Expand Your Ability: Embodiment, Somatics, and Feldenkrais

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What is it that I really seek for myself? So what is it to have a sense of autonomy or a sense of personal composure, a sense of being complete in myself and in such a way that I can enjoy the moment of being with myself rather than being tied to what I produce as a basis for my wellbeing. That's a paradigm shift. And that's so inherent within the very nature of the awareness through movement process, the Felder Christ process.

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which is to give a person a profoundly contrasting experience to their usual perception of themselves. That is the voice of Jeff Haller, a 40-year veteran Feldenkrais practitioner and trainer of other practitioners. He is my guest this week. We explore the topic of what it means to transcend your history. We explore why Jeff Haller chose the Feldenkrais method compared to so many other fields he was capable in, including

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Aikido, psychotherapy, and basketball coaching. We explore how Feldenkrais takes the field of psychotherapy and turns it on its head, and the lightness of the pure state of experience after a lesson when our compulsive tensions are set aside, and much, much more. My name is Jeffrey Schwinghammer, and welcome to the Expand Your Ability podcast. This show explores what it means to live and mature as human beings in a complex world.

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My guest today, Jeff Haller, is a Feldenkrais practitioner. Jeff Haller studied directly with Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais, the founder of the Feldenkrais Method. He graduated from his professional training program in 1983. Jeff's primary focus is training others to become Feldenkrais practitioners. He's been actively engaged in this work for 40 years. It dawned on me recently that Jeff has been doing this longer than I've been alive.

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He's been developing his skills for 40 years and it's immediately evident when working one on one with him. I've had the privilege of studying under Jeff Haller in my training program. He's generous and a real visionary. He held a workshop for practitioners in Minneapolis, Minnesota that I attended recently. We recorded this interview there. One quick thing, if you find these episodes helpful, please subscribe and consider leaving a 5 star review.

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Any little bit helps a ton. Thank you so much. All right, on to the interview. Welcome, Jeff Haller. Thank you. Second take here. Yeah, thank you for joining me for this interview. Since I'm in Minneapolis. Yes. Yeah, so you're here for a workshop and I had another opportunity here to interview you in a different context here for the podcast as opposed for the film.

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And so you have talked about many things during this workshop. And I wanted to start in one place, more autobiographical, where you talked about you had many occupational paths in front of you when you were younger. Yes. And what was interesting to me was you chose the path, the Feldenkrais method. Yes. Because you found in this method,

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compared to the other methods, Yes. that it helps people transcend their history. Yes, that's certainly a part of it. Yeah. At least that was the phrase you had used earlier in the workshop that caught my ear. And I was curious if you would take us through some of those paths that were in front of you and what you appreciated.

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And what you found in the Fallen Christ Method, like, help clarify that, what you noticed about transcending your history. Well, that's interesting because I played basketball in college, I played basketball at Oregon State University. And then I ended up going to Mexico following and I got a master's degree in intercultural education.

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And I came back to the States after the master's degree and I actually was a high school teacher for a period of time. So I had a career path. And my fifth year at Oregon State was in the education department with student teaching. So I had my first four years, I registered for a year at Oregon State. And so my fifth year was dedicated to getting my teaching hours for my teaching certificates. So I had teaching. And then when I was a high school teacher, I was a high school basketball coach.

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So I had the career path of teaching and basketball coaching. And then I had the opportunity to help put on a workshop in Corvallis that invited some of the main people from Esalen Institute at the time. This would have been in the very early 70s. It would have been like 74, 75 that we put on this workshop.

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And during that workshop, I had a chance to watch George Leonard, who wrote a book. He wrote a book that I'd studied when I was studying education at Oregon State called Education and Ecstasy. And, but he also wrote a book called The Ultimate Athlete. And in that book is a description of a man named Richard Heckler, his black belt test for Aikido. And so I had a chance during the weekend in Corvallis, I had a chance to observe George give a

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Aikido demonstration. And I turned in my resignation to the high school the next day because I was going to go to the Bay Area and study Aikido. And the day following that, I got a brochure for the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology which had Felton Christ Method, Aikido, and then all the studies in order to become a licensed psychotherapist.

