Feldenkrais® and Complexity: Rethinking Cause and Effect in the Body
- Jeremy Cline
- Oct 9
- 5 min read
Since I was a teenager I’ve dabbled in readings on chaos and complexity, one of the newer fields of mathematics and science. I took a class in college and remember thinking the the ideas and implications were fascinating for the improvisational dance and music I was engaged in at the time; forms would emerge with no planning, taking shape and then resolving, turning into something new. My artistic collaborators and I would create self-organizing, emergent systems as an exercise for refining our crafts. Comfort with complex and emergent systems gave me an edge in the field as an artist, and set me up for my study of the Feldenkrais Method®.
As it turns out, Moshe Feldenkrais was also a fan of complex systems thinking, and incorporated many ideas from the budding field into his work. That study of his produced interesting and enigmatic quotes along the lines of; “you have to abolish cause and effect thinking for this work….” Abandon cause an effect thinking? What does that mean? Isn’t all of our science and logic based on understandings of cause and effect? Wasn't he a scientist? How do I understand my problems thinking like that? Today we will examine the implications of this wild axiom from Moshe.
Why Effect is not Always so Connected to Cause
Within complex systems, events do not always occur in a linear progression with A causing B. Changes happen in unpredictable ways, best illustrated in the popular concept of the "butterfly effect". So then, what can you predict? How do you solve any of your problems if you have to abolish cause and effect thinking? The answer is you have to widen your focus and look at wholistic patterns. You need to adopt systems thinking to understand complexity.
Author and IT systems expert Ian Loe discusses this with elegance:
"Systems thinking recognizes that most effects have multiple causes, and that there’s often a significant delay between cause and effect. This is radically different from linear thinking, which looks for single causes and immediate effects.
In complex systems, small changes can have large effects (think butterfly effect), and large efforts can sometimes have small effects if they’re working against the system’s structure. Understanding causality in systems means looking for patterns over time, understanding delays, and recognizing that correlation doesn’t always equal causation." (https://medium.com/@ian_25476/why-systems-thinking-will-change-how-you-see-everything-and-two-simple-tools-to-get-started-5875fbc1ef0c)
Humans are undoubtably a complex system (as anyone who has ever been in a sustained intimate relationship or part of a family can attest to). We are hard to predict, and do not even know ourselves half of the time. We have a massive input of of sensations and information coming from both within out bodies and outside of our bodies. Events that might destroy one person will be laughed off by another, or even laughed off by the same person in a different situation. Our actions and habits sometimes cause immediate effects but often accumulate in unpredictable ways to cause unpredictable health and wellness outcomes as we live our lives. What intricate beings we are! It is important that we do not reduce ourselves to simple, linear, cause and effect thinking.
Cause and Effect in Injury and Illness
Consider the complex nature of the human body. The human body is not simply a sculpture or machine, but a thinking, acting entity, that is connected to memory, emotion, and intention. Though there is certainly utility in medical examinations and diagnoses, the simple, one-to-one manner in which they are often presented to us flattens the story around how pain and injury arise. Pain often comes from a combination of factors that have to do with how we use ourselves, and could be related to acute injury and trauma or could not be.
For instance, imagine you have knee pain. You go to the doctor and get an MRI of your knee; it comes back showing a torn meniscus. Now, just because you have knee pain, and a torn meniscus doesn’t necessarily mean that the torn meniscus is causing your pain or that repairing it will ease the pain. It might, but it might not. I have several friends who had meniscus tears, had them repaired, and then continued to have the same pain. Humans are complex system, and pain is a complex mechanism within that system. Consider this article from Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands:
For people of middle age or older with a tear in the meniscus, but without a history of acute knee trauma, surgery is rarely useful. Many studies have already shown that an arthroscopic surgery, in which a doctor treats a tear, is no better than physiotherapy or even a sham surgery, in which a doctor only makes incisions in the knee. Tears in the meniscus also often occur in people who have no complaints and are often not the cause of pain. Yet many orthopedic surgeons still operate on a torn meniscus. How come? (https://www.radboudumc.nl/en/news-items/2023/surgery-for-torn-meniscus-still-too-often-unnecessarily-performed)
One explanation of the linear-thinking approach has to do with the way that we have inherited a biomechanical model of the human body that sees it as tissues and cells without relationship to feeling, sensing, acting, and thinking; the ways that the Feldenkrais Method® views the human organism in its complexity. The alopathic medical view is extremely useful (and has saved a lot of lives) when it comes to bacterial infections and violent injuries, but has proven less useful for issues like chronic pain, neurological problems, and stress. For that, we need to adopt complex systems thinking.
Understand Complex Systems to Help You Move Better
The knowledge above is an invitation to not become so myopic in our focus when working with ourselves. We can focus on the details, then zoom out and sense the whole picture, then zoom back in somewhere else. It is an invitation to work with our bodies differently when we are struggling with difficulty.
It’s a reminder that when your knee hurts, you have to remember the function of the entire system. How does the hip move? The ankle? What about the chest and head and neck? What is my attitude towards myself or my life? Often times when people come to me with knee pain, I don’t even touch the knee. I work with their hips, chest, head, and sometimes feet. People are often confused by this but it yields results, and they don’t know why. The answer is because of complex systems changes, as discussed above.
By working with the whole person, we are able to make large changes. Though as with any complex system, you cannot predict a direct outcome. So we work in a way that is mindful, attentive, and present so we can adjust to the system as it changes. We can be listening and sensitive, because how do something is as important as what we are doing. In this way, training and learning while holding yourself as a complex system can bring powerful results that you might not expect.
Book a session and see for yourself!
