Over the years, I have heard many Feldenkrais trainers say that going through a four-year training is neccesary to create competent Feldenkrais practitioners. The stated purpose is to create professional practitioners.

That is the official story.

The reality is different.

If there is a meaningful requirement for competence, it is have never been meaningfully defined nor enforced. And I have never seen any evidence that the programs reliably produce professional practitioners.

But they do reliably award certificates!

Those certificates allow graduates to use the Feldenkrais service marks, and they are awarded whether or not the graduate has demonstrated the skill required to work competently with the public. Most trainers do not publicly acknowledge this problem. They also do not acknowledge the financial incentive built into the system.

The Financial Incentives

Training programs make more money when they accept more students. It is not in their financial interest to limit enrollment. It is not in their financial interest to for competence. It is not in their financial interest to fail students, remove them from a program, or refuse certification after collecting tuition for four years.

The people running these programs are financially rewarded for admitting more students and carrying them all the way through to certification.

Competency testing would interfere with the business model.

That is why Feldenkrais training programs are not really training programs.

They are licensing schemes.

The Feldenkrais Licensing Schemes

You pay the money for four years. You show up at the training. You complete the required number of days. At the end, you are granted permission to use the service marks, dependent, of course, on continuing to pay money to the guild or professional organization on a yearly basis.

That is the actual transaction.

If lawyers, doctors, psychologists, and other professionals were trained in the same manner as people in the Feldenkrais guild system, it would work like this:

1. Anyone who wants to become a doctor, lawyer, or psychologist applies to a program and is accepted.

2. He or she pays tuition to the institute for four years.

3. The student graduates regardless of skill or performance during those four years.

4. The graduate begins working with the public without an internship or a meaningful period of supervised practice.

5. The graduate pays a fee every year so that he or she can continue using the professional title.

Nobody would take that system seriously as professional training.

Yet that is close to how the Feldenkrais system operates.

And do not forget: Feldenkrais licenses can only be awarded through programs controlled by a very small group of people worldwide, by my count less than 130 the people..those who call themselves Feldenkrais trainers.

They tell us that they do this to preserve and protect Moshe Feldenkrais’s legacy.

Isn’t that a hoot?

The more certificates they award, the more they claim they are protecting Moshe’s legacy.

But awarding certificates is not the same as developing competence.

Controlling service marks is not the same as protecting the work.

Requiring four years of attendance is not the same as creating a professional practitioner.

The title “trainer” does not change the function.

The can call themselves a trainer, coach, facilitator, priest, hooker, or drug addict. It matters not.

Their function is still the same.

They are in the business of collecting tuition and awarding certificates that grant permission to use the service marks to people willing to pay them.

That is a licensing business.

It is not a system for producing competent practitioners.

The distinction matters.

It matters to students who spend four years and a great deal of money believing that completing the program will make them professionally capable. It matters to members of the public who assume that certification represents a consistently enforced standard of competence.

A real professional training system would define competence clearly. It would assess competence honestly. It would require substantial supervised practice. It would limit enrollment when necessary. It would fail people who did not meet the standard. It would be willing to withhold certification, even after years of tuition had been paid.

The present system is not built to do that.

It is built to accept students, collect tuition, carry them through four years, award certificates, and maintain control over who may use the service marks.

That is not professional training.

It is a licensing scheme.

Having said all that, I am not against training programs. They can be valuable. What I am against is pretending that they are the only legitimate way to become competent, teach the work, or create something of your own.

I am against confusing certification with competence.

I am against a small group of people controlling who is allowed to use certain words while claiming that this control protects the public or preserves the work.

You are free to study deeply, practice seriously, develop real skill, and create your own work without asking permission from a guild, professional body or anyone else. Though, yes, I know you must conform to local legal restrictions. Be careful. Don't do anything illegal or get thrown in jail.

You are free to learn from Feldenkrais without becoming dependent on the Feldenkrais system.

You are free to teach movement, awareness, learning, and self-exploration in their own language, under your own name, using methods you have used, tested and developed yourself.

A certificate may give someone permission to use a service mark.

It does not give competence.

And the absence of that certificate does not mean that a person has nothing valuable to teach.

The future of this work will not come from tighter control, more licensing, or more people repeating what they were taught in a four-year program.

It will come from people who are willing to learn, experiment, think for themselves, become genuinely competent, and create something new.

The post Feldenkrais Licensing Programs appeared first on Emergent Somatics.

Not throbbing pain or anything, just intermittent strain with occasional pain. Enough that I noticed it and thought,

“Hmm. This could turn into something. I need to deal with it now.”

It gave me anxiety because I had repetitive strain in my hand in grad school.

