For many years Feldenkrais's knee injuries were a major problem in his life, sometimes confining him to bed for weeks at a time. He knew that certain movements aggravated his condition, but only intermittently. Therefore, he felt that there must be some unconscious aspects of his movements which contributed to reinjury and which he could correct if he developed sufficient awareness. He lay in bed experimenting with tiny movements so that he could feel the subtle subconscious connections between all pats of himself. He studied biology and the neurosciences which supplemented what he had learned from physics and from his training in judo. In this way Feldenkrais reeducated his own movement habits and learned to walk efficiently and painlessly. In the process he learned a great deal about learning itself.

Thus, both Feldenkrais and Erickson had the intense motivation and curiosity to undertake the extraordinary project of becoming precisely aware of their own muscular efforts and movement. They learned to sensitize their feelings to that twilight reality at the boundary of intention and muscular action, emotion and sensation, conscious and unconscious experience and expression. Through a subjective, inner process of discovery they each acquired the perceptiveness to observe the subtle reflections of life in the visible and palpable body. Their experience of discovering and utilizing their personal resources prompted the vision that now awakens these resources in others.

A PARALLEL PHILOSOPHY OF LEARNING

While neither Feldenkrais nor Erickson espoused a "theory" per se, a working philosophy of learning is discernible throughout their writings. This philosophy is essentially a positive and growth-oriented, and hoes beyond the therapeutic dichotomy of sickness and health. In fact, the work of Feldenkrais and Erickson is as much transformational as it is remedial.

Learning entails going beyond one's limitations. One senses in Feldenkrais's and Erickson's work a tremendous enthusiasm and confidence in people's ability to learn. Yet, they lament, people limit themselves instead of using their potential. Erickson noted, "when we were very young, we were willing to learn. And the older we grow, the more restrictions we put on ourselves" (Zeig, 1980, p.75). Similarly, Feldenkrais remarked that as people get older "movements or actions are gradually excluded from their repertory" (1981a, p.xii). In order to convince people of their potential, Feldenkrais and Erickson often reminded them of the learning they did as children: learning to stand up, to talk, learning the alphabet, learning about the body and sex (Feldenkrais, 1981a; Zeig, 1980). These learning parables are woven into Erickson's inductions and Feldenkrais's lessons as affirmations of the fact that people can learn.

Both men attached importance to the therapeutic and self-actualizing value of human learning; they demonstrated how learning new abilities can lead to such positive transformations that symptoms spontaneously disappear. The key is that learning builds self-confidence. Erickson said, "Most neurotic ills come from people feeling inadequate, incompetent" (Zeig, 1980, p.222). And according to Feldenkrais, what makes therapies effective is that "your acts and responses must contain, even in your expectations or imagination, feelings of satisfaction and pleasurable achievement or outcome" (1981a, p.37). They carefully and masterfully created learning situations which established a foundation of success so that feelings of accomplishment could generalize to other situations (Feldenkrais, 1981a, p. 92; Zeig, 1980, p. 314). For Feldenkrais and Erickson, learning is not fundamentally an intellectual process; Learning is a sensory motor process involving the entire self, and results from doing. Feldenkrais quotes an old Chinese saying: "I hear and forget. I see and remember. I do and understand" (1981a, p. 89).

Erickson said, "The thing to do is get your patient, any way you wish, any way you can, to do something" (Zeig, 1980, p.143). Both Feldenkrais and Erickson were men of action who enjoyed the life of the body. Erickson's polio, despite the physical restrictions it caused, seemed only to heighten his appreciation for physical experience. Telling a client to climb Squaw Peak was an example of one of Erickson's prescriptions, parallel to Feldenkrais's more general emphasis on physical activity.

The concern for experiential learning is reflected in the way Feldenkrais and Erickson trained students to practice their methods. Erickson taught that learning hypnosis was like learning to swim: You have to get in the water (personal communication, November, 1979). Most people spent their time in an Erickson seminar "in the water". Likewise, Feldenkrais's training programs bear little resemblance to academia where objective knowledge is often dissociated from subjective experience. Instead, Feldenkrais crates a personal learning context where students have the opportunity to discover in themselves the kinesthetic sensitivity he learned through the work he did with himself. Underlying these methods of experiential learning is the assumption of somatopsychic unity which has profound implications for everyone in the helping professions. This unity is the basis for psychic complaints "surfacing" in the body and for neurotic complaints disappearing as a result of physical improvements. Out of the experience of their own integrity, both Erickson and Feldenkrais transcended the traditional mind/body dichotomy and saw human beings as fundamentally whole. Thus, Feldenkrais emphasizes that he does not touch bodies but rather persons. And when Erickson spoke to a person's unconscious mind, he was likewise relating to a whole person.

