“[In the] humanistic conception, with its roots in the Enlightenment… education is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with water, but rather, assisting a flower to grow in its own way… in other words, providing circumstances in which the normal creative patterns will flourish.”

-Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Mis-Education

What is learning?
What is improvement?
What is Feldenkrais?

by Edward Yu

The Feldenkrais Method could be considered the art of learning how to learn or, put another way, the art of learning how to improve. Feldenkrais is in this manner a radical departure from conventional approaches to learning and improving because where Feldenkrais emphasizes exploration, thereby encouraging people to learn how to learn and learn how to improve, conventional approaches focus on mimicking and performing, which commonly results in trying to learn and trying to improve.

Cultural misconceptions

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” -Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

Our dominant culture posits that trying harder, whether in academics, athletics, dance, artistic endeavors, work, spirituality, emotional growth, parenting, relationships—indeed any subject you choose—leads to improvement. Consequently, it is easy to assume that improvement is commensurate to the amount of effort you exert. In other words, the harder you try the more you stand to gain—“No pain, no gain,” as my high school track mates were all too fond of saying. According to this model, people who try harder improve more and are therefore more likely to succeed. Conversely, those who do not try as hard do not improve as much and are therefore less likely to succeed.¹

Of course, improvement alone doesn’t guarantee success. There is the added factor of talent, which supposedly plays a central role in the matter. We typically view talent as a head start or entitlement of sorts which endows the “talented” with special abilities. In contrast, we see a lack of talent as a handicap which forces the “untalented” to work harder just to keep up. Unlike effort, which is a choice, talent is “God-given,” genetically endowed or otherwise immutable: we are born with some measure or lack of talent and there is nothing we can do about it.

Thus, the simple equation for success is as follows: Success = Talent + Effort. The assumption here is that highly successful people: 1) are more talented, 2) try harder or, 3) are more talented and try harder. Of course this also means those of us who are not as successful are either not as talented, not trying hard enough, or lacking both talent and willpower.

Learning versus talent

“He was just ordinary, and I doubt whether any scout would have thought much of him in his first year.” -Joe Martin, Muhammad Ali’s first boxing coach

How is it possible that I could share the classroom with a future Rhodes Scholar or run on the same track team as the eventual state champion, yet still perform so far below their standards—even while working just as hard? Their relative success must be due to superior talent—unless we acknowledge all the learning and improvement that has taken place outside of the classroom and off the track.²

To begin with, the theory of talent assumes that those with superior ability were born with it and those who are less talented must exert more effort to acquire a similar stature. Unheeded in this assumption is the fact that without hours upon hours of learning, superior ability would not exist. This is to say, much of what we deem superior ability via talent is actually superior ability via learning.

That we overemphasize the role of talent and willpower may have to do with the fact that so much learning and improving occurs outside of conventional settings such as the classroom or practice field (in the case of organized sports), even though these are the arenas where most of our learning and improving are supposed to occur. By focusing almost exclusively on talent and willpower, conventional approaches tend therefore to ignore what could be the most crucial factor in improvement.

Largely unacknowledged is the fact that every single human undergoes an enormous amount learning before reaching the age of five. And while it is true that even young children exhibit differences in abilities that we often associate with talent, it is also true that such abilities could not emerge without the gradual refinement of sensorimotor skills—otherwise known as learning—that occurs during early childhood. This is of course not to say that learning and improving end on your fifth birthday. There are enormous possibilities for learning throughout our entire lives—all the way, in fact, until we die—and it is the great ones who capitalize most fervently on these possibilities.

Even child prodigies like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart aren’t simply born playing piano concertos. While they appear, within particular domains, to be more advanced than their peers, their abilities do not emerge out of thin air as genetic determinists would have us believe, or operant conditioning as behaviorists would lead us to think, but rather a complex interplay of genetics and the environment in which the individual plays a crucially active part. Prodigious ability therefore, has as much to do with self-directed exploration—otherwise known as learning—as it does with either genetics or environmental conditions. And this means that anyone, including a prodigy, who wants to extend her learning to a master level, must spend several years beyond early childhood crafting her skill. Mozart himself did not complete his first masterwork until the age of 21—that is, after having spent over 15 years behind the piano and many thousands of hours meticulously exploring music. So while he did exhibit precociousness in the field of music, he would never have come close to achieving what he achieved without having spent countless hours exploring and learning—even well after his fifth birthday.

