Feldenkrais and the Benefits of Self-Hypnosis

What is Hypnosis?

Here’s a nice clear definition:

“Hypnosis can be seen as ‘a waking state of awareness, (or consciousness), in which a person’s attention is detached from his or her immediate environment and is absorbed by inner experiences such as feelings, cognition and imagery’.¹ Hypnotic induction involves focusing of attention and imaginative involvement to the point where what is being imagined feels real.”

What is hypnosis and how might it work? – Anne Williamson, Palliative Care: Research & Treatment Journal, 2019

We have seen many versions of induced hypnosis on our screens, including stage hypnosis, where a skilled performer influences suggestible audience members to behave in embarrassing ways in front of an audience for everyone’s entertainment, or as a psychotherapeutic strategy in a detective drama – usually initially scorned by at least one of the regular characters – used to retrieve a lost memory in order to solve a crime. It is worth mentioning that this use of induced hypnosis has many detractors, sometimes for good reasons – Remembering What Did Not Happen.

The view of hypnotism as a form of ‘mind control’ may be why it is still seen as outside the mainstream, despite its long history as a psychotherapeutic tool. Stories based on the idea of surrendering the will and losing control to some malevolent power are a common trope in popular culture, whether the culprit is human, alien, or demonic; the movie Get Out is a recent Oscar-winning example.

Hypnotherapy

Most of us are also aware of the therapeutic version – I have a friend who stopped smoking forever after just one session. Hypnotherapy as a profession requires expensive training, the effectiveness of the process is variable, and it is usually quite pricey. Of course if you do manage to stop smoking after just one session you are well-compensated for the cost. One well-established system is known as Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), and it is worth mentioning here because its founders, Richard Bandler and John Grinder spoke highly of Moshe Feldenkrais and his teaching methods, and because – just as with Feldenkrais – the idea is to develop your own self-help abilities independent of the person teaching you.

‘Wandering Around In A Daze’

There are a few sources out there that focus on our ability to fall into a ‘trance’ – drifting into a dissociated or automated state in daily life. It only takes a little bit of thought to recognise the ways in which we can ‘drift off’ into a more internally focused state so I will just offer a few examples (for a deeper exploration I can recommend “Trances People Live”, by Stephen Wolinsky). One version of what I am referring to involves the things we do every day, and how easily we can slip into ‘automatic pilot’; I can forget that I brushed my teeth because I was ‘somewhere else’ while I was doing it; drivers sometimes find they have set off on a familiar journey when they intended to go somewhere else entirely; I listen to a lot of podcasts and I often find that I have become immersed in thought and need to rewind to catch up with the conversation – in fact in the worst cases I may have to do so several times, because there is something that happens just before the part I keep missing that sends me off into reverie again and again. These moments are more like a kind of self-hypnosis, our own thoughts sending us off into a kind of reverie (also the name of a well-respected self-hypnosis app).

This brings me to my main subject – the theme of my upcoming Daily Course…

Self-Hypnosis – also known as Auto-Suggestion

Self-hypnosis is somewhat different from the classic version; you are learning techniques that you can apply directly to yourself and thus can begin to manage your own neurological and emotional states in whatever ways suit you, without having to rely the intervention of anyone else. One of my colleagues suggested to me that this might be the root of its appeal to Moshe Feldenkrais. It is quite possible that his early interest in Auto-Suggestion (a well-established form of self-hypnosis, with a long history of helping people improve their health) helped shape his determination to make his Method as effective as possible for teaching people how to develop their ability to mature themselves continuously throughout their adult lives. The book he translated was The Practise Of Auto Suggestion by Émile Coué, from the English translation by C Harry Brooks. Coué is best known for the affirmation “Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better”, and it is easy to detect this positive emphasis in much of Moshe’s teaching – in recordings you can hear how he is constantly encouraging his students to expect and recognise a positive outcome from what they are doing in class. Later on Moshe wrote his own book The Potent Self, sharing his ideas about how we can learn to access our full human potential and thus become able to manage our own health and wellbeing, and to attain a lifetime of satisfaction and achievement.

