Robert Bowley Interviews Al Wadleigh About the Feldenkrais Method®

Article Summary

In this interview for the Qigong Effect Summit, Rob Bowley and Al Wadleigh discuss how the Feldenkrais Method® works with movement, attention, habit, and a person’s broader organization. Al describes how he encountered the work, distinguishes group lessons from private lessons, and explains why direct experience is important to understanding the Method.

An Interview Recovered After Several Years

I did this interview with Robert Bowley before the pandemic. Shortly afterward, I was finishing our house in New Mexico, getting ready to sell it, and preparing to move.

I lost track of the video and recently found it stashed away on another hard drive. So I did a little editing, added titles and time codes, and here it is.

Robert gave me permission to edit and use the video. In the conversation, he asks how I found the Feldenkrais Method, what happens in classes and private lessons, and how awareness can change the habits through which we move and act. We also discuss Moshe Feldenkrais, the relationship between movement and emotion, and the difference between describing this work and experiencing it directly.

Recording Details

• Program: Qigong Effect Summit
• Recording title: Rob Bowley Interviews Feldenkrais Practitioner Al Wadleigh
• Interviewer: Rob Bowley
• Guest: Al Wadleigh
• Published by: The Feldenkrais Store
• Publication date: February 22, 2023
• Runtime: 23 minutes, 45 seconds
• Format: Video interview
• Source: Watch the interview on YouTube

What Rob and I Discuss

Finding the Feldenkrais Method Through a Personal Problem

I first heard about the work during an NLP training in the 1980s, but I did not understand it then. Years later, severe back pain and spasms led me to private lessons with practitioner Jack Heggie. The changes I experienced were concrete enough that I had to readjust the seat and mirrors in my truck after one lesson. That experience gave me a practical measure of how much my organization had changed.

Classes and Private Lessons Work With Habits Differently

In a private Functional Integration® lesson, the practitioner moves the student and responds to the organization revealed through that movement. In an Awareness Through Movement® lesson, the teacher uses verbal directions to guide students through combinations of movement and attention. One approaches a person’s habits with help from the outside; the other gives the student a way to explore and expand those habits from within.

In both cases, we’re working with your habits—your preferred ways of moving and organizing yourself.—Al Wadleigh

Neither format is built around practicing one ideal routine until it becomes correct. Lessons vary because they investigate different functions and different relationships within movement. An alternative becomes useful when it is available spontaneously, without requiring a person to monitor every part of the action consciously.

Specific Problems Exist Within a Whole Person

When someone arrives with a shoulder, hip, or back problem, the painful area matters. It is also part of a larger pattern. A private lesson may work directly with the area, indirectly through related movements, or through the rest of the person’s organization. The choice depends upon what becomes apparent while watching and moving with that individual.

It really depends on the person.—Al Wadleigh

This is why two people with apparently similar complaints may receive very different lessons. The name of the problem does not supply enough information to determine how each person has organized around it.

Awareness Makes More of the Self Available

The interview returns several times to Moshe Feldenkrais’s idea that people move according to their self-image. When parts of that image are absent from awareness, those parts are less available to participate in movement. Lessons bring attention to sensations, relationships, and possibilities that habitual action normally leaves unnoticed.

The purpose is not to remain consciously preoccupied with movement. Attention is used during the learning process, and what has been learned can then recede into the background and become available as part of ordinary action.

Movement, Emotion, and Appropriate Limits

Rob asks whether a movement lesson can resolve emotional issues. I answer cautiously: some habits associated with emotional or physical experiences may change, but I would not claim that every trauma or emotional difficulty will resolve through lessons. Counseling or other appropriate professional support can also be valuable.

The useful observation is that emotional states have physical expressions. Anxiety, anger, happiness, and joy involve recognizable changes in muscular activity, posture, breathing, and movement. Exploring movement may therefore affect how a person senses and organizes an emotional pattern, without making a movement lesson a universal treatment for psychological problems.

Description Has Limits

Near the end, Rob asks for a simple way for viewers to experience the work. I recommend a free introductory ebook and lesson for the neck, shoulders, and upper back, as well as recorded lessons for people who prefer audio guidance.

The subjective experience of the Method is a whole other experience.—Al Wadleigh

We can discuss attention, habit, posture, and self-image in words. A lesson supplies the sensory experience that gives those explanations their meaning.