Learning and the Unconscious

Erickson described the unconscious as "made up of all your learnings over a lifetime, many of which you have completely forgotten, but which serve you in your automatic functioning" (Zeig, 1980, p.173). Feldenkrais said, "Immense activity goes on in...us, far greater than we appreciate or are aware of. This activity is related to what we have learned during our whole life from inception to this moment" (Feldenkrais, 1981a, p. 6).

There is a special, other kind of "learning": phylogenetic knowledge, learning acquired and passed on through evolution over countless generations. When Erickson taught the little bedwetting girl to control her urination by imagining being frightened, he used reflexive, phylogenetic potentiality that with awareness she could learn to utilize (Zeig, 1980, p. 82). Similarly, many Feldenkrais techniques are based upon utilization of latent, neuromuscular phenomena, including tonic and righting reflexes, grasping and sucking, protective reactions, and muscular synergy. Thus, for Feldenkrais and Erickson "the unconscious" is not the reservoir of difficult-to manage instinctual impulses depicted by Freud, but a life-sustaining activity which supports our thinking, feeling, sensing, and acting. Accordingly, many of their techniques are designed to reduce the interference of overly conscious direction and will.

Curiously, in light of the foregoing discussion, Feldenkrais rarely if ever uses the tern "unconscious"; he refers instead to the biologically specifiable entity, the nervous system. However, he speaks of the nervous system in a way that is comparable to Erickson's use of "the unconscious". When giving lessons, Feldenkrais will say, "Don't you decide how to do the movement; let your nervous system decide. It has had millions of years of experience and therefore it knows more than you do" (Note 2). This injunction parallels Erickson's characteristic induction: "You don't know what all your possibilities are yet. Your unconscious can work on them all by itself" (Erickson & Rossi, 1979,p. 46).

Organic and Hypnotherapeutic Learning

Feldenkrais's philosophy of learning is perhaps best expressed by what he call organic learning. Organic learning is related to the physical development of the body and nervous system codependent interaction with the outer world. The first few years of life display the most intense expression of this learning which is linked with organic growth. However, for human beings, there is no limit to potential growth since neurological growth is concomitant with new learning and is, in effect, the direct continuation of our embryological and infantile ontogenesis. Unfortunately the social norm is for organic learning to stop at puberty except in the social sphere. The personal somatic functions usually become arrested in their development or gradually deteriorate, causing a host of preventable somatopsychic difficulties from ulcers to backache.

The parallel between organic learning and Erickson's hypnotherapeutic learning is that each represents an inner-directed, highly personal learning process which unfolds the individual's potential. This process lies at the heart of how the person experiences and regards him or herself. Both of Feldenkrais's methods (Awareness Through Movement® and Functional Integration®) are intended to reinstate the self-perpetuating movement of organic learning. They lead the student through primal sensory-motor pathways and forests of discovery where the nervous system has retained the memory of, and thus the competency for free and natural movement. Analogous to Erickson's hypnotherapeutic learning, this process of reconnection with the inner, intelligent, sensory-motor self reinforces the impulse of growth, individuation, and creativity.

The essence of both organic learning and Ericksonian learning is that they are self-directed. As Erickson relates:

Similarly, Feldenkrais has called himself "a funny sort of teacher who doesn't teach, yet the students learn" (Note 2). The two methods thus create the conditions that nurture the flowering of individuality and self-realization.

PARALLEL TECHNIQUES

Creating a Learning Context

Analogous to some of Erickson's "reframing" procedures, Feldenkrais often resituates his students' problems in a learning context. For example, a woman approached Feldenkrais to be treated for her scoliosis. Feldenkrais told her that he would not deal with her "scoliosis" since many therapists had already tried unsuccessfully to "correct" her spine. She could, of course, go to a surgeon; but if he straightened her spine surgically, she would surely lose mobility. Feldenkrais explained that he could help her to learn how to move without pain and with ease in all cardinal directions. Furthermore, by learning how to perform functionally symmetrical movements, she would learn to appreciate in herself and improved skeletal organization and, in effect, learn to "straighten" herself.

Feldenkrais's learning orientation is atypical of most somatic approaches which ( a) diagnose and isolate specific structural or physical problems; and (b) attempt to cure or correct these problems; by (c) administering authoritarian, directive forms of manipulation and behavioral prescriptions. In contrast, Feldenkrais (a) situates the problem in terms of the availability or unavailability of choices and options open to the person; (b) engages in a mutual search for new options of behavior and experience which can lead to more favorable outcomes; and (c) utilizes already present competencies and works indirectly to support the person's ability to discover solutions through awareness and learning. In the following sections I describe how this general approach is embodied in Feldenkrais's techniques which parallel those of Erickson.