S2EP7我的费登奎斯之旅：从无聊到有能【英文】
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Hello, this is Zhiwei. In this episode, I will be interviewed by my Feldenkrais classmate Alex Green, who is also a senior somatic practitioner with experiences in many different modalities like structural integration or roughing, somatic experiencing, TRE, and so on. We will mostly focus on what is Feldenkrais method, what's so counterintuitive yet effective about this method,

I also talked about how I see the differences and relationship of neuroscience research and Feldenkrais method. This podcast is also published in the Red Beard Embodiment podcast, which is a podcast series that I highly recommend to anyone interested in somatic therapy, embodied trauma healing, Zen practice, and many other holistic health topics.

I'm also teaching Feldenkrais method online with the Redbeard Somatic Therapy, and I will put those links in the show notes. Now, please enjoy.

All right. Well, I am really excited to be sitting down with Dr. Joanne Lee. And Joanne, we are classmates. We've become friends. We were in our triad for a year and a half. So we've spent a lot of time together, both online and rolling around on the floor in Kelowna, Canada. So let me just set the stage a little bit.

introduce who you are. So Jue is a just finished up her PhD about a year, a year and a half ago from NYU in cognitive neuroscience. Jue is originally from China. She can, I don't really remember where, maybe Beijing. We can ask her about that.

And the reason that I know JoA is that we have been enrolled in a four-year Feldenkrais professional training, one based in Kelowna, Canada, which is in British Columbia.

And for those of you who don't know what Feldenkrais is, that's going to be the subject of our podcast episode today. But Feldenkrais method is a form of what's called somatic education developed by somebody named Moshe Feldenkrais, who is an Israeli scientist, martial artist and movement guy.

And he was kind of contemporary with Ida Rolfe and sort of in that era of the Western movement towards somatics and embodiment. And in very, very brief form, we'll define it more briefly.

fully in the podcast, but Feldenkrais work is largely a movement based practice. But it's not just movement for movement's sake. It is a method where you learn to pay careful attention to sensation and the subtleties of how we organize our body, breath and nervous system when we perform any action. And Feldenkrais method is,

comprised of a number of a whole compendium of lessons and a lesson is sort of a formal way of engaging in the Feldenkrais method.

where you learn to slow things down, attune your awareness to body felt sense and how you attend to yourself while performing a different movement and other somatic explorations. And the the intention or the hope of those kinds of lessons is to learn something about oneself from an awareness perspective, perhaps even to reorient.

rewire ourselves a little bit from a neuroplastic perspective and improve the efficiency, the ease, the awareness, and the functioning of being in a human body. So that's just one description of kind of some of the things that are included in the Feldenkrais methods. Just to be complete, so I'm mentioning the awareness through movement lessons is one half of

of the practice. There's also a hands-on component that's called functional integration and where the Feldenkrais practitioner works not through massage, it's not like doing body work in other forms, but by using touch and movement cues, helping to develop and refine the awareness of the body and the nervous system in a hands-on method.

Anyway, so what I thought would be really fun with you today, Jo-A, is first just to kind of hear your own story about what led you towards Feldenkrais Method amongst the many, many forms of somatic and body work that are out there. And if you're curious, I can share my version of that as well.

But so maybe we'll just talk about kind of how we got here and what we've been learning along the way. So with that introduction, welcome. Welcome to the podcast. All right. Well, yeah, thank you for the introduction. And we'll definitely talk in more detail or concrete ways of what is Feldenkrais. Sure. For me, I just grew up being a relatively athletic kid.

In the bigger context of very, very strict academic Chinese upbringing where you're just supposed to sit in front of the table since you're age six and study many, many hours per day. But I liked growing up like playing badminton, basketball. And I got into rock climbing and parkour in my college years. But most of those time...

I think at first it's just like social activity plus some performance-based training, how to shoot better goals in basketball and have better skills. Um,

parkour was really like a beginning where we are trying to achieve better performance, but we also start to really care about how you do that because there's so many details of how you study your body and use your body to do a simple jump or a simple running. It really depends on the teacher and I happened to got a teacher that is more this awareness-based teaching method.

And it was among my parkour friends. Someone mentioned Feldenkrais and say something is magical, blah, blah, blah. At that time, I have no idea. It just some letters entered my brain. Didn't know what's going on. And then somehow one day in the university gym in NYU, New York University, where they have like recreational class in the gym. It's usually a yoga, boxing, ab exercise. But one day I saw the word Feldenkrais.

I said, oh, I've heard this word. I can give it a try. So that's how I just began. I'm very happy just in that semester, somebody decided to start a Feldenkrais class there and totally changed my life. Do you remember what the first lesson was that you did?

No, not at all. I couldn't remember. Like the first year, probably first two semesters doing those lessons, my brain was just blank. I didn't know what I was doing in the...

probably half of those I was falling asleep to because it's such gentle, tiny movement. And I often sleep deprived somehow. But I did remember a clear contrast of like how I stand at the beginning or the end of the class where at the beginning, I'm like, I feel I'm standing okay. But towards the end, when we get up from the floor and stand up again, I was like, Oh, my legs are,

there's so much softer and so much balance now. And without doing this lesson, I wouldn't even realize there's some,

tightness in my leg so that that was a big thing and other contrasts like oh my lower back when i'm laying on the floor in the end they can actually get very close to the ground and i'm used so used to having such a arching and tight lower back to the point i never noticed sure

And I think it's after maybe one semester or two that my constant lower back pain was gone. Just one day, it's like, I haven't felt that for a while. I don't know what happened, but probably related to this. So that was my startup experience. So when you found that class in the gym, was it a regular? So you were able to go like weekly for a semester or longer or something like that?

Yeah, I think it's like almost every week for every semester. Great. Yeah. Well, so, okay. So that was when you were at NYU and NYU was your PhD work. What was your undergrad in? I did my undergrad in physics major and psychology minor in Peking University in Beijing. Yeah. Yeah.

I think at that time I didn't know what I want to study. Physics just sounds like understanding, discovering all the secrets of the universe. Plus people say you're going to do something difficult for your undergrad. So I chose that. Yeah. But at the beginning I knew like, I don't really want to be a physicist and win Nobel prize or something. I just want to check it out. I say it's like,

having a stroke in the museum. Cool. So what and then what what drew you to neuro cognitive neuroscience?

