Moshe  Feldenkrais

BODY AWARENESS AS HEALING THERAPY:
THE CASE OF NORA

        Berkley. Somatic Resources, Frog, Ltd. 1977. 1993. 96 pages. Paper.

ISBN-10: 9781883319083

Reviewed by Patrick Killough

(1) biblio.com 04/01/2011

Would you recommend this book to other readers?  Yes!  * * * * *

review:

Buncombe County in Western North Carolina (county seat: Asheville) is fortunate to have three renowned teacher/practitioners of Moshe Feldenkrais's health through body awareness techniques. The first two are John Robson and Lavinia Plonka. I take weekly "Feldenkrais" aka Awareness Through Movement aka ATM classes from both masters at Cheshire Fitness Center in Black Mountain, NC.

I am a still raw beginner in all things Feldenkrais. Virtually everything I know on the subject comes from my two teachers -- including from books by others that they recommend (Lavinia has written two brilliant ones of her own). After sharing with Ms Plonka the difficulties I had with the first book I read by Dr Moshe Feldenkrais (AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT), I was only too happy to accept her advice to tackle Feldenkrais's book here reviewed - BODY AWARENESS AS HEALING THERAPY: THE CASE OF NORA (1977, 1993). For Lavinia Plonka told me that THE CASE OF NORA is widely regarded as the Master's "most accessible" book -- i. e., one most easily understood by beginners like me. And John Robson was equally enthusiastic for the book's insights into the way Moshe Feldenkrais's mind worked during his "Functional Integration" (FI) hands-on approach to solving concrete problems of individuals with back pains, poor postures or whatever.

In the CASE OF NORA, Dr (of Science, not Medicine) Feldenkrais was asked to help a well educated, polyglot Swiss woman in her sixties whom a stroke had deprived three years earlier of the ability to read and write. After some initial examinations in Switzerland, Nora and her family were persuaded to send her to be with Feldenkrais at his base in Israel. in THE CASE OF NORA we relive with Moshe Feldenkrais and his students the many months of daily half hour sessions that Nora and Moshe spent together. 

First he helped her regain the ability to read. Later, after a separation while he traveled abroad, Nora returned to Israel able to read but still very weak in writing. She learned. Throughout his text, Feldenkrais shares his false starts, his already formed hypotheses about to to proceed with such a case and the new insights that emerged during his lengthy experience with Nora. He emphasizes the importance of Nora's having to learn to relax. He was surprised to discover how his therapy reminded Nora of her school days, when she had had a dread of coming late to school -- something that never happened. He lays out important information about our nervous system and brain.

THE CASE OF NORA is indeed "accessible." It introduced me to "the second half" of Feldenkrais method: Functional Integration aka FI. That is hands-on, one-on-one treatment or physical therapy, healing if you will. This has not been requested by or tried on me -- yet. The first half of "Feldenkrais" is hands-off, classroom instruction, ATM, laid out in Feldenkrais's earlier, much more difficult book AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT.

I find it useful to think of the two halves in terms of my personal adaptation of one seminal metaphor used by Moshe Feldenkrais: i

-- In an ATM classroom a piano tuner teaches a group many ways to tune their out-of-tune pianos (their bodies). Whatever the tune or sonata they want to play will sound better on a well tuned body.

-- in FI healing,  by contrast, a piano teacher shows me or you how to play those ivories better. 

I think that is correct to say that it is "FI" that  our third Feldenkrais activist, Black Mountain's Clifford Shulman  -- along with Lavinia Plonka and John Robston -- practices with his medical doctor-referred patients and others. Cliff also gives occasional Feldenkrais-rich ATM lectures, when he can find the time from his healing practice. ATM and FI are two sides of the same coin.  And Buncombe County is Feldenkrais country!  -OOO-

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(2) lunch.com 04/01/2011

title of review:  "Do we not read with our mouths?"

reviewer's rating of THE CASE OF NORA * * * *

REVIEW:

Doctor (of Physics, not Medicine) Moshe Feldenkrais (1904 - 1984) was an innovator. He studied under two time Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie in Paris. He was a pioneer of judo in Europe. He smuggled atomic research materials out of Hitler's Germany to England. He created the two-pronged "Feldenkrais Method" to increase human health through self-awareness. Previously, Feldenkrais had studied mind control, auto-suggestion and Emile Coue's upbeat work in psycho-therapy, especially relaxation and self-hypnosis. One fact is not always emphasized: his wife was a pediatrician. Through her Moshe had ample opportunity to watch infants as they happily and spontaneously learned to see, walk and control their hands. Feldenkrais drew practical inferences from what he saw.
 
Fairly late in his career as a healer and analyst of human movements, Moshe Feldenkrais planned to release a series of monographs describing his work with individual "patients." As things developed, however, only one such monograph emerged in his lifetime, THE CASE OF NORA. That case study exemplified the one-on-one, hands-on direct healing side of the Feldenkrais method, called Functional Integration or "FI" for short. The other side of the Feldenkrais coin, Awareness Through Movement (ATM), had been presented in a knotty, sometimes obscure book by that name five years earlier. ATM is hands-off teaching of several students at once in a classroom/gymnasium setting.
 
