What is Health?
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We deal here with health and not with disease. This is what Moshe Feldlin Christ told his students in his training program back in 1980. I believe that his definition of health is a big reason the Feldlin Christ method is so compelling for practitioners and for long-term students of the work. So what is health? Take a moment. What do you think is health? How would you define it?
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I'm your host, Jeffrey Schwinghammer. Welcome to the Expand Your Ability podcast. The purpose of this podcast is to help people expand their awareness, develop new skills, and pursue their goals. So in this episode, I will talk about Feldman Christ's take on what is health. Okay. So what is health? In 1980 and 1981 Moshe Feldman Christ led a training program.
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in Amherst, Massachusetts. In the final days of that first year of the training, he asked his students what they thought health was. He pointed to the dictionary as not being very helpful. He says in the dictionary, it's defined as an absence of illness. If you're not ill, that must mean you're healthy, right? It doesn't really give you an image of how to become more healthy.
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Okay, Feldenkrais said this in 1981, so maybe that's what the dictionary said then. Surely it must be updated today. What does the dictionary say today? Let's crack out the book. Okay, no, I actually went to the website. The Merriam-Webster website. Here for health it says, 1A, the condition of being sound in body, mind, or spirit. Especially freedom from physical disease or pain.
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2a. A condition in which someone or something is thriving or doing well. Then it offers another word, well-being. Okay, the first line, 1a, being sound in body, mind, and spirit. We can see that health relates to those three, but that doesn't really give us something to act upon. How do we become more healthy? How do we become more sound? The second part,
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freedom from disease. Yep, that's what Feldenkrais was pointing to. It's that absence of disease. The second line is a condition in which someone or something is thriving or doing well. And they connected that word well-being. This definition is maybe a little bit more helpful. Thriving brings us towards our goal that also includes growing, doing well.
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But there's still a lot of questions, like to whose standard of well? And isn't being well kind of like being healthy? Right? So the word well-being is defined as the state of being happy, healthy, or prosperous. Okay, nice, but it's a circular logic here. Being healthy is also having well-being, and well-being is also being healthy.
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One word a student called out was optimum functioning. Feldenkrais wasn't impressed with this answer. He said, because when you say optimum functioning, that means your best functioning. It's not too much, it's not too little. What a person can do, then most people can function to their optimum. All right, that particular phrase didn't do it. So what does Feldenkrais think about health?
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Well, he describes health on two levels. The first is the biological version of health. And I will quote him here. He says, it's the kind of organization of the mind or the brain, the entire self of the person that can take a shock. The shock that it can take without losing his ability to recover is a measure of his health. Okay. So this is about the shocks. We
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take the pressure and demands of your life that put you out of shape and then you recover your shape and then you can continue. Let's take a very simple example. Let's say you're walking and you trip and stumble. Your ability to catch your balance and then return to your activity of walking is something like health. I've seen kids trip and faceplant.
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then laugh and get up and run again. While they have the advantage of being very lightweight compared to adults, adults as they get older and older, tripping becomes a significant concern. To take a fall for some people could really wreck them. In this scenario, he's saying that if you wanted to measure your health, how big of a trip or a shock can you handle and recover from? Now, it's not just physical.
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I think it's also emotional too. Let's say you hear word of a loved one passing away. Does this take you to pieces completely or are you able to function and be supportive to others through the grieving process? Here's a big one. The pandemic was an absolute shock to all of us individually and collectively.
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I interviewed Feldenkrais practitioner Alice Boyd back in episode 7. She reported that doing the Feldenkrais method for some 8 years prior to the pandemic gave her the ability to adjust and cope with this new, incredibly difficult situation, far more gracefully than if the pandemic had struck before she had studied Feldenkrais.
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and reveal our true nature, our true capacity in where our cracks are. After you get crushed by the weight of a challenging circumstance, do you turn towards bitterness and resentment, or find another way forward?
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Feldenkrais in this talk doesn't use the word trauma, but I think this word fits in here. My guest from episode 17, Jenny Frank Doggett, said, Trauma that we don't metabolize gets stuck in our nervous system. We continue to protect ourselves even though we are way out beyond whatever that event was. Unresolved trauma are the shocks we've yet to recover from.
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We still maintain a compensation or a limp from that experience. A healthy person can bear challenges, bear responsibilities, can be responsive to emergency situations. They are flexible and capable in their ability to respond. A healthy person is reliable. They fall, but also get up. Let's pause a moment here.
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What are the shocks you've taken in your life? A loss of a job, a loved one? Have you lost your home? Has your ability to trust others been broken?
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And would you say you've recovered 100% from these shocks? I invite you to pause this podcast and explore these questions.
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Alright, so Feldenkrais offers a second definition, a second level of health. And for the people that really take to the Feldenkrais method, I wager this is what hooks them. So in this talk Moshe goes on to say, the next division of health is the one in which the person is capable of realizing around his environment, in his life, the kind of dream that he had
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when he was not wired in to not have dreams anymore. He's saying the ability to realize the kind of dreams we had in the past before we learn to not have dreams. I think this is the real gold of the work that continues to draw me back into it and for others too. So wired in in this context is this metaphor for how our brains map our experience, how
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our neurons wired together. This is essentially learning from life. And so we can learn ourselves away from our true nature through our experience, through whatever happens to us as we grow up. The shocks of life and our responses to them leave an impression on us. Our patterns of self-protection that we've adopted from our experience are maintained unconsciously.
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invisibly, and they take precedence in our nervous system. We are busy protecting ourselves as opposed to moving toward acting in a way that is truly ourselves. Perhaps you've lived in an environment that valued something, such as your ability to perform academically. And maybe that value wasn't so central to you, but you may do. That was what
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to meet that as best you could. And you ignored or overlooked something that was actually more valuable to you. In fitting in, there was something that was missed. The Felt and Christ work is about cleaning up the nervous system of outdated patterns of thinking, feeling, and moving, and bringing in neurological variability.
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here is the capacity to do many things and to choose between them so you can meet a great many challenges. And that variability is also for you to pursue something deeply meaningful to you. You might not yet even know what that deeply meaningful thing is. And that's fine, that's fine. That's part of the discovery process that the Feldenkrais Method can help you with.
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Okay, so to recap, for Feldenkrais, he defined health in two ways. Your ability to recover from shock, and your ability to realize your dreams. I hope this was helpful for you on your Feldenkrais journey. Let me know if you have any questions or feedback. And if you're interested to learn more about the benefits of the Feldenkrais method,
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I have a downloadable guide, the 9 Surprising Benefits of the Fallen Christ Method, you can find that in the show notes. I invite you to journal or have conversations with loved ones about the ideas in this podcast. This helps deepen our learning. Here is the question I'd like to leave with you today. What dream do you harbor within you? And if you're not sure, how might you find out?
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Thank you for your attention.
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