I have been getting some positive feedback about this podcast and I wanted to make it available to more folks, so here it is... enjoy!
Rob Cohen has a rich and varied experience with the work. He trained directly with Moshe Feldenkrais, Anat Baniel, Mia Segal and many, many others in our community.
This interview with Rob covers a great deal, including:
- the gifts of Amherst (and perhaps, some of the “curses”)
- the evolution of Feldenkrais’ training process
- why Moshe was afraid of what he knew (perhaps more of his students should be)
- Moshe’s strategy for challenging his own belief in what he knew
- a provocative idea: Did Feldenkrais change his teaching after meeting Milton H. Erickson?
- why Moshe taught almost no Functional Integration at Amherst (Did you know?)
- the importance of direct experience and templated lessons
- why we have more tools to both use and share the work that Moshe did not have.
- Moshe’s feeling of failure about what he had done (learning how to learn, he did not get people there).
- taking responsibility for the creation of our neural pathways.
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Great interview. Rob shows a wonderful and fresh breadth of perspective. Thanks for having taken the time to seek him out and ask him questions, Ryan.
Hi Ben – Thanks for stopping by, listening and leaving a comment. Rob is great. cheers! – Ryan
I just got a question from someone asking me who Rob mentions at 31 minutes into the podcast. The thinker that Moshe said he relates to the most. The person that Rob mentioned is Gurdjieff.
At some point, I should correct the ideas that some people in the Feldenkrais community have about Milton Erickson and his work. Practitioners seem to have gotten the idea that psychological change or “mental” change is not generative or not as powerful as Feldenkrais-ian ideas. And that is not accurate. There are changes that one can make with Ericksonian strategies that one cannot make with the Feldenkraisian strategies. And vice-versa. As always, one must consider context and which strategy to use with what client at what time. I will consider writing a longer exposition of this idea in a future blog post. The mis-application of some of Feldenkrais’ ideas are actually causing a great deal of unnecessary suffering in the community. In fact, some of Moshe’s statements are being used as dogmatic statements of truth, rather than being used a principles that might be useful for certain people at certain times and not others. Again, more to come.