I think at that point, towards the end of my undergraduate, I was really thinking I want to know more about human being. Like studying physics, you almost have no touch about human being. I don't know how to understand other people, how to understand myself, how to interact. I started the psychology minor and that was helpful, but I didn't

Yeah, I think it's also this similar idea that I want to discover some more deep and fundamental ways of seeing human being. And neuroscience sounds like this more emerging field that is more fundamental. That's my probably very naive initial impression that led me to that. No, I love it. I love it. So, so.

Because you started, you started the Feldenkrais training before you had completed the PhD. So at what point did it become clear to you? I mean, that was during the pandemic. I remember because we were online for that first portion of our training. Yeah.

Did you kind of begin the program thinking, okay, I've learned about Feldenkrais. This is what I want to do for my career. Or was it just sort of, I'd like to deepen my knowledge of this? How did it come about that you jumped into the training program?

Yeah, I jumped into the training program with the idea I want to open this black box. So there was one lesson I remember probably towards the end of the first year in NYU when I was doing Feldenkrais lessons. And it's a pelvic clock lesson, a classic one. And after that lesson, I just feel

I can breathe into my pelvis. Like what the heck is that? It's such a new experience. Like before I've read a lot about people training about their breathing and how the breathing can be so deep and thorough, whatever. But when I try to train myself to do that, I just find I,

resulted in more unnatural breathing patterns and tightening and strange things. Sure. It's like, why am I doing this? This is not helpful. Versus doing this pelvic clock thing, I was not attempting to do anything about breathing, but it ended up such an amazing result. Right. It's a really good feeling. Right. And I was like, this is a black box. I don't know what you guys did to me. Yeah. But I want to know more about it.

So when you say black box, it's sort of like it was a mystery to you. How does this method work? Why does it have the changes that I'm perceiving? And you wanted to understand. It's like you wanted to...

get a grasp of how does this method work? Something like that? Yeah. I really want to know the reason why it works. What's the mechanism behind this? How, how, how far along are you now in your understanding of the, of the, how it works question? Yeah, I think I've answered it all. Okay, good. No, I, I do.

So one thing is I didn't get what it is at all in my first year of training. In my first year of training, I was mostly falling asleep and trying to find that. There are some cool lessons that I haven't learned very much.

my new movement of the lift. That was our first lesson that really expanded my view of what Feldenkrais method can do. But, but still I was like, I don't know what's going on. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Right. It's still a mystery to me. I think it's more towards the second and third year that I starting to find it's not necessarily what are the movements that we're doing, but really important is how I do the movement. Hmm.

Yeah. Can you, can you, let's, let's elaborate on that for a second. So I guess there's maybe two things to elaborate on. One is, you know, you were talking about lessons and there's so many different kinds of lessons that I mentioned in the intro, you know, there's hundreds, if not thousands of, of, of, of lessons that Moshe Feldenkrais himself developed as well as, you know, other teachers along the way.

And, you know, the average lesson is 45 minutes to an hour. It's typically a fairly, when we say lesson, it's sort of most of these lessons are not, they're not invented on the spot so much. It's not like a, it's not an, it's not an extemporaneous exploration. There is some, some lesson,

learning that's been encapsulated into a lesson. And it might be a learning about how your pelvis is in relationship to your head. It might be a learning about the possibilities that exist within your breath. It may be a learning about some reflex mechanisms that exist in the body, like the sucking reflex from when you're an infant.

It could be a learning about the relationship of your bones relative to the ground. So there's any number of sort of pearls contained.

And the funny thing about any given lesson is sometimes you have an idea of what you're sort of supposed to be learning. Like why is this lesson the way it is? But very often you don't know. It's like you have a rough idea. This has something to do with my jaw or something to do with my spine and my feet. But most often you don't know too much exactly why a lesson is sequenced the way it is, et cetera. And if you're anything like me, Joanne,

The first time I do a lesson, usually it's just like, okay, I, like you said earlier, I noticed whatever the change is, but it's, it's, you know, it's, there's a bit of a black box element, you know, even now, um, oftentimes there's a bit of a black box element, uh,

And for me, it's often the repetition of a lesson a few times or teaching it to others where at a certain point I start to grasp, like I understand why it needs to follow the sequence that it does in order to evoke the learning that's intended through that lesson. Anyway, I just wanted to give a quick little context about these lessons that we're talking about. But could you speak for a moment about...

Sort of like the variety of lessons, because there's to me, there's really like dynamic and external sessions that are big movements. But then there's ones that are more awareness based or subtle, subtle, subtlety based. Could you just explain a little bit that? Because I think people would have a hard time grasping the range that's included in these lessons.

Yeah. Let me think how would I say it. Because some people say like, how do you systematically learn Feldenkrais method? To me, there's really not a clear system. So like there are several ways or dimensions you can think about the lesson. Sometimes it's a, you can think it's like fine study of certain part of your body, like sucking, there's the mouth, there's the,

Yeah.

or different patterns of your hip can connect to your pelvis in different directions. And then it's usually, it can be study of one part of your body, but usually it will extend to your whole body. Like we start from some minor jaw movement of like opening, close left and right. And then we say, what, how does your eyes move?

change the jaw movement and in the end we incorporate the pelvis and your whole body so it's really never a very local study but that could be a thing to get into it

And the end? Yeah. Well, yeah. And then you may be going there, but I was going to say, so that's a sucking lesson. It's a refined awareness to one part. And then there's like in our last judo role, right? We learned a very big pattern. But unlike if we were in a judo martial arts class where we might learn the whole pattern at once and then practice it and demo it, what took, I don't know,

10 lessons to get to, to get to the, to the final result. So yeah, yeah. Maybe you could speak about that or baby rolling or just those more overt movements. Yeah. I really like those more functional lessons where you are actually achieving a thing like baby roll is a classic way to, uh,

when you're laying on the ground, how to transition from sideline to the lay on the back or lay on the front. And as the name suggests, it's kind of inspired by how babies learn to do that. Right. And then we are really separating the steps of when they're learning them, probably first, not knowing what I'm doing in the end, not knowing the whole process. I'm just feeling tapping the ground and my connection to the ground. And when I'm shifting my weight, how is my,

weight shifting on the ground, how is the ground helping me to move and stuff. Right. Yeah, so we do it step by step, as you said, and it's really...

That's where I was talking about, it's not about how you do, it's not about what you do, but how you do it. By the way of not just passing through the part of imbalance or difficult and just use your muscle to push us through. And we're really slowing down and doing some smaller, easier things, but you learn how to do it most efficiently. Then all the puzzle pieces are here. Then you can achieve the bigger movement.

