THE FELDENFELDEN METHOD
                    (C)1992 Alan M. Schwartz

I recently attended a gathering of the severely gifted.  These 
wielders of indomitable mental power and its sequel - the status 
of social pariah - overran a local hotel for three days of 
Dionysian excesses aimed at people who were irreparably 
Apollonian.  Preceding each day's seminars exploring nuclear 
substructure and the astrological significance of chocolate there 
lurked morning exercises.  My plan was to sit hard by the 
breakfast buffet and consume everything within reach.  I was well 
toward achieving critical gastric hypercontainment when I was 
inveigled into the intricacies of the Feldenfelden method. 

Fashionable aerobic absurdities are inevitably led by taut-bodied 
seductresses encased within monomolecular spandex films flaunting 
five axis anatomical mobilities that would make a 20-year veteran 
employee of a Turkish brothel blush.  I would have been content 
to finish that last pound of lox had I not spied La Bombe Semtex 
flowing through the Hospitality Suite, enticing every living and 
two recently deceased males to join her downstairs to explore the 
Feldenfelden Method.  My protuberate belly and I tagged along.  
How lucky I was to have unwittingly shielded myself against ruin.

Bam Bam Feldenfelden held multiple black belts in home-study 
Tchai Quwan Reep and was an internationally renowned professional 
dwarf tosser.  He sustained a near fatal spinal subluxion during 
warmups in the 1952 Poughkeepsie Dwarf Tossing Invitational.  
Totally paralyzed, in unceasing agonizing pain, and hovering at 
the edge of death he was to spend the remaining eight decades of 
his life collecting Worker's Compensation and Social Security 
Disability benefits, fathering more than six dozen children, and 
selling seven billion dollars' worth of Feldenfelden Method 
franchises.  Rising above his own physical challenges he now 
invited the world to share in his discoveries.  La Bombe Semtex 
had received intensive personal instruction from Bam Bam 
Feldenfelden himself, and only years of dedicated whole-body 
tattooing had hidden the hickey scars that proved it.

We entered a large room ringed by chairs but otherwise empty.  
She bade us remove our shoes, empty our pockets, loosen our 
clothing, and lie on the floor.  As we closed our eyes and 
immersed ourselves in her voice and her scent, she engaged in a 
preemptory examination of wallets and billfolds as she spoke:

"The Feldenfelden Method is nothing less than establishing your 
body's kinesthetic resonance within universal somatic space.  
Through simple but precise, minute anatomical manipulations we 
will energize an aura of wellness.  I work with a chiropractor, 
so we may explore full-time reintegration of your sensorium and 
be completely reimbursed by your health insurer.  I also hold 
weekend seminars at my villa, where dozens of certified 
Feldenfelden method therapists will insinuate balance through the 
medium of the Jade Tunnel, forever establishing the quantum 
mechanical unity of monocoque skeletal realignment."

I lay upon a threadbare carpet, a breakfast rich with salt, 
sugar, starch and grease sloshing within my stomach, protecting 
me from the insidious mental tendrils enmeshing more susceptible 
souls.  As the instruction progressed we soon had our left ankles 
touching our right knees as our pelvises rotated to touch our 
breastbones, themselves realigned via the agency of our hands 
clasped behind our heads, cradling them and pushing them up and 
forward.  La Bombe Semtex flowed over to one participant and, 
using her trained hands, traced the energy pathways flowing from 
his knees through his inner thighs.  Judging from his muffled 
squeal, I'd hate to be the accountant reporting next quarter's 
profit/loss statement to the health insurer bankrolling his 
continuing self-actualization.

Our somatic reorientation proceeded for 45 minutes, culminating 
in a display of her three lavishly photo-illustrated books 
detailing the intricacies of beginning, advanced, and sustaining 
Feldenfelden technique.  That all the pictured therapists were 
female, representative of a broad range of ethnic, racial and 
geographic origins, and wholly unencumbered by the constraining 
nuisance of clothing no doubt empowered the remaining 15 minutes 
wherein she ran dozens of credit cards through her electrically 
powered stamper/verifier.  I was preoccupied with keeping a 
traumatized breakfast beneath my belt.  I was spared.

As I drove home that evening I spied a fellow motorist pulled to 
a freeway shoulder by a California Highway Patrol therapist.  The 
subject would receive about $226 worth of enlightenment and never 
have the opportunity to enter into kinesthetic resonance within 
universal somatic space.  The Feldenfelden Method was mine to 
share.  I checked my rearview mirror and floored the gas pedal as 
I passed.