Likewise, Michael Jordan who was viewed as the NBA’s most dominant player for several years, put himself through a rigorous self-learning program just to make his high school varsity basketball team (he was cut the first year he tried out). Despite this, little press is given to the extensive and painstaking explorations he undertook in his teens—explorations without which he would never have come to dominate the world of professional basketball.

Thus, in two renowned masters, Mozart and Jordan, we see a world of learning that has occurred in at least two stages: 1) early childhood and 2) some time later in life. Neither stage, however, has been given much attention.

Propensity and circumstance (otherwise known as luck)

“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”
-Albert Einstein

Each of us is wholly unique, and our genetic inheritance lends powerfully to the adult we grow up to be. Yet as mentioned above, genetics is merely a foundation from which any organism develops. Along with DNA, innumerable circumstances contribute to the shaping of our person and thus, the honing of our so-called talents. And aside from circumstances under our direct influence, there are ones over which we have little or no say, such as who our parents are, where we attend primary school (if we attend school at all), or whether or not we have access to a piano or a basketball during our formative years.³ Without a supportive environment a person’s talents may never have the chance to emerge, much less flourish.⁴ Thus, even if we are supposedly predisposed from birth to conduct the Vienna Symphony Orchestra or lead a basketball team to its first national championship, external circumstances may prevent either from occurring. If Mozart, for example, were born into serfdom, it is unlikely that he would have played a single instrument, much less rocketed up the short list of “world’s greatest musicians.” This is for the obvious reason that serfdom does not generally afford opportunities for learning music. And even if he were born to the same well-to-do family, but as a female (like his older sister, Maria Ana Mozart), any musical aspirations would nonetheless have collided with the patriarchal barriers that prevented females of that era from reaching higher levels in any respected profession.⁵ Similarly, if Jordan were born to upper middle class physicians, he would more likely have ended up working for the AMA than setting records in the NBA.⁶

Of course, highlighting external conditions does not exclude the fact that from birth, all of us exhibit propensities toward certain areas of development. Innate talent, in this regard, exists. Yet it cannot be extricated from learning, which at each and every moment of life—from birth all the way to death—continues to shape the way we move, sense, think and emote. Thus, no matter what so-called talents we exhibit we can continue to learn and thereby experience profound and often surprising changes throughout our lifetime.⁷ This means that while it remains nigh impossible to alter either our DNA or the social class into which we were born, we nonetheless have the option of learning at each and every moment in life. Learning, or lack thereof, consequently plays a never-ending role in the growth, decline, or stagnation of our abilities and our person as a whole.

Trying harder leads to…

“If trying hard didn’t work. Trying harder is doing more of what didn’t work.” -Charles Eisenstein

Even if we ignore the influence of so-called talent and circumstance we might conclude that over-achievers like Mozart and Jordan try harder than most people and this is why they are able to reach such great heights. Yet learning/improvement and trying to learn/improve are not equivalent. Ironically, trying harder often sabotages learning and improvement because it often means doing more of the same, or in other words, practicing old habits—whether physical, mental or emotional.

From a neurological standpoint, trying harder can mean traversing already well-established neural pathways rather than creating new ones. In simple terms, trying harder often translates to doing more of what you are already doing. And while it may lead to some gain, your improvement will be minimal compared to what is possible. Trying harder then can be equivalent to trading the possibility of maximal improvement for the certainty of minimal improvement. It is in a sense, bypassing possible discoveries and thereby mortgaging your potential in order to experience instant (and often meager) gains. It is like stepping ever harder on the gas pedal while never leaving first gear: beyond a certain speed, adding more gas will do little but yield more strain on the engine.

What is learning?

“Many people make the mistake of confusing information with knowledge. They are not the same thing. Knowledge involves the interpretation of information. Knowledge involves listening.” -Henning Mankell, “The Art of Listening,” New York Times

From a conventional standpoint, learning is something we do in school, and something we can measure through standardized testing. It is something we exhibit by knowing the correct answer to the question, as exemplified by what happens on TV quiz shows. It is, in short, an accumulation of facts, otherwise touted as knowledge.

Yet what is the nature of this knowledge? Is it absolute and binary, as normally presented in classrooms, on television, or by the State Department? If so, how could the world have been flat yesterday and round today? Will it take on another shape tomorrow?

If we abide by convention, the more we supposedly know, the less room we have for uncertainty, wonder and doubt. And this can lead to unforeseen problems. When Galileo proposed a helio-centric world, for example, the all-knowing (and therefore, “learned”) Vatican knew, with small amount of wavering, that he should be put under house arrest. (Likewise, when the New York Times, Fox News and White House officials collectively announce supposed threats to our national security, American politicians know reflexively that the “correct” response is to carpet bomb another Third World country.)