And I think those kind of movement is just really functional for people, especially if you have some injury, you cannot do this, like standing up from the ground easily or just aging or other conditions. And then you learn all these easy ways that is usually not so easy.

Like not so powerful, not so demanding, but enjoyable. Less effortful, but more useful and more enjoyable. Yeah. The path, the path of ease. Yeah. To me that, that concept of how you do, it's not what you do. It's how you do it is, is I agree with you really, really key. Let's talk about that. What, what is the, how, what is the, what, what,

What changed for you in the how to do it that then made the method more impactful for you? Yeah, I can tell the story here. There's actually a turning point at the very beginning of our second year of training. So at first, I just entered the class like, okay, I'll try to follow the instruction and try not to fall asleep. That's all my goal. But in the middle, something clicked in my mind. It's like,

the teacher always talk about how do you do it with less effort? How can do it more smoothly, more easily? So I really trying to sense, I think it's a super simple thing like laying on the ground and slide to your palm on the floor or something like that. And it's like sliding. I know I can do it, but there is some resistance. There's some friction. There's something not so smooth about it. So I just, I,

dived into this endeavor of how do I make it easier? What can I change? How do I shift my weight on the ground? How do I relax some part of my shoulder to do it? So I kind of totally ignored the teacher. Whatever you say, the instruction, I'm not following it. If I follow, I'm just going to do it my old way of making the movement happen, push it. Rather, I was really staying there and feeling it.

and just doing very simple thing. Then towards the end, I stand up and everything felt different. I was like, maybe I just made up something, or maybe this is the thing the teacher has been saying for a year, more than a year, and I didn't grasp it. That's the part of how, and until this day, when I teach students, I always emphasize like awareness through movement lessons. It's not a movement lesson. It's awareness lesson.

Meaning, why do we want to do slower, smaller? We want to do movement not to your extreme limit. It's because that's how you can be more aware. That's how we cultivate the awareness. Totally. Yeah. I mean, and what I always say with, you know,

The comment I make about Feldenkrais to beginners or people who are considering doing it, I say, you know, Feldenkrais is a really, is a funny method because in my experience with myself and with others, it's kind of boring and confusing until suddenly it isn't at all boring. And to me, that corresponds to this qualitative shift that you're referencing. And so,

I mean, from an objective perspective, you know, you're doing oftentimes pretty well.

basic boring movements and it's nothing like exercise. You're not getting your heart rate up. You're not even performing some useful action that's cool to look at most of the time. And so that's sort of the boring side of it. But to me, the qualitative shift that can happen is exactly what you mentioned, which is as soon as you recognize that the power of the method

is comes from a deep appreciation to how you do what you're doing, then suddenly this whole new realm of curiosity can emerge. You know, when we start just like,

Just like you in that example, how can I really do this with more ease? Or how can I do this in a way that my – that little jaw tension doesn't keep happening? Or how can I do this in a way that there's not a little hiccup in my breath or something? And it's those little things that as we start to iron out or refine the activity, that's

then suddenly there's this new way of operating. And I believe, you tell me if you agree or not, I think when we do a lesson where we make that shift into a greater subtlety or what Moshe, Dr. Feldenkrais, always often refers to as kinesthetic appreciation, which is a word I really like, which is basically he's saying, is there a pleasurable element to how you're doing what you're doing?

If not, let's figure out why not. Keep going until you can find a sense of pleasure, not just neutrality, not just efficiency, not even just ease, but a sense of pleasurableness. And I think that when that shift can happen,

In my experience, that creates a general shift. So if I find pleasure in doing bell hand or something, moving my fingers like this, if I can find kinesthetic appreciation there,

By the time the lesson's done, that shifted me, that qualitative shift. It extends to everything. It extends to how I enjoy my lunch that I'm eating. It extends to what I see when I go walk around on our break. So it's that shift into the how that to me is so fascinating. What do you think about that?

Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned bow hand for people who cannot see the video. If you're a podcast listeners, it's a simple thing. Imagine your hand, your fingers is like a bell. I also feel it's like some ocean creatures. I would just gently open your fingers, open your palm and close it and maybe synchronize with your breathing and open and close. Yeah.

And it's funny, I was talking to one student, we're having a one-on-one online session, and he has so much opinions and ideas to say. And to kind of bring him back to this kinesthetic sense, I said, can you talk to me while doing the bow hand? Can you talk while having the awareness of your hands moving with your breathing? And he all of a sudden just stopped talking and said,

It's hard. I'm all there in the brain, all up there. I can't really do it with my hand. I have to slow down. I have to get a little bit attention to my breathing while forming the idea. So it's almost a different way of being that is more embodied. And to me, oftentimes it's slower. Right.

And I like you were saying the pleasure. Now when I teach, sometimes I say you stay at the range of ease, but sometimes I say stay in the range of pleasure where you're really feeling happy. You can smile when you're doing this movement. It's not like we just talked about judo rows, many other rows. Moshe even taught someone to handstand or something to show the powerful movement.

technique, you can achieve powerful results. But also you would see when students are doing some very elegant rolling, they're smiling. Their face are light and soft. And that's the thing I like to see and people enjoy doing this Feldenkrais practice.

Yeah. Well, so I've got sort of two thoughts at once, but I'm just going to only follow one of them because it's hard to have two conversations at the same time. But one thought is,

Feldenkrais to me is such an interesting body of work because when I look at the kinds of people who have learned so much from it, it covers a wide range. It's like, okay, for example, musicians. There's a Feldenkrais practitioner in New York, Andrew Gibbons, whose training was in classical piano. And

And it was after an injury that he found Feldenkrais to try to rehabilitate, but he stayed with it, not because of the...

The, you know, because his pain went away, he stayed with it because it completely changed his understanding of what it means to play piano. And then later he became a practitioner too. But, but you hear so many interesting stories of artists, musicians, actors, athletes of all kinds that there seems to be, you know, there seems to be this way that people who are

who do have some skill, some function that's required, some performative task, where they find that the Feldenkrais method of not just practicing your piano more times that day, but kind of taking many steps backwards into almost like a meta approach to how you

sense and feel your body that that by spending time in that meta space or you know i guess what we often call the learning environment in feldenkrais that then that then the transfer into the skill you know whether it's piano martial arts uh a golf um uh

everyday tasks that so much is brought back into that activity. What can you say about that slice of things? Has that been your experience too, that meta learning side of it? What's your take on that?

