Difficult on Purpose: Embodied Learning in the Feldenkrais Method® and Beyond

This article analyses how difficulties are used as learning tools in the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education (FM), drawing on Moshe Feldenkrais’s theory and teachings, my experience as a practitioner since 2007 and my use of FM in postgraduate academic teaching. Performer training, particularly Eugenio Barba’s work, offers a wider context of embodied practice. FM challenges the parameters of difficulty, framing it as inherently productive. Key difficulties used productively in FM are the non-habitual, constraints, differentiation, diffuse attention and disorientation. To demonstrate the connection between physical and intellectual difficulties, I draw on Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenological approach to orientation and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s argument for the ‘primacy of movement’. I offer new ways of thinking about difficulty as emergent rather than intrinsic, expanding outwards from clearly embodied practices towards intellectual ones. To anchor this, I refer to an experiment in Israel aiming to integrate ‘organic’ and ‘scholastic’ learning through FM.