Release hand and wrist tension, part 1, 29 min
This is a go-to lesson for anyone with challenges in the arm, shoulder, and hand. You move the hand as if through honey, slowly, fluidly. Already the quality of your movement changes! Just bringing attention to the quality of how you move will change the degree of effort.
(From Soft hands and wrists in the FeldenkraisTREASURY.)
Download this lesson part 1 & 2 for $5
View all bestselling downloads from the Treasury:
Thought for August 15: the point of leverage
I am back on an Eleanor Roosevelt kick, having come across this paragraph about the point of leverage, which, for me, is what Feldenkrais is about: how to make life easier, not harder, to feel we can grow into our full stature instead of shrinking and feeling small.
Finding the point of leverage is learning how to make life workable. Practicing Feldenkrais is solving the puzzle of “workability” over and over again. For example, how can I move my arm if my ribs are rigid? That’s not workable. Often, the only answer people have is muscular: Strengthen the arm! Push harder! Use more force! But what if you bend or fold or turn in a new way? How can you find a point of leverage in the ribs, the spine, the hips, the ground?
It is partly a question of mechanics, but to access our full bio-mechanical potential, we have to sense the possibilities. If we don’t sense it, we don’t have it.
The passage that literally made me jump up and down (I have witnesses!) is this:
It is not wishful thinking that makes me a hopeful woman. Over and over I have seen, under the most improbable circumstances, that man can remake himself, that he can even remake his world if he cares enough to try. And I have seen him, by the dozen, by the thousands, making that effort.
Given leverage enough, a wise man said, “I could lift the world.”
Given incentive enough, man can remake his world. The incentive is his own well-being, the opportunity to grow to his full stature. Little by little, he is coming to know that and to grope for the point of leverage.
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try. For one thing we know beyond all doubt: Nothing has ever been achieved by the person who says, “It can’t be done.”
New to Feldenkrais?
Read these short notes:
Support for these lessons
If you love my lessons, consider a donation or a subscription. You’re awesome, I appreciate it!
Subscribe to my streaming site, the FeldenkraisTREASURY. No-risk subscriptions, cancel any time. Access hundreds of home movement programs on everything from balance, anxiety, hip joints, unlocking the pelvis, improving posture, and more.
Donate any amount to support my ongoing project of researching, recording, producing, and indexing thousands of Moshe Feldenkrais’s lessons.