Yeah, meta-learning sounds very abstract. I don't know how to make sense of that concept, but I like what you say about learning environment. Yeah, that's a really, really critical component for me to grasp Feldenkrais and teach Feldenkrais. It's a

We can think this way, why most of the time people don't do movement with this awareness? Why a lot of time, especially first timers, especially high achiever first timers, when they enter the Feldenkrais class, they're like, I'm going to do this this fast and this big and with this power. That's the default mode. Why do people like to do that?

I think it lies into this distinction of am I in a learning environment or am I in a survival environment? In a survival environment, it's totally performance-based. Nobody cares about how you do it or how long did it take for you to achieve it. You just do it. And if you do it, you get respect, you get approval, you are achieved.

versus if you don't, then you're a failure, regardless of the reason. So in that sense, people really want to show I'm capable, and I gain the confidence through this external evaluation of did I do it or not, versus the learning environment

who cares about the standard or achievement? How fast did I run? How well did I play in this concert? Like there's no other body. I don't care about them. What I have is this internal sense of, do I feel good? Do I enjoy doing this? Do I want to keep doing this or what? I want to try something else. And it's very spontaneous and, and,

The spontaneity is one difficult thing for many people to grasp. They're like, if I'm not following the instruction, do I do it right? Am I learning? Am I wasting my time? But the spontaneity is kind of turn on this internal sensing of, I know I'm doing it right because I feel good and I'm feeling better. I'm feeling more ease. And many people, I think,

not blame people themselves, but really the society or the way of we do conduct education is we kind of overwrite all this intuition about ourselves. The self-directed learning intuition.

Well, I can actually go into why I went into neuroscience again. And that was with the idea. It's towards the end of my undergraduate. I was studying physics. And at the beginning, the way I studied physics was just like everyone else. Do I understand this equation? Do I get the division right? Can I solve this problem? It's pretty external. But I just find it.

If you really think about why did all this decades, generations of physicists are doing the research they do and pushing the discipline forward, it's because they have questions.

they had a question. It can be very simple as why is this thing conducting electricity, like metal conduct electricity, but the stone doesn't. Why is that? It's so basic, but then you go ask why, why, why, and go deeper and deeper. Then you conduct this experiment and then you get this result and then you summarize it as an equation, a formula, something like that. But in the education, we were not asking all this curiosity driven questions.

And if you actually study physics in that way, it's way more pleasurable. It's way more interesting because I'm not bound by receiving, absorbing all this external information, but I'm asking questions every day and I can, uh,

ask new questions in my life or why don't I do this and that and be a bit more creative and feel this agency. So I was like, why is nobody talking about curiosity so in-depth in this education thing? And what is it in the brain that we've been ignoring? And I really entered the neuroscience program hoping to

discover the secret of curiosity. That was my initial motivation. How far did you get on that? Not very far. Yeah. And that's the thing about academic research nowadays. It's very...

in the way that it's usually very reductionist, like at least the way we do the very basic research is you have to simplify. I cannot study people reductionist

asking questions about physics because there are so many background information, knowledge, variants. You have to make it super simple, like people asking questions about a card game. They simplify it as that. But through the simplification, I feel a lot of Jews have been… Lose some of the original spirit of the question. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's very, very important, especially as a very junior researcher that I need to build on the previous studies. And just this field is still so open and lacking enough foundations for me to really ask the questions I'm interested in.

So you shifted from a, you know, a very rigorous scientific paradigm with some of the limitations you're mentioning here. Strengths, certainly, but some limitations. You shifted into Feldenkrais, which is all about experiential learning. What changed?

Is this letting you pursue your question about curiosity and how human intelligence or the human being works? Are you finding this a path that helps you with some of that inquiry you've been on?

Yeah, good question. I think now I see curiosity in such a different way than before. Like before, I was still mostly... At the beginning, I was very cognitive. I was like, when you ask a why question, how do you formulate the question? How do you use the language? It is mostly thinking and ideas. But as we just talked about...

Even in a movement field, when do people become curious about how they do a movement? It's also really important to get the mindset right. They need to feel safe to explore. They need to feel okay to not achieve something immediately. They need to not feel awkward from other people. And now I really see curiosity as a spontaneous expression when you feel safe and free. Yeah.

I think in the end, you might need to combine all these different dimensions of the emotional component, embodied components, the biological component, and then in the end, the cognitive side of how you express that and communicate that. So I don't know how I would attack the question now, but yeah.

I like teaching Feldenkrais. It's so quick to get feedback and interact with students. And you can really see a student starting from this very rigid, am I doing it right, following instructions to gradually starting to explore. And as the teacher, what if I do it this way and that way? Oh, I invented a new thing combining the last two lessons. Yeah, we're getting it. Totally, totally.

Well, so to me, that's, I mean, that's, that's what keeps my work so interesting is, you know, month by month, year by year, um, with somatic work, body work, SE work, now Feldenkrais work. You know, I, I get to learn about people every day. Um, and, uh, in learning about other people, I also learned about myself. Uh,

What about you? So now that we're in the phase now where we're teaching and we're working with people, what are you learning? What are you learning as you share this method with others? Well, let me talk about what I learned, first of all, in the context of me receiving the education, like in the training. Sure. I think I'm just a totally different person now. Yeah.

Compared to before, I was very cognitive. I think with logic and I kind of oftentimes ignore the body sensation feelings. A simple example would be, how do I spend my day before I'd be like, here are the tasks, here are the long-term goals, and then I break down my schedule and to-do list and stuff. And now I would really...

still have no sense of these are things need to be done, these are things that are better to be done, but also consulting my feeling. Do I feel like doing that or not? And to the point of like, if I teach a student, I need to decide what lesson do I teach? Let's say a one-on-one lesson.

I can think it very cognitively. It's like, what did the students say? What do they want to achieve? What did I see in the last lesson? What can I build on it and build a lesson plan? Like that's one way of doing it. But sometimes I feel, I don't feel solid about that process, that thinking process. I don't feel very confident and fluid to do that. I ask myself, why do I feel that way? It's probably because the lesson I was thinking, theoretically, it can help the students.

