Globe09.18.03

The Boston Globe

Thursday, September 18th, 2003

by Cara Feinberg — Globe Correspondent

After 10 years of doctors' waiting rooms, dozens of useless prescriptions, excruciating physical therapy, and attempts at macrobiotic diets, chiropractics, and alternative medicines, violist Rebecca Strauss felt sure she was slowly dying.

At 37 she lived in constant agony, unable to comfortably sit, stand, walk, lie down, or even feel her fingers move over the strings of her viola as she played it. She developed hot, itchy, irritated patches on her skin and couldn't eat certain foods, Her back began to ache, her neck went stiff, she had shooting pains down her legs. Sometimes, she felt she didn't have the strength to lift a hardcover book.

Yet after visiting countless doctors, she would get the same confounding news: Her test results were negative, and the physicians couldn't pinpoint the problem. "I was simply devastated," Strauss said in an interview at her Waltham apartment. "Here I was a musician, and playing my own instrument was torture. I had one doctor tell me to give up viola altogether and go find a different career."

But Strauss, who had loved the instrument since she first heard it at age 9 at Yom Kippur services at her family's synagogue, was unwilling to abandon her music. She kept searching for answers, until one doctor suggested she try something called Feldenkrais, a method of movement that practitioners and students swear by but that most people - both lay and medical - have never even heard of.

Now, three years later, Strauss, a freelance musician who has, played for the Boston Pops, the Boston Ballet, and the New England String Ensemble, is nearly pain-free. And she, her Feldenkrais teacher, Olivia Cheever, and Strauss's partner, photographer and writer Susan Wilson, have collaborated to render Strauss's journey artistically through an arresting multimedia presentation called "Soul Survivor."

The show, which combines Cheever's audiotapes of her sessions with Strauss, original artwork by Strauss, a musical piece for eight violas (all eight parts are played by Strauss), and visual images photographed and arranged by Wilson, will have its third public viewing in the Boston area from 7 to 9 p.m. tomorrow at Wellspace at Fresh Pond Mall in Cambridge, where Cheever has her Feldenkrais practice.

"It's very hard to talk about Feldenkrais, because it describes a process that is not necessarily verbal," said Cheever, a licensed psychotherapist, massage therapist, certified Feldenkrais practitioner, and cofounder and faculty member of the Longy School of Music's Mind/Body Department. "That's why Rebecca and Susan's" piece, 'Soul Survivor,' is so important."

Feldenkrais is "not a medical' therapy, it's an educational modality," Cheever continued. "It's based on the idea not of training the body but of the mind. Students basically relearn how to move and explore alternate ways of moving; by paying close attention to the signals our body is giving us, we can rediscover the effortless ways we moved when we were babies, ridding ourselves of some of the habitual movements that create our aches and pains in the first place."

This aspect of Feldenkrais the awareness through movement - has made it a popular choice for musicians and athletes, including cellist Yo-Yo Ma and former basketball star Julius Erving, who have used it to improve their coordination and grace, said Dr. Andrew Weil, an author and founder and director of the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona's Health Sciences Center in Tucson. But more often, it's used to aid recovery from trauma or injury.

"I often recommend Feldenkrais to people with chronic back pain or people whose movement has been restricted by injury," Weil said in a telephone interview. "It's a' shame so few doctors know about it. I feel it has greater potential to heal than many traditional therapies, including physical therapy, and it's much more time- and cost-effective."

Such was the case with Strauss, who at age 5, was sexually abused. Though the revelation of the assault did riot come about through Feldenkrais — Strauss had long dealt with these issues before in psychotherapy — the movements she learned in her Feldenkrais sessions helped her to understand the relationship between her childhood trauma and the intense full-body pain she experienced as an adult.

For her, post-traumatic stress, when combined with the repetitive strain of playing the viola, took a toll on her body, creating a sense of dissociation and disembodiment every time she picked up her instrument.

"I had completely disconnected the mental from the physical," said Strauss. 'Though I'd been going to psychotherapy, which was incredibly helpful, I simply couldn't identify where my physical pain was coming from. I didn't' realize that I was triggering it with certain movements that brought flashbacks, that something like putting my viola on my shoulder could make me feel completely unsafe, as if someone were attacking me from behind. I was totally terrified every day, and I didn't even know it."

This terror, Cheever explained, was plaguing Strauss's muscles, squeezing them into painful knots when she played her viola. Even when she put the instrument down, the throbbing would persist.

According to Cheever, the Feldenkrais method is ideally suited to treat such cases. In the 1940s, when doctors told Moshe Feldenkrais, a Russian-born physicist, 1 mechanical engineer, and martial arts expert, that he needed surgery to repair an old knee injury, he "was determined to find a less invasive treatment with a better chance of success. He began to experiment with very small, repetitive movements, ultimately regaining full use of his knee, and teaching his discoveries to friends.

Today, according to Andrea Wiener, the assistant director of the Feldenkrais Guild of North America, a professional association and training institution for Feldenkrais teachers, there are more than 4,000 practitioners of Feldenkrais worldwide, about 2,100 of them in North America.

But despite Feldenkrais's growing popularity, said Dr. James Gordon, the founder and director of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington and the former chairman of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine, it's not surprising that it's still relatively unknown in medical circles.

"[Feldenkrais has] only really been around since the '70s, and it takes a while for genius ideas to be accepted," Gordon said. "Even most doctors don't know about it; when it comes to unconventional therapies, doctors are usually the last to know. Their interest is in practicing what they have been taught, and Feldenkrais is not something we teach in medical school."

Feldenkrais is practiced two ways: Awareness Through Movement group classes, which use verbal instructions to guide students in what seem like very simple floor exercises such as bending, turning, leaning, and breathing; and private lessons called Functional Integration, in which the practitioner offers gentle hands-on guidance through movement tailored to the individual.

A private session usually lasts about 90 minutes, said Cheever. "We'll take a full health history, and do a 'body scan,' looking for movements and habits that we've developed that we may be unaware of, but are causing us pain," she explained. Then the fully clothed student will lie on a padded table as the practitioner guides him or her through a series of movements.

"Our motto is 'no pain, no pain,'" Cheever said. "We don't want the student to do things that cause her pain. We try to identify problem areas and then suggest alternate choices of movement that are not painful.

"Cheever will typically give students movements to do at home, so that the body can learn through repetition. "Some people come for a few sessions and some come for ongoing sessions," she said. "Rebecca came to me over a period of three years, and she still attends sometimes. But what distinguished her was not just her remarkable progress but her ability to articulate what was going on with her and how the process worked."

With Strauss's permission, Cheever began audio taping their sessions together, tracking Strauss's three-year journey to recovery. During that time, Strauss kept a diary and participated in other expressive therapies, rendering her own experiences not only through the words Cheever captured on tape but through her own writing and visual artwork.

"The work I did with Olivia has really catapulted me to look at my life in a whole new way," Strauss said "I want to use that strength to find new ways to make music and art that can possibly help other people. When I watch 'Soul Survivor,' I can barely believe I functioned as I did for so many years. When you're in survivor mode, you use 85 to 90 percent of your 'energy just to stay alive. Now, I spend that kind of energy living."