Where's Your Inner Compass?
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
Feldenkrais is finding your own inner compass.
There are guides, but you find it yourself.
Many Feldenkrais students say the practice is like coming home. Why is that? Because sensing things that we have avoided or perhaps forgotten in ourselves is like coming home.
As children, we develop our sense of self in sync with our relationship to gravity: we touch things and explore the world of external objects until we know it is "I" that moves and "that thing" I am holding. We learn to integrate our sensations with stimuli from outside world. Not integrating sensations creates reactivity and chaos in the system. When that happens, we revert to a survival mode.
Not being able to integrate external stimuli occurs with PTSD, with just feeling jarred for a moment, with mental health issues, with emotional upsets, with all kinds of situations and for all kinds of reasons.
Finding "home" is feeling our center, our place of poise, our balance, our point of reference, the stillness inside us that we know is a safe place to perch no matter how precarious the external world may be.
When we don't have this, we are constantly shifting in response to the unknown. Dodging this way and that to find what passes for balance in a contracted, tense body. Living too long like this creates greater breakdowns in the system with the fight, flight, or freeze aspect of the sympathetic nervous system on high alert. It wears us down.
Finding home is one of the best uses of the Feldenkrais Method I have ever seen.
The gentle, non-judgmental process of rediscovering your own internal world is a relief for many people, especially when we often feel imposed upon by other systems, beliefs, and structures. Systems like our family, the medical world, educational systems, athletic or dance training, social norms, etc.
There are no stories, beliefs, or "shoulds" around Feldenkrais. Just sensing how you move and what your habits are. Use the lessons not to fix yourself, but to connect your internal dots to feel whole and coherent. It's like your entire being speaks with one voice.
The more you let go of cultural, social, and familial biases about how you "should" be sensing, moving, or behaving, the more you discover who YOU are.
Three Ways to Find Home
Here are three simple ways to reset your nervous system
for reaching, sitting, and standing.
This helps to find the midpoint of balanced sitting.
This helps posture, standing, and feeling effortlessly tall and centered.
This helps find home for the arm in relation to the spine for easier reaching.