Now, you might think:

“Ryan, you’re a somatics practitioner. So you probably did somatics for it.”

And normally, yes, that's what I would do.

But this time, I decided I needed to look at my hand habits and environment. No point in "fixing" my thumb if I am doing something that is going to bring back the strain.

You can probably guess what the culprit was...thumb...strain...likely to do with computer, mouse, writing, or a phone, right?

Yep.

I use a Mac with a trackpad. The little square below the keyboard where you can swipe right, swipe left, scroll, click, and do all that.

And the way I use it, I click with my right thumb.

I’ve been doing that for years, perhaps more than a decade. Clicking who knows how many hundreds of thousands of times.

Apparently, my right thumb decided it had had enough.

The pain and strain were basically my thumb saying:

“Hey. Something needs to change here.”

I got on YouTube and started looking up ergonomic trackpads and ergonomic mice. And some of them looked useful. But before buying anything, I decided to test my theory.

I went digging through my old boxes and junk drawers and found a 10-year-old white Apple mouse.

I plugged it in on the left side of my computer. And now, when I need to click on something, I use the mouse with my left hand.

My right thumb gets a break.

It is no longer clicking hundreds of times a day.

And...it seems to work. Feels better.

So far so good.

Worried that it might not be enough, I also dunked both my hands in ice water for a few days. Nothing complicated, just a bowl with ice to reduce inflammation, and get circulation moving through my thumb and fingers.

And those two little non-Feldenkrais interventions have (so far) eliminated nearly all of the strain in my hand.

I'm not giving advice here about specific treatments for pain and strain relief. I'm just saying that it can be good to pause and ask:

1. What am I doing repeatedly that might be causing this?
2. What can I do to change the pattern?

Sometimes the answer is finding what you have been doing over and over, and changing it up until you get a useful change.

Peace!

Ryan

The post Pain Relief Without Feldenkrais appeared first on Emergent Somatics.

But then one day you look at the actual history and think:

"Wait a minute. Who in the hell gave these people this authority? Who certified the certifiers?!"

The term “Guild Certified Feldenkrais Trainer.,” sounds impressive, right? Sounds official. Sounds like something Moshe Feldenkrais must have created...? After all, the Guild has his name on it. His picture. His service marks. His whole aura floating around the thing like nag champa incense at a Yoga retreat.

So it is very easy to assume that the original Feldenkrais trainers were chosen by Moshe.

ha!

It's a reasonable assumption that is completly and utterly false.

When I was younger, I was willing to be diplomatic and say it is a myth that Moshe chose a few of his young American students to become trainers. Now, screw it. Let's drop the diplomacy: It was a lie!

Moshe did not create a trainer certification process.

Moshe did not personally certify any of the Feldenkrais Guild trainers. Not only did he never use the term "Feldenkrais Trainer," he was dead when they started using it! Moshe did not sit in a room, observe them training practitioners, and say, “Yes, these are the people who should carry my work forward.”

The first so-called Feldenkrais trainers began using that title after Moshe was no longer alive to approve, disapprove, clarify, correct, bless, curse, or throw something at them and call them idiots (one of Moshe's favorite words.)

So what happened?

The usual human thing happened: A small group of people got control of the public structure around the work: The service marks. The institutional language. The fancy-looking doors with hieroglyphics and fancy locks.
And then some of them anointedt themselves. And then became the people standing at the doors stopping others from entering. (Feldenkrais Trainers don't wear funny little hats like the Pope and his Cardinals. But they did consider it.)

One of the key figures in all the nuttiness was Jerry Karzen.

He was Moshe’s organizer, secretary, and traveling companion.

Jerry described the early process in his own words:

“In January 1983, I was asked by the Directors of the Feldenkrais Foundation to become its executive director while simultaneously the North American Feldenkrais Guild established the Training Accreditation Board. Soon thereafter, I asked Mark Reese, Russell Delman, and David Bersin to serve temporarily as trainers in Foundation-sponsored training programs...”

Read the little word there. “I asked.”

Not Moshe asked.

Not Moshe certified.

Not Moshe evaluated.

Jerry asked.

And what the hell did Jerry Karzen know? Was he a Feldenkrais trainer himself? NO. Had he trained others to do the work? NO.

And yet this is where the title begins. Not with Moshe. Not with a transparent public process. Not with a demonstrated standard of competence. But with Jerry asking a few men from the inner circle to “temporarily” serve as trainers.

Temporarily.

That is another little word worth noticing.

Because temporary arrangements have a funny way of becoming permanent hierarchies where no one is allowed to ask questions. And that is what happened.

The temporary became permanent.
The permanent became sacred.
The sacred became protected.
The protected became dogma.

