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Feldenkrais Research Journal • volume 3 (2007)

Article

Accidentally on Purpose

Lawrence Goldfarb
PhD, CFT

Abstract
In this article the author leads the reader through a reflection on interactions and a lesson with a client.
The reflections expertly provide a window into the thinking guiding a lesson, illustrating its effect on a
client.

Keywords
Feldenkrais, movement evaluation, somatics, movement habits, observation

Copyright ©: The copyright for this paper remains with the author(s).

First published: http://www.mindinmotion-online.com/media/pdf/acconpurp.pdf ©1993-94

Please cite: Feldenkrais Research Journal, volume 3; 2007.

Service marks: The terms Feldenkrais®, Feldenkrais Method®, Awareness Through Movement®, ATM®,
Functional Integration®, and FI® are service marked terms of the International Feldenkrais® Federation
(IFF) and Feldenkrais professional guilds and associations in many countries. In keeping with academic
conventions, they will not be service marked in the entire text as may be required in nonacademic use,
but only for the first and most prominent use of the terms. In recognition that these phrases are formal
terms referring to specific practices within the Method, and to the Method as a whole, capitalization of all
the words in each term has been retained.

Published by the International Feldenkrais® Federation (IFF) https://feldenkrais-method.org
Available online at https://feldenkraisresearchjournal.org

https://feldenkrais-method.org/
https://feldenkraisresearchjournal.org


 1 

   
 
 
 

ACCIDENTALLY ON PURPOSE 

 
Lawrence Wm. Goldfarb, Ph.D., C.F.T. 
 
Harlan leans on his daughter's arm as he hobbles into my office. Gingerly, he lowers himself 
onto my low Feldenkrais® table, his daughter supporting his right elbow. He feels for the table 
with his left hand, lowers himself with his left buttock leading, and settles into an awkward 
sitting position, his right hip slightly lifted and his right shoulder lowered. His right side 
appears shorter and he looks shifted to his left.  
 
"My hip hurts," Harlan declares, staring at me, "And my back, it hurts here, a little." He points 
to his right low back. "You know, I don't like to complain. The pain's not so bad. It's just 
when it interferes with getting around that I get to worrying." 
 
"Ever since Dad fell, about seven or eight months ago, he's been having problems. He has a 
terrible time getting up and sitting down . . ." 
 
"Especially getting in and out of the car. It's a bother—no—it's a struggle. I can barely do it 
on my own." 
 
"The doctor told him there's nothing wrong with his hip and back. . ." 
 
"Except for some mild arthritis."  
 
"Right. Can you help him?" 
 
Harlan is in his late sixties and, although he is suffering, he looks at me with bright clear eyes. 
From the moment he entered my office, his determination to walk, to sit, to keep moving 
despite obvious discomfort impresses me. "Give me a few moments to look at you. I want to 
see if your problem relates to how you're moving and holding yourself. Do you mind if I sit 
next to you and touch your back?" 
 
"Not at all." 
 
I place my right hand softly on his back, forming my hand to the contours of his ribcage and 
spine, noting the texture of the underlying muscles. Sensing how the muscles on the right side 
of his spine bulge through his shirt, my hands inform my mind's eye. Feeling the distribution 
of muscle tightness in Harlan's neck, shoulder girdle, back, and hips, I discern the greater 
postural action of the muscles on the right side. This gives me a clue to the underlying 
configuration of his skeleton, which I examine by gently tracing the skeletal contours and 
locating the bony landmarks of his spine, ribs, and pelvis. I sense the habitual asymmetry of 
Harlan's spine as it curves to the left so that the ribs on the right side are closer together than 
those on the left.  

IFF Academy 
Feldenkrais Research Journal 3 (2007) 

® 2007 by the author 
ISSN 1817-4000 



 2 

 
However, movement, not posture, interests me. How is his way of moving related to his way 
of holding himself? Placing one hand on either side of his ribcage and nestling my fingers 
between his ribs, I gently shift his torso ever so slightly toward his left hip. He responds to my 
suggestion willingly, moving easily and fluidly. Hinting that he shifts to the right, I sense 
reluctance: he responds haltingly and then stops. I stay in the range defined by his willingness, 
repeating these small shifts around his left hip several times to confirm what I notice.  
 
