The forgotten link;
Remarks on the body - mind problem

In 2008 YR published his thoughts after 5 decades of practice & research around the Feldenkrais Method and its relevance to science.

The monograph, Corollary Discharge, The Forgotten Link - Remarks on the Body-Mind Problem, is a condensed reading how a mechanism in the mind/brain can be utilized for continuous learning and relearning namely corollary discharge.

Notes on ATM Link[+]  Notes on FI Link[+]

This article is published in November 2018. I have recently attended a gathering for feldenkrais teachers with the purpose to keep the didactic way developed by Yochanan Rywerant available and spread. The book Acquiring the Feldenkrais Profession is since long out of print in English with no date when it will be available again.

The document about FI (Functional Integration) was handed out in a gathering in Tel Aviv in 2007. The ATM document some other time. The knowing shall be available, that is what I learned from Yochanan Rywerant. 

Feldenkrais theory is difficult. The A B C and the 1 - 2 -3 of how is not so often listed. The above documents are helpful. The answers are not obvious.

In an attempt of openness I leave them for anyone to study.

An exploration of the Hebrew culture;
its tradition of teaching & learning and its influence on the Feldenkrais Method.

by Eva Laser

In "The Feldenkrais Method, teaching by handling". Dr Feldenkrais does not write a lengthy foreword which apparently was opposed to his deeper understanding of humility, learning and knowledge; he plainly writes exactly how he explained it in a lecture for director Peter Brook and Teatro Campesino in the early summer of 1973.

(How close are we to Moshe’s vision of Our Profession?)

by Yochanan Rywerant.

     The future of the Feldenkrais Method lies not only in aiming at a steadily increasing number of practitioners, but also in increasing actively the quality of those practitioners. Moshe Feldenkrais himself has been very keen in asserting that his Method is not to be considered another kind of physiotherapy or movement training. He was ridiculing the opinion of some people that considered his system as a kind of "body - work." He strongly believed that people can learn to have better control over their actions, and hence be healthier. It had to start with clarifying certain ways the brain perceives and acts and seeing the movements of the body as expressing processes within the central nervous system (CNS)....

Introducing this page at Feldyforum, a discussion forum for Feldenkrais Teachers, Rob Cohen contacted me and wrote;

Thank you for taking the time and making the effort to create a homage site to Yochanan on the internet. Yochanan offered a unique contribution to the method, seeking a clarity of theory, application, and pedagogy of high standards and unswerving purpose. After the Guild was formed and he chose not to work under the direction of those junior to him, his influence within the international structures of the work became marginalized. I hope that the site grows and that his idiomatic way of looking at the work is not lost to posterity.

So I replied. Please write something more - and he did.

This book has a threefold function:

It is written for the trainers in professional training programs that teach the Feldenkrais Method and might use it as a compendium for much of the material which is to be presented in such programs...

Practioners of the FM might use the book as a reminder and refresher...

The general reader interested in FM will find here not only a general overview of the Method, but also plenty of items, which,on the one hand constitute an extensive definition of the Method and, on the other, show, by their mere structure and didactic processing, how a complex system like this Method could be taught efficiently.

The Feldenkrais Method Teaching by Handling was published 1983 at Harper & Row

The authorized edition of the training manual of basic theories and techniques. Indipensable för teachers and their pupils.
This front cover is from the third edition printed in 2003.
The foreword is written by Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais.

In December 2010 a group of teachers met in Tel Aviv.

With Honor to Yochanan Rywerant

by Moti Nativ

"Yochanan Ryverant began learning from Dr. Feldenkrais about the Method in 1952; I was then two years old. Many people learned from and followed Yochanan for decades. I was lucky to have the opportunity to become Yochanan’s student and friend, during the last two years of his life.

Yochanan Rywerant no longer summons students around his bench or the floor to explain the elements of the Feldenkrais system. A long undertaking to make the principles of the method visible and explainable in a sensory context has reached a new phase. His refined touch is to be felt no more...

This eulogy by Eva Laser was published in Somatics Magazine Journal of the Mind/Body Arts and Sciences Volume XVI Number 3.

This page is a sharing of his legacy,  a legacy which contributed and added to the development of the Feldenkrais Method.