Once people begin to explore Feldenkrais sessions there is a natural, normal, and quite common question usually phrased as:
"How often should I repeat a session?
Practitioners sometimes believe that Moshe told his students not to repeat a session.
I have not seen any quote by Moshe where he directly tells people to not repeat sessions.
(If you have one with a reference, please send it my way).
In fact, in the Awareness Through Movement book, Feldenkrais specifically tells students to think about and review sessions in their mind after doing them:
When you wake up, stretch for a minute or more in bed, and try to recall the general feeling of the lesson you did the night before. It is worthwhile to repeat two or three of the movements that you can remember. Think over the lesson from time to time during the day while you are doing other things, and see whether you can identify any changes it has caused.
Set yourself fixed times for this during the day, even if it is only for a few seconds at a time. Every time that you recall the past lesson it will become more firmly established in your mind.
When the exercises have become an established daily habit, do them at whatever time is most convenient.
What Feldenkrais DID tell people on a regular basis was to not turn sessions into exercise and to not do sessions mechanically.
He made that case that you should not do movements as if they were exercise. For example, you can find the exact phrase "Do not exercise," 8 times in the transcripts of his teachings in Israel.
And in the Awareness Through Movement book and many other places he made the case that observing and feeling your body while moving is better than mechanical repetition of a movement.
However, none of that directly addresses the question of whether or not you should repeat a session.
I do not believe you can actually repeat a session. It is a bit like the idea that you can not step into the same river twice.
As long as you are listening to your body and feeling yourself and paying attention, each new experience of a session has the potential to be meaningfully different.
And for those with chronic pain, it makes a great deal of sense to repeat sessions.
Repeating sessions can not only help let go of the pain but also stop it from coming back.
And it can be very helpful to repeat sessions at different times of the day and even in different places.
Doing sessions right before bed (or even in bed) and sometimes in the morning or afternoon seems to help the nervous system let go of the tensions that create stress and pain.
Ok, that's all for now.
I hope that was useful!
If not, let me know what is on your mind and what you would like to read?
Peace!
