Psoma Therapy

I have been very inspired by reading Anat Baniel’s Move Into Life: the Nine Essentials for Lifelong Vitality. There is so much overlap from her version of the Feldenkrais Method and my approach to Hakomi and yoga, the integration of which is what I now call psoma yoga.

What follows are some excerpts from my commentary about  Anat Baniel’s “nine essentials” and psoma yoga:

My way of practising and teaching psoma yoga, (the integration of yoga and my version of the Hakomi Method) has been informed by my exposure over the years to the Feldenkrais method with wonderful teachers like Brian Lynn and Susinn Shaler. Ron Kurtz (the creator of Hakomi) worked closely enough with Moshe himself that the development of Hakomi psychotherapy was also significantly influenced by Feldenkrais’ approach. The idea of a learning approach and freedom through self awareness rather than a diagnosis and treatment model, the principle of non forcing and non violence, the idea of being experimental and paying attention with mindful awareness, these are all characteristics of both Feldenkrais and Hakomi. 

Anat Baniel worked closely with Moshe Feldenkrais and has developed her own approach largely based on the Feldenkrais model. In her book, Move into Life, she identifies nine "essentials" for vitality. They are:

1. Movement with attention
2. The Learning Switch
3. Subtlety
4. Variation
5. Slow
6. Enthusiasm
7. Flexible goals
8. Imagination and dreams
9. Awareness

Here are the psoma yoga ideas around each of these wonderful "essentials":

1. Moving with attention: we want to practise a certain quality of attention in all we do, whether it is yoga asanas, or walking, or relating to others, or just sitting still. Our attention is curious, nonjudgmental, and non-striving.  This quality of attention moves us out of a paradigm of right and wrong, fixing or correcting. In psoma yoga we call it reflective presence.
   
   We might begin by noticing how our body is organized in one of the four "noble actions" : sitting, standing, walking, and lying down. We would do a body scan, for example lying on our back, and notice the relationship of our body to the ground. We are simply paying attention with gentle curiosity, and without trying to change anything. After this body scan, we might move into an asana or movement, and then lie down again to notice what seems different.  The point is to practise with mindful attention to whatever is happening.
   
   Even the way we pay attention is organized by habits, so the psoma yoga therapist or teacher will draw attention to something that is outside of your habitual awareness and help you expand the possibilities of what you can be aware of. It's about opening to more possibilities.
   
   
2. Having a learning model, rather than a model of fixing or correcting, is essential to the practise of psoma yoga and psoma yoga therapy.  Motivated by a desire to be more aware of our habits and reactions, we want to turn a kind of friendly attention toward the way we do things in order to discover the automatic behaviors and underlying assumptions that limit flexibility in both our body and our mind. We know that this practice of mindful awareness of ourselves, and others, brings choice and freedom through consciousness. This practice is a learning journey. As Moshe Feldenkrais used to say, we cannot do what we want until we know what we are already doing.*
   
   * The Elusive Obvious, Moshe Feldenkrais
   
   
3.  Subtlety
   
   A focus on subtlety is related to the principle of non-violence in Hakomi and ahimsa in yoga. In psoma yoga we practise not forcing...not trying to make something happen. We participate in the unfolding process without trying to control it.
   
   When we are paying attention to our body, the signals may be very subtle, unless we have ignored them for so long they have become pain. When the signals are subtle we need a high level of sensitivity in how we pay attention. Then we can use very small changes to gather information. Changing one thing very slightly when we are paying attention with mindful awareness can evoke a strong reaction and generate a lot of information about our habits. Only with the kind of sensitive attention, and a curiosity about what happens, are we able to notice, in the practice of psoma yoga, the subtlest signals that carry the most information about how we are organized in ways that are so implicit that they are usually outside of conscious awareness.
   
   
4. Variations
   
   In psoma yoga therapy, as in Hakomi, this involves experimenting in mindfulness.
   There is an important distinction between changing something about posture or how we move as a correction, on the one hand, or making a change as an experiment in mindfulness for self discovery on the other. In the first we are inevitably setting up an internal conflict between an old habit and a new pattern. What can result is resistance.
   When a habitual pattern is connected with a belief, it is unlikely to change unless the belief is brought into consciousness. Since our brain is shaped by experience, our past tends to keep us living in a kind of virtual reality that sometimes has very little to do with present conditions.
   
   Beliefs are over generalized and usually outside of conscious awareness. By suggesting something, verbally and nonverbally, that contradicts old beliefs, we smoke them out. Old beliefs are almost always limiting and frequently cause unnecessary suffering. Until we become aware of them, however, they persist.
   What both Feldenkrais and Kurtz discovered and applied creatively - Feldenkrais to bodywork and Kurtz to psychotherapy - was the principle of using variations or experiments in mindfulness to give our brain, nervous system, and body a range of alternatives, knowing that with enough experimenting and the right kind of attention, the whole system will typically choose the most efficient and effective option. This proves to be far more successful than trying to force a change or even simply repeating a new pattern over and over.
   
