































Feldenkrais Research Journal • volume 1 (2004)

Article

The Experience of Being Embodied: Qualitative Research And
Somatic Education - A Perspective Based On The Feldenkrais
Method®

Yvan Joly
MA; Feldenkrais Institute for Somatic Education Inc., Québec, Canada

Abstract
Somatic Education is the name of a new disciplinary field which focuses on the living body, on the
biological basis of consciousness and awareness, and on movement as experienced in space. The
Feldenkrais Method and all other methods for somatic education share the need for qualitative research:
to formulate their theories and define the scientific basis of their concepts; to measure the effects of their
practices; to understand and improve the training process for practitioners and teachers. The paradoxical
nature of verbally conducted research dealing with a non-verbal research object such as the body also
needs to be clarified. Any researcher concerned with the quality of somatic education must bring to the
research process an awareness of her/his own body. This is both a characteristic feature and an
undeniable necessity for such research.

Keywords
Somatic Education, Feldenkrais, consciousness, awareness, qualitative research

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

First published: Revue de l'Association pour la recherche qualitative (1995), Vol. 12, pp. 87-99.

Please cite: Feldenkrais Research Journal, volume 1; 2004.

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


     
IFF Academy 

Feldenkrais Research Journal 1 (2004) 
® 2004 by the author 

 

THE EXPERIENCE OF BEING EMBODIED   

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH AND SOMATIC EDUCATION  
A PERSPECTIVE BASED ON THE FELDENKRAIS METHOD® 

By Yvan JOLY, M.A. (Psychology),  

Feldenkrais Institute for Somatic Education Inc. 

107 Avenue de Touraine, St-Lambert, Québec J4S 1H3 

Tél. fax. : 1-450-671-0638 

E-mail: yvanjoly@compuserve.com 

 

INTRODUCTION – A Personal Point of View 

 

The perspective I would like to present here springs from my experience as practitioner, 

instructor, and researcher in the sphere of somatic education, and more particularly as a 

Feldenkrais® (note 1) or “Awareness Through Movement” teacher.  I would like to share some 

ideas, relate certain “adventures”, and above all outline a few questions which have been 

uppermost in my mind during more than twenty years of researching issues of special interest 

in the context of my practical work – and specifically in the field of somatic education. Please 

note that this introduction does not aim at being strictly academic in either style or pretension.  

If “the body has its reasons”, body-centred work and a practitioner’s reflections about the 

practices constituting such work also have their proper reasons. 

 

My thanks go to the Association for Qualitative Research and the committee charged with 

organising the congress on “Le corps de la recherche” (“Research into Embodiment”) for 

letting me represent the perspective of professional somatic educators. This theme offers an 

excellent opportunity for building bridges between the worlds of university and professional 

practice, and especially between researchers, practitioners, and those who are involved in 

researching issues arising within the context of actual practice. 

 

In the following sections I will deal with four points: 

A- The sphere of somatic education and the Feldenkrais Method 

B- Relevant research requirements in that field 

C- The limitations of verbally conducted research into the experience of “being embodied” 

D- Research into embodiment and the researcher’s body 



  
2  

Y.Joly/Feldenkrais Research Journal 1 (2004) 

I will try to show that the methods of somatic education offer a vast range of possibilities for 

anyone interested in qualitative research. This field itself is in need of research and a coherent 

language.  The somatic process needs to be properly spelled out. Finally, somatic practitioners 

and educators need to come up with an appropriate language which matches the somatic 

experience. That task in itself constitutes an interesting paradox and exceptional research 

challenge since somatic experience essentially defies verbal description. In addition, the 

methods of somatic education offer qualitative research a unique opportunity for immersion in 

the phenomenological experience of being alive in a body – i.e. a concrete setting for 

researching embodiment where the body of the researcher is also taken into account. “Non-

reductionist researchers in the cognitive sciences see conscience and experience as 

irreducibly real phenomena. We therefore need to equip ourselves with a method for 

exploring these phenomena.” (Varela 1993a: 54) In his book The Embodied Mind Varela 

turns to Buddhism and meditation in order to underpin his research into enactment and the 

phenomenology of mind.  I myself believe that somatic education offers research a wide 

range of methods for exploring the phenomenology of the body and should therefore occupy 

an important place in qualitative research – in terms of realisation of actual projects and also 

in education and training. I hope that what I have said so far will facilitate exchanges between 

the fields of qualitative research and somatic education.  

 

A- THE DOMAIN OF SOMATIC EDUCATION  

       with special reference to THE FELDENKRAIS METHOD 

 

Somatic education is in process of emerging as a new discipline. It could be defined as: the 

disciplinary field embracing a variety of methods concerned with learning processes 

whereby the sensitive body (the ‘soma’) acquires awareness through movement within 

its environment. 

