Movement Nature Meant: Ruthy Alon on Recovering Organic Movement

By Al Wadleigh, GCFP

Article Summary

In the four-part film Movement Nature Meant, Ruthy Alon explores how spiraling, folding, crawling, creeping, and rhythmic undulation can restore forgotten movement possibilities. Her demonstrations reveal a central idea of the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education: we can learn by listening to movement, varying it, and allowing the whole person to discover a more harmonious organization.

Ruthy Alon and the Movement She Loved

Ruthy Alon (1930–2020) had a beautiful way of speaking about movement. She could describe a hand pressing against the planet, a knee serving the spine, or a back learning to flow through the changing demands of life. Her language was poetic, but it was never decoration added to the movement. The image helped you sense the relationship she was describing.

Ruthy first heard about Moshe Feldenkrais while teaching children on a kibbutz in Israel. After returning to Tel Aviv, she began attending his public lessons. She had not come because of an injury or a particular problem. She simply loved movement and recognized that something important was happening in those classes.

For years, she traveled to the lessons, explored them at home, and gradually began sharing what she had learned with neighbors and students. After approximately eight years, she became one of the original 13 students in Moshe Feldenkrais’s first professional training. She went on to teach practitioners around the world, write Mindful Spontaneity, and develop her own Movement Intelligence programs, including Bones for Life®.

In a 1992 interview about her years with Moshe, Ruthy explained that her early impulse was to share her enthusiasm. That quality remained present throughout her work. She invited people to investigate movement for themselves and to discover the intelligence within their own organization.

Movement Nature Meant gives us an unusually complete expression of Ruthy’s approach. She speaks, demonstrates, and allows the movement itself to carry the argument. The film is presented here in four parts, each developing a different aspect of the same question: What becomes possible when movement is organized in closer cooperation with gravity, the supporting surface, and the patterns available to the whole person?

Part 1: The Wisdom of the Spiral

The first film introduces Ruthy’s larger theme and then turns to a familiar problem: How do you come from lying on the floor to sitting? Many people approach the action as a direct lift. The head and shoulders strain upward, the abdomen tightens, and the person confronts gravity as though success depends upon overcoming it.

Ruthy looks for another pathway. Lying on the back, she draws the legs inward and becomes more ball-like. The rounded shape makes rolling available. Instead of lifting the body vertically away from the floor, she changes its orientation and lets the rolling gather direction.

The transition also asks for something less visible. To continue the spiral, Ruthy turns toward the floor and briefly gives up facing the surrounding world. That willingness allows the movement to pass through the side and continue into sitting.

“The continuing spiral will raise you up fluently.”
— Ruthy Alon

The spiral does not defeat gravity. It works with gravity, the floor, and the body’s changing relationship to both. Sitting becomes the outcome of a coordinated path rather than a separate achievement imposed at the end.

Part 2: Folding, Lengthening, and Organic Rhythm

Part 2 begins with folding. Ruthy brings the head and knees toward one another while lying on her back, but the purpose is not to contract as far as possible. She moves slowly enough to discover whether the abdomen can remain soft, the breathing can continue, and the back can participate without unnecessary strain.

Folding and extending are often treated as opposite exercises. Ruthy presents them as complementary capacities. A back that can only arch is no freer than a back that can only round. What matters is the ability to change organization according to the movement that is needed.

When she turns onto her stomach, extension is explored through length. The movement does not have to be produced by shortening and compressing the back. Different arrangements of the arms, legs, and supporting surface allow her to find her own pathway into a longer curve.

The exploration then becomes rhythmic. Rocking and undulation distribute the movement through the body rather than concentrating it in one place. Ruthy’s attention shifts from the shape being made to the living process that makes the shape possible.

“You experience the whole of yourself expressed in this rhythmical movement, which is common to every living cell, to all organic life.”
— Ruthy Alon

This is Ruthy at her most poetic, yet the observation remains practical. A rhythm that reaches through the whole person feels different from one produced by a few isolated muscles. The movement becomes a conversation among the back, abdomen, limbs, breathing, and floor.

Part 3: Crawling, Primal Swimming, and the Resourceful Back

The third film turns toward crawling and what Ruthy calls primal swimming. These early forms of locomotion offer the back many relationships that are easy to lose once standing and walking become dominant.

On hands and knees, support continually transfers from one limb to another. The spine changes shape as an arm reaches, a knee advances, and the pelvis responds. No single part carries the entire task. The back becomes useful because it can adapt to the movement passing through it.

Lying on her stomach, Ruthy explores another pattern. A knee turns outward and bends before the leg is lifted. The order matters. When bending is completed first, lifting asks for less effort and can be supported by the pelvis and spine.

The knee is therefore doing more than moving the leg. Its path creates rotation through the pelvis, ribs, and back. What might appear to be a local leg movement becomes a form of whole-body undulation.

“Reminding yourself of forgotten interactions and configurations expands your movement potential and brings you closer to what nature intended you to be.”
— Ruthy Alon

Ruthy does not propose that adults should return permanently to crawling. She uses these older patterns to remind the nervous system of relationships it once knew well. The past becomes a resource for present movement.

Part 4: Sharing the Work and Reawakening Possibility

Part 4 continues with creeping, now emphasizing the distribution of work between the neck and torso. Ruthy begins with the foot and leg, allowing their pressure against the floor to initiate rotation through the pelvis and spine.

She then turns to the hand. In her evolutionary image, the hand once served as a front leg. Pressing the palm against the planet sends a response back through the arm. The shoulder blade approaches the spine, the ribs and torso join the movement, and the head turns because the larger structure beneath it is turning.

The neck no longer has to produce the entire action by itself. It can complete and refine a movement organized through the trunk. This is what Ruthy means by changing the distribution of work. Improvement in one area may depend upon inviting other areas to participate more fully.

The final portion opens into less habitual alternatives. Ruthy associates these exploratory movements with an earlier period of life, when movement was still being invented rather than merely repeated. Rejuvenation, in this context, means recovering the willingness to experiment.

“With your expanded movements, your excitement about life expands as well.”
— Ruthy Alon

The sentence captures something essential about Ruthy. She did not separate movement from the person who was moving. A larger repertoire could alter more than physical range; it could change the attitude with which a person met the next possibility.

Returning to Movement Nature Meant

Across the four films, Ruthy moves from the spiral of coming to sit, through folding and lengthening, into crawling, primal swimming, and creeping. Each exploration recovers a relationship: weight with the floor, the abdomen with the back, the knee with the spine, the hand with the torso, and the neck with the larger movement beneath it.

The phrase “movement nature meant” does not point to one correct posture or an ideal movement everyone should imitate. Ruthy is describing coordination refined through evolution and rediscovered through personal inquiry. The patterns are ancient, but the learning takes place now, within the person exploring them.

Ruthy’s particular gift was her ability to make these relationships imaginable. She could speak of the spiral raising you from the floor, the hand pressing into the planet, or movement carrying the rhythm of organic life. Her poetry did not take us away from practical movement. It brought us more deeply into it.

Sources and Related Reading

• What Is the Feldenkrais Method®?
• How to Do Awareness Through Movement® Lessons
• Rolling from Lying to Sitting and Standing

Accessibility note: Ruthy narrates each film, and English subtitles appear within the video image. The companions above identify the principal concepts and essential movement context but are not complete transcripts or substitutes for synchronized captions.

Source and rights note: The four videos are embedded from the BonesForLife YouTube channel. This page does not independently host, edit, or claim ownership of the films. Brief quotations are reproduced to identify and discuss the central idea of each installment.