After moving Harlan gently side to side—or trying to—several times, I understand that he is 
not about to roll easily onto his right buttock. It isn't that he can't, or that I couldn't push him 
there, it's just that he actively avoids it. Each time I suggest going to the right, the movement 
becomes more difficult, as if we are moving up a steep incline.  
 
Like most of my students, by the time Harlan made it to my office he had applied all the 
resources he could marshal and found no remedy. He appeared at my doorway resigned to his 
dilemma, having concluded that something is wrong, that he must be physically damaged or 
defective.  
 
Rather than searching for what's broken or wrong, I am curious about what's happening—how 
Harlan moves—and how his way of moving makes his problem necessary. From the moment 
he entered my office, I looked at how he moved, noticed an asymmetry in his gait, and saw 
how unevenly he moved as he sat. At the beginning of the evaluation, I observed his way of 
moving, looking to confirm or deny my initial impression. First, comparing his muscles right 
and left and then contrasting his movements side to side, I correlated what I saw with what I 
felt, fathoming a pattern, a stubborn consistency in the midst of all the fluid changes of 
everyday movement.  
 
No matter what, Harlan sits on his left hip. Having determined this, I now have an idea of how 
Harlan's pain and immobility relate to his movement. I have found an invariant, a constant 
pattern, a consistent manner of moving and not moving that makes him more limited than his 
skeleton requires him to be. Only the beginning of the evaluation is complete—I have some 
idea of what he does involuntarily and, thus, can't help doing.  
 
This is only the beginning of the evaluation because understanding how Harlan's habitual 
pattern causes his predicament is not enough. Experience has taught me that what is most 
obvious to me as observer—what I can't help noticing—is invisible to the mover. Blinded by 
the familiarity of his habitual movements, he is condemned to repeat the conditions that make 
his discomfort inevitable. My job as teacher begins by understanding the student's problem in 
terms of the pattern of her or his movement, that is to say, in terms of the way movements are 
limited and constrained. But change can only come when the student changes his or her 
perception. Until Harlan is aware of how he is moving, he will have no choice in the matter, 
he will not be able to do—or not do—as he wishes. Unless he becomes aware of how he is 
moving, unless he perceives how he is moving and of how else he can move, he won't be able 
to change.  
 
In his book Somatics, my colleague Thomas Hanna suggested the metaphor of amnesia to 
explain when we humans become habituated to—and, therefore, unaware of—some aspect of 
our movement. The pattern is neither gone nor forgotten; some part of Harlan's nervous 
system continues to produce this behavior with remarkable consistency. Rather than 
forgetting the past, this psychosomatic process is more like an active disregard. Something is 
happening—Harlan is doing something intentionally but unconsciously—and, at the same 



 3 

time, he does not notice that he is doing it. He is ignoring himself, blinding himself to his own 
intentions and actions. Perhaps the hypnotic phenomenon of negative hallucination is a better 
way to describe a form of intentional neglect: the subject does not perceive something that is 
there or, another way of saying it, hallucinates that something is absent.  
 
How can I help Harlan become aware of his habitual pattern without contributing to his 
feeling that something is terribly wrong with him? Placing my hand palm down on the table, 
to the right of his right buttock, I slide it slowly underneath and reach under his sitting bone 
without resistance. On the left side, however, my hand cannot slide underneath his buttock.  
 
"Do you notice how I can slip my hand under your right buttock here, like this?"  
 
"So?" 
 
"Notice how I can't slip my hand under your left buttock?" 
 
"Well, I'll be damned. I never did notice that. How come you can slide your hand under 
my right side but not under my left?" 
 
"Because you're shifting over onto the left side of your pelvis." Having said that, I bring my 
left hand to rest gently on top of his head. "This isn't happening by chance or by accident. 
And it isn't something happening only in your pelvis or your lower back. Let me show you." 
 