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a degree in psychology that could have led towards becoming a psychotherapist. So when I was at Oregon State, excuse me, when I was at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, then there it was. When I was in Mexico, I'd studied yoga and I could have gone on to become a yoga teacher. I'd had a background in Tai Chi by that point in time. I was working on a black belt in Aikido. I could have become an Aikido teacher, a Tai Chi teacher, a yoga teacher.

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I had a background in massage therapy and at the school I took courses in Jinxingdo so I had the acupressure possibilities for working. I knew of the work of chiropractic and I knew of the work of physical therapy. I knew the work of a therapist or a psychotherapist. All those paths were open to me. I could have pursued any one of them.

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But the Feldenkrais method I found to be the actual keystone in one sense that holds all of that up. Because the very basis of the Feldenkrais method is that I believe that anybody who really understands the underlying principles that drive the Feldenkrais method could take the Feldenkrais ideas and then use them to transform any of the other practices.

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And so I oftentimes, I'll say to people, if I could help you with your way that you work with your breath, and it would help you with your yoga, would you be interested? If I could help you organize yourself through your skeleton in such a way that it would improve your Tai Chi, would you be interested? So can I take a person to the very foundational...

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elements of movement and of experience that would translate into having a better basis for any practice that you would practice. And I think I can. I think that's inherent in Moshe's work. Now you asked another question though.

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the method can help you transcend your story. And the way that I think about that is very, very simple. I think Moshe turned psychotherapy upside down on its head. In other words, so generally, if you're in a psychotherapeutic setting, the situation this is a generality, but it's often about you reflecting about something in your past.

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And from that reflection of the past, you come to realize something within yourself. And the question is whether as a result of that, you actually learn new behavior or you develop coping or adaptive mechanisms. But it's always some view of myself into my story.

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Feldenkrais... Some view of yourself into your story, because you're reflecting on your story. Right. Feldenkrais took this completely the other way. For example, many of the people that he first worked with early on in Israel, when Palestine just converted to Israel, became the nation of Israel, and he came back from England where he was to...

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start his practice to start his work in Israel, many of the people that he first worked with when he was developing awareness through movement were survivors from the camps. And why would you take those people back into the story? Where would you take them? They've already been dehumanized to the degree that they have been. They've been...

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disenfranchised and marginalized to the extreme. So there's no reason that you're going to further any trauma they're already experiencing. So how would you build for them every single time that you have a session with them, you do something that builds their way of being functional in the world of gravity. So every awareness through movement lesson builds some element of function.

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In other words, it begins to build and refine from the point you are and you take the way that you've developed yourself in your history, the way that you've developed your experience in gravity, the way that you developed yourself relative to your family, the way that you developed yourself relative to society, relative to the culture, relative to every single moment that your nervous system has been involved in the environment, which is always your nervous system is never not a part of the environment.

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So there you are. It's out of that process that you begin to develop a concept of yourself, self-concept. It's out of that you develop your self-image. It's out of that that you develop your compensations and your self-protections and your necessity for self-preservation. It's out of that that you do whatever you need to to give yourself a sense of safety. It's out of that that you develop whatever process that you do that gives you a sense of meaning.

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Right? So all of those processes become inherent in what we call, so to speak, a normally developed human being. Moshe said, so now we take you where you are, this moment, where you are as a being. We don't need to go back and look. That matrix of behavior, all that comprehensive tapestry of your life experience is already existing within you. How can we use that as a resource?

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and then take you a step further in your functional ability. Help you find a way that you can support yourself in gravity so that you have a sense of grace and ease within yourself. And as soon as you're more graceful within yourself and more functional within yourself, how does that affect your sense of well-being? How does that... And so, working with the people that were survivors, every time they came to awareness through movement session...

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they experienced some way of inhabiting their life in a more functional way. So their nervous system began to develop for themselves a much more refined story than the story that they came from, until many of them became very, very fit, very, very whole, very, very complete within themselves. They began, they...

