Bodywork as systemic and inter-enactive competence: participatory process management in Feldenkrais® Method and Zen Shiatsu

Abstract

Feldenkrais and Shiatsu enable somatic learning through continuous tactile coupling, a real-time interpersonal dynamic unfolding in a safe dyadic sphere. The first part of our micro-ethnographic study draws on process vignettes and subjective theories to demonstrate how bodywork is infused with systemic sensitivities and awareness for non-linear process management. Expressed in dynamic systems parlance, both disciplines foster metastability, adaptivity, and self-organization in the client's somato-personal system by progressively reconfiguring systemic dispositions, i.e., an attractor landscape. Doing so requires a keen embodied apperception of hierarchies of somato-systemic order. Bodyworkers learn to explore these in their eigenfunction (joints, muscles, fascia), discriminate coordinative organization in small ensembles, and monitor large-scale dynamic interplay. The practitioner's “extended body” reaching forth into the client's through a resonance loop eventually becomes part of this. Within a bodywork session, practitioners modulate this hierarchical functional architecture. Their ability for sensorially staying apace of systemic emergence allows them to respond to minute changes and customize reactions in a zone of proximal development (dynamic immediacy). They stimulate the client's system with a mix of perturbing and stabilizing interventions that oscillate between eigenfunctions and their coordinative integration. Practical knowledge for “soft-assembling” non-linear synergies is crucial for this (cumulative local effects, high-level functions “slaving” the system, etc.). The paper's second part inventorizes the bodyworker's operative tool-box—micro-skills providing the wherewithal for context-intelligent intervention. Practitioners deploy “educated senses” and a repertoire of hands-on techniques (grips, stretches, etc.) against a backdrop of somatic habits (proper posture, muscle activation, gaze patterns, etc.). At this level, our study addresses a host of micro-skills through the lens of enactive cognitive science.

Sources of Embodied Creativity: Interactivity and Ideation in Contact Improvisation

“…This supports motor control. It allows making a continuous stream of micro-decisions without overshooting or lagging behind, i.e., a mode of dynamic immediacy [ 77 ]. Dancers can now confirm or disconfirm extant dynamics with “homeopathic” responses.…”

“…Both feedback and active responses from other agents can be strategically elicited. Instead of devising a fully-fledged plan, agents can follow loose directives that suggest further exploration foci [ 103 ], use open task funnels that allow dynamic specification of action details [ 77 ], engage in constraint-based-discovery of novel affordances [ 118 ], and in some cases even let new higher goals evolve in the process [ 12 , 13 ]. What is more, agents can shape or select environments to stimulate them [ 119 , 120 ] without pre-specifying the outcome, but by homing in on a general field of interests and possibilities.…”

Attentional Focus in Motor Learning, the Feldenkrais Method, and Mindful Movement

“…Three recent papers looked at these foundations from different angles: in work using functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning by Verrel, Almagor, Schumann, Lindenberger, and Kühn (2015), a short, Feldenkrais-based sensorimotor intervention—usage of the “artificial floor”—had effects on cortical activity in functionally related brain regions; whereas Kimmel, Irran, and Luger (2015) provide a perspective on the relationship between dynamic systems theory and the Feldenkrais method (as well as Shiatsu) using a micro-ethnographic approach. Support for the idea to use Feldenkrais movement lessons for the re-education of the whole person comes from Clark, Schumann, and Mostofsky (2015) who propose a “model of skilled attention in which motor plans, attention, and executive goals are seen as mutually co-defining aspects of skilled behavior that are linked by reciprocal inhibitory and excitatory connections.”…”

The preparatory set: a novel approach to understanding stress, trauma, and the bodymind therapies

“…BTES address the person as an integrated whole, an approach quite different from the bio-medical approach of isolating, analyzing and treating the functioning of separate systems. BTES use movement, proprioception, interoception, posture, and various ways of attending to the body and bodily experience, rather than cognitive methods or conventional exercise approaches (Wright, 2000 ; Stuart, 2013 ; Kimmel et al, 2015 ). These factors have made it difficult for researchers to find appropriate conceptual frameworks for studying BTES (Kerr, 2002 ).…”