   
5. Slow down.
   
   The brain needs us to slow down in order to acquire the new information needed for learning or performing anything new. Our mind also needs us to slow down to come more fully into the present moment. Part of the success of a yoga practice is in the slowing down of movements and mind.
   
   In psoma yoga, as in Hakomi, we sometimes invite the client to study a habitual gesture or movement very slowly in mindfulness in order to find out more about it. What else goes with that gesture... What does your body seem to be saying...We let the slow and mindful experience of the movement offer us answers. Moving slowing, as we do in psoma yoga, allows us to pay attention to the fine small details of of what we are doing and thus creates a space in our field of awareness where something significant can come into consciousness.
   
   
6. Enthusiasm
   
   In both Hakomi and psoma yoga, we practise something we call "loving presence". This involves noticing something about the other person that is a source of inspiration and nourishment for us...something that touches or moves us. We can find this anywhere or in anyone when we are looking in a particular way.
   
   As therapists, seeing a client in this way does two things - it relaxes us with the reassurance that this person, no matter how much he is suffering or struggling, has the resources he needs to survive and to thrive. And it reflects back to the client, in our demeanour, a reminder of his own strengths.
   
   The practice of loving presence was for Ron Kurtz a culmination of many years of teaching and practising Hakomi. The practice involves moving intentionally through four steps that tend to set up the conditions for this state of mind to arise spontaneously. This is a state in which we feel inspired, enthusiastic, and appreciative.
   
   The four steps in the practice of loving presence are: first, becoming aware of our habits. The second step is to interrupt these habits and create a little space. In the third step, from this open spacious mind, we want to look beyond the surface to the person behind the story. We search for sources of inspiration. We generate a kind of enthusiasm, and fascination, about what might be possible, what wants to unfold, what treasures we might collaboratively discover. And in the fourth step, we simply let ourselves be nourished by the whole experience of being with this person. This might seem like a radical idea for therapists or helpers generally. It turns out that this shift creates the best context for the other person to have a healing experience.
   
   
7. Flexible goals
   
    Holding very loosely the intention, in psoma yoga as a personal practice, to become more consciously embodied, we let go of specific goal-setting around getting stronger or more flexible, or even healthier. Rather we put our attention on the journey, not the destination. We notice changes but we let go of judging them as good or better, right or wrong, success or failure. We engage whole-heartedly in the practice without trying to make anything happen. My approach to yoga was what I originally called "remembering wholeness" because I realized that wholeness is intrinsic (the Sanskrit word "yoga" implies this).*
   
   Healing, as the verb of wholeness, therefore must mean wholeness happening. As a practice of wholeness, yoga is a process of remembering wholeness, of re-connecting, body, mind, and spirit, with our own intrinsic wholeness and with the unity principle in all things. This happens as an unfolding mystery and offers continual surprises, which requires that we let go of fixed goals and attachments to results.
   
   We want to enter into the sacred mystery of this journey without our assumptions and presumptions getting in the way of how this mystery wants to unfold.
   
   * Remembering Wholeness, Books 1,2 and 3, Donna Martin
   
   
8. Imagine and dream
   
   To imagine and dream is to move beyond the limitations of what we know and travel in the dimension of the unknown. Our aliveness depends on our willingness to stay open to new possibilities, to imagine and even dream of a life beyond what we have known.  In psoma yoga therapy we are helping others to imagine and to find and experience new possibilities for positive and nourishing embodied experiences, beyond what their old realties have allowed. We assist them to stay open, to consider something new, to turn a dream of what might be possible into a new reality, and to rediscover the power of imagining.
   
   
9. Awareness
   
   In psoma yoga we are practising paying attention in new ways and we are also cultivating an awareness of what we are doing and how we are noticing. All of our experience is organized by habits, including how we pay attention. Mindfulness is an awareness of present experience, whatever it is. But paying attention to our moment to moment experience is going to be limited to the habitual ways we have learned to observe. We are only going to be noticing what we are in the habit of noticing. The role of a psoma yoga teacher or therapist is partly to invite you to pay attention in new ways, and to become curious about who is noticing, not just about what you are noticing. This kind of awareness opens you up to a whole realm of new possibilities and choices. As a yoga teacher for forty years, I found myself telling students that what they were noticing was less important than that they were noticing. Also I repeatedly said that the way we do things is the way we do things... Not very poetic, but true.
   
   When we pay attention to how we are observing ourselves and others, and begin to experiment with other ways, we open to other realms of possibilities and experiences.
   
   Psoma yoga therapy integrates the skillful way the Hakomi method uses little experiments in mindfulness for assisted self discovery and for emotional healing with the physical and spiritual embodiment of awareness for remembering wholeness. Freedom from the constraints of habitual reactions and unconscious beliefs can open us to the possibility of true liberation which is the point of yoga.