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That whole story became a part of a wisdom tradition. They became part of their wisdom that they could then bring forward and, you know, they're advocates for a particular quality of life. Yeah. So we have to appreciate that. Yeah. So when you say story, we're talking about a person's actual life experiences Right. and their own perceptions.

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of those life experiences. And the way that they maintain that ongoing internal repetition of that. Right, where they find themselves doing the same behavior over and over again. And they must. They must. So...

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And function is kind of simply verbs, walking, running, lifting, moving, interacting with other people. It's just functioning in the world. So how is it that we can look at a person's functioning and that is different, separate from their story? How is it that function informs story and story informs function?

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So Moshe wrote a book that came out in 1949 called Body Immature Behavior and in that he described, he defined neurosis as a person living compulsively out of their habit and even though they're consciously aware of the habit they can't do anything about it. And he said, he called that

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So if I am someone who's unfulfilled in some way, I'm anxious, or I have some significant measure of insecurity about myself, then my muscular habit is going to be to defend me in the large measure from what I don't want to experience. I don't want to feel that I'm anxious. So how do you keep yourself from feeling anxiety?

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You don't just take a deep breath and open your vision and open your heart and go, God, this is great. I love being anxious.

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give me some more anxiety. I just can't wait to have that experience. No. Quite the opposite. Quite the opposite. Often getting smaller. You're getting smaller. So that your muscular habit is going to be... Then you internalize it and you become more and more used to it. It becomes the preference for yourself. That becomes your muscular habit. That becomes your internal sense of preference and the way that you define yourself in the world. In the way that you act, move. It doesn't make any difference. Even at play you maintain...

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that level of unnecessary, unwanted tension within yourself. It's invisible. Completely invisible. And it's so internalized that you think it's you. Right, we're so associated with that way of moving, that way of protecting ourselves that it's, this is my personality in some sense. This is me. I am and my mind and my limbic system will do everything it can to continue to repeat that because that's what's known as safe.

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That's what it knows in order to have a sense of I Am.

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It's, that's the tough place where we choose the familiar, even if it's very much uncomfortable. Even if it's killing us. I mean, we'll maintain, we'll maintain, we'll seek the familiar. Say, for example, you and I have a, say we have a nice experience and for a moment we move out of the gravitational field of all the angst and stress and the issues that plague us and we find ourselves.

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in a place where we're open, free, happy, associated to experiences of simple joy. And the entire world that we're from, all the people that support us, know us, love us, that don't want to go on our journey with us, they're going to do everything they can to pull us back into their world of what's safe, because we become unsafe for them.

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We become a threat to them in some sense. Our happiness is not something they really seek for us because it'll mean that they would have to change and their system doesn't want to change. So how long is it we're going to be able to stand in that new orbit above the gravitational field? Everything in life in our own historic conditioning is going to want to pull us back to what is known and safe. So then the question is, how do we continue to expand the orbit?

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instead of always being pulled back to, into the orbit of what is so deeply conditioned, so deeply known, so profoundly internalized that it's who we think we are. And if we're outside of it, it's like that's not safe. It's not safe for me to be happy. I want to stay on that point there of that metaphor. So in the Felton Christ Method...

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we look at our relationship with gravity. How are we being supported by the ground? And then that becomes a metaphor for all the ways in which that gravitational pull of our old habits draws back in. There's a sort of self-assertion that all of our habits have that self-propagate.

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Yes. And that's that sinking back into what we know, and that's like gravity pulling us back in. Yeah, just like, I mean, we just become our own gravitational field. Right. And so then the question is, is how do we transcend our own historic way that we know ourselves, even though that we know it's not the, I mean, you talk to people and you really take the time with them and say, okay, so.

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in your life, in your lifespan trajectory, what would you most like for yourself? And almost every person, unless they're just an adrenaline junkie, I had one guy say, well, I want to climb Mount Rainier one more time. Yeah. But for the most part, people recognize that they would like to come have a particular sense of being able to be

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at ease with them, have a sense of composure, a sense of being that they don't want to be driven to excel, they don't need to be identified with how much money they make. I mean, that ultimately is the midlife crisis, isn't it, when a person has made their living and they're looking at the trajectory, okay, I'm going to play, I'm going to go, I'm going to retire, I'm going to do a thousand loops around the golf course.