(In a future post, I will share some of the terms Feldenkrais trainers have said about my writings: Sacrilege! Abomination! Mentally deranged!)

But I digress.

Decades later, people are still bowing before titles that were not created by Moshe, not certified by Moshe, and not based on any clear competency requirement that anyone can point to. That does not mean these men knew nothing. It does not mean they had nothing useful to teach. It does mean that they got official titles that gave them the ability to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for something that they were figuring out on the job. And it does mean that they had to lie to others - and eventually to themselves when they said, "This is what Moshe wanted."

And I don't think they realized it puts them below Moshe.

Puts them below a dead man.

Some of these men (and women) are in the 70s and 80s now and they are still not their own authority.

So yes, if you have had the feeling that something is not right in the Feldenkrais world, trust that feeling.
The hierarchy around the Feldenkrais Method is B.S.

It started as a poltical and myth-making hierarchy and not one based on skill
.
And no, it didn't descend from heaven or from Moshe.

It came from people with access, proximity and a willingness to use it for their own benefit. And once you see it - really see it - the whole thing starts to wobble.

Not the work but the "officialness."

The priesthood around the work.

The idea that some people are closer to the source and therefore get to decide who belongs, who speaks, who teaches, and who gets treated as legitimate. Ok, I could go on and on here...and I will. But that's enough for one blog post.

In the meantime, please stop and feel your contact with whatever chair, bed, floor or other surface you are in contact with right now.

Notice your contact.

Not the story about your contact with it, but your real lived contact...

That's real. And it belongs to you.

Peace.

Ryan

The post Not Certified By Feldenkrais appeared first on Emergent Somatics.

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 about doing the work.”

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 acquite and teach voice-guided movement lessons in your own way.
You can learn over time, in your own life - just like Moshe did - 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

By the way: When I posted a version of this on Facebook, I got replies from people sayin that they enjoyed the immersive format. It was good for them and enjoyable. That's great. I am not making a statement of the utllity of any training format for any particular person. I am pointing out some of the historical factors behind the design (or lack of design, as the case may be.)

The post Rethink Intensive Feldenkrais Trainings appeared first on Emergent Somatics.

But awareness does not work that way.

Awareness cannot be forced.

Not by me.

Not by you.

Not by Feldenkrais.

Not by any method, teacher, therapist, trainer, or professional organization.

Why?

Because limitations in self-awareness usually have a protective function. People do not avoid certain truths because they are ignorant. They avoid them because seeing too much, too quickly, would threaten the identity they have built their life around.

That does not mean we should hide things. It does not mean we should protect false public narratives. It does not mean we should pretend that professional organizations, teachers, or communities are healthier than they are.

But it does mean that forcing awareness usually fails.

Milton Erickson understood this deeply. In most cases, you cannot rip away a person’s protections. They have to develop the strength and resources to realize harsh truths on their own.

It is just as true in somatic work as it is in therapy.

And it is true in professional communities.

I still believe that open communication is healthier than secrecy. I still believe that the truth eventually gives us more options. I still believe that hiding from reality creates emotional, intellectual, and professional violence.

But no one can be forced to see, feel or move differently.

Awareness cannot be forced.

It can only be invited.

The post Awareness Cannot Be Forced appeared first on Emergent Somatics.

The Alexander Yanai sessions are a large collection of group lessons taught by Moshe Feldenkrais starting in the 1950s. It was a very fertile and experimental period in the development of his work.

Some of the sessions were taught live by Moshe. But many were recorded on reel-to-reel tapes, which was cutting-edge technology at the time. And when you read the transcripts of him teaching, you can sometimes feel how alive the situation was. Moshe was watching. He was noticing. He was testing ideas.

To me, these sessions are fascinating because they show Moshe Feldenkrais actively developing his ideas. This was a time before Moshe was teaching other people how to “do Feldenkrais” in any formal way. He was still figuring it out for himself. He was experimenting with how to teach, what to teach, and how people responded to different movement ideas and instructions.

To me, that makes the Alexander Yanai sessions even more valuable. They are not always polished, finished lessons.They are working sessions exploring ideas.

We have access to the sessions now because after Moshe's death the recordings were transcribed, translated, and published.

That is part of what makes the work so interesting.

The lesson was not simply about doing the “right” movement. It was about discovering something through the process of paying attention, sensing, trying, adjusting, and learning.

They are not museum pieces.

They are not just old material.

They are a record of a living, experimental process.

Many of the ideas in these lessons later became more familiar parts of his workshops and trainings. You can often find early versions of movements, themes, and teaching strategies that were later refined into other lessons.

That is one reason I keep returning to them.

They give me a glimpse into how Moshe was thinking, teaching, testing, and developing his work in real time.

