Painting the face with five lines
This is a slow, sensory-based lesson with an amazing result, kind of like a detective novel. Give yourself permission to lie on the floor and just listen. See what you think.
For me, it changes how I feel from the inside, as well as calms the system down from a busy day. I feel all the tension in the face drift away, and the skeleton becomes clearer.
A framework for Awareness Through Movement:
As a Judo practitioner, Moshe Feldenkrais understood what it meant to be dynamic. Humans do not ever “hold still,” not while we are still alive.
What we want is to maximize our dynamic potential. How do we do this? We don’t live in a state of optimum potential all the time. We all get hunchy shoulders and achy backs.
The problem is when we get stuck and forget how dynamic we can be. I see it all the time in my practice: people don’t remember how to access easy movement.
The filing drawer of potential
Consider Awareness Through Movement like an easy-access file drawer that you can draw on whenever you want where the files are not answers, they’re options.
The more Awareness Through Movement lessons (ATMs) you do, the more varied and rich your file drawer becomes. You can have multiple tabs, colors, and sections! Okay, maybe that’s just me, gleefully over-organizing in my head. But really, the filing system analogy works.
It’s not that I never get stressed myself. My jaw will tighten and my back has slipped discs that ache if I don’t keep up with lessons.
It’s just that over the years, I’ve created a thick set of movement files I can draw on. I know that even if I have moments of compression, pain, and feeling stuck, if I remind my nervous system to sense and feel something different, life has more joy and possibility.
More lessons:
This lesson is from Release the jaw, neck, and face in the Feldenkrais Treasury.
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Quote of the week:
“My purpose is to allow people to move closer to actually being creatures of free choice, to genuinely reflect individual creativity and emotion, freeing the body of habitual tensions and wired patterns of behavior so that it may respond without inhibition to do what the person wants.”