Coordinating hips and shoulders, 32 min
This is a slow, gentle lesson with attention on coordination, sensing, and timing. It also focuses on quality: jerky versus smooth, straight versus angled, synchronous versus out of sync.
The art of Feldenkais is the brain making sensory distinctions. This lesson is uncomplicated in terms of movement, but complex in terms of neurological patterns.
When I do this lesson, I’m inviting myself to move so lightly and easily that I end up taking lots of breaths and slowing down when I realize I can’t move so easily with all this tension I’m holding onto!
Here we rigorously avoid tension. Tension just invites our brains to engage in old habits of effortful movement. Instead, we want to re-build the sense of ease and contentment that we lost piling on layers of strain and stress over the years.
(This lesson is from Destress and calm in the Feldenkrais® Treasury.)
Thought for May 9th: The Listening
Have you ever been somewhere so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think? It’s the same with your nervous system: Too much background noise and you can’t hear yourself feel.
Tension and stress create a lot of background noise.
When skillful Feldenkrais practitioners do an Awareness Through Movement lesson, they listen so deeply to themselves you can practically hear their brains crackling.
You, too, can find this. Nonjudgmental listening is what brings you to a safe inner place. It is that safety which releases chronic tension and invites choice and freedom.
It sounds paradoxical, but trust me, you cannot circumvent this step.
A client said recently how much she appreciated being touched in this way. It’s not a medical, massage, or therapeutic touch.
It’s just being met where you are, being thoroughly seen. It’s so calming to be held without anyone asking anything of you. It's neutral, unbiased, and accepting.
The language of sensation is personal, truthful, and inarguable. It is not wrong to feel something is challenging or painful. The power of being seen is what Feldenkrais practitioners bring to clients, and it is what you must bring to yourself.
Whether you are challenged by back pain, a knee replacement, a frozen shoulder, emotional trauma, or a mid-life crisis, it's the same: When we feel supported, then we can let go.
quote(s) of the week:
“The word 'listen' contains the same letters as the word 'silent'.”
― Alfred Brendel
“It takes two to speak the truth—one to speak and another to hear.”
― Henry David Thoreau
“If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here—and by 'we' I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement.
As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything