Feldenkrais and Shiatsu enable somatic learning through continuous tactile coupling, a real-time interpersonal dynamic unfolding in a safe dyadic sphere. The first part of our micro-ethnographic study draws on process vignettes and subjective theories to demonstrate how bodywork is infused with systemic sensitivities and awareness for non-linear process management.
Expressed in dynamic systems parlance, both disciplines foster metastability, adaptivity, and self-organization in the client's somato-personal system by progressively reconfiguring systemic dispositions, i. Doing so requires a keen embodied apperception of hierarchies of somato-systemic order. Bodyworkers learn to explore these in their eigen function joints, muscles, fascia , discriminate coordinative organization in small ensembles, and monitor large-scale dynamic interplay.
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Within a bodywork session, practitioners modulate this hierarchical functional architecture. Their ability for sensorially staying apace of systemic emergence allows them to respond to minute changes and customize reactions in a zone of proximal development dynamic immediacy.
They stimulate the client's system with a mix of perturbing and stabilizing interventions that oscillate between eigen functions and their coordinative integration.
The paper's second part inventorizes the bodyworker's operative tool-boxβmicro-skills providing the wherewithal for context-intelligent intervention. At this level, our study addresses a host of micro-skills through the lens of enactive cognitive science. Experts in dyadic bodywork configure a rich set of skills in real-time to stimulate a client's self-organization Blackburn, ; Myers, ; Tarr, ; Heller, ; Fogel, ; Porcino et al.
