Touching a person's foot with a small, thin board without making direct contact with his hands, Moshe Feldenkrais would give someone a profound and transformative unmistakable sense of skeletal support and internal connection from the sole of their foot through the leg, pelvis, spine, and all the way to the head. He called his cumulative, methodical, non-coercive, and reliable strategy for evoking this unforgettable experience the Artificial Floor.
Making the Connection offers an in-depth, two-part approach to understanding how the Artificial Floor works and developing the skills you need to teach it well. In the first part, Larry Goldfarb introduces the participants in a Feldenkrais Teacher Training Program to this quintessential lesson over a week of focused instruction. In the second part, Larry presents an advanced, comprehensive online postgraduate course that delves into the detail and depth of this incredibly potent Functional Integration.
The program answers the following fundamental questions:
- What did Feldenkrais mean when he referred to a standing leg?
What are the whole-body implications of this idea?
- What, specifically, does the teacher look at and feel for?
How do you make sense of what you notice?
How do you develop that hidden sense of reaching further than you touch?
How does this relate to working with and through the board?
- What, specifically, does the teacher look at and feel for?
How do you make sense of what you notice?
How do you develop that hidden sense of feeling and reaching further than you touch?
- And then, of course, there's knowing how to respond: How do you determine the options and understand their implications, including where they most likely lead?
- How does the teacher move so that actions like lifting the student's leg become easy and educational?
- What's the difference between using the board as a teaching tactic and developing the FI's unifying theme?
- How do you understand THE ARTIFICIAL FLOOR from both sides of the board?
Making the Connection consists of a total of 29+ hours of advanced training. This program is available exclusively to Feldenkrais teachers or trainees with a professional Become a Better Teacher (BABT) account on the Mind in Motion Online website.