They Were for Moshe, Not You
The original Feldenkrais training model was not created for your nervous system.
It was created for Moshe’s travel schedule.
The San Francisco training, 1975–78, was organized around long blocks of daily classes. Amherst, 1980–83, was one long summer stretch each year.
Why?
Not because four- and eight-week intensives are magically better for somatic learning.
Not because the human nervous system requires being away from your life, family, clients, and work for a month at a time.
Moshe lived in Israel. He was 71 when the San Francisco training began and 76 when Amherst began.
He did not want to fly back and forth more than necessary.
And for many years, sometimes even now, a travel solution for one aging teacher became a sacred educational model for everyone else.
People started acting as if month-long intensives were the deep, traditional, somatically correct way to learn the work.
They are not.
They are logistics dressed up as pedagogy.
Learning science generally favors distributed practice over massed practice. Shorter learning periods, repeated over time, tend to create better retention and deeper integration than cramming.
That also fits the earlier, more organic way Moshe taught in Israel: regular weekly learning over time, while people lived their actual lives.
So when a parent, a working practitioner, or someone with a full life says:
“I can’t disappear for four weeks at a time.”
The answer should not be:
“Then you are not serious.”
Maybe the better answer is:
“The training model was never designed around you in the first place.”
And once you see that, the whole thing starts to look different.
You can study the work in your own way.
You can practice the work in your own way.
You can teach voice-guided movement lessons in your own way.
You can learn over time, in your own life, with your own students, without pretending that Moshe’s travel schedule was a universal law of awareness.
The work is bigger than the training format.
And it is definitely bigger than the organizations that inherited it.
— Ryan