But in bodily, I myself didn't feel a big change during that lesson where I didn't really feel a new clear connection. So that made me hesitant versus some other classes I did it myself. I feel really good change, a big difference. And I can articulate, I can...

pretty well communicate that to my students and I feel confident to do that. So just everything become a lot more embodied when I make a decision of, do I do this or not? - Hmm, hmm, hmm. - Is that something like just, was that being too disconnected from the body or like what I talked about, is that something totally normal to you since you've been doing in this body work for so long?

Well, repeat the question. Let me make sure I understand. Yeah. So I wonder, did I come from this very brainy cognitive way of living into this more embodied decision-making? Is that something not just me? Or like for you, you've been in this somatic field for so long. Has that been incorporated in your life deeply already? Yeah.

Uh, yes. I mean, that, that shift you're talking about, I mean, I, I had my own version of it, a different version. Um, and, and I see, and I see that shift. So let me, let me see if I can add any, any from my own experience. Um,

One way to look at it is, I mean, I like what you say. It's like previously there's a cognitive and a logical framework for planning your day, making decisions. If you're going to make a lesson plan for an individual, there's sort of the cognitive framework makes total sense. But you used a phrase I really like, which is now you consult with your feelings. Well, that's such an interesting thing. Well, what is feelings?

And, you know, on the one hand, it's, you know, yeah, it's your mood, right? So it's energy levels. It's the mood. But what's informing those feelings? It's, you know, it's how much sleep you got. It's the weather today. It's what conversation you had with somebody earlier. So it's such a more...

changing thing by definition. And so feeling state is not something that we can exactly anticipate.

Or it doesn't even follow sort of a simplified logical framework. It's more of just what's arising out of the circumstances of a day and all the complex variables. And on the one hand, there's one's own feeling state. Okay, what's arising in my own life?

embodied cognition to use that word. But then also, you know, when we were do our client work, right? So it's like, let's say, yeah, we want last time they learned this. So this time they might be able to learn this. Well, that's sort of a logical step makes sense at one level. And once in a while, that logical sequence does make sense to follow. But if but but if we're in a feeling mode,

for ourselves, then we can also be in a feeling mode relative to our client or student. And it's, and it's what's alive for them today. What's the state of their nervous system? What's, what's, what are they, what's the level of their own curiosity? How is that directed? Are they, are they curious about this problem at hand or are they, or is their attention limited?

Tied up somewhere else. If so, what does that mean for the best use of our of our of our time here today? So I don't know. I don't know if what I just said adds anything useful, except to me, there's just this.

There's this, it's a, there's something that's, it's more of an inductive approach. It's like you have to take account to what's true in the moment and, and, and then formulate a plan or an action that's in response to that rather than a predetermined kind of an agenda, so to speak. Let me sit with those thoughts for a moment. Yeah.

I feel what you said, I can kind of relate, but it's also very abstract. I think one thing is clear that doing Feldenkrais really taught me to allow this moment by moment change, allow this uncertainty, because usually the...

when we're facing something in the future, planning is a good way to reduce the anxiety. I feel like I have some action plan. I know what to deal with. It seems like I can be more confident with that. But gradually with more and more teaching Feldenkrais, I do feel the confidence actually come from this, um,

this developed ability that I can sense this developed awareness of I can feel where the student is and how I can provide help given what I see right now at this moment.

And it's not, sometimes it's about movement. I can see more clearly, oh, there's something not so fluid in this movement. I can have that sharp eye to see that. Then I can help the student to adjust. Sometimes it's this openness to sense, is the student paying attention? Is the student feeling tired and sleepy? And one time their student like,

doing some eye lesson and the eye looked down and she's like, I feel sad about it. I told not in the plan, wouldn't have expected that, but it's just, I could feel she, she's some hesitance there doing that movement. She took longer time to rest. So I asked what's going on. How do you feel? She told me that. So it's really, it's,

It's a totally different paradigm for me. How do I approach the world and react? In that example you just gave, when her eyes were directed, was it you that felt sad or was it she that felt sad or both? Both.

No, she felt sad. So what I could see was just her movement kind of stopped very slowly and she took a much, much longer rest. The breathing was not as relaxed as before. Right. And so I asked, how do you feel? What about we take a break if you want to take a longer break? Right. And she took a longer break and stand up from the ground, walk around a little bit and told me how she felt. Right. That's it.

Yeah, well, I mean, so that, you know, so to me, that's an example of where, you know, a concept that we use in medicine.

in lots of things. I mean, parenting, psychology, but the concept of attunement, right? And attunement is that when there's two people in relationship, that one can be quite sensitive to what's arising for the other person. And the contrast would be, so if I was a, I don't know, if I was a fitness instructor,

Then my job is to sort of like, OK, we're going to do this. We're going to do this number of repetitions. And it's almost like we're going to do this thing almost no matter what, unless, you know, you can't do it. So that's sort of one attitude. But but but another attitude is one that's that's much more aware in a moment by moment basis of as you're performing this lesson that I'm instructing.

watching for all the subtle shifts in muscle tone, in body language, in sort of the felt sense of the individual. We as Feldenkrais practitioners or any kind of practitioner, we can become very attuned, very attuned, sensitive to the nuanced changes of the organism. And because of the Feldenkrais method,

We have the freedom to adjust, ask a question, spend more time. So we have the flexibility to sort of ride the rhythms that present in the moment rather than just trying to adhere to some sort of a fixed routine or something like that.

Yeah, yeah. It's very true. Like this method itself, it's about awareness. It's about learning. It's about creating this learning environment so the student can have this spontaneous learning exploration. So it's really, really not important at all for them to achieve something for me to teach all the things I prepared today. And a lot of times I might just teach half of the lesson, but do it much slower and

And as I said before, there are different dimensions to view a lesson. It could be something super simple, but I'm directing all the attention to how you start a movement. And then we zoom in and zoom in in this very initial starting and learn how to start a movement. That could be a lesson itself. So I really don't feel guilty of cutting anything short. Yeah.

as long as the student is with me or if they're not. And that's another thing is at the beginning of every lesson, I would say like, if you need rest, rest as much as you need. Don't follow my instruction. My instruction means nothing if your body really says no. And to the point, a lot of times the students are like, teacher, I know I scheduled the lesson today, but I really don't feel like it. Then

First of all, I'm glad my students are saying that to me because a lot of time, I need to be a good student. I need to be quote-unquote respectful and do the thing that we agree to do, blah, blah, blah. That's how a lot of external requirements that we face daily. But here, at least you need to communicate that with me of saying, I don't feel like it. And then we can explore. Besides just giving up, are there any other options we can do? Are there any other way we can...

have some support or engage. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. I like that. Um,

You shared with me at one point that, so Moshe, you know, I always call him by his first name. I don't know why I should call him Dr. Feldenkrais. I'm sure I don't. I'm not really on a first name basis with him, but I don't know. It's my habit. Anyway, but he has written a, you know, he's got a number of excellent books. And first of all, I really like him as a writer. He's a really interesting writer. So that's its own thing. Yeah.

