August ATM's - a variety of lessons #26

Generalise Skill, not in the ATM book - Moshe Feldenkrais - NOVELTY

…. and so we complete our lessons from the ATM book with lesson number ten which reminds me of BEing a pinball machine!

A lesson that is quite brilliant in its simplicity - I’m including my notes from the secret study group when we did this one back in April 2025, (the 10th to be exact).

At first I was reminded of Valentin Dikul, the Russian circus performer who was born into aerially gymnastic parents. Valentin was involved in an accident at age 14 when a beam broke and he landed awkwardly breaking the vertebrae of his lumbar spine in such a way that doctors said he would never walk again.

Valentin REFUSED to accept this fate.

Instead he began working with weights in his bed to (re)introduce his muscles and bones back in to their functional working state. You might find this documentary interesting, it shares his path to regaining the ability to walk.

What does this have to do with this series of foundational Feldy lessons? Well, after doing it with the secret study group, I shared about resisting the urge to get up and get the tennis ball from my kitchen table so that I could explore what it would be like to actually have a ball roll over the back of my body. In the discussion after the lesson, Silvi mentioned something about a law of physics, and how weight is needed to press down, toward the ground for a change in structure to happen.. that’s when something clicked for me. It is the WEIGHT of the ball that mattered. While doing the lesson without a weight on my back still prompted the sense of pressure on my back, that thought of having something physical to shape me was difficult to shake - it awakened a stream of consciousness that morphed into diamonds needing pressure… is this why humans ‘need’ something to press us up against ‘the wall?’

I felt a bit like a diamond afterward having had to constantly ‘force’ my torso to squirm underneath an imaginary ball, as “i” become the receptacle to accommodate the flow…. re-configuring bones, muscles, organs… and braincells in anticipation of the directions stirred up through my imagination. Working out which areas I had to press in to the ground at the front to provide a path for the ball on my back had me really feel the power of the big muscles and bones in my torso - once “under control” they really are built for more work than I’d been giving them.

Feeling my back AND stomach teaming up to work in unison had me think of how much fun it would have been for my organs getting squished in unusual positions. They sounded grateful at the end!!

I also experimented with my head in different positions to include softening the jaw, loosening the eyeballs and letting the tongue go… which added another something special to the experience. Every BODY is different and there are many many ways to tackle this little challenge Moshe sets for us. If you feel so inclined to share your experience after doing this lesson, please do, let us know what you came up with to make the experience interesting - as though these movements are not already interesting on their own!!!

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As of tomorrow we will be bringing more of these foundational movements into the rest of the lessons - as we break them apart into tinier bite sized chunks, round two of this project takes a different form.

THANK YOU for your support in bringing these movements to life!!!

Enjoy learning more about, with, and for your Self… from the man himself: