Summer vacation has arrived (in the Northern hemisphere). Our Newsletter team is taking a break until September. Before we head for the beach or the mountains, we offer you a review and a preview of the IFF Research Working Group Network activities.
Continue reading “Review and preview of the IFF Research Working Group Network activities”
9pm Central European Daylight Time (CEDT)
Sunday 26th June 2022
For the past year, the IFF Research Database Group has been hard at work updating and improving the searchability of the catalogue of references of the Feldenkrais on the Zotero database.
Please join us as we present the new updated Zotero database.
Some of the topics that we will cover are:
Registration is via mail to iffrg-events@feldenkrais-method.org
Hope to see you there!
Over the past year, the IFF Research Database Task Group has been hard at work updating and improving the searchability of the articles on the Feldenkrais Method on the Zotero database which other members before us have accumulated over the years.
Please join us as we present the new updated Zotero database on
9pm Central European Daylight Time (CEDT)
Sunday 26th June 2022
Registration is via mail to iffrg-events@feldenkrais-method.org
We would like to introduce ourselves.
Continue reading “Introducing the IFF Research Database Task Group”
Date: May 15, 2022 at 5PM CEST (time zone converter link)
REGISTER: via mail to iffrg-events@feldenkrais-method.org
with Roger Russell, MA, PT and Diane Hannemann, Ph.D.
Movement science is one of the many perspectives for researching the Feldenkrais Method. Since its rise in the 1980’s, the field has grown rapidly in the sophistication of research methods, its theoretical depth and innovative applications.
Continue reading “Online Event with Beatrix Vereijken, Ph.D.”
Date: 15 May 2022, 9pm CEST
REGISTER: via mail to iffrg-events@feldenkrais-method.org
Beatrix Vereijken, Ph.D., a movement scientist and Professor at the NTNU in Trondheim, Norway is one of the principal investigators of a five-year, international study (2019-2024) involving 17 research centers, 2400 participants, and 50 million Euros. (https://www.mobilise-d.eu/ ) . She and her team are using mobile tracking technology and clinical tests for statistical analysis combined with interviews and questionnaires. They want to find out what matters most in the lives of individual patients.
Continue reading “Online Event of the IFF Research Working Group”
At the start of last year, the research database task group came together to see how we could improve the searchability, the functionality and update the articles in Zotero database on the IFF website.
For the past year, the IFF research database task group has been hard at work going through each article. There are currently around 800 articles on the database.
Continue reading “News from the Research Database Task Group”
We are the IFF Research Events Group: Corinna Eikmeier, Anne Frütel and Joanne Bouckley
The events group took up its work in 2021 to create highly informative events on Feldenkrais Method research. We have been building a structure that can reliably provide events. Building it in a way that will also work in the future. If successful our work will remain in the background, only becoming visible if it doesn’t work.
We have multiple goals:
Elements from György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out and Perspectives for the Feldenkrais Method
By Stéphanie Ménasé
Stephanie Ménasé, Ph.D. is familiar with the Feldenkrais Method since the early 1990’s. She finished her Feldenkrais training in Paris in 2012 with Myriam and Sabine Pfeffer. She has been a member of the IFF RWG Data Base task group since January 2021.
Read more about her biography at the end of the article.
Interested in what I do not yet know, and curious to understand, or at least to try to understand, what I do not yet understand well, I immersed myself in György Buzsáki’s The Brain from Inside Out, Oxford University Press, 2019, 441 p[1]. The book’s underlying question is how are learning human beings capable of improvement, in the sense of an evolutionary perspective of individual and species development. It consists of 14 parts, a reference list of more than 50 pages[2], and a remarkably detailed 24-page index allowing for an alternative circulation between chapters.
Continue reading “Book Review: Reflections on research into the functioning of the nervous system”
The changes that the Feldenkrais Method brings to each person’s personal development are engaging stories. However, not every story is a case study. Jim Stephens pointed out that for researchers, case study methodology is a structured procedure to document those stories. He offered a compact review of four different approaches to how case studies can be done.
April 3rd, 9pm CET
Hillel D. Braude, MBBCH PhD
The Feldenkrais Method as Physiological Psychology in Practice: Research Insights – A presentation with discussion
REGISTER: via mail to
iffrg-events@feldenkrais-method.org
Dr. Hillel Braude is an Integrative Medicine Doctor, Feldenkrais Practitioner and Neuro-Ethicist. Hillel is the Founder-Director of SomaticWell, an Integrative Medicine Clinic providing specialized treatments for infants and children with autism, and other neurodevelopmental disabilities. Hillel has published extensively in the field of Neuroethics, Somatics and Philosophy of Medicine. He is the author of Intuition in Medicine: A Philosophical Defense of Clinical Reasoning (The University of Chicago Press, 2012).
Other Online Events
What is in Our Research Toolbox? with Professor Beatrix Vereijken, Ph.D., Norwegian University of Science and Technology
The New Feldenkrais Method Research Data Base: A milestone for FM Research – Presentation and Celebration with the Data Base Working Group
More information in the next IFF Research Working Group newsletter in early April.
Continue reading “Online Event Calendar”
SPECIAL FELDENKRAIS RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM
SORBONNE PARIS, 31 AUGUST – 2 SEPTEMBER, 2022
A special Feldenkrais Research Symposium dedicated to the theme of Experience, Reflection, Language: Phenomenology and the Feldenkrais Method will be included in the Fourth International Conference on Brain, Body, Cognition, to take place at La Sorbonne, Paris, France between August 31 – 2 September, 2022. (https://www.movementis.com/)The International Feldenkrais Federation Research Working Group will conduct this Symposium.
Continue reading “Call for Abstracts”
Online Event of the IFF Research Working Group
DATE: October 31st 2021, 9PM CET
REGISTER: via mail to iffrg-events@feldenkrais-method.org
Susan Hillier, PhD Professor Susan Hillier is Dean: Research at the University of South Australia. She is also a Feldenkrais Practitioner (Melbourne 1991) and Trainer. Her personal practice, teaching and research have a broad focus on the neuroscience of sensing and moving – in particular for people who have sustained an injury or illness that impacts their function in daily life.
Cliff Smyth, PhD, GCFP Cliff has been practicing Feldenkrais Method for 30 years. As a member of the IFF Board and more recently the Research Steering Committee, he was involved in starting the IFF's research lists, the Feldenkrais Research Journal, and the current research network initiatives. He is a Faculty Member in the Department of Mind-Body Medicine, at Saybrook University. He is the editor of the Feldenkrais Research Journal.
Research offers us many ways of “knowing” and “understanding”.
Therefore, research can offer us ways of understanding the Feldenkrais Method – in the way it is experienced; the potential pathways by which it influences our lives; and the potential effects of those experiences – for people generally, specific groups or individuals. Good research is based on questions and explorations of answers to those questions. Just like Feldenkrais.
In this presentation with time for questions and answers , Susan Hillier and Cliff Smyth , two experienced researchers and Feldenkrais Practitioners will discuss the ways research and the Method intersect to be of mutual benefit. In describing the kinds of research that have been done they will present an overview and examples of the research that has been done so far using different research methods, and in diverse fields.
In reviewing what has been done so far, we can contribute to a conversation of where we could go next.
After the presentation there will be a Q&A and discussion part.
The event will be recorded and the recording will be made available on the IFF website afterwards.
For people who can`t participate in real time, there is also the option to send questions in advance. Please send questions to: iffrg-events@feldenkrais-method.org
What are the optimal methodologies for conducting research into the Feldenkrais Method? While there is a clear set of lessons and techniques applied across Feldenkrais trainings, there is no equivalent set of methodologies for researching the Feldenkrais Method. The question of research has become more acute with the ever-increasing number of publications referencing the Feldenkrais Method.
Hillel Braude
Its field of practice in terms of first-person experience of movement and intersubjectivity is inherently resistant to positivist research methodologies associated with medical research, such as Evidence Based Medicine.
In addition to a constitutive approach, research methodologies applied to the Feldenkrais Method also need to account for embodied processes related to emergent phenomena and self-organizing systems.
Correlating first-person experience and third-person neuroscience as proposed by Francesco Varela in the field of neuro-phenomenology also provides a promising methodology for the Feldenkrais Method in relation both with ATM’s and FI’s.
These individual studies research the Feldenkrais Method on an ad-hoc basis, and do not describe generalizable or meta-theoretical approaches to researching the method.
Determining optimal methodologies for researching the Feldenkrais Method requires a working definition of it. One methodology may be to breakdown the components of the Feldenkrais Method for analysis. However, this approach also has its limitations, exemplified by the analogy of the well-known Indian parable of the blind men encountering an elephant. Each describes the characteristics of the elephant based on his limited information. Grabbing the tail, the first man concludes that the elephant is a rope. The second feels the elephant’s rough and knobble knee, declaring it to be a tree trunk. Feeling its writhing trunk, the third considers it to be a snake. The parable assumes an inherent referential instability arising from the limited perspective of the observer, necessitating interdisciplinary perspectives. However, the parable is especially pertinent to the Feldenkrais Method, since its field of practice in terms of first-person experience of movement and intersubjectivity is inherently resistant to positivist research methodologies associated with medical research, such as Evidence Based Medicine. In addition to a constitutive approach, research methodologies applied to the Feldenkrais Method also need to account for embodied processes related to emergent phenomena and self-organizing systems.
Continue reading “Researching the Feldenkrais Method”Two Feldenkrais related research papers published in “Frontiers” drew a lot of attention in 2015 and made it to the “Top 100” of articles most viewed:
Clark D, Schumann F and Mostofsky SH (2015) Mindful movement and skilled attention. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9:297. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2015.00297 [HYPOTHESIS & THEORY ARTICLE]
Verrel J, Almagor E, Schumann F, Lindenberger U and Kühn S (2015) Changes in neural resting state activity in primary and higher-order motor areas induced by a short sensorimotor intervention based on the Feldenkrais method. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9:232. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2015.00232 [ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE]
Congratulations to all the authors!
See the full list at the Frontiers BLOG.
IFF Research Network 