The other day at the grocery store, I was marveling at how little my signature on that electronic tablet looks like my signature.
I’ll bet you have the same experience regularly — you pay with plastic, scribble a signature (it looks scribbled whether you scribble or not), accept it as your own and leave with your stuff.
I’m convinced it’s not just that I know I just ‘wrote’ it that makes me accept that ridiculous scrawl as my own. I believe I’d claim it in a heartbeat six months from now because although it looks nothing like my signature — it looks everything like my handwriting.
This is what makes ‘handwriting’ such a potent metaphor in our work, a shorthand way of saying that ‘who we are’ will be evident in our expression of what we learned from Moshe Feldenkrais or any of the trainers who succeeded him in bringing new practitioners along. Moshe told us often that we would each develop our own handwriting … and this is one of the crucial requirements for building your practice.
No one wants to work with ‘a method.’ No one wants to work with a clone of your trainer — not even a clone of the most talented one you had. People are attracted to you because of you — yourself — and what you bring to the equation: your unique understanding, coupled with your unique experience, your unique life story, what you see, how you touch, your presence as a human being — the total expression of all that you are, when you are in the same room with your clients.
So here is one more reason to become more of who you are: it’s how your Feldenkrais handwriting develops. Your handwriting in our work evolves in just the same way your ‘other’ handwriting developed and evolved as you matured — from the first clumsy strokes you made as a child, through adolescent experiments with curlicues, slant and missing strokes, to the matter-of-fact, do-it-without-thinking way you write now as an adult.
Your handwriting is yours, whether you write with a pen, pencil, crayon or lipstick, in sand, with your big toe, your ‘other hand’ or by holding the implement between your teeth. It’s so much you, that it shines through in a random assortment of pixels on a screen at the grocery store.
No matter what your level of experience, writing your Feldenkrais story in your own handwriting makes it your own, the unique gift you offer your clients.
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