30/06/2025
Statement – One Year After the Launch of yochananrywerant.com
Published on the 41st anniversary of Moshe Feldenkrais’ death
I have a code to the front door of the Feldenkrais School. The code is 1984. Orwell wrote his future scenario in 1948. That is one reason — it’s a code people remember, many have read the book and make the association. The other reason is that my daughter was born that year. We travelled to Israel on July 1st, and I read in the next day’s newspaper that Moshe Feldenkrais had died. He was present already then
Today marks one year since I launched my website yochananrywerant.com — a tribute to Yochanan Rywerant, and above all, a space for publishing my ongoing research into what I have come to call Classical Feldenkrais.
Life is not a thing; to paraphrase Moshe Feldenkrais, it is a process. To improve the process is to improve life itself. The Hebrew language does not separate “process” from doing. There is no fixed noun that stands apart from action. The structure of the verb root system — always referring back to how something happens — makes it clear that what we call process is in fact a mode of ongoing transformation. Feldenkrais, shaped by this linguistic and cognitive framework, does not treat “a process” as an external sequence. It is what happens in the person, as a continuous shift in the relation between intention to achievement.
In English, the translation of Moshe Feldenkrais’ definition of awareness — “correlates intention to achievement” — may appear to be a mistake: a grammatical slip where “and” is expected. But the choice is deliberate. In Hebrew, the preposition le- (ל), represented by the letter Lamed, does not indicate conjunction but direction. It marks a relationship of direction, not of equivalence. Feldenkrais, writing and thinking in Hebrew, understood awareness as a functional orientation: not a pairing of two things, but a dynamic relation between an initiating intention and its unfolding realization. Awareness is not made of two elements; it is the path between them. To speak of “intention to achievement” is to preserve this structural logic — and to remain faithful to the linguistic and conceptual framework from which the method emerged.
The Hebrew word for action, pe’ula, is not “an action” in the sense of a completed unit, but a coherent event that unfolds as intention, organization, and ex*****on are made present to each other. It is structured, but not fixed. What we usually call “change” is, in this context, not an external outcome but a shift in the internal organization of action. A process, in this sense, is not a sequence of steps — it is the reconfiguration of relationships within the act itself.
Henri Bergson, whose influence on early 20th century philosophy is well known, is mentioned explicitly in the 1929 foreword to Autosuggestion, written by Hugo Bergman. Citing Baudouin’s “law of reversed effort,” Bergman explains that effort directed against the imagined process creates interference rather than change. Bergson’s view, he writes, is that willpower and intelligence are only surface expressions of the mind, whereas imagination and instinct arise from a deeper level. In this light, Feldenkrais’ emphasis on perception, differentiation, and the self-regulating nature of learning aligns with a tradition that values internal coherence over imposed control. To improve the process is not to push it — but to create the conditions in which it can unfold.
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