The skeletal voice & a book recommendation

03/07/2025

Highlights

1. Announcements:
• Last call for Early Bird for workshops with Robert Sussuma - 6th July.
• Special Monday Classes in July: Introduction to Bones for Life with Lara Liu

2. Thought of the Week
• About Bones for Life

3. Book of the Week
• Helgoland, Carlo Rovelli: What Quantum Physics Can Teach Feldenkrais Students

4. Quote of the Week

Announcements

1. Last call for early bird price: Voice Workshops with Robert Sussuma in October!

Good news: if you were thinking about joining - the early bird offer has been extended until this Sunday, July 6th!
The workshops will be held at two of Feldenkrais Education’s venues: one in Brussels (2nd-5th Oct.), the other in Paris (18th-21st Oct.)
You’re welcome to attend either one, or combine both for a deeper experience.

Here is a quick overview of what you’ll be exploring:

🦴 Brussels – The Skeletal Voice
In Brussels, The Skeletal Voice looks at how skeletal awareness can unlock unexpected vocal ease and flexibility. You’ll explore broad movement ideas alongside practical vocal strategies to help you find more resonance, reduce effort, and refine articulation.

🎶 Paris – The Singer’s Voice
In Paris, The Singer’s Voice invites you to refine your singing through a clear yet flexible process, free of rigid drills. You’ll focus on precise vocal intentions while exploring somatic strategies that make technical and artistic growth feel natural, intuitive, and even fun. If you love getting into the details of singing and want an approach that works with your body—not against it—this workshop is for you.

Join one workshop—or come to both for a fuller experience.
Early bird price is available until this Sunday, 6th July!

Learn more & register here: https://feldenkrais-education.com/en/workshop-with-robert-sussuma/

2. Special Monday Classes in July: Introduction to Bones for Life with Lara Liu
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For the next four Mondays — from July 7th to July 28th — Lara Liu, originally from Taiwan and now based in France, will be guiding our Monday evening classes. Lara is a certified Bones for Life trainer who studied directly under Ruthy Alon, one of Moshe Feldenkrais’ original students and the founder of the Movement Intelligence approach. Lara brings a gentle, precise presence and deep somatic insight, offering a rare opportunity to explore the foundations of this powerful and intelligent body of work.

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📅 Free Live Sessions introducing Bones for Life
7th, 14th, 21st & 28th
Mondays at 17:30 (in English)
Mondays at 18:30 (in French)

Thought of the week

🦴 Bones for Life — Strengthening Through Intelligent Movement
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Bones for Life emerged from a striking observation: in her sixties, Ruthy Alon traveled through Africa and the Middle East, where she was inspired by the effortless grace and upright posture of women carrying heavy loads on their heads. Despite having lower bone density, these women experienced far fewer fractures than their Western counterparts. This led Ruthy to develop a program of rhythmic, weight-bearing movements to stimulate bone strength, improve skeletal alignment, and support dynamic postural integrity.
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Bones for Life is part of Movement Intelligence, a suite of somatic programs developed by Ruthy Alon to support learning through movement in everyday life. The broader approach includes Chairs (adapted movements for seated contexts), Walk for Life (refining natural walking), Mindful Eating, and Solutions for Optimal Mobility. Each program offers practical tools to cultivate resilience, coordination, and autonomy at any stage of life.
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Book of the week

Carlo Rovelli: Helgoland, Making sense of the Quantum Revolution

What Quantum Physics Can Teach Feldenkrais Students

We read Carlo Rovelli’s book and thought there were some interesting parallels to be made with the Feldenkrais thinking. Helgoland isn’t just a book about equations. It’s about rethinking reality itself.

Rovelli tells the story of Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, in 1925, alone on the windswept island of Helgoland. Faced with contradictions in atomic physics, Heisenberg made a radical move: He stopped trying to describe what electrons are when nobody’s looking, and focused only on what we can observe—the outcomes of interactions.

This shift led to quantum mechanics, a theory where:
Particles don’t have definite positions until they’re measured.
Outcomes are probabilistic, not certain.
Things exist in superpositions (multiple states at once).
Entangled particles remain connected across distances.

Quantum mechanics showed that reality isn’t made of self-contained objects with fixed properties. Instead, properties emerge in relation to something else. Rovelli argues that the heart of quantum theory is the fact that nothing has properties on its own. Everything exists through its relations. This perspective challenges our common-sense idea of a world made of isolated, solid things. Instead, reality is a web of interactions.

What Does This Mean for Feldenkrais Students?

Well, Feldenkrais learning is deeply relational. No body part moves in isolation.
Posture and movement aren’t fixed ideals but adaptations to context.
Awareness means sensing relations: head to pelvis, feet to ground, intention to action.
Learning is not about imposing correctness but exploring new possibilities.

Just as quantum theory abandoned describing things “in themselves,” Feldenkrais practice encourages us to notice what emerges in movement, without rigid assumptions.

We were inspired by Helgoland’s focus on relations over objects, its preference for observation over assumptions, its embrace of context and uncertainty and its ongoing curiosity about what emerges.

Rovelli’s physics and Feldenkrais learning both ask us to see the world—and ourselves—as dynamic, connected, and full of possibility.

Quote of the week

“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”
― Werner Heisenberg, Across Frontiers