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and drink with my buddies at some point in time. Is that all? Is that what my life is for? What is it that I really seek for myself? So what is it to have a sense of autonomy or a sense of personal composure, a sense of being complete in myself and in such a way that I can enjoy the moment of being with myself rather than being tied to what I produce as a basis for my well-being? That's a paradigm shift.

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And that's so inherent within the very nature of the awareness of the movement process, the Felder Christ process, which is to give a person a profoundly contrasting experience to their usual perception of themselves.

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So if I come in, I just gave a lesson to a person who expressed a measure of anxiety about a healthcare concern that they have. And so in that lesson that I just gave, at the end of the lesson, the person was not embedded in the anxiety. They had been into a different situation. There's, they as a human being had the ability to observe themselves in the way that they historically.

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maintained a tension in themselves. And as a result of the lesson, that tension was able to decontract, de-tonify because I provided support for them in ways that their system could find a support that they didn't know that it could have. And as a result of that, the person was in a state that wasn't anxious. He wasn't experiencing the same measure.

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of the story that his mind produces that produces the emotional mobius loop of his mind creating the emotions, the emotions creating the mind play and the tension that goes on and the underlying fear that's underneath all that and what you have to do to keep yourself from feeling what you don't want to feel. And what is it when a person... People meditate for that for years to find a measure.

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calm, quiet, collected peace in themselves. And in this lesson, in 45 minutes, if you looked at the person, the person was... There's just a demeanor of, ah. And you could look and you could see the person. You didn't see all this particular tone that's anxious that you see in people.

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There's a person who's just standing there in front of you and he's, in a sense, naked to himself. He's naked to everyone else. It's absolutely lovely to be with a person who's not having to be in the place of defending themselves. Now, how long before the gravitational field of all the defenses and all the story comes on? That's up to him. The question is...

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How can he continue to mature himself so that being collected and whole within himself is of greater value than what he is known for and what he produces?

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But, as my friend Dennis Leary, who was a trainer in the fellow creates method, in these moments we create a moment of unadorned worldly engagement, where the person isn't adorned with their historic engagement, all the muscular habit that they know themselves by.

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and for a moment they have the opportunity to experience themselves in a very, very pure way. And that pure way actually defies the gravitational field. The skeleton, the nervous system organizes the skeleton so that the skeleton can provide the clearest support in the gravitational field to cancel the effect of gravity. And a person has a chance to move through space with a sense of grace and ease.

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particular kind of regal quality that's not burdened by...

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The instability of how we move in the gravitational field by the heaviness that we carry in our life. We're not pulled into the ground. We're like... 375 million years ago, tetrapods started coming on the Earth. They didn't do push-ups to get their mass, their body mass, off their feet. Their nervous system developed in such a way to elicit a response within their musculature to lift them.

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And when you have a person in a pure state, they just experience themselves being lifted into the field of gravity to cancel the force of gravity. And there's a particular quality of just simpleness, ease, elegance. Right. So when you elicit that and the person finds that clarity of support through their skeleton,

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Their musculature is no longer acting in a habitual way and no longer feeding back into the nervous system, into the thinking, into the feelings. Right. It's not just that we feel away and then we move away. We move and that feeds back into the system, a sort of feeling, a sort of thinking. And that is story. Right. So they're not, for that moment, they're not in the habit, the unconscious habit.

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the compulsive behavior. Compulsion means you only have one way to do things. So you're in a much more open system. You're in a state that's significantly more open, and you're open to possibilities. You have the...you know, the part of you that wants to protect you is your limbic system. But you have a forebrain. It's interested in curiosity, imagination, spontaneity. It's interested in making distinctions. It's interested in something novel. It's

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to be awake and expressive. And so you open yourself to possibility rather than to habit. And the limbic system, the part of the way that your mind has been conditioned in such a way that your mind doesn't really work for you. It's freaks! That's not me! And it's not very long before your whole system tries to pull you back into what's habitually

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known because that's what's known and safe. But if this other sense of autonomy becomes more and more intact within you, then this other voice of hysteria or anxiety, all these other voices that you have, you find yourself... they don't go away. You don't want your mind to be damaged. You don't want to have a lobotomy.