Uncertainty

“The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty…we take it for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure—that it is possible to live and not know.” -Richard Feynman

Learning relies on wonder, curiosity and uncertainty—a triumvirate which serves as a visa into unchartered territory, so to speak. This triumvirate is, in fact, precisely what allows each and every one of us to assume new and unpredictable positions—whether physical, emotional or intellectual—at any given moment in our life. Learning from this perspective, means leaving behind certainty so that we can become more aware of ourselves, and consequently, the world around us.

From a neurological standpoint, learning is the process of creating new neural pathways through play and exploration—both of which by definition involve wonder, curiosity and uncertainty. Learning from this perspective happens only minimally in conventional educational settings, all of which tend to extinguish play, exploration, curiosity and uncertainty in favor of imitating and performing. In this manner, conventional settings tend to trade uncertainty for certainty, exploration for rote, imagination for being “right,” and learning for obedience.

Learning and constraints

There is almost always some sort of disparity between what a student needs to learn in order to serve the purpose at hand, and what she is able to learn. The two are rarely congruent and the conventional approach of holding tightly to the former generally confounds the majority of students. This is because what the teacher thinks the student needs is not necessarily what the student truly needs at any particular moment. And what she truly needs relates to how she is able to process information into useful knowledge—how, in other words, she is able to make sense of the virtually limitless amount of information both impinging on and available to her at any time.

Whether consciously or unconsciously employed, constraints are necessary for learning to occur in any field, from fine arts to theoretical physics to basketball to plumbing. In the broadest sense, constraints are the particular conditions under which we find ourselves (or our test subjects) at any given moment. Yet the conditions need not be accidental. We can deliberately choose our constraints as do researchers attempting to test out hypotheses, or children inventing rules to a game. Choosing our constraints narrows the field of virtually limitless information so that researchers, children, and the rest of us, can more easily make sense of and thus, organize incoming information. It follows that constraints are precisely what make both research and learning possible (and what prevent games from turning into random acts of chaos).

Albert Einstein, who fundamentally altered our view of the science, nature and indeed, the entire cosmos, could not have done so without carefully choosing his constraints. His creative genius could in fact be attributed to both a consistent and eminently novel use of constraints. One of his most famous thought experiments, for example, involved “constraining” the speed light to a constant velocity, thereby allowing for variations in time, space and mass. Einstein’s constraint led, over the course of ten years, to the Special Theory of Relativity.

Einstein is not alone.

Progress in any field relies on the continual invention or identification of new constraints, the illumination of old, forgotten ones, and the discarding of ones that no longer serve the purpose at hand.⁸ Progress in human development also relies on the ability to use, change and (re)invent constraints. Our use, in fact, begins at birth as each infant adheres assiduously—albeit unconsciously—to the constraints laid down by Newtonian physics (and/or God, depending on your point of view). Doing so makes it possible, over the course of months, for each child to learn how to crawl, stand and eventually walk.

What do you do in Feldenkrais?

In the Feldenkrais Method, practitioners carefully choose among a virtually limitless number of constraints in order to better address what students are able to learn at any given moment. And when students run into difficulties, practitioners will often alter the constraints, seeking a better match between their needs and abilities. In this manner, practitioners afford students more opportunities for discovery and learning.

Concretely, Feldenkrais classes normally involve slowing down and exploring movement to the degree that students can sense and therefore move themselves in fundamentally new ways. This process of methodical exploration and learning is what practitioners of the Method refer to as gaining awareness through movement. And the approach stems from the notion that learning is the process of becoming aware of what a moment ago, we were not aware of. Learning, from this perspective, could be considered the act of increasing awareness.

In light of this, Feldenkrais could be considered the art of bringing awareness to the process (i.e. exploring), rather than simply focusing exclusively on the end result (i.e. mimicking or performing). From this standpoint, improvement is not so much proportional to the amount of effort you exert or the number of facts you can recite, as it is to the amount that your awareness increases each time you explore a particular activity. By awareness, I am speaking of what you actually sense and feel in your body. I am speaking, in other words, of an increase in sense-ability. And because sense-ability generally increases with diminishing effort, improvement normally occurs most rapidly when you exert less effort rather than more. You could consequently say that improvement is inversely proportional to the amount of (extraneous) effort you exert. And from this standpoint it would be more apt to say, as Feldenkrais Practitioners often do, “No pain, more gain.”

