjieff proposes a similar metaphor, but one that details more explicitly the difference between the soul, the intellect, the passions, and the body. His central idea is that his teaching allows a soul to provide an aim to his organism, whereas most of the time it is a pile of disorganized activities of the reflexes. It is the intent of Gurdjieff’s program is to give to the psyche the force to gain control over the chaotic structure of the organism and permit a reorganization of the centers and the way they relate. Once this work is accomplished, an individual is able to identify with the forces of his organism and become profoundly who he is. This metaphor can be summarized in the following vignette.70
Vignette on the coach metaphor. The normal man is like a carriage (the mechanics of the body) drawn by two horses (the feelings) lead by a coachman (the intellect). The coachman is not stupid because he knows how to read and count, and he knows the laws of the country and can find his way to an address. But this mind is a heap of mental habits that allow him to find clients, who all of a sudden, give him a direction, a route. The horses have been ill cared for and poorly fed (only straw from early on in life). They are collapsed in on themselves. Even the coach is badly maintained by a coachman who does not understand his equipment. Described in this manner, the human being is a kind of disarticulated clown and relatively impotent.
Typically, the coach obeys the orders of the many clients who impose their authority at various moments. Gurdjieff’s aim is to form a deeper self that can take care of all the parts of an individual system in a coherent way. In differentiating the intelligence of the coachman from that of the person who stepped into the carriage, Gurdjieff differentiates (more explicitly than Plato) the intellect and the soul. Only the soul can verify the well-being of each center of the organism (well-treated horses, well-oiled carriage, a relevant and well-trained intellect, etc.) and find a direction that promotes the coordination of the centers of the organism. Once the organism is actively inhabited, it can at last potentiate its gifts in a way that makes sense. Like Socrates, this soul is what Gurdjieff attempts to activate with his method. This is an elitist method, like that of Plato’s, because it separates those carriages that have an occupant from the others. But this does not prevent it from being relevant.
Gurdjieff, just like Fodor (2000), accepts the theories of Hume and Darwin and their implications for all of the parts of the organism that function automatically. The challenge that the spiritual movements pose to the scientific theories is that it is possible to create a context that permits something to emerge in the middle of this chaotic assemblage that is an organism so that something might emerge and crystallize in the form of what the ancients called a soul. This context requires a collective endeavor in which the particular essence of an individual can blossom like a flower out of its bud.
These Movements have a double aim. By requiring a quality of attention on several parts at the same time, they help us to get out of the narrow circle of our automatism. And through a strict succession of attitudes, they lead us to a new possibility of thinking, feeling and action. (Jeanne de Salzmann, 2010, The Reality of Being, 57, p. 121f)
THE QUALITY OF ATTENTION
The “normal” man often focuses his attention in a rather hazy and unsustained manner. When an individual observes himself attentively, he inevitably notices that the concentration time rarely lasts more than a few minutes. Gurdjieff used many methods to develop the duration and the quality of attention. They often consisted of exercises or dances71 that mobilized the relationship between the intellect and the diverse centers of the organism. The pupil then learned to increase the length of time during which he could concentrate, the number of elements on which he could concentrate at the same time, and the precision of awareness. He also learned to clean up his sense of observation of the prejudices and his encumbering expectations. One typical exercise is to walk at a certain speed on a street full of pedestrians and count the number of women who are wearing red. Another is to make a brisk movement with one arm and a slow, gentle one with the other. This second type of exercise is similar to the kind used by a pianist who must play differently with each hand. To be capable of being attentive to several events at the same time and different points of view (cognition, affect, sensations, etc.), is one of the goals sought by Gurdjieff’s students. A good pianist plays different notes with each hand, but he can also create a different mood with each hand when it is called for. The student thus learns to feel that each of his centers reacts to a given event with a particular point of view. Once he really comes to feel this, he can learn to consciously coordinate most of the points of view with which his organism experiences a singular event.
