Head through the gap, 41 min
These days, I am focused on weight-shift lessons. These lessons find ease by leveraging from the center instead of hauling ourselves around from the overworked, smaller muscles of the extremities.
This lesson, like last week’s, is an education in hoisting vs. levering. Why waste energy hoisting when you can lever? Levering is a pivot, which is what we all need more of as we shift from a sprint to a marathon in the current shut-down.
When I do this lesson, with each new variation I start to feel the fluid organization from the middle. What’s your experience? Don’t try to “do” the movement, just let the variations sink into your experience. Your nervous system will find the path.
Think about your center of mass: how do you swirl around yourself spontaneously, without thought or demand?
Thought for April 11th: Relearning Movement Skills
People ask me, “What is Feldenkrais?” For many years, I’ve answered with three words: “Relearning movement skills.”
No one thinks they’ve lost movement until they literally can’t find it anymore, until they can’t live their life in the same way. By that measure, we’ve all lost our movement skills by being confined to the house!
When not on lock-down, movement skills can be lost through a variety of inputs, including inefficient habits, poor self-use, injury, disease, emotional trauma, surgery, over-working, under-working, rigid posture, brain injury, neurological challenges, and loss of sensory-motor awareness in skeletal balance and distribution of muscle tone.
Relearning Movement Skills in a Pandemic
This week, I’m adjusting to the idea that this is a marathon and not a sprint. It’s a new way of being in the world, adapting and adjusting on every level. For example, I lived in New York City for almost twenty years and I never had more than a couple days’ worth of food in the fridge, partly because of space, partly because food was so accessible!
Now I have a freezer full of stuff I would normally never buy and my cupboard is stocked with canned goods, bags of noodles, extra chicken broth, and multiple bottles of sriracha. (I measure lifestyle changes by food adjustments, you can tell.)
I am relearning movement skills around food. I’m relearning movement skills around the distance I keep as I pass people out walking the dog. I’m relearning movement skills around picking up the phone and calling a rotation of friends. I’m relearning movement skills around spending more time at the computer than I ever wanted to.
Movement skills are habits, behaviors, actions, attitudes, postures, and compensations. Movement skills are everything from how we breathe, reach, bend, and turn to how we roll over in bed or pick up dog toys or fold the laundry.
These habits are not wrong. Habits create order. We need habits to put on our clothes and brush our teeth. Some habits serve us well, and others are unconscious and interfere with our intention, with our being our best selves.
How can we discover which habits serve us and which ones interfere?
One of the ways to distinguish between a habit we feel is necessary for our life and a habit that interferes with our intentions is by paying attention to the lightness and ease and quality of how we move.
Paying attention is the alchemy that improves all things.
I wrote that on my whiteboard this week, but forgot where it came from. It might have been Moshe Feldenkrais!
Want more help?
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