This discipline is interested in the living body’s subjectively experienced capacity for self-

education. The field it covers lies at the intersection of arts and sciences focusing on the living 

body, and is of relevance for many different spheres:  health care (rehabilitation, psychology, 

physical activity), sports performance (training and competitive achievements), the creative 

arts (interpretation and creation), philosophy (embodiment of mind, “constructivism”), 

education and teaching in general (concrete physical and experiential foundations of 

learning); and also more specialized fields such as phenomenology, bio-mechanics, 

meditation , biology and “systemics”, cognitive sciences, and movement sciences. This 



  
3  

Y.Joly/Feldenkrais Research Journal 1 (2004) 

impressive list of tangentially related disciplines well demonstrates the complexity of this 

newly emerging domain - without even mentioning the thirty or so specific methods 

embraced by practitioners all over the Western world in the name of somatic education (note 

2).  “Beyond their special features the different methods share a fundamentally similar aim: 

learning to refine one’s kinaesthetic and proprioceptive sense in order to act with greater 

efficiency, pleasure, and power of expression, - but also with less pain” (Quebec Association 

for Somatic Education, 1994).         

 
In the expression “somatic education” the word soma is of special importance. Its intended 

meaning differs from current usage, opposing somatic and psychological. Here we are in fact 

rehabilitating the concept of soma implied by the Greek word which since the time of Hesiod 

has stood for “the living body”. Hence what we are thinking of is the body in its totality, i.e. 

subjectively experienced as an integral part of its environment. The recent trend of 

articulating and valuing the experience of being thus embodied goes back to Thomas Hanna, 

the founder of the American magazine Somatics (note 3).  He suggested the following 

definition of somatics: “ the art and science of the interrelational process between 

awareness, biological function, and the environment” (Hanna, 1989: 1). Apart from Hanna 

several other authors and researchers took an interest in the body experienced as a living 

entity (note 4), in embodiment (Varela, 1993a, 1993b, 1994), in the self-regulation of living 

systems (Maturana and Varela, 1990), and in the anatomy of consciousness (Rosenfield, 

1992, 1993). 

 

The vast field of somatics includes practices of oriental origin, biofeedback, mental imagery, 

Reichian approaches, psycho-neuro-immunology, and everything related to the body-mind.  A 

well-defined sub-division of that field consists of methods whose common perspective is 

somatic education (Johnson, 1995).  

 

Somatic education distinguishes itself from the majority of psychophysical approaches which 

bring to light repressed emotions and unfinished relationships by way of the body. Such 

approaches could be called “somatic psychology” (Johnson 1997) or “soma-therapy” as 

indicated by the title of a French journal.  Does not the word therapy etymologically signify 

the treatment of dysfunction and illness?  However, the art and science of somatic educators 

does not focus on pathology and symptoms, aetiology and healing, but rather on the sensory-

motor learning process, the development of kinaesthetic potential, and the discovery of better 

strategic options in movement (Joly, 1994:14). 



  
4  

Y.Joly/Feldenkrais Research Journal 1 (2004) 

Let’s take a concrete example and talk a little about the Feldenkrais Method which I have 

been practicing and teaching for more than twenty years. This method was created by Moshe 

Feldenkrais (1904-1984), a physicist and engineer who once worked at the Joliot-Curie 

laboratory for nuclear physics. Feldenkrais was also a judo expert and first European black 

belt, and a follower of Gurdjieff’s teachings. His method offers improved awareness of the 

living body as it moves within the gravitational field. Feldenkrais was interested in human 

movement and its role in the development of our skills and the implementation of our actions.  

This method is practiced both within a group and individually, i.e. under the verbal or manual 

direction of a teacher.  This teacher will have undergone extensive training aimed at acquiring 

“objective” knowledge of the moving body, as perceived in third person mode (anatomy of 

movement, physiology, biomechanics, bodily functions).  At the same time, if not primarily, 

such a teacher will have submitted to a rigorous process of subjective movement exploration 

as experienced in first person mode. This rehabilitation of educated subjectivity in 

professional practice constitutes the unique characteristic of somatic education as a discipline. 

In order to gain professional competence the teacher-practitioner has to rely on her or his own 

experience or personal understanding and knowledge, acquired through actual 

experimentation.  In this respect each of the main methods of somatic education employs its 

own educational strategies for training future teachers. But let’s look at a concrete example by 

providing you with an experience here and now. 

 

First EXPERIENTIAL PROPOSAL 

Stay as you are right now, sitting or reclining, and pay attention to your position and the 

sensations you are experiencing in your body at this moment. You can close your eyes or 

keep them open as you please.  You’ll find that one of these two possibilities will make 

the exploration easier.  Direct attention to your breathing and observe the rhythm. How 

much time is taken up by breathing in, breathing out, and the pauses in between?  

Where does the respiration make itself felt in your trunk? 

Now let your attention go to the parts of yourself that contact the floor and the seat 

(maybe also the back) of the chair. 

Notice if these areas of contact and support are similar on the left and right side of 

yourself.  

Notice if the head seems to be inclined, vertical, or turned.  

Don’t change anything of what you are observing. You may actually find it difficult to 

sense something without moving immediately. 



