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the Feldenkrais Method® online and in Halifax NS with Lynette Reid
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Lifting on the stomachI would encourage you to get your remote control ready for this one, or have some other means to pause and restart. After doing each instruction on one side, and after resting, pause the recording and lead yourself through the movements on the second side.
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A comment
I am finding a bit of a lack of enthusiasm for repeating things on the other side even though I feel ought to. I think I quite like the feeling of being asymetrical because thats how I can tell a difference by compairing the worked side to the other side.
I know that some lessons are taught only on 1 side and the other side improves spontaneously by itself. I have experienced this sometimes. Do people generally prefer to do both sides or just 1 side in a lesson?
bingo
That feeling of asymmetry is a great teacher. Go ahead and do the lesson on one side only and enjoy it!
There's no compulsion to do things on both sides--not at all; typically in a training the more we go along the more we do things only on one side, or much more briefly on the second side. Just do enough two-sided work that your preference for one-sided does not itself become a compulsion either! It is possible that there are interesting things to discover that you wouldn't discover if you never did work on the second side. And if you do a lot of work only on one side, pick a different side from time to time.
Asymetrical
I agree. I think one-sided lessons are great for feeling the difference, but I do think it's necessary to get used to doing the other side if only in the imagination. That way, the transference of learning is more concrete. Of course, I find working only with 'the mind' hellishly difficult since I seem to possess a mind that leaps around like a monkey on speed, and has a general inability to focus unless occupied with something physical. Perhaps this inner work is what really interested FK. In his 'Awareness Through Movement', he writes:
"In the esoteric schools of thought, a Tibetan parable is told. According to the story a man without awareness is like a carriage, whose passengers are the desires, with the muscles for horses, while the carriage itself is the skeleton. Awareness is the sleeping coachman. As long as the coachman remains asleep, the carriage will be dragged aimlessly here and there. Each passenger seeks a different destination and the horses pull different ways. But when the coachman is wide awake and holds the reins, the horses will pull the carriage and bring every passenger to his proper destination."
"In those moments when awareness succeeds at being with one with feelings, senses, movement, and thought, the carriage will speed along the right road. The man can make discoveries, invent, create, innovate and "know". He grasps that his small world and the great world around are but one and in this unity he is no longer alone."
I quoted this because I find it inspirational and because it indicates to me that FK's curiosity was stimulated by holistic schools of mental development in the East.
By the way, on the subject of doing the movements only in the imagination, I read recently that scientists have discovered that just thinking about moving a specific muscle causes electrical activity in that muscle. Interesting, huh?
Regards
Laurance
Laurance Rudic
http://www.laurancerudic.blogspot.com
awareness through movement
It is awareness through movement, not movement through awareness. It's not always obvious that that's the case, since there's plenty of "improvement in movement" to be got by adding "awareness." But somehow embedded in the work is the idea that this process of increasing options is a process of developing awareness. But then I think "awareness" must mean something different from "attending to" or "noticing."
The Eastern connections are very real. For me the thinking in the method is somewhat like Buddhism without the quietism that can sometimes be understood as its implication. (There is a brief lecture by Moshe on the topic in the Amherst tapes and a little discussion rejecting this quietism in Buddhism in the London Transcripts.)
They're both embodied and conscious forms of exploring the nature of freedom.
It would be too quick to say that Plato believes it's reason (and not awareness) that is the charioteer, and hence the whole history of repressive Western thought was born. Plato places reason in that place in the course of telling a myth to recover from the shame of having blasphemed love...there is too much complex irony in the Phaedrus for such a simple statement. But the Western Christian tradition has perhaps taken him that way.
Conscious knowledge
In the Elusive Obvious Moshe states that he uses the word awareness as conscious knowledge.
He also states he denotes by the word awareness conscious-of plus knowledge.
He says that being conscious of intentional swallowing does not mean he is is aware of how he does it.
He gives the example that his learning is enhanced by becoming aware that to lift his right foot off the ground he has to primarely mobilize his right hip joint which means he has to shift most of his weight to his left if only for a wink.
"Noticing" or "attending to" are elements that can lead to conscious knowledge or awareness.
I guess...
Hi Nelson. '"Noticing" or
Hi Nelson.
'"Noticing" or "attending to" are elements that can lead to conscious knowledge or awareness.'
Thats a good way of putting it. Noticing Can also lead to quite big and radical physical improvements and changes in the body which is the most important thing i think. The question for me is once i notice something, a limitation or holding in the body. What to do about it? Usually in other forms of movement yoga, gymnastics etc it is about stretching or forcing through the limitation which from our point of view does no good. On the other hand just to notice something doesn't seem to be enough. So it is about finding a middle road between forcing and just doing nothing. And also finding other possibilities and patterns of movement which you are not yet aware of.
the middle road in Feldenkrais is experimentation
This is where the craft of the lesson design comes in. You notice--and you may also if you like notice what you can consciously "let go of" or "relax" or "push farther" or "stretch" and then notice what changes result from that. But primarily how you address the "holding" in this process is through exploring another sequence of movements designed to shift the fundamental basis of why you are holding or limiting yourself--i.e. your self-image. Then you return to the movement where you noted the holding and check to see what has changed.
So when you notice yourself holding you don't have to do anything about it at all, because the lesson is designed to do something about it for you.
But that doesn't mean that you can't include in the process some time spent just letting go of parasitic and useless tension that you notice. Exercising conscious control of what usually comes and goes unconsciously. And the range within which you can do that becomes broader and broader over time.
I often find it useful not to "alienate the holding from the action" as it were. Instead of thinking to myself, "damn it my jaw is tight when I do this movement--let me try to release that" I think "here I am doing this action by clenching my jaw...let me try doing it by opening my jaw". Or, if that's too drastic a leap, I might try doing it by starting the clenching of my jaw slightly earlier or slightly later in the action. (Vary the lesson: orientation, manipulation, timing: when there is more freedom in these respects, the movement becomes one that is less and less subject to the compulsion of the holding.)
The fundamental process is what we call differentiation (sensing that we have options in action and being able to make use of those options functionally in relation to our environment), not stretching, releasing, or letting go.
Hi Daniel
Nice to meet another traveller on this journey!
I guess Lynette's response gives plenty of food for thought ( and action ! ).
So we should leave it at that for the time being, just wanted to say hi too!
Regards, Nelson.
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