Nora was a sixty-something, educated, polyglot Swiss woman. Knowing that Moshe  was visiting Switzerland from his base in Israel, Nora's sister wrote to Dr Feldenkrais, asking him to see Nora.  A sudden stroke had stiffened Nora's body a bit, left her speech slightly impaired and soon took away her ability to read and write. A specialist found left-brain circulatory damage. The trauma might heal itself. But in three years it had not been healed. Nora grew depressed. Wrote Feldenkrais: "I was her relatives' last hope." In THE CASE OF NORA he details his many months of effort, most of them in Israel, which eventually restored Nora's ability to read, and later to write. He began by observing her head movements.
 
THE CASE OF NORA has several little asides and excursions that lay out Feldenkrais's indebtedness to Jean Piaget and others who had studied children. You must crawl before you can walk. You must read before you can write. An early question Moshe asked himself: back to what childhood age or level had Nora's brain regressed to make Nora unable to read and write? Children may be blind for the first two weeks after birth. But they already hear sounds in the womb.

"The fetus hears the heartbeats of its mother, the noises of her digestive tract, bubbling of gasses of all kinds, sounds of her breathing, coughing, sneezing and other noises. ... An infant is predominantly a hearing animal" (Appendix: The Essence).
 
The infant is also a feeding, sucking animal. As it grows and learns to see, it also masters its fingers and thumbs. And it probably prepares to acquire the skill of reading through its mouth, through speaking. Without talking there is no reading. Indeed there are people to this day who can read only aloud or must at least move their lips silently to grasp a written text. People wondered why Feldenkrais taught Nora to read by means of a straw held in her mouth.  Feldenkrais spontaneously replied:  "Do we not read with our mouths?" (Ch. 5).
 
For the longest time, even the best educated Romans had only read aloud. In 384 in Milan Saint Augustine marveled to find Saint Ambrose reading silently to himself in his room.
 "When he read," said Augustine, "his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud," CONFESSIONS, Ch. 6.
 
Step by step the former physicist taught his pupil Nora to relax, to relish the tiny steps she was taking and learning to repeat and adapt, to choose freely and with joy like the child she had been when she learned to read and write the first time. It worked. Read all about it in Feldenkrais's BODY AWARENESS AS HEALING THERAPY: THE CASE OF NORA. The book is short and makes its points without many wasted words. It may, however, seem a fault that the author is not always clear to himself or to readers why this or that hunch did or did not pay off. Sometimes even the great Moshe Feldenkrais can only guess, speculate or shrug his shoulders.
 
-OOO-

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(3) bn.com 04/02/2011

title of review:  "Entering the world, Nora could not speak any language, walk, read, write, sing, whistle, or yodel"

rating: * * * *

review:

Posted 4/2/2011:

Three years before 60-something Swiss citizen Nora met and was evaluated by renowned healer Moshe Feldenkrais, she had suffered a mild stroke. Her body had stiffened a bit. She could no longer read and write. After many months of one-on-one "Functional Integration" (FI) treatment at Feldenkrais's office in Israel, Nora was a new woman. How the two together accomplished this is told in Moshe's 1977 case study BODY AWARENESS AS HEALING THERAPY: THE CASE OF NORA.

Nora's goal was "cure": return to just the way things were before her stroke: which may or may not have been objectively good. Moshe Feldenkrais's goal was to take Nora's remaining vestigial abilities to read and write and "improve" them, make them gradually better along an open-ended scale with no limitations (Ch. 4).

Feldenkrais's wife was a pediatrician. She kept him in touch with infants as they learned, progressively, to suck milk, to hear, to see, to crawl, to walk, to point with fingers, to distinguish left from right. All those things and more Nora had done as an infant and a child before learning to read and right. Feldenkrais decided that he must bring Nora back to her infancy and slightly later if she was to recover her lost skills of reading and writing.

"Entering the world, Nora could not speak any language, walk, read, write, sing, whistle, or yodel" (Appendix: The Essence).

As an infant Nora had been relaxed, learning from the sheer joy of curiosity. How recapture that amazing age?

Seeing reading as impossible until one first learns by listening to the spoken word, Feldenkrais placed a straw between Nora's lips. He made her do eye exercises looking down the straw, creating double images and eventually training the straw, later a pencil, later a pen on written words. When pure texts proved too hard, Feldenkrais introduced picture books, as would have been the case when Nora was learning to read 55 or more years earlier.

It's all there in THE CASE OF NORA. This is a book very accessible to non-specialists in trauma treatment but also instructive to specialists. A major weakness is absence of a topical index. But the author's constant moving between hands-on treatment of Nora, trying this and trying that, speculating and learning is a pleasure to read. -OOO-


recommended reading:

-- Moshe Feldenkrais - AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT

-- Lavinia Plonka     - WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF?
                                - WALKING YOUR TALK

-- Annette Wellings - PILATES FOR SCOLIOSIS

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(4) amazon.com  $15.95  2 reviews 04/01/1011

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