  
5  

Y.Joly/Feldenkrais Research Journal 1 (2004) 

To continue the concrete description of a somatic educator’s daily work, I can say that during 

a single week I may encounter the following people in my private practice: a child suffering 

from cerebral palsy, a construction worker recovering from back injury, a singer in search of 

vocal flexibility, a musician suffering from chronic pain when he plays the violin, a painter 

whose creative inspiration has hit rock-bottom, a professional golfer looking for a teaching 

method that might help beginners to learn with greater ease, a teacher suffering from anxiety 

and burn-out, a “full-time” mother who is trying to reorient herself after her children have left 

home, a dancer who finds his technical training too exhausting, a dyslexic child, or even a 

horse with behaviour problems whenever it has to get into a horse-box for transportation. 

What all these client-pupils have in common are certainly not symptoms!  All these people 

encounter themselves in somatic education because of the approach, which allows self-

experience as an embodied being and self-awareness in and through movement.  

 

The practice of somatic education relies on the practitioner’s capacity to sense her/his own 

self in movement; and also on the ability to perceive - by way of observation, touch, and 

imaginative projection - what is going on in the other person’s subjective experience. It is as 

if one could tune one’s own inner experience into that of another living system and on that 

basis set in motion an educational process by employing the particular strategies which 

characterize each method. A major part of this educational work relies therefore on the 

practitioner’s intuitive capacity. By that I mean the capacity to think without words in that 

pre-verbal universe of the sensory-motor realm, in the intimate awareness of embodied life. 

This makes the approach what it is. This also causes all the difficulties both in the practice as 

such and in the training of future practitioners. And what about the difficulty of doing 

research in that universe beyond the reach of words? And isn’t it paradoxical to be speaking 

about all that now? 

 

B- The Practice of Somatic Education and Requirements for Appropriate  

Research 

In somatic education, as in any new discipline, there is a great need of appropriate research. I 

am going to highlight a number of requirements, not necessarily in order of priority.  

 

1- Somatic education needs to define itself as a discipline, spell out what it involves. Its 

theoretical models are still relatively little developed. Its language lacks precision and 

practitioners of various allegiances are using the same words. Anyone who reads a little 



  
6  

Y.Joly/Feldenkrais Research Journal 1 (2004) 

about this field will quickly realize that their vocabulary is nearly interchangeable, while 

they employ very different strategies in their practical, concrete, educational work.  Hence 

the first great requirement is to clarify language, concepts, methods, and theoretical 

framework. A research project should be mentioned in this connection.  In her doctoral 

thesis Odette Guimond (1987) presents important analysis of the meaning and crucial role 

played by movement in theatre performance and the training of actors, but also more 

generally in somatic education. Such research helps enormously to stimulate 

conceptualisation. 

  

Undoubtedly, behind the linguistic frameworks (“languaging”) in which each such method is 

couched, there resides a hidden substratum common to them all, constituting the domain to be 

defined.  Furthermore, anyone who is familiar with more than one of them is aware of 

enormous differences between the various methods - both in terms of theory and concrete 

educational practice.  

 

“One will be more directive, or rather corrective, another more exploratory; one will put the 

emphasis on the use of space, another on interiorisation of movement; one will prefer 

movement on the floor, another in the vertical.  Different somatic educators will be more or 

less interested in language, imagination, interaction among the participants, communication 

by touch, emotional or artistic expression” (Joly, 1994:12). 

 

In terms of set theory one could say: what is common to this great variety of methods will 

define the discipline of somatic education as such. However, the features characteristic of 

each method on the conceptual and educational level have still to be made explicit; and in that 

respect research is still in its infancy. Rigorous research is crucial in order to establish the 

boundaries and appropriate signposts for this disciplinary field.  

 

2- Effectiveness of somatic education still has to be underpinned by rigorous, I was going to 

say scientific, research, provided that subjective real-life experience is included in the 

researcher’s idea of science.  Of course one could apply traditional double-blind 

procedures to measure the effectiveness of an intervention in somatic education; for 

instance among patients suffering from multiple sclerosis or athletes willing to submit 

themselves to a variety of interventions, randomly assigning subjects to experimental or 

control group and also taking into account the placebo effect. Such research could be 



  
7  

Y.Joly/Feldenkrais Research Journal 1 (2004) 

pertinent; and when all methodological and ethical difficulties have been overcome, 

certain objectifying and quantifying projects of this type would undoubtedly be useful, if 

not absolutely necessary, so as to assure the credibility of the discipline – at least in 

certain circles. However, and for all sorts of reasons, this type of research has never been 

very popular in the somatic domain. My personal experience and initial training in 

scientific methodology could have taken me in that direction, but I have resisted such 

research mainly because the research methods don’t seem to derive from the same source 

as the process which they intend to examine. It took me years to get in touch with my own 

sense of being really alive in my body and give this sense its due in my personal practice 

and existence. So all purely objectifying and quantifying research became something I 

wished to resist because it simply does not do justice to the importance of the process 

under investigation.  Can the effectiveness of the process in somatic education be 

evaluated as such?  In other words can it be measured by way of external, objectifying 

criteria, without taking into account the specifics of the particular methods being used? 

Undoubtedly it can, but that is not the only way. We simply need to recognize that any 

intervention involving another person is unique.  Somatic education or method F, A, B, or 

C does not function for “multiple sclerosis” or “back pain”, but for individual people, and 

it “works” more or less regardless of the symptoms presented.  The most important factor 

in efficient intervention is the communication established between practitioner and pupil.  