Experience an Introductory Lesson

The interview does not contain a guided movement sequence. Instead, I refer viewers to a free ebook containing an introductory lesson for the neck and shoulders. Follow the written preparation and lesson directions, move within your comfort, and stop or rest whenever you need to.

Download the free ebook and introductory lesson

You can also explore online classes and the individual audio lessons available through The Feldenkrais Store.

Edited Transcript

Editorial note: This transcript was prepared from the recording and its automatic captions. It has been edited for punctuation, sentence boundaries, repeated filler, and unmistakable recognition errors. Speaker meaning, qualifications, conversational language, and substantive examples have been preserved. It is a readable edited transcript, not a verbatim record of every sound.

How I Got Into the Feldenkrais Method

Rob Bowley: Welcome to the Qigong Summit. It’s great to have you here.

Al Wadleigh: Thank you, Robert. Good to be here.

Rob: I’ve been asking all the speakers and experts on this summit a little about their background and how they got into their work—in your case, the Feldenkrais Method.

Al: I started learning about the Feldenkrais Method when I was in my NLP training back in the early to mid-1980s. We had a couple of Feldenkrais® practitioners taking the NLP trainings, so that was my first introduction to it. I didn’t really understand it at the time.

One of those gentlemen, Jack Heggie, later gave me private lessons. In my early thirties, I had developed severe back pain. I was having back spasms and difficulty breathing. Like many people, I found my way to the Method because I was in pain and having difficulties.

Over the course of about five to seven private lessons with him, I had a remarkable change. I remember going out to my truck after one lesson and having to change my seat and rearview mirrors. My organization had changed in such a dramatic way that my truck didn’t fit me anymore. I had to adjust the truck, and I never put it back. I never readjusted the mirrors or changed the seat again.

That was a nice metric for how change can take place with the Feldenkrais Method. It wasn’t something I had to practice consciously. The change became automatic, and I got to keep it. That was how I initially got into the work.

What made me want to become a practitioner came later. At the time, I was publishing audio programs, which I still do. After working with Jack in private lessons, I suggested that we put some of his work on audio. We published several programs, including Healthy Back, Total Body Vision, Total Body Golf, and Running with the Whole Body. They are available on my website, AchievingExcellence.com.

Then Jack invited me to videotape a workshop he was giving for practitioners called Primary Forms of Functional Integration. Functional Integration is the private, hands-on work—the one-on-one lessons. Receiving a lesson had seemed to me like a lot of random poking, pushing, and pulling. At the workshop, I saw that it was a well-organized, carefully considered use of movement.

I could see that after he worked with someone, the person sat differently and moved differently. It blew my mind. I had an opportunity to play a little. A friend at the workshop said, “Come on over, Al.” Jack showed me some things, and I got to try them.

I went home that night and said to my wife, “Sit on the floor and let me try this with you.” I moved her around a little, and she felt better. For much of the next month, anybody I ran into heard, “Get on the floor. Let me try this with you.” I would move the person around a little, and almost everybody had a positive reaction. That was the tipping point that got me interested in joining a training.

It seemed as if the universe organized itself to get me there. My wife said, “You’ve got to go.” My parents offered to help pay for it. A friend who lived two blocks from the training center invited me to stay in his basement. For the next four years, I had a place to stay and a great deal of support. I received an excellent training with Elizabeth Beringer and Feldenkrais Resources and never looked back. It was a fundamental experience, and it is one for which I will always be grateful.

Classes and Private Lessons

Rob: The interesting thing is that it isn’t something you do consciously. In a class, as opposed to one-on-one work, you are doing the movement yourself. In a one-to-one lesson, someone else helps you do the movement.

Al: Yes. In both cases, we work with habits—your preferred ways of moving and organizing yourself. Some habits facilitate your abilities, while others contribute to your problems. We want to change those habits.

In a private lesson, I move you. I can sense your habits, interact with them, and modify them. It is as though you are inside your box while I am outside helping to change it.

In a class, which we call Awareness Through Movement, I guide you through a series of movements combined with awareness. I ask you to try combinations that are often strange and unusual. By doing that, you expand your habits—your box—from the inside out.

I am not giving you A, B, C, and D and telling you to practice the same routine. We don’t do the same routine every time. Each lesson is different and addresses a different aspect of functioning or improves a different ability. We bring habits into conscious awareness, work and interact with them, and then allow them to return outside conscious awareness. They become second nature, so you don’t have to practice or think about them. The changes are spontaneously available to you. That is one of the beauties of the Feldenkrais work.

