A Daily Practice
A Daily Practice
In order to improve you must have a curious mind. From this posture you’ll learn your craft, your calling, that which drives you forward. Find your passion, do it for 10 years or 10,000 hours and you’ll be adept, a master at whatever it is that speaks to you. All you need is a commitment to yourself and willingness to never give up.
If you start with judgment, finding fault, it’s counterproductive. That’s intentionally pushing into resistance and creating pain. Pain is an indication from the nervous system to stop. It doesn’t mean stop doing what you want, it’s an indication that how you are habitually doing these actions needs to be addressed.
With Feldenkrais you will learn a better way to create comparisons, to find little differences. It’s really important to reduce the stimuli. Another way of saying this is to reduce the amount of effort, as you begin to soften your movements. Listen while you allow your breathing to continue with a more even pace. Study your natural inhale followed by an rich exhale. Your breath is the first indication of unnecessary tension that interferes and dampens a movement, even your thought process.
What about your eyes? Did you know that your entire spine is connected to the movements of your head and eyes? Where your eyes go, you will go. Stop for a moment and pause, close your eyes, then slowly open them and notice where are your eyes focusing. Too often with our current environment of computers and mobile devices, the eyes are focused downwards. Concentrate on lifting your eyes up to the horizon as your neutral focus.
Create a daily practice of starting with a whole body scan in a comfortable position. People loose awareness that very small simple movements begin a direction to more major everyday gestures. These are little bits you can add into your daily regime, like some of the movement patterns from Awareness Through Movement (ATM)® classes. The goal is to create new patterns of little motions that will become part of how you move through the world. These new patterns act as auto-body functions which happen without you having to think about them.
I believe that the unity of mind and body is an objective reality. They are not just parts somehow related to each other, but an inseparable whole while functioning. — Moshe Feldenkrais
I’ll offer 4 afternoon ATM classes this week with audio files for you to download and explore as often as you’d like. If you are not receiving my weekly links for classes, reach out and I’ll add you to the mailing so that when the timing fits, you’ll join us for a gentle, playful experience that I assure you will enrich you life!
See you on the floor, or when you are in my area, come for a private session that will inform your body and awaken your mind to what moving into the zone of ease and pleasure can feel like on a daily basis.
Warmest,
Peggi
