Don’t Make It All or Nothing
Don’t Make It All or Nothing
In The Feldenkrais Method®, we take time to awaken internal and personal connections. Whether you are attending to how every part of your being—body and mind—is interconnected, it’s when you become interested in finding these connections that you immediately begin to improve the quality of your life.
The question becomes, are you interested? Does this excite you to find easier ways to do what you want to? The next question is, what are your beliefs, and are they holding you back or encouraging you to move forward? What if you dedicated yourself to small explorations daily instead of waiting for when you need a fix? Yes, there are challenges to deal with in this process, after all, life is a process, “the dance of life.”
How engaged are you with finding the resilience that comes naturally through these experiences to find more of what you want back in your life? This dance of life has its ups and downs; without them, how much would you be driven to find new and better questions to resolve obstacles? The most efficient and effective way to move through obstacles is to be in your process of experimentation, and the best way is through intentional movement with the awakening of how you are doing the action. It’s not all or nothing. It’s a steady process of awareness.
Dr. Feldenkrais asked how to develop a method of self-learning. Begin this process by tapping into your daily life like you brush your teeth… From this self-inquiry, he created thousands of lessons known as Awareness Through Movement (ATM)® patterns that began with developmental movements. Think for a moment: at some point in your life, did you ever feel buoyant, resilient, and playful? That indicates that you were in sync with the gravitational field, where your skeleton was more aligned for upright posture without creating a holding pattern.
Dr Feldenkrais shared a term, “acture,” that was the ability to move in any direction without needing a preparatory movement. It is a process of sensing and feeling where you are in space and the result is a sense of light, easy ability to move without the sense of heaviness, weight and difficulty. Too often, the brain signals your body to hold a muscle to avoid pain. ATM teaches how to unwind that brain signal and let your body work in flow without the need to hold. These holding patterns, after years of avoidance, create serious problems.
These wonderfully sculpted ATM lessons are different from other exercise regimes where you are directed to mimic or perform reps and sets without awakening your awareness of how you are activating. It’s more about finding within your sense of ease and comfort, which translates as efficiency. Build from there, find ways to adapt and modify so that throughout the guided ATM, you, with time, begin to make the lesson yours.
“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
I invite you to join me for my offerings in Feldenkrais. I offer live, in-person hands-on sessions known as Functional Integration (FI)® as well as small, intimate ATM classes in my studio that are scheduled for your personal ease. In addition, I offer 4 afternoon Zoom ATM classes, and private Guided Learning virtual sessions that are crafted just for your needs to awaken possibilities how to move forward. Please reach out if you are not currently receiving my weekly class links for attending when the timing is right for you. All virtual classes and sessions come with an audio file to download and continue your learning.
I hope I’ve earned the privilege of your time and attention and have piqued your interest and curiosity.
Warmest,
Peggi