But you mentioned that, so he has one book, it's a case study, and it's called The Case of Nora. And you mentioned to me that that felt like, you said it was the useful behavioral neuroscience that you'd been searching for. I wonder if you could elaborate on that a little bit. What impression did that have on you?

Yeah. First of all, I don't see Moshe as a writer that is accessible at all. Like most of his book, I just read and fall asleep. I can't follow. Again, it's too oftentimes very abstract, like so dense that there's 10 years of experience behind every sentence. So I usually don't recommend beginners to just dive into the book. You might lost in the concepts.

but this story of Nora is a really easily digestible book where he was just presented with this case of this old woman very intellectual multilingual but she lost the ability to read and write or at least that's what her family thought at the beginning was the problem like

reading and writing, but they're going to Moshe Feldenkrais, this movement guy. And they did fine. Just after the first lesson, she did some gentle movement of turning the head and stuff. Then she was able to write something and read it out. And they're like, what the heck? This is so effective. And then they sent her to Israel to actually do the work with him every day. So, and it's really good that Moshe was there.

telling the story and his thinking process. So the part of, um,

behavioral neuroscience. For example, he knew that we use different brain regions to process words, letters versus numbers. So most people would think read and write is just the same thing, but it's actually much easier to read and write numbers than the letters. So he started with numbers and asked this patient to try that and she succeeded. Everyone's happy. She's happy. Achieved.

And he's like, okay, now I'm going to stop here. I'm not going to push more to ask her to write the words and stuff. So that's more language processing. Yeah. Oh, I learned that in the textbook. I didn't know it's useful in this case to help a patient.

And it's really interesting. I just reread this book again. And now so many more things click with me. Before I was kind of like, I spent five years studying neuroscience. Now it's out of window. I don't use that anymore in my teaching. I'm just doing this movement thing and be happy with my bodily sensation. But then I saw when Moshe was faced with such a complicated case that he later discovered she was also having problem with just breathing.

spatial orientation how to put on shoes and nobody else realized that was an issue because everyone just helped her to put on her shoes because she's sick. She's a patient, right? But he realized there's a lot more issues with that. And then his thought process was to think what is this neural...

neural connection there. What is required to have this sense of spatial awareness and how do I adjust my environment to fit into what I'm going to do? Like he said, he's visualizing all the spring regions, how they connect and how the flow of information, he was using the word flow of fluid,

fluid, but it's really, I think it's a flow of information from the more modern perspective. Yeah. Like he's imagining this process and where does it get stuck? Where is it? It's good as a highway. Yeah. So I was like, maybe what I learned before could be useful one day in my future Feldenkrais practice.

Because right now, most of the time, my students are still very, very functional, good functional people. They don't face some severe neurological situation or someone face that, but got it pretty well nailed down. But when you're going deeper into this field and facing more challenging situations, I think that's

overall understanding, the modern understanding of the brain would be really helpful. Well, so let's talk about Moshe sort of as a scientist for a second because he was...

What's in your view, what are some of the things, I guess in my view, he was ahead of his time on understanding certain, you know, sort of learning principles or he took theories and he made it experiential and practical. That was to me one of his areas of genius. But when you sort of think of this method as having a,

a neurophysiological underpinning to it. You know, that this isn't a random, you know, we don't use magic to create the change. There are, you know, he was, he was sort of, he,

he was using neurophysiological principles, some of which hadn't been proven yet, but he was sort of assuming that this may be how it works. Can you speak to that at all? Sort of how you see his theoretical body, the underpinning informing the method itself? We can see a lot of correspondence of why we do something and how to explain that neurologically, I think.

Don't know if that's how he did it. Like, did he start from the theory then go into the practice or the other way or both ways? Like one important thing is why do we use small, soft movements or when you're doing FI functional integration, the hands-on work, why do we use such gentle touch? It's when you're lowering the intensity than the awareness, the sensitivity of,

What's going on? What can I feel has improved? So that's a famous law. But usually it's in the way we learned in school. This is called psychophysics. We're studying how do we conduct experiment to prove this law? What's the exact form of this law? But it was hardly used in application today.

And even, even nowadays, I think there's still a lot of gap there or I could be ignorant. But for example, Moshe was talking about like, let's come back to the case of Nora. And he was saying she, he tried to help this woman from sitting to stand up by gently lead her head and kind of pull her head. And that will connect to the spine. And usually with a well-developed brain nervous system, um,

that there should be a reflex so the whole body knows how to respond to this. But for her, she's just stiff and didn't know what to do when she was receiving this gentle touch from Moshe. What Moshe did was not doing a lot of weird other things to change her, but just make his touch softer, make the intensity lower of this interaction. And then after a few repetitions, she was able to do that.

So there's a lot more than the simple law of intensity and sensitivity. Like what is this interaction going on between these two people and how does the whole body response change? Like it's almost like a,

just click, click, click. And the connections were there and suddenly the light bulb is on. Like why did that happen? I think with a very reductionist way of studying psychophysics, it's hard to understand that whole body's organic response being restored through this gentle touch. So, so I think there's still a lot of open field for future research. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, you know, like in Norman Doidge's book, you know, the way the brain changes itself or the way the brain heals itself. I can't remember exactly the title and he kind of credits Moshe Feldman. You know, Norman Doidge, I think is a, is a medical doctor and researcher and his, and his big area of interest is around neuroplasticity and, and that book, the way the brain changes itself or the way, no, I think it's the way it heals itself. Yeah.

is about examples of healing via neuroplastic change. That's the basic theme of the book. And he credits Moshe Feldenkrais as being sort of a pioneer, where it's as though Moshe had the conviction that

that neurological change was possible even before the scientific paradigm of the time recognized the degree of sort of malleability or neuroplasticity to the brain. So therefore, Moshe was...