THE QUALITY OF ATTENTION MEASURED BY A GESTURE
Vignette showing how a gesture allows for the observation of the duration of attention. Take a simple exercise: ask yourself to raise and lower your arms exactly the same way 100 times. Someone in the room can verify the exactness of your count. If your attention is not trained for this type of task, you will not be able to accomplish this gesture exactly 100 times in a row. You will improve if you practice over and over again. Typically, this is what happens: At the beginning you have no problem. But as soon as you perform this gesture for, say, the thirtieth time, you think of something else. You think that you are executing an exercise, which is too easy for you, very well; and the individual suggesting this exercise to you must think you more stupid than you are; or you think of what is waiting for you at home; or you are thinking of the last film you saw, and so on. In short, you forgot to keep on counting. You therefore pick a number at random, forty for example, and you begin to count again. Because of this momentary inattention, you end up having completed this movement approximately but not exactly 100 times. Irritated with yourself, you begin the exercise over; once again, your count will be interrupted at least once by other considerations that will interfere with your consciousness without you really knowing why. You will invent many explanations, for example, that it is impossible to remain attentive when an exercise is so boring or so lacking in motivation. There is also a strong chance you will feel irritated because you were not able to complete such a stupid task. This type of exercise allows us to see that attention is a difficult mental tool to manage. Few people recognize the weakness of their attention when it has not been developed.
Now consider another example that permits us to go a little further concerning what the observations of an individual’s gestures teaches us about his mental attention. For this, I take a typical lesson in tai chi chuan carried out in slow motion. (I have briefly described this discipline in the chapters dedicated to the Chinese martial arts.) The situation I propose is for you to imagine yourself as a beginning student who is observing a tai chi master demonstrating a movement. From the point of view of your conscious perception, the master’s gestures are relatively simple and hardly acrobatic. You have the impression of perceiving each element of the moving posture being demonstrated. The master asks you to repeat the movement you have just seen. To help you, he does it with you. If he is a good teacher, he repeats it exactly the same way as many times as you want. Doing this requires a rare quality of attention. Typically, you repeat this exercise, somewhat proud of having done it well, but conscious that your imitation is only a close approximation. If a third person compares what you have just done with the movement of the master, he will see that the difference is, in fact, enormous. If the scene was filmed, you would soon be made aware of the difference. The distance between the hands and the torso, the distribution of the weight on the feet, the fact that the impulse of the gesture originates from the feet and from the pelvis are things that, typically, the beginner does not perceive. The student soon notices that he is able to concentrate on only two or three parts of the body at the same time, while there are many variables to integrate to complete a movement correctly. The master knows from experience that it will take years of regular work to be able to imitate, with sufficiently adequate precision, what he has just demonstrated to you. Given that tai chi is a sequence composed of around 100 global body movements, the student is confronted not only by the limits of his attention but also by the limits of his memory.
We have to accept that there exists a kind of memory of the gesture that does not function like memory through visual representation. After having followed many courses and having practiced at home, some gestures and even entire sequences become motor habits. After a certain amount of time (months and even years for some people), the student gains the ability to carry out the entire sequence with relative accuracy on automatic pilot—that is, thinking of other things most of the time, like the driver of an automobile. But the teacher sees this right away because the motor centers deform the gestures to assimilate them. They create automatic dynamics that produce mechanical gestures that do not have the postural structure mobilized by the master. The student must then learn to coordinate his mental memory and his motor memory to execute his form of tai chi with greater precision.
This is an example of the usefulness of the notion of centers such as Gurdjieff conceives them. It consists in training the motor and intellectual centers at the same time and the way they are coordinated. In tai chi, this coordination requires certain coordination between motor activity, respiration, and mental activity. This makes things even more difficult to follow with a mental attention that can incorporate only a few elements at the same time. Furthermore, we must take into account the fact that tai chi is, before anything else, a martial art, and that each position has a function in combat. Finally, mental attention must also integrate a listening to what the Chinese call the chi, which is, according to a rudimentary simplification, the internal force from which all of the centers of the organism are organized. This is just the beginning of tai chi. In effect, tai chi is a martial art. In combat, it is executed with a speed and sense of purpose aimed at vanquishing the opponent.
For many years, I followed such training with Lizelle Reymond and her students. She was often amused by the countless distorted faces we made when we concentrated (tongues licking lips, frowns worthy of a horror film, a strained and pale face, etc.). This is a good example of the useless stimulations we ceaselessly mobilize. Films of the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin show us that his face is practically immobile, even when he is playing heartbreaking melodies. Everything that artists like him have to give to us is expressed in the music produced by their handling of the instrument. On the other hand, among excellent musicians of a lesser talent, probably because they must presently accommodate the exigencies of the visual media, emotional expressions burst forth in all directions and their music is often less expressive. Everything happens as if each facial expression takes something away from the attention focused on the violin and its sound.