Of course, this does not mean that you should never try harder, but rather that doing so as we are taught—that is, exclusively and therefore without attending to sense-ability—strictly limits improvement. And this brings me to the crux of the matter: if the greatest improvement occurs through increasing sense-ability, then it behooves us to make increasing sense-ability rather than increasing effort our main focus.

Learning can be involved in any activity

“The aim is a body that is organized to move with minimum effort and maximum efficiency, not through muscular strength but increased consciousness of how it works.” -Moshe Feldenkrais

“Improve at what?” you might ask. Anything. When you bring awareness to process, you instantaneously create new neural pathways outside the realm of habit. Over time, you will likely improve in ways that you never imagined possible and in places that you might never have considered (and by the way, imagination tends to be largely constrained by shared cultural values—but I’ll save this discussion for another article). It doesn’t matter who you are or where your so-called talents reside.

¹ It should be noted that success is culturally defined and may have little, if anything to do with human welfare. Jared Diamond has taken pains to demonstrate how the fall of any civilized (or preliterate agrarian) society has a great deal to do with cultural standards that should be outlived, but which instead outlive the human inhabitants. Regarding Easter Island, Ancient Egypt and Greece, for example, one could make the case that an unyielding and myopic vision of success led to their eventual collapse. Despite such historical examples, cultural standards haven’t changed much other than to accelerate the destructiveness by which we live. We may have traded the massive stone heads on a remote Pacific Island for the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, Medici for Goldman Sachs, and the Pyramid of Giza for the Luxor Hotel, but the premise of bigger and “better” at any cost—human or environmental—remains unchanged.

² Note that even if we agree on what it means to succeed, the stick by which we measure success will always fall short of the goal. Thus, standardized tests most accurately measure someone’s ability to take standardized tests (if not their ability to pay someone to take it in their place), but not necessarily their intelligence, creativity or imagination. Likewise, Gross Domestic Product—a popular measure for national success—most accurately measures Gross Domestic Product. And this brings up a few questions: 1) whether standardized tests accurately measure what they are supposed to measure; 2) if not, what is being left out of the measurement; 3) if things like intelligence and national success are indeed measurable; 4) how has the dominant culture defined abstract concepts like intelligence and national success (and should we accept its definitions)?

³ Access is crucial to any kind of learning. Bill Gates, for example, had the opportunity to work extensively with computers in his youth during the late 60s to early 70s—a time before personal computers existed, and when it was uncommon for even university professors to have regular exposure. Similarly, Albert Einstein received rare and important exposure to the inner workings of electricity when in his teens, he had access to electric dynamos at his father’s workplace.

⁴ To use an extreme example, one would be hard pressed to find prodigious behavior among the children in a Romanian orphanage during Nicolae Ceausescu’s reign.

⁵ Maria Anna Mozart excelled in music at an early age, but lost footing in the public eye when her parents put all of their efforts into nurturing and promoting her younger brother. Were the world less patriarchal and more egalitarian during her era, today’s renowned symphonies might be playing her compositions rather than her younger brother’s.

⁶ Circumstance, also known as fate, destiny or sheer luck, cannot be overlooked when it comes to our notion of success. The most obvious factors affecting an individual’s chances for success involve class, race, nationality and gender. A mere fifty years ago, for example, it would’ve been unthinkable for a poor, or even upper middle class black person to climb into the ranks of the top 1 percent in terms of total assets. These days, it is at least possible, though unlikely—and strikingly less so for someone who is altogether poor, black, and a woman. Similarly, anyone not born to wealthy parents—what we today refer to as the “top 1 percent”—will have much less of a chance of becoming a member of Congress, or corporate CEO than someone who is.

⁷ Jordan’s surprise, for example, was to show that someone who was initially overlooked by high school coaches could end up dominating the entire world of basketball. Similarly, John Harrison, a simple clockmaker in 18th Century Europe, outshone the greatest scientists of his time by inventing the first device to accurately measure longitude for sailors on the high seas. Harrison’s achievement, which involved painstaking exploration spread over several decades, is a testament not only to human curiosity and desire, but the vast world of learning that exists outside of conventional settings.

⁸ And searching for the original purpose—that is, the purpose behind the purpose—can lead to provocative questions. Does anyone remember, for example, why it is better to lower cholesterol, raise obedient children, or build billion-dollar football stadiums?