I slowly tilt his head a little to the right. His right ear moves toward his right shoulder, his 
shoulder lowers toward his hip, and the hip rises ever so slightly from the table. His right side 
shortens; he shifts his weight further onto his left buttock. Now I begin to take his head gently 
to the left. His head returns to its home position and then something funny happens: as I 
continue to tilt Harlan's head just a little further to his left, his back stiffens. Leaving his 
weight on his left sitting bone, he keeps his back straight and he tilts his torso, as one piece, to 
the left.  
 
"Hmmm . . . I do feel different when you tilt me to the right and to the left. The movement to 
the right feels easy. To the left, it feels more difficult, heavier." 
 
This is a strange moment, one I cherish. Suddenly, Harlan's experience of himself is open to 
question. This isn't me as teacher telling or showing him something he didn't know. Instead a 
new experience of the self emerges from the shadows. Curiosity appears in our midst and, in 
that moment, the possibility for change is born. Whether he knows it or not, Harlan has made 
the transition from passive patient to participating student. 
 
My hands find the spaces between the top of his pelvis and the bottom of his ribs. I sense how 
his back and belly muscles are taut and contracted on the right; while on the left side of his 
waist, those muscles are softer and inactive. 
 
"Feel these muscles, on your right side, here." Harlan startles as I press into his tensed trunk 
muscles. "Notice how much softer the ones on the left side are. See, it doesn't feel 
uncomfortable if I touch these, does it?" 
 
"Sure feels different on the right when you're touching me, like you're shining a light into a 
dark corner. How come I never noticed this before?"  
 



 4 

"Well, you just got used to it. Where I grew up in upstate New York we had a saying: 'You 
can't smell the manure on the farm.' Psychologists call it habituation: when something 
happens over and over, you stop noticing."  
 
"Do you think this might have something to do with my fall? All my hip troubles started back 
then. It's like I'm limping, keeping my weight off the side I fell on, isn't it?" 
 
"Yes, that's right. You hurt yourself and, without thinking about it, you changed how you 
move. That change became automatic. Even though the injury has healed, you keep moving 
the new way without noticing that you are doing so. That kind of habit is what I call 
unconscious and on purpose." 
 
"And that change in my way of moving and holding myself meant that I kept moving 
crooked. That's the root of my problem."  
 
"Yes. Even if you had some kind of physical problem, the way that you are moving is only 
making things worse."  
 
"How can I change that?" 
 
"Well, you have already begun to change. You were moving in a way that you were unaware 
of and didn't have control over. Now that you have a glimmer of awareness into what you are 
doing, you begin to have the possibility of changing it."  
 
"Before you helped me feel and understand what I was doing, I thought I hobbled around 
because of my problem or my age. Now I can start to feel that my way of moving has 
something to with why I have pain. I am beginning to think if my movement changes, then 
what I do and feel might change." 
 
"Exactly," I say, content that, once again, the evaluation process has done its job. Much like 
putting the edge of a jigsaw puzzle together first, doing an evaluation sets the frame for the 
session, giving us a big picture, and letting us know how the pieces fit together. The 
evaluation allows me to figure out how Harlan's way of moving makes the problem necessary 
and shows Harlan how his way of moving has something to do with his difficulty. As such, 
the evaluation sets movement as the context for our work together and creates a basis for 
common understanding, a foundation upon which the rest of lesson can be built. 
 
"Harlan, how about lying down on the table, on your side," I say. 
 
Harlan takes his shoes off, asking which side he should lie on. After I say it's up to him, he 
lowers his trunk slowly until his left elbow is on the table. Placing his right hand on the edge 
of the table, he lowers his left shoulder to within a few centimeters of the surface. After 
hovering briefly, his shoulder drops with a soft thud, his head touched down, his legs lift, his 
knees bend, and, a moment later, he is lying on his side with his right leg resting on his left. 
His choice of lying on the left side makes sense to me: this position naturally lengthens the 
left side as the left shoulder spreads away from the left hip under the weight of his body. This 
configuration allows the right side to maintain its habitual shortened configuration. 
 
Sitting behind Harlan, I rest my left hand on his right shoulder, saying, "I am going to move 
you a little. I want to find out in which directions you move most easily. If I do anything that 
feels uncomfortable or that you don't like, let me know and I will stop immediately. The idea 



 5 

in this kind of work is that suffering is optional--in other words,you don't have to feel worse 
to feel better." 
 
