Allowing resistance to melt
Life is easier when you use your center to move the limbs. Discover how the limbs float because you shift your weight, not because you are straining with small muscles to move big bones!
Read MoreUnknown to knowing
This lesson experiments with the chin to the knee, the forehead, the nose, the lips. Getting good at shapes, angles, and pressure will help you recover a mobile ribs and spine. I’m including a follow-on lesson this week. The folding diagonals lesson is a little more athletic as you learn to use the big muscles in the trunk.
Read MoreUncertainty and Gratitude
A slow, yummy lesson with gentle reaching of the arms and rolling of the pelvis. It clarifies rotation and counter-rotation, key movements in walking and running. Plus, it’s soothing, like you’re rocking yourself.
Read MoreThe immune system, resilience, and stress
An amazing lesson to alleviate tightness in the chest, tension in the shoulders, or stiffness in the upper back. As you clarify how the arms connect through the bones, the muscles become available for power instead of tension.
Read MoreUp and out, or down and in?
Our inner state is reflected in our movement. Some people need help moving up and out in their lives. Others need help moving down and in.
Read MoreUseful Discriminations
It is a common assumption that we need to strengthen muscles to improve movement. Yet, people can lift a significant amount of weight at the gym and then throw their back out lifting up their young child. That’s because repetitive muscle movements are not always incorporated functionally into our lives.
Read MoreDoing vs. Being
Use Feldenkrais lessons to develop deep listening skills, the kind where you don’t interrupt the speaker—which is you, in this case! Wait, wait, wait, and then ask, is there any more? I’m here, I’m listening. Imagine giving yourself this gift of attention!
Read MoreCreative acts
Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think about it.
— A. A. Milne
Read MoreThought on Balance
Balance is that elusive key we all believe would unlock life's perfection.
We want work/life balance, family dynamic balance, emotional balance, health balance, checkbook balance, tire pressure balance in the snow. Except nothing is static, all is in flux.
Read MoreSpontaneity
"Learning to think in patterns of relationships, in sensations divorced from the fixity of words, allows us to find hidden resources and the ability to make new patterns...In short, we think personally, originally, and thus take another route to the thing we already know." —Moshe Feldenkrais
Read MoreLearning and Smiling
One of my favorite quotes by Moshe Feldenkrais is:
“One has to set about learning to learn as is befitting for the most important business in human life; that is, with serenity but without solemnity, with patient objectivity and without compulsive seriousness. Clenching the fists, tensing the eyebrows, tightening the jaw are expressions of impotent effort. It is possible to succeed in spite of these faults only at the expense of truly healthy joy of living. Learning must be undertaken and is really profitable when the whole frame is held in a state where smiling can turn into laughter without interference, naturally, spontaneously.”
Read MoreWhy Humans Stop Learning
I have been thinking all week about why artificial intelligence is artificial and how humans learn new skills in the context of our deeply ingrained sense of self.
At some point, and for many reasons, humans will stop differentiating patterns. Instead, we think, “This is good enough. I’ll just put up with this pain/dysfunction/challenge forever.” The narrative is set.
Read MoreOn Sitting up straight
It’s not wrong to slump over for a while, it’s just tedious. To stop doing that pattern, I get on the floor and remind myself that I can move my shoulders and ribs in other, better, more dynamic relationships.
In a similar vein, I’ve recently been telling my clients to do Feldenkrais after getting off the couch in the evening. Going straight to bed without doing fifteen or twenty minutes of movement in your spine is a recipe for disaster.
Read MoreLetting go of the shoulder
We all grip unconsciously. It’s the nervous system protecting us on some level, but it’s exhausting. Pulling or saying, “just let go!” never helps; you have to support the pattern in many configurations, over and over again.
Read MoreOn Highly Sensitive People
Sometimes the holidays are rough for folks who count themselves among the highly sensitive people, which is about twenty percent of the population. Regardless if that’s you or not, this lesson will help drop down into sensing yourself.
Read MoreOn slouching
People always think slouching is bad. It’s not. It’s only bad if it’s your only choice.
Read MoreNotes on self-image
The self-image is defined as the parts of ourselves that we have learned to sense. “Learned sensing” slows down by the time we’re about fourteen. As adults, we live with an incomplete self image and rarely make a point of clarifying our sensations, with the consequence that we often intend to do one thing and in fact do the opposite.
Read MoreOn Resilience
Here is a sentence from Moshe Feldenkrais that has deeply affected me over the years: All habitual muscular patterns and attitudes are developed to bring safety and abate anxiety. What does that mean? It means we are sensibly protecting ourselves all the time.
Read MoreNotes on learning
From early childhood, we are taught to strain ourselves…This habit becomes so ingrained in us that when we do something and it comes off as it should—just like that!—we do generally feel it was just a fluke—it should not be that easy—as if the world were not meant to be easy.
And we then even repeat the same thing, to make sure this time we strain ourselves in the usual way, so that we feel we really have accomplished something.
—Moshe Feldenkrais, The Potent Self
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