This at least is what the practitioner believes, because s/he is unlikely to use the same 

strategies for people with the same symptoms. What would therefore be the point of 

evaluating a method of treating an illness or improving a sportsman’s performance when 

the mediating factors are left out of account?  Although I am not familiar with the entire 

realm of methodology, I ask myself if one should not simply recognize that qualitative – 

and more specifically phenomenological - methods are better able to shed light on the 

domain of somatic education, including assessment of its effectiveness. Research projects 

such as the one undertaken by Sylvie Fortin (1994) at the University of Quebec dance 

department exemplify how qualitative methods can be applied to the study of somatic 

education and its impact within a particular discipline, in this case dance.  

 

3- The “real life experience” of those actively involved in the process of somatic education is 

an area that has scarcely been studied and documented.   A few pioneers, such as 

Charlotte Beaudoin (1994) of the department of physical education at the university of 

Laval, are interested in this aspect. Obviously, that type of phenomenological research is 



  
8  

Y.Joly/Feldenkrais Research Journal 1 (2004) 

extremely relevant to everybody in this field and very rich for those who accompany 

students’ professional development.  In addition, participation in such a research project 

must enrich the experience of anybody involved in discussing what is at issue.  However, 

that kind of research presents a major methodological challenge, consisting in having to 

explain in words what is somatically experienced during a course of action. 

  

Doesn’t the value of this type of research mainly depend on the subjects’ capacity to 

verbalize their experience? This question will be taken up later since it crops up in 

connection with both study of process and procedure, and also research into other aspects. 

I believe that the relationship between lived experience and language lies at the very 

centre of what needs to be clarified in somatic education.   

 

4- The verbal and especially the non-verbal communication process unfolding between two 

people during a somatic education session might strike an uninitiated observer as quite 

mysterious and give rise to questions such as: What impels the practitioner to say this or that, 

touch here or there, make a pause, start again, and finally stop? Students in training 

programmes are always curious to know what their teachers are thinking of when they give a 

demonstration. What objective do they have in mind, what principles guide the teachers’ 

actions? The answers to all these questions are part of a complex cognitive process, which 

belongs essentially to the immediacy of direct experience in the present moment, but is 

ultimately supported by past experience.  The practitioner may see images, hear words, feel 

some sensation or emotion, receive inspiration from an idea, direct attention to her/his own 

comfort or sensations. - By the way, how does the practitioner know that the source of those 

sensations lies either within the self or in the interaction with the other because they originate 

in the other person? -  An important breakthrough in research into this kind of question was 

made in Quebec by Yves St Arnaud at the psychology department of Sherbrooke University 

and Yvan Joly of the Feldenkrais Institute for Somatic Education in Montreal (St Arnaud, 

1993, St Arnaud et Joly, 1992). Aiming at developing appropriate concepts for somatic 

practice, they applied a methodological model inspired by “action-science”. Sufficiently 

general in scope and therefore not restricted to somatic practices, this model essentially 

consists of an exchange based on a questionnaire which was drawn up with a specific idea of 

practice in mind. This questionnaire also offered an opportunity to review video-recorded 

interventions which the practitioner is then asked to explain, make explicit, and describe, in 

terms of what s/he subjectively experienced during the professional moves made during the 



  
9  

Y.Joly/Feldenkrais Research Journal 1 (2004) 

session.  As a result her/his educational strategies begin to stand out more clearly. These are 

then reflected back to the practitioner by the researcher who devised the methodological 

model. The effort of trying to verbalize one’s actions and subsequent reflections on this action 

are enormously stimulating.  Since I have myself submitted to such a process I can testify to 

its value. As a result comprehension of my interventions improved tremendously and my 

capacity to find adequate words and explain myself to others also made big strides. The 

influence on my personal practice could be felt during the long months of research. (It is more 

difficult to maintain that is still the case after several months have passed). My teaching 

activities in training programmes have greatly benefited as well.  In my view, this type of 

research deserves to be repeated and maybe pursued more methodically for the different 

practices involved in the domain of somatic education.  Of course, here too much remains to 

be done if research is to include all of somatic experience, i.e. not only what can be put into 

words. Is there a way of accounting for the entire complexity of the interactive process 

experienced in somatic education without succumbing to the reductionism of language?     