My left hand forms to Harlan's shoulder, my palm resting over the blade and my fingertips 
curving around toward his chest. I move his shoulder girdle slowly forward a few times, 
feeling the viscosity of the movement. My hand asks, "How is it to move in this direction? Is 
he willing or reluctant?" I wait, without insistence, for his response. Next I bring the shoulder 
blade back, sliding the inner edge toward the spine. Even in these small motions, I can feel the 
pull of opposing muscles the instant they begin to limit the shoulder's range of motion. 
Neither in this direction nor the previous one is my motion much larger than the thickness of a 
matchbook. 
 
Checking his shoulder's willingness to glide up toward the ear, I sense resistance, as if I was 
trying to run through water. In contrast, bringing the shoulder down toward the pelvis is easy, 
the motion well oiled. The shoulder glides toward the pelvis, more easily than in any of the 
other directions I check. Had I found something else, I would have had to rethink my 
hypothesis, but what I observe fits with the global pattern of the right side shortening. 
 
With the fingers of my right hand touching the crest of his hip bone in front and my thumb 
reaching back around back, I inquire into the movement of his pelvis. After testing all the 
directions, I find that Harlan's pelvis is most willing to move in the way that fits with his 
overall inclination, that is to say, it moves up, toward the right shoulder. Keeping one hand on 
Harlan's pelvis and placing the other on his shoulder, I put these movements together now, 
bringing his shoulder and hip toward one another several times. When I contrast this with 
bringing shoulder and hip apart, the quality of the movement changes from fluid to halting, 
from willing to reluctant. 
 
"That's the same thing I was doing sitting--contracting my right side. Funny, I'm still doing it 
when I'm lying down." 
 
"Do you notice how these muscles feel?" I ask, pressing into the tightly contracting muscles 
that run along the left side of the spine from the shoulder down to the lower back and pelvis. 
"Can you compare them to the ones on the right? Feel here, on the left, they are yielding, 
softer, while the ones on the right are harder. This is the same thing we found in sitting. Why 
are your muscles working when you're lying down? In this position, they don't need to hold 
you up but they seem to be working anyway." 
 
Harlan tries to stretch his right hip and shoulder apart. He struggles and stops, "Just makes me 
feel tighter. I don't seem to be in charge of these muscles anymore." 
 
"Let me show something." I bring my stool to the other side of the table and sit in front of 
Harlan. Straightening my index finger, I extend my right hand toward his, saying, "Please 
grab hold of my finger with your hand. Yes, that's it, wrap your hand around and get a good 
grip. Now hold on as tight as you can." 
 
Harlan has a powerful grasp, his large fingers engulfing mine and pressing my captive index 
finger into the palm of his hand with surprising strength. As I earnestly struggle against his 
finger's powerful grip, he squeezes harder and the tip of my index finger turns a darker 
crimson. 
 



 6 

"What can I do to get out of this grip? I can try to pry your fingers off but you're pretty 
strong" I demonstrate the futility of my efforts. "Besides, struggling puts me in direct conflict 
with you, making this a contest of wills and battle of strength, like arm wrestling. But how 
about if I do this instead?"  
 
I put my left hand around Harlan's fist, my fingers over his, and squeeze. I accompany and 
amplify Harlan's grip until, all of a sudden, I sense his grasp relax. My finger slides out easily. 
 
"What happened? That was strange--all of a sudden my hand relaxed."  
 
"What happened is that I did more of what you were doing and you let go." I bring my stool 
back to the other side of the table. As I continue to explore Harlan's movement disposition, I 
explain, "Before, the more I struggled against you, the harder you resisted my efforts. But 
when I took over the work your muscles were doing, they let go." 
 
"Why does that work?" 
 
"The idea is that your muscles are governed by your brain. They didn't decide to tighten up on 
their own. How tight they are depends on what's happening in your nervous system, on what 
you notice, and what you want. While I continue to touch and move you, let me tell you a 
story. Several years ago, when I was giving a lecture for the biofeedback department at San 
Francisco State University, I noticed that the students in the back row were pretty sleepy. The 
classroom was like one of those theaters where the stage is at the bottom and the rows rise 
toward the back. As I continued to speak, I realized that the sleepiness was spreading down 
the rows." 
 