Sometimes we use the phrase these days, having a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. Do you know that expression? Yeah. Yeah. So to me, it's like Moshe really embodies the growth mindset to the extreme. It's sort of the idea that like,

Any limitation, okay, I have cerebral palsy, so I can't move my hip this particular way. Or I had a stroke and now that disrupted my speech center or whatever. It's like his worldview was like, no, no, no, there's no limitation.

there's always the possibility of investigation. And he must have believed very deeply that the human possibility for evolution, change, you know, I don't think he believed, it's not about believing in miracles, but it's believing about the possibility, that our common sense view of

of what's possible and not is pretty limited. And I think he was a person who carried this idea that, in fact, the possibility intrinsic with any human organism is much, much, much, much greater than we expect. So somehow he really carried this principle within him.

See, and I think it's not a belief that's something abstract derived from experiment. It's just really, really empirical that he has done this thousands of times. And I like he's just...

Still humble. He's like, Nora is in this severe situation. I'm not sure. And you guys as family members shouldn't expect me to be this miracle delivery guy. And I cannot promise anything, but we'll see. And then he's so resourceful to pull resources from this different fields and try different things and being inventive on how to design new exercises. I was thinking like,

who the hell decided to lay on the floor every day and figure out all the thousands of lessons? Like, what's your life like? Have you been just rolling on the floor daily basis? Yeah.

It's very inventive, and that's why you can have this optimistic belief. Right. You know your strengths. You know your potency there. Right. Totally. Well, so just to speak, I guess, a little bit to my, you know, one aspect of my own interest in Feldenkrais was that's what really hooked me in was this concept of –

Yeah, I mean, you know, it's the learning versus a fixing paradigm or this and that sometimes is the way we phrase it. But, you know, when I think about...

So I started Feldenkrais after I felt that I was pretty experienced with structural integration. And so structural integration is Ida Rolf's work. And they were friends and they felt that there was some Venn diagram. There was some overlap of what they were trying to do, which was to improve human functioning.

but they had pretty different ways of achieving those results. And, and Ida's style was to mechanically, it was a more as a mechanical paradigm, understanding that the, the fascia and the muscle tissue, of course, it connects to the neurology in the brain, but, but, but there was a bit of a mechanical approach. How do we lengthen tissues, organize the structure, get things to interrelate mechanically better. And then the result was,

Coming from that will be, you know, that the whole will be improved by reorganizing the parts at a physical level. There will be an improvement of function at the physical, but also psychological, even spiritual level from the from the struck from the Ida Ralph's sort of framework.

And in Moshe's view was so much, so much different. He wanted improved human functioning as well, but it wasn't about, you know, hey, we need to lengthen this. We need to length mechanically lengthen this muscle for you or this and that. And and so.

Even though I, through my structural integration work, I think I developed a big appreciation for the neurological slice of what's happening. Still, nevertheless, there's this sort of a mechanical bias where, you know, we, you know, we're, we're physically manipulating the tissues. And, and,

The other example of a mechanical paradigm. So structural degradation could be a little bit of a mechanical paradigm. But, you know, I think about like, you know, the approach to exercise these days is often or physical therapy, right?

Most physical therapy is kind of mechanical in nature. It's like, okay, we need to fix this function of your shoulder. If we strengthen this muscle and we lengthen this muscle, then the function will be better. So again, it's sort of a mechanical approach to improving the human biology. And all those things have their place. They work within certain limits.

But where Feldenkrais comes in is, no, we're not going to make a mechanical change in the system. That might happen. But where we're going to do is we're going to create a change on the learning side. And the learning side is a function of our central nervous system and as it relates to the somatic nervous system or the body as a whole.

And, and, and, and so to me, it's a little bit like the analogy I would maybe sometimes use is kind of like a computer analogy. Are we fixing the hardware or the software? And, and, and,

Rolfing is a little bit, it's like fixing the hardware and then changing the hardware affects the software. But where Feldenkrais comes in, no, no, no, let's pay attention to the software. How does this feel? What's happening? If you do this and you slow it down, if you do it with more ease, now what happens? Now go back to look at the first thing you were looking at.

What's happening there now? Is there any more possibility than before? Okay, now that we've incorporated that, now let's look at the pelvis and do some detailed work there. Now let's connect that to the breath. Okay, now let's go back and look at that first problem again, turning your head. What's the experience? What's happening now? What's happening now? So it's that...

neurological entry point or the learning side that to me was so captivating. And that's where I feel like I've gotten so much value is and I still do mechanically oriented work, but now it's in combination. I see it as two sides of a coin that

Just doing it for them isn't enough. How do I also bring them into that experience where they can grasp it and even repeat it and even deepen it independently is sort of more of the direction that I'm continuing to go.

It's so interesting. You use this software, hardware, computer analogy. That was like my whole thinking paradigm from computational cognitive neuroscience. It's like, what's the algorithm in human's brain? And how do they think? How did that compare to artificial intelligence algorithm? But yeah.

Sometimes I'm thinking, are we asking the same question? Because if we see the whole process of learning to fix a problem, that's one way of thinking. And practically, that's why many people find us to receive this learning experience. But

It's very touching that Moshe was saying learning Feldenkrais is not about being flexible or I don't care about flexible body. I care about flexible mind. I want to restore human dignity. So what really constitutes this human dignity, I think one really big part is to regain the spontaneity of I have the choice to decide what I do and I can respect that.

And also I have ways to learn. I have ways to discover. And awareness is a big part of the training for you to be able to discover ways for yourself. So not only you fix problems, but also build new possibilities, achieve things that you didn't thought you could before. You didn't think you could have achieved before. So when you think that way, this learning component is a must for a person.

they cannot be always relying on finding the best therapist to fix every problem I have. Then you're still not gaining that agency. Right. That's absolutely correct. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But then on the same time, I'm not saying Feldenkrais is, is,

so powerful that everybody can definitely or should definitely do it. Like we've talked about to have this learning environment where you feel the ease and relaxation to explore. But what if somebody is already in such big physical pain?

that they might first need to have that pain under control a little bit, and then they can enter this explorative state. And in that sense, maybe some structural integration would be helpful. And many other things I'm still learning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wonderful. Well, I wonder if we could switch to a little bit about your teaching these days, because...

You know, you're teaching through Red Beard, which I'm so excited to have you doing both one-on-one work and then the every other week class that you're doing. So listeners, you should definitely tune in to the biweekly class.

But you've been working with rock climbers, bringing the method in. So just tell me a little bit about maybe that you could use the rock climbers as an example. But tell me a little bit about your teaching these days. Yeah.

