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Integration in Motion
An interview with Anat Baniel (HQP 1996)
by Raz Ingrasci (Edited by Shawn McAndrew)
 An
internationally known leader of the Feldenkrais Method®, Anat
is Founder of the Anat
Baniel Methodism. She has developed prevention and wellness programs
for the Tanglewood Music Center and the San Francisco Symphony and
has worked privately with musicians, athletes, and the general public.
She is also known for her work with children with developmental difficulties.
Anat is a member of the Hoffman Advisory Council.
Raz Ingrasci: What is the purpose of the Feldenkrais
Method?
Anat Baniel: The fundamental purpose of Feldenkrais’
method is to provide an opportunity for people to continue their
growth process and to become as fully human as possible. The core
purpose is to facilitate people
to be able to act effectively and according to their true desire
in their lives.
RI: How do you enter it?
AB: The way is two-fold. We use the kinesthetic
sense via movement as the primary language, the actual movement
with your body. You learn a large and varied vocabulary of different
movements. The learning of these movements comes with an intense
utilization of self-awareness. We use movement as an opportunity
for someone to get to know him or herself, and to get to full awareness
in that process, and in his or her life in general.
In this work, we understand that the human brain depends on awareness
as a means to acquire skills, to learn to function well. Movement
and awareness are combined to bring about greater freedom in movement,
greater ease in action and a way to feel better about one’s
self. The body feels better. With it comes a feeling of vitality,
of opportunity, of power, a freedom in thinking, becoming more human.
Dr. Feldenkrais was asked once, “Does this work make peoples’
bodies more flexible?” He said, “Yes, for sure you get
more flexible, but that’s just a bonus. What I’m after
is not flexible bodies. What I’m after is flexible minds.”
Then he thought a little longer and said, “What I’m really
after is to restore people to their human dignity.” Human dignity
is when humans know what they’re doing and have a say in what
they’re doing. And that’s what the work is about.
RI: As little children, we actually taught ourselves
how to crawl, roll over, sit up, walk, and jump. Feldenkrais shows
us that we forgot how we learned those physical skills. In Hoffman
we see that, as adults, we have forgotten how we learned our emotional
makeup. Until we remember how we learned, whether physically or
emotionally, we are unable to learn more.
AB: I agree with you that we forgot how we learned.
With babies and young children the learning process occurs spontaneously.
I don’t believe children learn the process they go through,
but it is available to them.
RI: It’s pre-intellectual.
AB: Absolutely. The brain is there to learn. What
happens, according to Dr. Feldenkrais and in my understanding, is
that around sexual maturation the interest shifts strongly into
social aspects of one’s life. That’s when the “organic,”
spontaneous growth process of childhood becomes inhibited in most
people due to social forces. One of the core characteristics of
a child’s learning, in terms of movement or emotions, is that
there is a continuous process of differentiation and integration.
In Feldenkrais, there is great investment in differentiating on
the feeling and sensation level and directing it toward movement.
In Hoffman, there is a differentiation between body, spirit, and
intellect, but also a huge investment in differentiating the emotions.
When I went to the Hoffman Process, even when I just got the questionnaire,
I knew you guys were on the right track because the very first thing
you do is engage people in a differentiation process that involves
hundreds of emotions and feelings.
RI: Humans have unwanted emotional material in
their lives that they cannot integrate. At Hoffman, we teach people
how to differentiate it, move through it and integrate the learning
into their lives. It seems to me that in Feldenkrais, people come
with unwanted physical problems. Is your learning process parallel
to ours?
AB: If someone says to you, “Raz, I have
a pain in my shoulder,” you might massage the shoulder and
try to give it range of motion. You’d focus on the shoulder
and it would help some, but often it does not work as well as we’d
like it to. But when I look at someone who has arm and shoulder
pain, I expand my picture. I say this shoulder does not live alone.
This shoulder lives in a body that has ribs, a spine, a neck, a
head, eyes, and a pelvis. I look at how that shoulder sits in the
context of the body. Without exception, I have found that there
isn’t enough differentiation between that shoulder and the
neck, the ribs and other parts of the body. I merely introduce new
possibilities very gently — turn the head one way, the shoulder
another way, feel what your pelvis is doing, and so on. After sufficient
differentiation has occurred then, spontaneously, there is the integration
of that shoulder. In Hoffman, there is a differentiation of emotions.
The moment the emotional aspect starts becoming differentiated,
then there’s something to integrate. For me, I see this as
a biological process.