And for anyone interested in Feldenkrais, movement, learning, or the history of somatic education, the Alexander Yanai sessions are a rich and important source. There are times in my life whe I do several a day, as I spoke about in my post on Alexander Yanai deep dives.

Peace!

The post Feldenkrais Alexander Yanai: What Are They? appeared first on Emergent Somatics.

It feature a live demonstration with a participant dealing with whiplash-related neck pain and restricted movement.

I used Descript editing software (Get a 50% discount for 2 months) to clean and restore the audio and to add captions. Because of that this is the first time I have been able to watch the entire video and hear it! (I have tinnitus)

In this segment, Feldenkrais explores how the head, eyes, shoulders, breathing, abdomen, and overall muscular organization are linked in the nervous system, and how changing those relationships can quickly alter pain, effort, and range of motion.

The demonstration includes Feldenkrais observing asymmetry in the neck and body, working hands-on with the participant, and then using standing movements involving the eyes, head, knees, and heel to produce a striking change in comfort and mobility. It is a vivid example of his approach: understanding how the nervous system has organized itself, then changing the conditions so a different pattern becomes possible.

Audio note: The original recording had significant audio limitations. This version has been substantially enhanced using AI-based audio restoration to improve clarity.

The post Moshe Feldenkrais At CERN. FI Demonstration. Audio Restored! appeared first on Emergent Somatics.

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. ?

The post Somatic Levels of Meaning appeared first on Emergent Somatics.

Just a few moments ago, I bumped into a note from several decades ago where a Feldenkrais trainer expressed online one of the founding myths of the Feldenkrais Guild system:

"Moshe wanted a strong guild to protect his work. That was his expressed wish."

That's a myth about Moshe. A good myth for someone who wants to claim to be a direct descendant of Moshe, working on his behalf. But it flies in the face of what some of Moshe’s closest students have said over the years, including:

Moshe had no interest in the incorporation process, and not very much interest in the “Guild.” With Moshe working hard and traveling, he did not want to waste time with the confusion common to the Guild, with several factions wanting to control and influence its activities. From: Moshe, No Interest In The Guild

And even more to the point: All the polices, procedures and politics of the various organizations came about after Moshe's death. Apart from one of Moshe's original Israeli students - Mia Segal - none of the original American Feldenkrais trainers were training with permission from Moshe. Moshe did not certify anyone as a "trainer" and never used that word. I can say that with complete confidence as Moshe was dead when the first group of people began calling themselves Feldenkrais Trainers!

If that is true, where did the first Feldenkrais Trainers come from? They were chosen by Moshe's "traveling companion" Jerry Karzen. Karzen himself was not a Feldenkrais trainer and had never trained others to do this work. You might ask on what basis he chose others to train?! A great question. I published an article on this in 2013: A Letter from Jerry Karzen.

Just a short reminder: Every tribe nation, religion and yes, professional group has its origin myths. They are designed to create legitimacy and authority, keep money flowing to the founders and keep system intact—whether the myth is true...or not.

The post Myths about Moshe and The Feldenkrais Guild appeared first on Emergent Somatics.

It was about a research study on interventions for knee pain and it said:

"A new study has found that adjusting walking style can effectively alleviate knee pain and slow cartilage degradation....and demonstrated that gait retraining, involving small adjustments to foot angle, provided pain relief comparable to medication."

In plain terms: they claimed that adjusting how people walked eased knee pain more than medication did.

Curious, I dug a bit deeper—and found that it was quoting high-quality research from The Lancet. The article explained it this way:

“By making a small adjustment to the angle of their foot while walking, participants in a year-long randomized control trial experienced pain relief equivalent to medication.”

And that’s what struck me most. Here’s top-tier research confirming what many of us have seen for years in Feldenkrais: small, personalized adjustments can change everything.

But I believe Feldenkrais works even better than the research intervention, because instead of prescribing a single ‘correct’ pattern, Feldenkrais helps your nervous system to discover variations that fit your body best—so the improvements feel natural, lasting, and effortless.

It reminded me of my Walking With Ease, Power & Grace series that I have not spoken about since 2023. Each short standing lesson helps you explore small variations—how your feet touch the ground, how your knees and hips support you, how your spine and breath join in—until you find the version that feels best for you.

The result? You stand better and walk better. Less strain, more stability, and a lighter, easier walk that doesn’t mask pain but reorganizes how you move so the pain can lessen or go away.

If you are interested, you can check out the series below. Walking sessions are great because you can do them with virtually no preparation. You just take off your shoes and begin...

Learn more and get the series here

The post Feldenkrais Better For Knee Pain Than Medication? appeared first on Emergent Somatics.