As we have already seen with Elsa Gindler, these methods aspire to develop the intelligence of each person by integrating different forms of intelligence: like the intelligence that guides movements, the intelligence that guides the affects, the intelligence that guides the senses, and so on. The theories proposed by the schools inspired by Gurdjieff are debatable, but it seems that the few elements I have singled out indicate that many aspects of this approach are worthy of more attention on the part of psychologists and psychotherapists.
Moshe Feldenkrais (1904–1984) was born on the May 6, 1904, in Slavuta, Ukraine. He was interested in Japanese martial arts from the age of fourteen. He involved himself in the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. In 1930, in Paris, he became an engineering student and studied physics. At the same time, he enhanced his practice of judo to treat an injured knee. He joined the English army during World War II. While working as an engineer, he developed his method of bodywork. His central idea seems to be that developing the dynamics of the body necessarily mobilizes the development of the others dimensions of the organism. Only then can a person acquire greater maturity.
Feldenkrais’s method was established by 1949. It integrates different skills from judo, Matthias Alexander, Gindler, William Bates, and maybe Gurdjieff. He obtained his knowledge of Gindler’s method from a meeting with Heinrich Jacoby.72 He retains from this encounter the necessity to let his students learn to explore, feel, and discover how their organism needs to develop.
Feldenkrais’s method includes a particularly refined analysis of the alignment of the body in the gravity field and the automatic habits an organism forges for itself. He uses these automatic procedures like a trampoline, a spring that can take other forms when it loses its tension. The individual can use this force to transform himself and build useful automatic habits he had not yet acquired but needs. Feldenkrais thinks the organism needs habits to function, but once put in place, they are difficult to recalibrate. An individual’s innate and acquired habits are not always constructive or synergistically put together in the present context.
Feldenkrais is known mostly for his work on the re-calibration of sensory-motor and respiratory habits. For him, this implies a reconstruction of the way an individual thinks about and experiences his postural alignment, respiration, gestures, and affects. By learning to integrate these forces, the individual can develop his intelligence and acquire greater maturity. Feldenkrais’s method is taught all over the world. It has inspired the bodywork of several body psychotherapists in the United States, such as Jerry Kogan, Ron Kurtz,73 and George Downing.74 I briefly summarize some aspects of his system, which takes up themes discussed in other parts of this manual.
Feldenkrais situates his method between two poles:75
According to him, these two types of approaches have helped many people, but neither can help everyone. To combine them, he proposes an organismic approach that sometimes reminds one of Gurdjieff’s formulations. For example, when he distinguishes distinct centers:76
As in Lamarck’s and MacLean’s models, these three centers correspond to levels of the nervous system that formed at different moments in the course of evolution, and therefore have distinct modes of functioning. Each center can function in parallel in a relatively independent way. Thus, some automatic behaviors set up without the knowledge of consciousness may automatically recruit certain conscious mechanisms.77
Like Gindler, Feldenkrais (1949, p. 13) explores a “sixth sense” that can develop when an individual has refined his ability to perceive his body. For Feldenkrais, the sixth sense organizes itself around the kinesthetic perception, as when one attempts to evaluate the weight of an object without a scale, eyes closed. Another example on the usefulness of developing this sixth sense is his work on certain affects, like fear. According to Feldenkrais,78 an affect is necessarily a form of nonconscious coordination between the sensory, intellectual, and somatic domains. A readjustment of an individual’s affective life therefore necessarily implies work that combines interventions on all these dimensions. He does not believe an individual who is blocked regarding the alignment of the segments, muscle tone, respiration, and intellectual capacities would have the resources required to integrate his affective dynamics. Feldenkrais also thinks an individual must recover the entirety of his fundamental postural repertoire to find a kind of maturity. He voluntarily admits that certain parts of the body are more important than others, that certain forms of connections between the dynamics of the organism are particularly relevant for an individual’s maturation. This allows him to accomplish remarkable work with some physically disabled people. Even a person who has lost a leg can mobilize some postural dynamics that lengthen tendons, awaken motor cells, activate rarely used brain circuits, realign available segments of the body, and so on.