RI: You have a reputation for producing extraordinary
changes in people whose bodies have been compromised through accident
or illness. You’re also very well known for helping people
of great physical prowess, like athletes or musicians.
AB: First of all, in Hoffman you have a lot of
highly functioning people who come to you. They’re already
successful in the world. So what do you do with a successful person?
You don’t have to have a problem to benefit. You just have
to have an internal feeling that you could do better.
I worked with a musician. He’s a top-notch piano player. He
already plays like a dream, so why does he seek me out? Because
when you’re an artist, you know whether it’s the way you
really want it or not. You know if it feels right or not. Even if
everyone is clapping and you get a lot of contracts, you know inside.
He wanted me to watch him play and see if I could make a difference
for him.
I was in his living room and I watched how he played. I saw that
there wasn’t enough representation of the pelvis, lower back,
and middle back in the playing. I said, “He plays and he doesn’t
know he has a pelvis.” The pelvis has the most powerful muscles
in the body attached to it. That means this guy is giving up on
so much of his power and trying to do it all with the arms and shoulders.
I worked on one side of him, his left side, which is not his dominant
side, so he could feel the difference. Then I said, “Go play
the same thing again.” He was stunned! He could feel so clearly
the ease and the control of the arm and the control of the musicality
— the expression of the music.
When we move our arms, our whole body — each part — has
to know what its job is. The whole body has to decide where it’s
going to be and what it’s going to do. You can’t just
move your arms and send everything somewhere else. In every movement
the whole body needs to be represented and integrated.
RI: One time you touched a certain vertebra in
my back and you asked me to move it. I didn’t know how so I
started moving my abdominal muscles, and you said “no, not
those muscles, just the muscles connected to this vertebra.”
You led me through a visualization so I could “see” the
vertebra moving. The vertebra moved. I didn’t know how I did
it, but in that moment, I differentiated that vertebra. It was a
surprise to me.
AB: Muscles and joints don’t move on their
own. The brain is in charge of that. You train the brain to become
increasingly refined and have more control over increasingly complex
movements and actions. I think that Hoffman does the same thing
with emotions. Let’s say anger, happiness, jealousy, and fear
are my only four emotions. I try to do my whole life with those
four emotions. I try to teach, have children, have love, buy groceries,
and everything with those four emotions. My life is going to be
a disaster. So, you go to Hoffman and first you get pre-Process
homework. Suddenly you are trying to figure yourself according to
100 criteria, not four. People look inside themselves to find all
those feelings and emotions. They go out of Hoffman much more differentiated
emotionally and integrated spiritually than when they entered.
RI: It seems to me that Hoffman complements Feldenkrais
work very strongly.
AB: Enormously. The whole process we see —
emotions-thought-movement-feeling — are all subject to the
same underlying biological characteristic. It’s a process,
not a thing. It’s something we generate; it’s something
we create all the time. When there is an interruption in movement,
it’s usually due to insufficient differentiation and integration.
I worked with a world-renowned conductor who had a problem in one
of his shoulders. The way he moved his poor shoulder — the
ribs were stiff, the lower back and pelvis didn’t participate
properly. He used too much power in certain muscles which created
inflammation. He said, “You know, when I’m on vacation
my shoulder doesn’t hurt.” I said, “Sure, because
on vacation you’re not using your arms to conduct an orchestra
for hundreds of hours a month. If you vacation, you don’t need
me. But if you want to continue conducting to an old age, you need
me. It depends on how you want to apply yourself in life.”
RI: So what you’re talking about is having
a self at the level of the body. So that we can fully live in our
bodies, express through our bodies, and the body is not separate
from the rest.
AB: Absolutely. I worked with a young woman who
had a stroke. The arm was a little paralyzed and the walking and
the balance were compromised. I gave her her first lesson. When
she got up, her arm moved better, she stood better, and she balanced
better. Do you think she said that? No. She said, “Thank you.
I feel whole for the first time since my stroke.”
Is it spiritual, is it emotional, is it the body? It’s the
“I.” It’s the integrated self. In my training, I
had someone saying, “You know, I lay in bed and I just feel
me. I felt me in a way I never felt me before.” It’s like
pieces of the self suddenly kick in — the leg, the knee, the
shoulder — but it’s not about the muscles, it’s about
YOU in that. ø
For more information about Anat’s work, trainings, seminars,
and private sessions,
please call 800/386-1441.
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