All this inspired us to explore systemic skills in our context, which is “as embodied as it gets.” We also felt that merging this with tools from enactive cognitive science, motor control theory, and ecological psychology provides flesh and blood to the concrete implementation of the process. We then found out that Günther Schiepek, Wolfgang Tschacher and others had developed a dynamic systems framework for describing non-linear processes in psychotherapy. Others such as Herfel and collaborators emphasize that Shiatsu theory itself contains essential aspects of dynamic systems thinking. The first generation of Feldenkrais textbooks even took up key terms from cybernetics.
We discovered that Feldenkrais theorists like Carl Ginsburg and Marc Reese were greatly inspired by theories of dynamic self-organization and autopoiesis, including joint work with Esther Thelen, the renowned developmental systems researcher (Spencer et al., 2006). During this project the impression grew in us that the experts' perception of processes in our vignettes reflect what dynamic system theorists speak of. The present work emerges from a cognitive micro-ethnography of interaction skills done with interviews and practitioner diaries.
We shall show how practitioners respond continuously to embodied emergence and hereby stay in a micro-zone of proximal development with the client. Our second aim is to demonstrate that a particular kind of situated embodied interaction with a profound interpersonal connection is affine to the systemic approach. These systemic sensitivities are partly explicated by metaphors, jargon, and conceptual frameworks of Shiatsu and Feldenkrais teachers, but partly remain pre-reflexive. They are equally sensitive to the nature of non-linear synergies and take care to incrementally and gently nudge the client's dynamics rather than enforcing anything. Practitioners structure the interaction process and its dynamics in ways that are highly sensitive to how parts interrelate and dialectically interact with their embedding wholes, thus exhibiting a consistently holistic awareness. The first claim we submit is that while acquiring the requisite technical and sensory skills bodyworkers must also develop competencies we call “intrinsically systemic.” Practice constantly confronts them with the limitations of linear and mechanistic causality, forcing them to deal with dynamicity and complexity. At this level, our study addresses a host of micro-skills through the lens of enactive cognitive science. Practitioners deploy “educated senses” and a repertoire of hands-on techniques (grips, stretches, etc.) against a backdrop of somatic habits (proper posture, muscle activation, gaze patterns, etc.). The paper's second part inventorizes the bodyworker's operative tool-box-micro-skills providing the wherewithal for context-intelligent intervention. Practical knowledge for “soft-assembling” non-linear synergies is crucial for this (cumulative local effects, high-level functions “slaving” the system, etc.). They stimulate the client's system with a mix of perturbing and stabilizing interventions that oscillate between eigenfunctions and their coordinative integration. 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). Within a bodywork session, practitioners modulate this hierarchical functional architecture. The practitioner's “extended body” reaching forth into the client's through a resonance loop eventually becomes part of this. Bodyworkers learn to explore these in their eigenfunction (joints, muscles, fascia), discriminate coordinative organization in small ensembles, and monitor large-scale dynamic interplay. Doing so requires a keen embodied apperception of hierarchies of somato-systemic order. 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.e., an attractor landscape.
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. Feldenkrais and Shiatsu enable somatic learning through continuous tactile coupling, a real-time interpersonal dynamic unfolding in a safe dyadic sphere.
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