 

5- The last research requirement I would like to mention relates to training programmes and 

the effectiveness of the teaching and learning process they offer. Analysis of the training 

process of future somatic educators itself has hardly begun. However, some schools have 

already trained several hundred new practitioners.  Training models could be more 

precise, and better validated as well. What kind of competency profile (since this 

expression is fashionable at present) are we looking for and would ultimately like to come 

up with? How do we establish the criteria indicating successful completion of the training 

course? How do the trainers determine whether a student is in a position to practise 

without supervision? How does the subject acting as a trainer establish an educational 

rapport with the subject in the role of trainee? What objective factors have to be taken into 

account in the training programme? How can one evaluate the achievement of objectives 

on the level of the subjective learning process for which the student him- or herself needs 

to be responsible? What kind of self-examination is expected of the students?  We have to 

remember that in somatic education one has to be able to touch a person’s head and sense 

what the subject experiences while being touched! The model that all the different schools 

of somatic education rely on to a certain degree in their training programmes is based on 

the master-disciple relationship. Is that the most appropriate model? If somatic education 

as a discipline begins to penetrate into the academic sphere what conditions will the 

institution have to respect in order to safeguard the subject’s living experience at the heart 



  
10  

Y.Joly/Feldenkrais Research Journal 1 (2004) 

of the process? How does it become apparent that the students’ personal development 

requires immersion in somatic experience and how is that aspect to be incorporated in 

curriculum and evaluation?   

 

Several questions about education and training with regard to professional practice have been 

raised by GRAPP (Groupe de réflexion et d’action sur les pratiques professionnelles) (note 

5).  Between 1987 and 1997 this association brought together in Quebec trainers, 

practitioners, and teachers from different academic institutions as well as some practitioners 

and trainers from the private sphere. This group scrutinized the relationship between action 

and reflection, academic and practical knowledge, theory and practice, and all aspects 

concerning the training of future practitioners in education, psychology, sociology, 

counselling, and also in somatic education. After all it has to be realized that somatic 

education is not only of relevance in connection with the training of professional practitioners. 

Discussions at GRAPP showed that somatic education could contribute a great deal towards 

devising exploratory and learning models for all aspects of subjective experience as an 

integral part of action. At GRAPP we could, for instance, add to reflection about intuition and 

the workings of non-verbal thought. In turn the influence of our colleagues in university 

education and training and at more practically oriented levels led to a considerable expansion 

of our understanding with regard to methods and problems in the relationship between action 

and reflection. Hence that type of research proved to be very useful for us.   

 

C- THE EXPERIENCE OF BEING EMBODIED 

      THE LIMITS OF VERBALLY CONDUCTED RESEARCH 

Let’s now move straight to the heart of what preoccupies me most, namely how we 

experience ourselves as living bodies and how we speak about that experience. To begin with 

I would like to remind you with Korzybski (1966:25), the originator of general semantics that: 

1) The map is not the territory (Words are not the thing they represent). 

2) A map does not cover the entire territory (Words cannot convey everything they 

represent). 

According to my personal mythology I would say that the sense of being embodied is like the 

flag on the highest point of an iceberg. The greatest part of the iceberg of consciousness is 

below the waterline. Then there is the visible part of the iceberg, which – one might say – can 

be “felt”.  On the very top of the iceberg there is a tiny little symbol for communication and 

identification. What is the relationship between these “levels” of embodied life?  I am using 



  
11  

Y.Joly/Feldenkrais Research Journal 1 (2004) 

the word “levels” on purpose, implying at the same time that we need to ask about the 

hierarchy of these levels. The answer from the point of view of somatic education is that the 

highest, most important level is that of experience, and experience cannot be reduced to what 

one can say about it.  

 

In my opinion we would get thoroughly trapped if we were now to begin a sophisticated and 

intellectually demanding discussion about semantics, semiology, and the role of the senses. 

Don’t worry; I have neither competence for, nor any present interest in, such a discussion. I 

simply want to draw attention to the feeling of unease that frequently crops up when the 

question of research into the living body is raised. This often leads to endless verbiage and the 

experience itself gets lost. Of course we use words for certain kinds of communication such as 

I am involved in here. But how many books, how many articles devoted to the 

phenomenology of the body and lived experience, consist of a continuous flood of 

abstractions that have nothing to do with the living experience of the researcher and hardly 

anything with that of the subject under investigation.  Please don’t misunderstand me: it is not 

a matter of dismissing language, and the oral or written symbol, altogether. I too belong to 

those who sometimes defend, occasionally with brio, the view that “an unspoken experience 

does not exist”! It is more a matter of making sure that right proportions and links are 

maintained between the flag on the iceberg and the iceberg itself, including the part 

submerged under water. 

 

Maybe, however, it is simply a question of revising the use of language? Well, no, that won’t 

do, if you ask me. Of course, after seeing a film one can talk about it in different ways and on 

different levels. Certain forms of language, certain styles of expression, are more or less 

detached from what the viewers experienced during the film, or more or less in tune with it. 

For research in somatic education it would be more appropriate to stay close to the 

experience, even if one’s objective is to elaborate a theory of somatic education. But my 

intention is to go even further in this debate, since asking one’s subjects to speak about their 

somatic experience already demands a degree of dissociation from them, especially if one 

asks them to speak during the process of experimentation (“experienciation”). Talking about 

a somatic experience in retrospect means relying on memory and the evocation of the 

particular experience; in other words the subject no longer talks about what s/he really 

experienced but about something else.  

 



  
12  

Y.Joly/Feldenkrais Research Journal 1 (2004) 

Allow me to distinguish three aspects of somatic experience and its expression, and to make 

what I have in mind more concrete by asking you to consider for a few moments how it would 

be to subject yourself to the following experiential exposition: 

 

Second EXPERIENTIAL PROPOSAL   

 

Please take a minute or so to make yourself really comfortable on or in your chair. 

