Oiling the Tin Man’s Armor and Healing His Heart III: Reich’s and Feldenkrais’s Treatment

Self-Image, self-organization, appreciation/acceptance and letting go

At this point, we can return to the perspectives offered by Feldenkrais. We can begin to further unite some of the rich concepts offered by Feldenkrais (and conveyed by Alfons Grabher) and connect them to contemporary insights offered by theorists and researchers in other fields. We begin with the sense of appreciation for and acceptance of the natural movement of the human body for some purpose.

Finding the natural purpose of movement: Grabher (2010, p. 19) describes the typical Feldenkrais session and emphasizes the non-demanding nature of these sessions:

There are no stretching exercises in Feldenkrais classes, in the sense that muscles are pulled against resistance. In this regard there is no warm-up stretching, no cool-down stretching, no hold-the-posture stretching; no static, dynamic, nonballistic, AIS, not even PNF stretching. Such stretching methods are not part of the Feldenkrais Method.

The purpose of movement is to be appreciated (Grabher, 2010, p. 53):

When a muscle is used for a movement that it’s not meant to do normally, or if it’s disturbing other muscles’ work, in Feldenkrais we call this “parasitic action”. We use this strong term because instead of contributing these muscles draw energy from a movement and make it less efficient, maybe even painful in the long run. In other modalities this is called “energy leak”.

We find close parallels to this perspective in the work being done in the area of appreciative inquiry– or what I retitle and expand on as “appreciative perspectives” (Bergquist, 2003, Bergquist and Mura, 2011). From an appreciative perspective, the “natural” work being done within organizations is to be acknowledged, understood and supported. It often contributes to the ongoing stability (and success) of the organization.

The “key” to ongoing, sustained achievement in an organization is often to be found in the “common” narratives of everyday successful operations in an organization.  Sometimes described as the “vernacular” work of the soul (Moore, 1994; Briskin, 1996), these daily operations are often taken for granted or it becomes the subject of “planned change” in the organization. As in the case of Feldenkrais’ “parasitic action”, the artificial patterns of behavior that are inserted into an organization without respect to the organization’s sustaining culture can provide counter-productive and even toxic. Stability and appreciation are often of greater value than change and “improvement.” Feldenkrais would probably enjoy holding hands with the practitioners of appreciative inquiry and those practitioners, like myself, who seek to find and support the best practices operating at the present time in an organization—it is about creating an “appreciative organization” (Bergquist, 2003).