At the same time that I am telling the story, I continue to explore the ramifications of Harlan's 
pattern, investigating the micro-movements of his ribcage and spine. Each place I put my 
hands, I ask how this rib or vertebrae fits into the overall scheme of things, how its movement 
correlates to the overall bias that we found. I am not trying to change him, not trying to 
correct what I find. I am following the dictum, "Think globally, act locally." In each locale, I 
accompany him, going with what is easy and looking for how to make it even a little easier, a 
little more fluid. By making manifest how all of him--right side as well as left, head and neck 
as well as spine and ribs, legs and feet as well as pelvis--is involved, the pattern becomes 
clearer and, somehow, as it becomes clearer, the pattern begins to lose its grip.  
 
"I was beginning to wonder about my lecture's effect when it hit--the heat. The vent in the 
back of the room had been blowing out hot air without pause and the thick wave had finally 
reached my head. Wondering what to do, I watched as a student in the back of the room tried 
to adjust the thermostat but couldn't--it was locked to prevent tampering. So the student then 
opened the back door, allowing cold outside air to rush into the room. It seemed like a good 
idea, but it wasn't. The cold air rushed over the thermostat. This meant the thermostat 
registered that the room as too cold and signaled the furnace to keep working away." 
 
Having facilitated the smaller movements nested within the larger constellation, I begin to 
correlate movement in place--for example, the pelvis--with motion somewhere else--the mid-
back or shoulder. Each time another part comes into play, the right side shortens more easily 
and the movement begins to echo throughout Harlan. Again, I place one hand on his shoulder 
and the other on his hip. When I bring shoulder and hip together, I can feel everything 
participating; interestingly enough, when I return to the starting position, his shoulder and hip 



 7 

keep moving, coming ever so slightly farther apart than before. As if the compulsion has 
released, the right side is beginning to show the first signs of being able lengthen. 
 
"In my lecture I had been discussing how the brain governs the muscles, so I thought that the 
room's heat wave might provide a good analogy. I pointed out that in selfregulating systems it 
is impossible to change the behavior--the output--of the system directly. The more you try to 
alter its behavior, the more it resists. Since the system's behavior is a consequence of what it 
senses, one way to elicit change is to change what happens at the sensor and in this case it 
meant doing something to the thermometer. I asked someone to close the door and someone 
else to go the bathroom, soak some paper towels in hot water, and lay them over the 
thermostat. Once the box warmed up, the heat shut off." 
 
"I get it. The hot towels do the same thing as squeezing my hand to get me to let go." 
 
"That's right. It is also the same approach I've been taking when I move you around. 
Feldenkrais used to talk about using the muscles to fool the brain. After you follow the pattern 
by supporting the muscles in their contractions, doing the work for them, the nervous system 
senses that the muscles have nothing left to do. Now something new can happen. You might 
call this strategy "following in order to lead." As I say this, I begin to move Harlan's right 
shoulder toward his head while moving his right hip away from his shoulder. His right side 
elongates a little, easily, and the left side of his waist begins to arch slightly from the table. 
 
"Hey, that's different. My back feels much better." 
 
I slowly help Harlan come to sitting. After giving him a few moments to re-orient, I feel the 
muscles along his spine and repeat the side to side shifting movements from the evaluation. 
The muscles on the right side are now softer and his movement is more symmetrical. He is 
more symmetrical. I take a few moments to explore the movements that are now possible for 
him, especially bringing his shoulder forward and beginning to explore turning to the right. 
By accompanying and amplifying Harlan’s habitual constriction we made a dead-end into an 
intersection.  
 
"I'm sitting more evenly now. My right butt is touching the table." 
 
"Try lifting your buttock and keeping your right side shortened. Can you feel all the work you 
were doing before? Good. Now let your hip down. It's no longer out of your control; once you 
can reproduce the tightness and intentionally let it go, you are no longer stuck." 
 
"Well, I'll be damned." 