Make any change that you feel necessary. 

Do this NOW before reading further.  

GOOD, THANKS.  You can read on. 

Observe what kind of adjustments you made in response to my invitation/ suggestion.  

If, so far as you know, you didn’t make any changes, simply go on reading. 

How long did it take you to decide what you should change in your posture and relation 

to the chair; and how much time did the adjustments themselves take?  

Did you talk to yourself internally before, during, or after changing something? 

What did you actually change? 

Could you go back to the starting position, which would obviously have seemed less 

comfortable to you?       

Does that position appear different as you re-consider it now? 

If you did change your position, does that mean that you were not sitting comfortably 

before? 

RETURN TO THE SECOND POSITION, IN OTHER WORDS THE ONE YOU 

CHOSE IN ORDER TO BE MORE COMFORTABLE. 

Which criteria did you take into account in your decision to change or not to change 

your position? 

Were these sensations, interior images, emotions, tastes, smells, tactile or cutaneous 

perceptions, words you heard or said to yourself, an impression of being tired or tense, 

or whatever else? 

If you are more at ease in your present position, what tells you so? 

Finally, consider for a moment the following two possibilities: 

either you have already answered all these questions and are now free,  

or you now have to write down your answers for an interviewer who will soon ring you 

up in order to carry out his research into somatic education.   

 



  
13  

Y.Joly/Feldenkrais Research Journal 1 (2004) 

The distinctions I would like to present after this practical experiment will throw light on 

different modes of experience. First of all let’s be clear: From the standpoint of somatic 

education, the primary objective of this little exploration might have been to discover the 

concrete notion of comfort in sitting, and through that bring about an improvement of the 

person’s capacity for self-regulation as s/he interacts with her/his environment. This is what 

the teacher hopes to achieve. We also have to take into account what impact the teacher exerts 

through his presence, vocal intonation, the pauses s/he makes, the choice of words. Then we 

have to ask what the pupil experiences and learns; and also what the pupil thinks s/he is 

experiencing and learning, what he or she is actually conscious of.  Finally, there is the 

question of what the pupil can or wants to say about her or his experience.  That is just a brief 

overview of some of the distinctions we have to make in somatic education as a scientific 

discipline. 

 

What is important for me in the practice of somatic education as a teacher is that my pupils 

develop the skill to organize themselves during movement and action. This would include 

being able to change position regularly in order to maintain the experience of comfort while 

sitting during a conference or lecture, even, or particularly, if that lecture or conference is as 

captivating as this one.  During this somatic learning process I can give my students a sense of 

direction by employing an approach of verbally guided discovery such as the one above. 

More often than not the answers to my questions which the pupils come up with benefit only 

themselves, without being communicated to the teacher. I could also guide my pupil’s 

somatic learning process with my hands, i.e. through touch, sensing the nature of the pupil’s 

experience of comfort by way of an extension of what I myself experience, and directing her 

or his somatic exploration and learning through touching the person with my hands.  In both 

cases there is no need for the pupil’s verbal expression; in fact it often cuts the pupil off from 

her/his sensations, especially in moments of intensely novel and complex discovery. In some 

cases I might myself disconnect my discourse from what the pupils are somatically 

experiencing at that moment (by talking about the weather or the most recent game in my 

favourite sport). In this instance it is as if I took charge of verbalising a certain dissociated 

level in order to allow the pupil to associate more successfully on a somatic level. Of course 

both the pupil and myself could also confirm a particular somatic experience by some 

comment, indeed amplify such an experience by talking about it. But to repeat once again, 

most of the time such verbalisation is not essential to the process of somatic learning. And 



  
14  

Y.Joly/Feldenkrais Research Journal 1 (2004) 

here we are back with the question with which we started: what about research into the 

process that is taking place during somatic education? 

 

D- Research into embodiment and the researcher’s body 

 

Before readers get the impression that they have been taken on a voyage towards squaring a 

circle, let me describe in the following paragraphs what the nature of the relation between 

“somatic life and language” might be.  In fact I believe that we need to develop research 

methods which include the researcher’s consciousness in their methodology.  

 

In the 70’s a number of research workers yielded to the incontestable need for consciousness-

dependent research (scientific studies that take the researcher’s state of consciousness into 

account). This proved to be necessary, for instance, in studying states of altered consciousness 

induced by psychotropic drugs. How far was it possible to go in understanding these 

phenomena of modification of consciousness if, in order to be objective, the researchers 

remained outside the experience under investigation, “coldly” measuring physiological 

changes, taking note of modifications in observable behaviour, and recording the sounds their 

subjects were making and their often disconnected words? I must admit that I lost track of that 

methodological breakthrough and some of you are probably better informed about recent 

developments in that line of research. In any event one could say that this research strategy 

has at least justified some rather beautiful hallucinatory experiences on the part of a few 

courageous researchers. But I don’t intend to talk about that. May it be sufficient to underline 

that, in my opinion, elaboration of a perspective which includes the researcher’s state of 

consciousness and as a result mobilizes his subjectivity could be highly productive for 

somatic education. But let’s have another experience before going any further.    

