Attending to the Process of Changing Behavior: A Reply to Ives' Commentary

In our article, "The Feldenkrais Methot!': A Dynamic Approach to Changing Motor Behavior" (Buchanan & Ulrich, 2001), our stated objectives were to offer a tutorial on the Feldenkrais Method ofsomatic education based on the writings of Moshe Feldenkrais and suggest several parallels with dynamic systems theory. Briefly, Feldenkrais teachers and dynamic systems theorists believe that humans self-organize their behavior from the interactions among their individual resources, environment, and task requirements. Both groups acknowledge that behavior often assembles into preferred or habitual patterns ofvarying stability. Changing an existing behavior requires perturbation or a relative destabilization to create conditions for the reassembly ofa related or different behavior. Feldenkrais and dynamic systems theory explicitly view system behavior as emerging from the interactions ofmultiple subsystems and strongly believe in a continual coupling between perception and action. Asa corollary to our objectives, we hoped to interest researchers in conducting well designed studies of Feldenkrais and its fundamentals from an overt theoretical foundation. We briefly reviewed studies published in peer-reviewed journals and acknowledged the limitations of many of them before we proposed several studies formulated from a dynamic systems theoretical