Here is a snippet of Moshe lecturing on his work at Cern – the quality is poor, but there is very little available to share of Moshe in his own voice so I will offer you this and continue to look for something better – it is a short segment at the end of a longer lecture – all of these videos and other are collected in my Moshe Feldenkrais Playlist:

This application of the hypnosis process has less stigma attached to it, but is also less recognised by the general population. One way this emerges is that there are many related and over-lapping strategies for self-healing that use these techniques, and despite their different names they can all be recognised as versions of self-hypnosis, thus of ‘auto-suggestion’.

I will be exploring as many of these ideas as possible in my Self-Hypnosis Feldenkrais Daily Course…

Positive Thinking

– this idea has been misused to such an extent that some people consider it toxic – (Donnie Darko/Barbara Ehrenrich) – so it was helpful to me that it enabled me to greatly improve my life early on. This was in my 20s, which was the age at which I first recognised how unhappy I was. I tried out quite a few techniques, and although I did have some success with affirmations, a great deal of what worked can be described as reframing my attitude to life generally. This involved a lot of reading and a lot of thought. I won’t try to cover this history of that time in my life here, I will just mention some of the people whose ideas I found most liberating. I am preparing a longer version of this article which will include a recommended booklist. I particularly valued Alan Watts’ The Wisdom Of Insecurity; Carl Jung’s Psychological Types; Transactional Analysis, specifically the Book I’m Ok, You’re Ok. Everything written by Robert Anton Wilson, but if I have to pick one it is probably Prometheus Rising; and of course I started reading Moshe’s books because I began learning Feldenkrais in 1986. 

Positive thinking is related to the process of changing your attitudes using Affirmations – they are easy to dismiss – often the way they are taught can feel like simply lying to yourself (and it can also seem like that to others – my brush with Rebirthers/my dad’s version of positive thinking). However, after advice from an expert teacher I began to find affirmations very useful indeed.

Gratitude and Appreciation

– are closely related but slight different in the way they encourage positivity in our daily awareness. I practice both, and I find gratitude often wells up spontaneously when I am eating something delicious, and I will immediately offer my gratitude to the animal that provided me with such wonderful nourishment. Appreciation feels more like the right term for beautiful skies, and beautiful babies, and gorgeous music, and, and – I could go on and on.

Another strategy related to positive thinking is focussing on forgiveness and I am convinced this is something that we all need to actively address about the way we deal with all aspects of life. My own version is based on the idea of Radical Forgiveness – by which I mean that forgiving people who are genuinely sorry is simply the honourable thing to do, and not to do so shifts the culpability onto your own shoulders. After a lot of thought it seems to me that the powerful thing is forgiving people who AREN’T sorry – I think achieving this produces a feeling of freedom like no other. My better understanding of the power of forgiveness for emotional well-being began with Brandon Bay’s book, The Journey. We will have plenty of time to discuss these ideas in the discussion section of each class. I also think that people like Ellen Langer are correct in their understanding that if you can find ways to become less judgemental in the first place then you can stop blaming others in the first place and then you won’t need to forgive them, BUT I certainly would not suggest that is an easy path.

Mindfulness

I won’t discuss this in depth here as I have written a full length article about this subject – instead I will share the Buddha quote that shows how similar the Feldenkrais approach is to his definition of ‘mindfulness centred on the body’, which inspired me to write the article, and to focus confidently on this aspect of my teaching.

“There is one thing that, when cultivated and regularly practiced, leads to deep spiritual intention, to peace, to mindfulness and clear comprehension, to vision and knowledge, to a happy life here and now, and to the culmination of wisdom and awakening. And what is that one thing? It is mindfulness centred on the body.” (Italics mine)
Gautama Buddha

Extra Material for discussion during the course.

We will look at the role and the potential of both the Placebo and the Nocebo effects and we will look in detail into the question ‘which is worst, ‘false’ hope, or ‘false’ despair?

I will be sharing information about my non-Feldenkrais information sources, including Dr Joe Dispenza, and Les Fehmi’s Open Focus techniques.

I will be adding more information here soon – right now I need to get this up on my website!