 

Third EXPERIENTIAL PROPOSAL 

Please try to understand the meaning of the following text, but don’t do any of the 

movements suggested in it. Or better still, read the text aloud to a colleague who will do 

the movements while you observe what he or she does as you read. 

 

Once again find a comfortable sitting position. 

Now fix a point on the horizon. 



  
15  

Y.Joly/Feldenkrais Research Journal 1 (2004) 

Close your eyes, lift the head towards the ceiling. Then open your eyes and notice that, 

with the head in this position, the eyes are looking at another point above the first one. 

Return to the starting position.  

Keep your eyes on the first point straight in front on the horizon and with the tip of your 

nose begin drawing circles in space.  Start with tiny circles, slowly increasing their size 

in a gradually expanding spiral which you then reduce again to return to the very first 

circle. Three or four times, slowly, first in one direction, then in the other. 

Now close your eyes and lift the head once again towards the ceiling. As you open your 

eyes decide if the higher reference point has remained the same or if you have gone 

beyond that first limit.  

Come forward on your chair so that your body is no longer in contact with the back of 

the chair. In this position place your interlaced hands on the top of your head. The 

elbows are open and point to the side.  Keep your head and elbows fixed in space as you 

begin to roll your pelvis on the seat, forward and back (Some people would say: rock 

your pelvis on the ischia, the two sitbones of the pelvis). 

Do this pelvic rocking motion several times, slowly 7 or 8 times, while keeping the head 

and elbows fixed in space. If you can feel them, notice the movements of the trunk, the 

spinal column, the ribcage, the back, and the stomach. 

Place your hands on the thighs, close your eyes, lift your head as if you wanted to look at 

the ceiling, and now open your eyes and observe where the higher of your two reference 

points is now situated. In other words are you still looking at the same point as before or 

somewhere higher up on the wall, maybe even on the ceiling? 

Sit back comfortably and rest a little. 

 

What was your experience, if you took part in the preceding exploration without actually 

doing the suggested movements? How could you study this kind of movement process with 

the objectives of collecting one or two pupils’  impressions, understanding the method and 

logic of the sequence, measuring and also assessing its effectiveness, and comprehending why 

the movement became more free for some participants while there was no change for others? 

How could practitioners who devise such movement-explorations be helped to improve them?  

 

By way of a conclusion 

 



  
16  

Y.Joly/Feldenkrais Research Journal 1 (2004) 

The qualitative perspective characteristic of somatic education is founded on a state of 

absorption in sensory-motor and kinesthetic experience. The major part of what happens in 

experience belongs to the pre-verbal realm where somatic education offers opportunities for 

the most interesting and most difficult research. This would demand that the researcher 

plunges into a universe of subjectivity where language and reflection offer only occasional 

signposts. In this universe, the primary line of enquiry for any research has to be somatic 

experience as it is lived by a person. However, the researcher is going to run the risk of 

loosing the security of boundaries: between research and practice, between experience and 

reflection, between what is being lived and what is reported in an analytical frame of mind 

and conveyed in a reasonable and articulate way.  “Humanity has to learn how to live in a 

fluid world without either fixed landmarks or ultimate foundations” (Varela, 1993b: p.132). 

Then one has to consider what kind of research and what methodology is appropriate. At issue 

is qualitative research into consciousness that needs to be pursued primarily within the maze 

of everybody’s “I”.  Beyond that I would also wish that qualitative research in somatic 

education should rely more and more on that shared broad experiential base involving 

immersion in immediate and constant renewal of lived embodiment. From that vantage point 

we might be able to devise qualitative research methods which include the real life experience 

of breathing and everything else happening within the autonomic nervous system; of sensory 

perception mediated by the skin and muscles; of all aspects of posture and movement, 

including the vestibular aspect, and all the dimensions of body consciousness in relation to 

space which are the very foundations of our sense of individuality. I would like to close with 

the following words by Israel Rosenfield: 

“A brain does not function independently of the body it exists in.” (Rosenfield, 1992:139) 

“The pattern of acquisition of body image and, with it, of knowledge of objects suggests how 

central body image is to our understanding of the world. Notions of space, objects, and self 

reference depend on body image and they cannot be separated” (Rosenfield, 1992:62). 

“The unconscious body image is the system of reference for our subjectivity” (Rosenfield, 

1993:148). 

 “Continuity of the sense of being alive is created by movement” (Rosenfield, 1993:147).   

 

Reading this author and a number of others quoted here and elsewhere, one really has the 

impression that we are only at the beginning of an important trend involving re-appropriation 

of the living body in cutting edge scientific research. Somatic education offers an exceptional 



  
17  

Y.Joly/Feldenkrais Research Journal 1 (2004) 

way of plunging into the very heart of experiencing the nature of consciousness. That is where 

research is waiting for us. See you there – with or without signposts. 

October 28, 1994 

 

(Translation by Ilana Nevill) 

                                                                Notes 

1) The FELDENKRAIS METHOD ® is the registered trade mark of the North American 

Feldenkrais Guild. 

