o Both are methods of education which increase our ability to take advantage of the plasticity of our brains.
o Both recognize that it is necessary to have options in order to maintain a healthy life.
o Both methods emphasize that learning new options is the natural way we develop throughout our lives,
from infancy to old age.
o Both methods maintain that we can keep the habits we have just as they are. We merely need to learn more options which can give our current habits a rest.
What Dr. Tomatis and Dr. Feldenkrais said
about their work:
Tomatis: Existence can be considered
a permanent process of education.
Feldenkrais: The whole procedure is that of adult reeducation and not treatment. This is as it should be, for it is a question of teaching and learning and not of disease and cure.
Tomatis: The listening function does not affect only the ear. It mobilizes the entire nervous system by means of the vestibular apparatus. By its particular neuronic action, this regulates muscle tensions of the body (both static and dynamic) and relative position of the limbs. In fact, the vestibular apparatus controls everything to do with posture and gesture. This explains how the whole body is called upon
when a question of listening arises.
Feldenkrais: Understand that there are two sorts of learning. There is the kind of learning which is committing things to memory. That learning is independent of time and experience. But there is learning in which you have no say whatsoever, and that learning is latent in the natural laws which have produced our brain,
our nervous system, our body, and our muscles.
Tomatis: It is by perfecting tools specially designed to re-establish dialogue between one organ and another and between an organ and one’s whole being, that our future work lies. Everything consists of dialogue, of language, and therefore of listening. It is no exaggeration to state that every disharmony in listening brings with it a disharmony in a human being’s total integration, whether this manifests itself against some other person or against one’s own self.
Dr. Feldenkrais also said this about his Method:
1. It makes us conscious of the shapes and
interrelationships of the skeleton.
2. It both reduces and equalizes the prevailing muscular tonus.
3. It reduces the amount of effort expended in all we do.
4. It simplifies the way in which we mobilize ourselves for any particular action.
5. It enhances our sensitivity, allowing us to take notice of even small aberrations from the norm.
6. It improves our ability to orient ourselves spatially.
7. It adds versatility to the way our intelligence functions.
8. It reduces fatigue, thus increasing
our capacity for work and endurance.
9. It improves posture and breathing,
thereby rejuvenating the body.
10. It improves one’s health and capacity for action.
11. It improves coordination in all that we do.
12. It makes all learning easier, mental, or physical.
13. It leads to a deeper self-awareness.