A Strategy of Hope

A Strategy of Hope

When you have hope, you begin to see possibilities for improvement, creating different behaviors and ways of being.  No matter who you are, when you feel depleted, whether mentally, emotionally, or physically, all are directly connected; your brain is depleted.  Your focus narrows into survival mode.  The other thoughts of creating improvement are pushed to the rear.

All of this requires lots of energy to imagine things outside your known. How to move forward, taking little steps, comparing, and allowing little risks to notice differences all require energy.  You actually need hope to imagine other possibilities that allow you to take small risks towards improvement.  This energy comes from your well-being, which also helps create more hope, reinforcing the practice of building new habits daily that support you moving forward.  This creates a regenerative cycle where one supports the other for health and improved practices.  Create the foundation for the rest to build upon, as a strong underpinning to support new growth.  This is where hope that creates well-being becomes a strategy for sustainability.

The Feldenkrais Method® offers the power to learn how to imagine and create a sensory pathway that helps you notice.  At times, you struggle to imagine something, maybe a movement that a teacher guides you to think about before activating it.  For many, the skill of imagining or visualizing is not easy; most just do without understanding what is requested.  The older, hard-wired patterns surface immediately.  Pause for a moment and think back on things you used to do comfortably.  This is a Déjà vu process in which you bring back into your nervous system the sensations of doing.  From this place, you can begin to visualize without doing. Notice how you begin to subtly activate with the thought of this renewed sensation.

Struggling is part of being human, which is complex and demands slowing down to understand new information rather than doing the same over and over again.  That’s rote, habitual acting out that doesn’t teach you anything new to improve the quality of your life.  A wiser approach would be to use the difficulty as a cue to ask better questions and to welcome challenges.

This is the process in The Feldenkrais Method®, to transform and shift, where hope as an emotion becomes a strategy for improvement.   This transformation uses hope as a strategy to actively envision what the next step forward might be when it’s not using the same strategy, expecting a different result.

I share with my students and clients that once you sense and feel an improvement, while other approaches were not able to sustain, your way to not only sustain the improvements, but more important, that once you know it’s possible, we support you in finding small, attainable strategies to continue your growth and improvement no matter what issues you are coping with.  There is hope, since so many of my people share the frustration that other medical approaches have not fully resolved their concerns.  It’s a process, and this takes time, commitment, and pleasure to ensure that learning continues, and the improvements do as well.  At the heart of the matter is that your daily practice becomes an investment in your future capabilities.

 “To learn we need time, attention, and discrimination; to discriminate we must sense. This means that in order to learn we must sharpen our powers of sensing, and if we try and do most things by sheer force of will we shall achieve precisely the opposite of what we need.” – Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais

At the heart of this transformation is a fundamental shift from hope as an emotion to hope as a strategy. Hope isn’t blind optimism. It’s a cognitive resource that enables you to connect present actions to future outcomes, to imagine what doesn’t yet exist but could.

George Harrison shared that when you don’t know where to go, take any road; it will lead you somewhere other than staying stuck.

“Through awareness, we can learn to move with astonishing lightness and freedom at almost any age”- Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais

I hope I’ve earned the privilege of your time and attention, and look forward to connecting with you when the timing is right.

Warmest on a wintry mix of snow and sleet in my neck of the woods.

Please be safe and enjoy what Feldenkrais has to offer to improve the quality of your life!

Peggi