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If you don't want your brain to be damaged, any kind of damage to the brain really affects the ability for the brain to produce itself. So we learn to keep a calm, collected quality with ourselves in relationship to a very, very busy world. In this point in time, which we're living, we become more and more chaotic. We're living in greater chaos. So a definition that Moshe...

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might give about health, he originally said, he said health is the ability to live your unavowed dreams. That means you have the resources within yourself to bring forward that which you most, most wanted yourself to bring it forward into life. But he might also agree with me when I say that a healthy person is a person who is able to meet chaos in such a way that they can thrive.

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They have the resources to meet chaos and not be overwhelmed by the conditions that they're living in. That means they're also not overwhelmed by what their mind is going to produce. Father Christ was very clever. He said, thinking that does not lead to a change of action is nothing other than celebration. If we want our minds to be effective, then our thinking has to lead to a new way of acting.

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And to do that, to transcend our history, is not a one and done event. It's a practice. It's a coming back and discovering again and again the way to... Yeah, but not to discover again and again. To have every discovery lead to an expanding matrix of possibilities. A neurological system that has greater and greater variability, that has many, many continuing growing...

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pathways of possibilities from which to meet, to meet all the vagaries of life. Not to just keep coming back to and finding something, it's that the nervous system is meant to continue its own evolution, so long as we don't keep having to be in the place where we're defending our internalized history.

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to continually be explorers of our own experience. Exactly. And then this work, I mean, the practice of awareness of movement is a practice that once you understand the process of awareness of movement, then the process can be, the process of living as a novel way, it doesn't make any difference what you're doing.

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That's why the work is so elemental to every other practice.

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That's the underlying thing because this work studied to create the conditions by which a person can learn to function in a higher way. And then once you understand the principles, then go practice your Tai Chi, your yoga, or your Pilates because you know how to be inside yourself in the investigation so that the habit of the action that you do that is historically...

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difficult for you. You find a new way in a new way in a new way so your practice continues to grow you rather than have to keep you keep you informed in the historic way that keeps repeating the cycle of yourself.

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I think that's a great place to leave it for today. There you go. That was a great way to end it. Yeah, thank you, Jeff. Where can people learn more about you? Jeff at InsideMoves.org. Yeah, okay, so they email you directly? Yeah, they can email me directly, yeah. Awesome.

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I think my website really needs to be rebuilt, but it hasn't yet. I've said it for years, but anyway, it's insidemoves.org. Wonderful. Thank you so much for sitting down with me. This was wonderful. Oh, thank you. That was just a 30-minute interview, and we covered a lot of ground. Having a conversation with Jeff Holler is a bit like drinking from a fire hose.

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he is distilling his 40 years of experience into very concise statements. And so part of my dream, part of my desire is to unpack those ideas, to make this podcast a resource for people to understand these ideas. So if you would please send me an email to...

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Jeffrey at expandyourability.com and let me know what you're curious about. What did you hear in this conversation that you want to understand more of? Is it something about the nervous system? Is it something about our compulsive patterns or those tetrapods that he mentioned? What are we talking about when we're talking about tetrapods? And they're not doing push-ups. So please let me know what you're interested in.

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Because having conversations with others about what we're learning is so helpful to our learning process, I invite you to go to your friends and family and talk about these ideas. Do these ideas resonate with your life experience or theirs? The question I would like to leave with you today is, if you were to be able to transcend your history, what would that mean for you? What would that feel like?

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I have a free guide on the 9 Surprising Benefits of the Feldenkrais Method, and you can find that in my show notes. It's also an invitation to join my newsletter, where you'll hear about episodes as they're released, as well as updates on the Feldenkrais documentary, and ways to work with me. Thank you for your attention.