Back in 2003, completely bored and turned off by my PhD studies, and not having the money or time to travel and attend so-called Feldenkrais "advanced workshops" I decided to engage in an experiment: I bought a scanner and scanned all of my physical Feldenkrais transcripts into pdf form. I had around 700 at that time.
And then I had my Apple's text-to-speech program read me the sessions as I lay down on the floor and did them (though many were also done standing or in a chair).
I did 3 sessions a day, every day for about 3 months, around 270 Feldenkrais sessions in total.
To put that in perspective, that's more Feldenkrais sessions than one would get in 4 years of a Guild Certified Feldenkrais Training. And you would have had to attend weekly classes with Moshe at his Alexander Yanai studio for at least 8 to 9 years to do that much. (He sometimes recorded, taught and revised one single session for a week or more).
This strategy of leveraging technology for my Feldenkrais practice turbocharged my development in ways that were both astounding and painful.My feelings and actions changed so rapidly that I stopped fitting into my life contexts.
Most Feldenkrais trainers and their ideology began to bore me. I could see how they were warping the ideas to fit their limited understanding and agenda of selling the work piece-by-piece to maximize their income and feed their egos.
My professors in grad school began to bore me as well.
There were times in grad school meetings where I sometimes had to pinch myself to stop from laughing. I was in this powerful, altered physical state from doing Feldenkrais, and they were talking about latent variables, manifest variables and all kinds of made-up ridiculous b*llshit that I couldn’t take seriously anymore.
And that is one of the many reasons that I do what I do online and stay independent of the professional organizations and their dominance hierarchies. We live in a time where you can acquire high-level skills without submitting to the whims of an outside “authority” or certification scheme.
If you take a moment to think about it, you will realize that's what Moshe did. He taught Feldenkrais without ever attending a Feldenkrais training. And he was a Feldenkrais trainer, even though he never met the requirements to be one!
ha!
Some might think I am joking, but I am not. The possibilities are endless if you do the work. And THE work will turn into YOUR work. Your own deep, self-directed learning can take you to places that no one can teach you to go.
Peace,
Ryan
This article was based on adapted from one of my essays on Substack called "Unlocking Genius"