It's interesting for Feldenkrais teachers. One requirement is you're not just making sure your students are happy. You need to be happy. Not only make sure students are relaxed, you need to be relaxed first. So that's kind of a theme behind my, when I decide what do I want to teach? I need to teach something that makes me happy. So I was like, I like rock climbing and I find using the Feldenkrais method actually helped my climbing. So I want to just teach that and try it out. Right.

So that was this, it's just a paradigm shift too. Like before I thought Feldenkrais method, how do you learn it? You just do the lessons, you follow the scripts, you do the sequences, but it's really, again, this philosophy of how to do things. You can apply to so many other things in life. So what I did was just when I'm doing some climbing,

I talk to myself like a Feldenkrais teacher, like, can you do it more slowly? Can you do it with less E? Can you do it with less effort? Notice how you start, which other part in your body can you include in your body image? And that's a big thing. Rock climbing. Cause you're so go oriented. You're only probably paying attention to your hands, but where's my feet? Where's my pelvis? Your breath, the quality of your breath. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So,

I just not only chose some Feldenkrais awareness through movement lessons for climbers that I think were essential, but also just some climbing exercise you can do in this Feldenkraisian way to do climbing. And I received students saying like, I never noticed my breathing on the wall, but once I noticed and I realized,

keep myself breathing. All the difficulties were suddenly not a problem at all. And so it's like, when I started to allow myself to climb with this slow pace and more awareness, I can climb for hours and not feeling tired. It's so relaxing. I'm so happy. All these new experiences I heard from was like,

We're getting something here. Yeah, yeah. Oh, good. They're getting more kinesthetic appreciation on the wall. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Exactly. Hey, nothing wrong with something being more pleasurable, is it? No. And, of course, there are students feeling all confused, like, oh, when I slow down, I

I find I have so much difficulty and tightness. I don't know what to do. I'm freezing and stuff. And then we work with that too. Yeah. Very cool. Very cool. Anything else with your, anything else that's exciting for you about your teach? So you're teaching rock climbers. I think you're teaching some, some classes in China. You're teaching some classes here. Anything else, anything worth sharing about, I don't know, fun things or.

Feedback or... Let me think. I don't want this to become like a marketing slogan. Pop up something quick. Yeah, yeah. No, no, that's fine. Well, okay. I'll probably just quickly share two other pieces of feedback from my students that was also kind of new and touching for me. So one was, again, from the rock climber class. And I was asking like,

do you feel it's not as exciting? Do you feel you're not achieving a lot and therefore not satisfying? And I heard the students like, but this is such a deep reach experience. I experienced so much more in the 60 minutes than any other exercise or movement modality I've done before.

And that also apparently lasts for a while. Like next day when I walk and when I run, I feel so differently. Not only it's easier, but I feel more full. I'm more aware of this whole experience. So I think that's another way to teach Feldenkrais. Just forget about all this functional improvement. Are you doing movements better? But just the state of deeply immersed in your body and everyday movement is

That is a very valuable experience that sadly most of the time we can't experience. But really it's everywhere once you open that switch. I remember doing one hand lesson and gently move the finger and stuff. Then everything I touch, it becomes a soft touch. And every move I'm doing, it has this new layer of color there. It's like...

It's drug. I don't know. That reminds me. I remember one time doing a hand lesson and we took a break. It was during our class. And we have three cats. And one of them is always afraid and kind of is afraid of me. And, you know, once in a while relaxes and lets me pet her, but not very often. Anyway, it came out of this lesson. I think it was a hand lesson.

And then, you know, we had 10 minutes. And so I went over and I was petting the cat. And it was like for the first time she just like would relax. She really and nothing changed for her. It was because of how I was was approaching had shifted. Yeah. But but yeah. But that's the dance of two neuro systems. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

And then that connects to the next comment I received. The student was from a more martial art background, but he also had a lot of issues of pain and stuff. And he said, Feldenkrais is the first thing I truly experienced this notion of loving myself.

I never mentioned this notion about love to my students, but the student gave me the feedback of like Feldenkrais make me feel I'm really loving myself. Like I'm allowing myself to do slow, gentle movements. There's not a right or wrong. There's not a achieving or underachieving movement.

And I don't need to be the strongest. I don't always need to be stronger and stronger and stronger. Although that could happen in the end. But that's not the focus of this method. And you don't evaluate yourself that way. And if you use that approach in your relationship, in your interaction with others, that's, I think, another big change how Father in Christ method has evolved.

enlightened me to change a lot of aspects of my life is if I see other people as a student secretly see them as a student like how would I my view change of a person I'll be a lot less judgmental and a lot less slower to come to a conclusion of what's going on right but be a bit more open and softer and if this person doesn't want to change I don't want to push yep

Yeah, no, I love that. And that comes through. I think it was Jeff Haller who made the comment, because he was at the Amherst, the last full training in the United States that Moshe Feldenkrais did. A lot of people. Arlene was there, I think, too. Or maybe, no, maybe she was in San Francisco. Anyway, and...

And Moshe, he was with everybody for weeks and weeks during this training. And a comment that really made a big difference to Jeff was Moshe was kind of frustrated, he said, at one point. And he said something like...

Like, you haven't learned how to take care of yourself or you haven't learned how to truly care for yourself. So I have to do that for you until...

But that's really what I'm trying to teach you is for you to really learn how to take care of yourself. And what I like about that is it's not in a superficial way. It's not like, hey, take a bath. It's not sort of a superficial kind of a self-care. But it's sort of like until you can really listen to yourself and

And have an intimate connection to your own self in the biggest sense of the word, physiology, psychology, all of us. Until we have that intimacy, we're lacking something.

I think in my memory, Moshe put it in a much more confrontational way. He's like, I can take care of you much better than yourself. Yeah. Yeah. No, you're right. Maybe it is. Maybe that is what it is. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah. Yeah. I think Arlene Zong, our teacher mentioned like Moshe is so gentle to kids, but he can really be confrontational to adults and be spicy about it. Right. So it's interesting, but yeah.

Yeah. At the same time, it's really a new notion of what is taking care of myself. What does this consumerism world teach us about that versus what is my actual experience? Yeah.

Very cool. I think we should end on that note. Anything you want to, is that anything else to throw in? Well, thank you for all the questions. I didn't know I have so many stories to tell. And I bet there will be more stories next year. I'm sure. I'm certain. I'm certain of it. Very cool. Well, thanks, Jue. Yeah, thank you.