Working Specifically and Holistically

Rob: Do you work with people who have specific problems? Suppose someone has a shoulder or hip problem. Would you look at that specifically through a series of movements, or would you still work holistically through the whole body?

Al: The work is holistic, and I also target particular areas depending upon how the problem presents itself.

If I am working with someone in a private lesson, I may watch the person walk or sit. I talk with them, ask them to do some movements, or have them lie on the table so I can begin moving them. I start to feel how that person’s organization is influencing the issue they are having.

Depending upon what I sense and how the person responds, I may work with the area directly or very indirectly. I might work with everything around it so that the rest of the organization improves, and then the problematic area improves. My response is nuanced according to the individual person.

About Moshe Feldenkrais

Rob: Let’s go back and understand a little more about the origins of the Feldenkrais Method. It was originated by Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais.

Al: He was an Israeli physicist, martial artist, and engineer. Martial arts were a significant part of his development from adolescence onward. He immigrated from Russia to Palestine at the age of fourteen and later put himself through school.

Even as a young man, he approached martial arts in a distinctive way. I have heard a story about him arranging for a friend with a camera to photograph another friend being startled as he came through a doorway. Moshe was interested in the person’s spontaneous response. He asked how that second-nature reaction could be modified into a more useful defensive technique. That sounds like what I described earlier: taking a habitual response and helping it become something better.

As a young man, he was also interested in the relationship between mind and body. In his early twenties, he translated a work by Émile Coué, an early figure in autosuggestion, into Hebrew and added chapters relating the ideas to somatic applications. This was later published in English as Thinking and Doing.

He went on to study judo after moving to France and worked with Jigoro Kano. He was among the first Westerners to earn a black belt in judo. You can see in his writings how martial arts provided a foundation for his thinking about movement.

When you reach his later martial arts book, Higher Judo, you can see an overlap with the ideas he was developing in Body and Mature Behaviour. One body of work was moving toward the other—from a defensive art toward a broader learning system.

Rob: Fascinating.

The Feldenkrais Method and the Alexander Technique

Rob: How does it differ from the Alexander Technique? With the Alexander Technique, you go to someone who helps you understand the technique through simple movements and prompting. How does that differ from the Feldenkrais Method?

Al: I am not an expert on the Alexander Technique. My understanding is that it works a great deal through the relationship of the head and neck to facilitate improved use and posture.

The Feldenkrais Method has a very broad range of movements and functions with which it works. Moshe Feldenkrais left us literally thousands of lessons to study. They are different from one another and address different aspects of functioning, including different ways of using attention to interact with yourself and improve your abilities. I see it as a broad and in-depth system, with respect to people who practice the Alexander Technique.

How Mind and Body Work Together

Rob: I am interested in the way the mind and body work together in the Feldenkrais Method.

Al: That is one of my favorite aspects of the work. It is not solely about movement. It also concerns how you use attention to interact with yourself and how changes in movement and attention influence one another.

During a lesson, you are actively aware because I am guiding you to do a particular movement and sense what you are doing. I may ask you to attend to one part of yourself, notice a relationship, or make variations that challenge your customary thinking.

If you simply read the directions for a lesson in Awareness Through Movement and performed the movements without attending to the sensory questions, you might still benefit. When you bring attention into the process, however, you encounter another level of the work. I think one aspect of Moshe’s brilliance was bringing those systems together.

Body Awareness and Habit

Rob: How does increasing body awareness help in changing your habits?

Al: Feldenkrais often said that we move according to our self-image. If parts of our self-image are absent—if we don’t sense them—they are less available to participate in movement.

In a way, all Feldenkrais lessons address this idea of improving the self-image by becoming more fully aware of movement and sensation. More of you can then participate in what you do. Movement can become more graceful, lighter, easier, and sometimes more powerful while using less unnecessary effort. This may resolve conflicts among habits that were not working together in the attempt to achieve a goal.

Socialization and the Internal Map

Rob: As we grow from childhood into adulthood, conditioning is imposed from outside. We interpret it in the moment, and that is how we build an internal map. Many people carry that map with them until it becomes who they think they are.