2) From 1992 the Quebec Association for Somatic Education was involved in creation of a 

network  embracing many specific approaches with the aim of establishing somatic 

education as a domain in its own right. Six approaches are represented (as of 1994) in the 

association: the Alexander Technique, Holistic Gymnastics (Louise Ehrenfried), “Anti-

Gymnastics” (Thérèse Bertherat’s approach to kinetic awareness), Body-Mind Centering,  

Laban-Bartenieff  Fundamentals, the Feldenkrais Method. 

3) The American magazine Somatics constitutes a unique source of reference for somatic 

education as a discipline. Since 1976 Somatics has been published twice a 

      year by the Novato Institute, 1516 Grant Avenue, suite 212, Novato, CA 94945. 

4) See The Newsletter of the Study Project in Phenomenology of the Body, Elisabeth 

A. Behnke, P.O. Box 0-2, Felton CA 950 18 U.S.A. 

5)   Sadly one of the co-founders of the group, my dear friend Roger Tessier died  

last year. The group itself no longer exists. (This note dates from August 2002) 

 

                                           Bibliography 

Beaudoin, C. (1994). L’expérience d’intégration des apprentissages en éducation 

somatique selon une perspective phénoménologique. Mimeographed. University Laval. 

Department for Physical Education. 

Feldenkrais, M. (1972). Awareness Through Movement. NY: Harper & Row  

Fortin, S. (1994). ‘When Dance Science and Somatics Enter the Dance Technique Class’. 

Kinesiology and Medecine for Dance, (15)2, 88-197. 

Hanna,T. (1889). La Somatique. Paris: Interéditions. 

Joly, Y. (1994). “L’éducation somatique: au delà du discours des méthodes”. Association 

française des praticiens de la méthode Feldenkrais, Bulletin d’accueil, 12-19. 

Johnson, D.H. (1995), Bone, Breath and Gesture: Practices of Embodiment, Berkeley, 

California: North Atlantic. 



  
18  

Y.Joly/Feldenkrais Research Journal 1 (2004) 

Johnson, D.H. (1997), The Body in Psychotherapy: Inquiries in Somatic Psychology, 

Berkeley, California: North Atlantic. 

Korzybski, A. (1966). Le rôle du langage dans les processus perceptuels. New York: The 

International Nonaristotelian Library. 

Maturana, H., Varela, F. (1987). The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human 

Understanding. Boston: New Science Library. 

Regroupement québécois pour l’éducation somatique (1994). Brochure presenting the 

affiliated approaches. 

Rosenfield, I. (1992). The Strange, The Familiar, and The Forgotten. An Anatomy of 

Consciousness. New York: Alfred K. Knopf. 

Rosenfield, I. (1993). “Pourquoi le cerveau n’est pas un ordinateur”. Science et Vie, no. 

184: Les secrets du vivant. 

St. Arnaud, Y. (1993). “ Guide méthodologique pour conceptualiser un modèle 

d’intervention”. F. Serre (ed.). Recherche, formation et pratiques en éducation des 

adultes. Editions du CRP, Sherbrooke University, chap. 8. 

St. Arnaud, Y., Joly, Y. (1992). Agir consciemment: conceptualisation du modèle d’une 

pratique en éducation somatique. Mimeographed. Department of Psychology, Sherbrooke 

University. 

Varela, F., Thompson, E., Rosch, E. (1993). L’inscription corporelle de l’esprit: sciences 

cognitives et expérience humaine. Paris: Seuil 

 “                      “                     “                    The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and 

Human Experience. (1993, 3rd printing). The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts; 

London, England. 

Varela, F. (1993 a) “Rencontre avec Francisco Varela”. Sciences humaines, no. 31 

Varela, F. (1993 b) “Varela chauffe la tête”. Actuel, no. 31-32  

 

 

Yvan Joly, M.A. (Psy.) is a psychologist and trainer-practitioner in the Feldenkrais 

Method® . A fter studying cognitive science at the university of Montréal, he devoted 

himself from 1971 to 1980 to applied social science and management consultation. Since 

1980 Yvan Joly has a private practice in somatic education at Montréal and is now in 

charge of the Feldenkrais Institute of Somatic Education there.  He gave courses in many 

university departments in Québec and has been teaching in Professional Feldenkrais 



  
19  

Y.Joly/Feldenkrais Research Journal 1 (2004) 

Training Programmes in fourteen countries over four continents.  Yvan Joly is the author 

of numerous study reports and articles. 

 

                                              Abstract 

Somatic Education is the name of a new disciplinary field which focuses on the living 

body, on the biological basis of consciousness and awareness, and on movement as 

experienced in space. The Feldenkrais Method and all other methods for somatic 

education share the need for qualitative research: to formulate their theories and define the 

scientific basis of their concepts; to measure the effects of their practices; to understand 

and improve the training process for practitioners and teachers.  The paradoxical nature of 

verbally conducted research dealing with a non-verbal research object such as the body 

also needs to be clarified. Any researcher concerned with the quality of somatic education 

must bring to the research process an awareness of her/his own body. This is both a 

characteristic feature and an undeniable necessity for such research.   

 


