Something that I have been tracking over the years is the different ways that people categorize somatic sessions with words—and how that affects learning, pain relief, and other needs.
Words are labels, right?
Labels pointing to experiences.
But the words are not the experiences themselves. They just point to them.
People can use the same word and embody it differently. And they can have similar experiences but wildly different interpretations of that experience.
Different Words for the Same Lesson
For example, people will do a session and use different labels to describe it. It can be called:
- relaxing
- illuminating
- tiring
- difficult
- impossible
- boring
Of course, pain-reducing and stress-releasing are also common themes. And in my sessions, “meditative” and “hypnotic” come up from time to time as well.
However, your experience of those words will be different than mine or anyone else’s.
And that difference isn’t a small thing.
It’s actually the starting point for how people learn, change, and even relieve pain.
For one person, a movement feels “tight.”
For another, the same movement feels “protective.”
Someone else says it “releases the pain.”
Another person calls it “strain,”
and someone else says “well, that was pointless!”
The label can alter the experience — and the experience can alter the label.
Different embodied meanings.
Different pathways for comfort, learning, and action.
What the “Founders” Thought
And then there are the founders and teachers who do not like particular words.
For example, you can see Moshe Feldenkrais on video getting impatient during trainings and saying to students:
“No, no, it is not about relaxation!”
Or when he was annoyed that someone compared one of his sessions to meditation, he would go on long rants calling meditation “idiotic.”
I do not like that, because I find it an unhelpful intrusion on another person’s worldview and experience.
A person’s experience is their experience and they can talk about it any damn way they want. I do not impose my movement on them, so why would I impose my language and thinking?
Somatic Levels of Meaning
I am writing about this now because I am pulling together a framework called Somatic Levels of Meaning. It’s been a long time in the making! Decades.
It is about helping people reclaim and respect their own embodied movement and language — respecting that each person organizes and talks about their experience differently.
It is based on a framework used by Gregory Bateson in the 1970s called logical levels (originally a mathematical model), and later refined by Steve Andreas, a colleague and mentor of mine who passed away in 2018.
I do not know exactly how I will roll it out.
It might be in a series of YouTube videos or blog posts.
It might be a webinar or course.
Whatever I do, I will make an announcement here. And I hope you stick around to see it.
Peace!
Ryan
By the way, this article was originally going to be sent only to folks in my Easy Feldenkrais Members email list. But at the last minute, I thought others might be interested as well. If I was wrong about that, my apologies. We will return to our regularly scheduled programming soon. ?