In his teaching, Feldenkrais (1980) uses his hands to help an individual feel how the segments of his body ought to be aligned in the gravity field. He begins by coordinating the alignment of the head and the shoulders in coordination with the breath; then he descends toward the feet. When possible, he works with a person thirty to forty times on successive days, in individual or in group sessions, then less frequently according to what is happening in the patient’s organism. Once again, we find the idea that the functioning of an organism cannot change unless it learns new practices on a regular basis. An apprenticeship is a matter not only of consciousness but also of motor activity and nervous and physiological systems. It also needs the support of an external expert presence. Doing it alone with a book or a DVD is never enough.
Like Gurdjieff, Feldenkrais became an advocate and practitioner of a modular and parallel approach before this position became fashionable. He freely admitted that each organism is composed of heteroclite mechanisms that simultaneously impose different requirements on each organism. But like most engineers of his generation, he still used the classical causal system. Each center interacts in a direct fashion, like the sequential movements of billiard balls.
To become activated, the readjustments of the body effected by Feldenkrais’s method must ally themselves with the mental and affective dynamics of the person. This work can only be accomplished with people who accept opening themselves up to modes of emotional functioning that are relatively spontaneous and expressive.79 This seems to go on by itself when we admit that a feeling is formed by nonconscious mechanisms that animate the body and the mind. That is why it can happen that a feeling sometimes expresses itself through a motor expression, visible to another, without the individual having any conscious awareness of the event. Once this form of reaction has become co-conscious, it can more easily find its place in conscious dynamics.
Like many people who were skilled in gymnastics, Feldenkrais (1980) assumed that there exists only one healthy and normal functioning. This functioning serves as the reference point to evaluate everything that functions differently. A spine should have a certain curvature or it is sickly and deformed. The criterion Feldenkrais adopted to assess the healthy way to move is close to that used in the martial arts: a gesture functions normally when it is executed with the least amount of energy possible. I have already showed that this economy is only observed with people who have followed a regular physical training. For him, an “I” begins to exist only once the individual can clearly differentiate the signals created by the organism from those that come from the environment (space, gravity, and the social dynamics).
One of the things Feldenkrais did remarkably well was to exploit the existing systems of the organism and support their capacity to readjust. Consider the case of a chronic startle reflex, which shortens the extensor muscles.80 It sometimes suffices to increase this chronic tension and these elastics, which are the muscles, will be inclined to stretch and return to their place of origin. He can thus contact the natural propensions of muscles, and then help them to readjust themselves spontaneously. This is, for example, what he does when he works on the organism’s need for orgasm. For Feldenkrais, the orgasm, as a reaction, is composed of different sensorimotor mechanisms and innate affects. Like Reich but with greater finesse, Feldenkrais81 describes the biomechanics of the orgasm like a type of reaction that constitutes itself spontaneously if the individual only lets the different centers of the organism become activated without inhibiting them. The reflexes that manage the movements of the pelvis, its rhythm, and its coordination with the pelvic movements of the partner function even if the nerves of the spinal column at the dorsal levels are sectioned off. This observation suggests that the relevant centers of the brain are activated in parallel, simultaneously, in a modular fashion during coitus. Some people have the anxious impression of falling when a startle reflex blocks the orgasmic reflex. This feeling would come from the fact that the conflict between the anxiety circuit and the orgasm reaction activates nervous mechanisms that influence the equilibrium centers situated in the ears.82 Feldenkrais’s analysis indicates that an affective act like coitus is a coordination of specific modular practices that are situated in all of the dimensions of the organism. That is why, for Feldenkrais as with Reich, only individuals who are physically mature (muscles and respiration function well), affectively mature (enjoy a sexual relationship), and mentally mature (have a moral framework that permits agreeable sexual relations) are able to live a satisfactory orgasmic sexuality. Feldenkrais shows how frustration causes an impoverishment in the quality of the tissues, the muscles, respiration, and flexibility (and thus of the postural repertoire), while reinforcing the neurological and hormonal circuit that set in place the circuits of stress and anxiety.
The work of Feldenkrais is often used by those body psychotherapists who are not particularly Reichians and who want to have modes of body intervention at their disposal that are more precise and effective than those developed by orthodox Reichians. However, Feldenkrais’s vision is different from psychotherapy’s vision. Consequently, it is difficult to integrate the two approaches.