About
I’ve studied the body through seven different doors.
Philosophy, Gestalt counselling, Chinese medicine, Taiji, stage, sport, educational design. For years they seemed separate paths. Bilateral Education is the point where they met.
My name is Jacopo Fedeli.
Training
The seven doors.
None of these disciplines, alone, would have arrived here. It’s the point where they cross that matters.
Philosophy
Degree and experimental thesis on ambidexterity: Merleau-Ponty, Varela, Gallagher. The frame that holds everything else together.
Gestalt counselling
Two years at the Centro Studi Terapia della Gestalt. This is where «don’t correct» comes from: staying with what happens instead of forcing it.
Chinese medicine and shiatsu
Two years of training, plus macrobiotic nutrition. The body read as chains and pathways, not separate parts.
Taiji and Taoist meditation
Intensive training in Yang-style Taiji, then years of independent practice, and daily Taoist meditation. This is where release comes from.
Stage and improvisation
Academy of mentalism: character work and stage improvisation. Presence is a skill, and it can be trained.
Sport
Football, tennis, basketball, horse riding, water polo, combat sports, athletics. Three years of Bikram yoga. Each discipline asks for a different side.
Cultural design
I’ve designed cultural events and programmes: understanding how a meeting is built, how it opens and how it closes. It’s the door the shape of an encounter comes from — it has a beginning and an end, and isn’t just any exercise.
The crucible
Then the body forced me to choose.
From sixteen to thirty I lived with chronic pain. I went through osteopaths, posturologists, physiotherapists, Feldenkrais, shiatsu — and from each I learned something, but none resolved it. Then, after one session, a head pain appeared that never left. I quit my job as a Digital Marketing Manager.
I practised Taiji fourteen hours a day. Not out of discipline: because moving slowly took the pain away, and the moment I stopped it came back. I tried muscle relaxants: they increased the stiffness and made me gain twenty kilos, so I stopped them.
What the pain did, in those years, was force everything I knew to talk to each other: Gestalt with Chinese medicine, Taiji with phenomenology, stage with sport.
The turning point
A question, while walking.
One day, walking, I asked myself where the step began if I did nothing. The left leg started; the right closed. I reversed the order.
Walking like that, for days, loosened tensions no treatment had ever released. I hadn’t added strength to the weak side: I had stopped correcting it. From there came the thesis and Bilateral Education. And that same question — where does the step begin, if you do nothing — is still the first thing I ask anyone I work with.
Why me
The competence isn’t in a discipline: it’s in the point where they cross.
A physiotherapist knows muscles. A Taiji teacher knows release. A counsellor knows not-forcing. An actor knows presence. A designer knows how to build an experience that can be learned. None of them, alone, would have arrived here — nor would I, had I followed a single door. Bilateral Education exists because those disciplines, in me, were forced to meet.
Honesty
What this story is not.
The pain was my laboratory, not my credential. This is my experience, not a therapy and not a promise of cure: chronic pain has different causes from person to person and must be assessed by a health professional.
What I offer is research with declared, falsifiable hypotheses, and a method that can be learned. I’m a researcher, not a healer — and the difference, for me, is not negotiable.
The simplest way to meet
Let’s meet.
Reading a biography tells you little; working together tells you far more. If you want to know me, write me two lines.
Do you run a centre, a school or a practice, or do research? Here’s where we talk about working together → And if you have an awkward question, even better.
One body • Two sides • One choice