Al: You have addressed some of the key topics in the opening chapters of Moshe’s book Awareness Through Movement. We develop naturally for a while, and then we begin conforming to social rules and guidelines. We go to school and learn to inhibit ourselves—to sit still, be good boys and girls, and achieve. These expectations become layered onto our earlier development.

People eventually arrive at an idea of who they are. Moshe spoke of the work as helping restore human dignity and supporting maturation—helping a person become more fully human and mature.

Do Feldenkrais Lessons Resolve Emotional Issues?

Rob: It seems that if someone had an emotional problem rooted in a past experience, perhaps the Feldenkrais Method could approach it indirectly without requiring the person to reengage with everything from the past.

Al: To a degree. I would not say that every emotional trauma or issue will resolve through lessons. Some habits formed in response to trauma or other early challenges—like habits formed after a physical trauma—may change. It can also be good to receive counseling and have emotional and psychological support.

The work addresses emotion in an interesting way. Moshe wrote in Body and Mature Behaviour that without movement or muscular contraction, there is no expression of emotion. The feelings we have and the expression of those feelings involve subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, muscular contractions. Anxiety, anger, happiness, and joy have recognizable postures and movements associated with them.

He also discussed how emotions help shape posture because they are experienced through time and across many contexts. Muscular contractions associated with them can begin to influence how we organize ourselves.

As a young man, I experienced a great deal of anxiety. My posture was rounded forward, and my neck extended in front of me. I did not know what to do about it. As I did Feldenkrais lessons, that organization began to change. The patterns associated with my anxiety also began to change, and I became better able to sense and work with them.

Rob: In today’s world, we are bombarded with information. Many people sit at a desk from nine to five or longer. By the end of the day, even without a particular emotional problem, they may feel wired and stressed and find that their bodies are tight. I imagine the Feldenkrais Method could be a helpful way of releasing that.

Al: Yes. When you are working at a desk and interacting with a computer for six, eight, or ten hours, particular ways of sitting, moving, organizing, and thinking are repeated. That repetition has an impact. Your nervous system anticipates doing the same thing again, and those habits become more established.

Feldenkrais lessons can complement that situation by helping you reset and return to a more balanced, neutral place from which you can move. I would add Moshe’s definition of posture: the ability to move in any direction without preparation.

Rob: I can see where that comes from in the martial arts.

Al: Exactly. He sometimes used the word “acture” because he found “posture” too static. People may think posture is a position they must hold rigidly. “Acture” assumes action, and in some way we are always moving.

How to Get a Direct Experience

Rob: Is there a simple practice you could share that listeners could try after the interview, just to give them a taste of the work?

Al: The easiest thing would be the free ebook I wrote and published. People can sign up for my email list and download it. It contains a simple lesson addressing tension in the neck, shoulders, and upper back. It also introduces fundamental ideas about how we approach a lesson and what a Feldenkrais lesson is.

That would be the simplest way for someone to have a direct experience.

Rob: We’ll put the link under the interview so people can explore that.

Al: Great. If people prefer to be guided through a lesson, I have individual lessons on my website. They can read the descriptions and choose one. That is another way to experience the Method and find out what a lesson is like and how it feels. We have talked about it objectively, but the subjective experience is different.

Final Thoughts

Rob: Unfortunately, we are coming to the end of our conversation. Is there one thing you would like listeners to take away?

Al: The power and effectiveness of this work are difficult to describe in words. The subjective experience can open your eyes and mind and make more freedom available in how you act.

Many people come to the work because they have pain or another difficulty. It can be helpful with those difficulties. Beyond that, it offers tools for improving how a person functions and for becoming more mature and complete.

Rob: Thank you, Al, for a fantastic conversation. I know our listeners will get a great deal from it.

Al: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I love talking about this work. It is a significant part of my life, and it continues to fascinate me even after twenty years.

Rob: Here’s to another twenty years.

Al: Let’s hope for that.

Rob: Thank you again. That’s it for today, but stay tuned for another interview tomorrow.

A Direct Experience Gives the Explanation Meaning

This conversation ranges across biography, history, movement, emotion, and habit, but it repeatedly returns to one point: the Feldenkrais Method is difficult to understand through description alone. The ideas become clearer when a person can sense how attention and movement interact during a lesson. That is why Rob’s final question about how to begin is more than a promotional conclusion. It returns us to the direct experience that first changed the position of my seat and mirrors after a lesson with Jack Heggie.