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Recorded ATM Lessons

The following ATM lessons are recorded live in class and offered for your interest and learning. They are not professionally recorded; the quality varies.

Click the play button below to stream, or click "download audio file" to save on your computer. You may also subscribe to this feed via iTunes or an RSS reader.

Not sure where to start? Check out Past Class Themes and Past Workshops to see organized lists of 2-6 lessons with some explanation of the idea the series is organized around.

Bending while sitting and shoulder movements

Here we get into more detail with the shoulders, but still in a manner that relates everything to everything. I'm not quite sure why the class found that idea so funny. ;-)

54:10 minutes (12.4 MB)

Dragging feet and head left and right

One of those miracle lessons. What do these actions have to do with one another? How can something so restricted get so easy by doing something else entirely?

55:50 minutes (12.78 MB)

Legs to the side and lifting them with the hands

Zooming in on the hips, but within a context where everything has to play along--the weight shifting on the pelvis, the shoulder lengthening instead of clutching, the head willing to go anywhere, the chest and spine flexible.

51:10 minutes (11.71 MB)

Looking over shoulder

I do apologize for the crackling. You can skip this if sound quality matters to you at all! If you persist and do it, you just may find yourself with a lengthened neck.

The previous lesson referred to is From clarifying the hips to turning and lifting the head. And I'll investigate whether it was my turtleneck sweater interacting with the mic that caused this sound!

58:00 minutes (13.28 MB)

Flexors

This is a "core" lesson in many senses! This kind of lesson is usually one of the earliest lessons in an introductory series. It's full of the paradoxical approach of Feldenkrais--free the extensors for more effective action by moving in the direction of flexing; "strengthen" the flexors by making more effective use of your back moving backwards (lengthening the extensors); and pay attention to the "vegetative processes" (e.g. breathing) as you go!

43:10 minutes (9.88 MB)

Turning on a side axis

Returning to our theme of turning on a dime, this lesson finds the relation between really standing, the freedom of the head, and the freedom to turn.

Heavily but not completely edited to remove all my evening's left-right mix-ups. Left in the local colour in the form of free-associating to Ellen Page (from Halifax) and the movie Hard Candy.

44:40 minutes (10.22 MB)

Twisting the Pelvis with a Long Arm

Taking the idea of turning around the axis into another orientation (lying on our backs, rolling to the side), and playing with some flexion along the front diagonals: you'll get an interesting view into your shoulders with this one! Like an x-ray machine, only kinaesthetic, with zero radiation exposure!

56:00 minutes (12.82 MB)

From clarifying the hips to turning and lifting the head

This lesson continues from the previous week (for which the recording unfortunately failed--you can find an outline at this page on Feldy Notebook).

We're clarifying the hip joints and finding the magic path of the head in space for a effortless turning, extension and lifting of the head, somewhere in between side-lying and face down, and somewhere in between side-lying and face up.

1:00:50 minutes (13.92 MB)

Turning heels and head

Continuing the theme of turning in the hip, and now refining and relating the carriage of the head. It would be interesting to repeat the previous lesson (Turning heels out) some days after doing this one.

53:20 minutes (12.21 MB)

Turning heels out

This lesson--entirely in standing--is about finding your axis for turning, with the head and the pelvis coordinated in a smooth arc, and the volume on the extensors of the back "turned down." It's the first of our "turning on a dime."

I'm particularly intrigued by this lesson in relation to a passage in The Potent Self that I've always found intriguing. In the chapter, "The means at our disposal," he talks about needing to shut down the habitual work of the extensors in the low back and neck before anything new can be learned. This makes sense and doesn't in light of his usual progression of introductory lessons--a "flexor" lesson is often first. And of course lessons are usually done in lying for this reason. But none of these intro lessons are as extreme as what is described in that chapter of The Potent Self. This lesson, paradoxically in standing, actually carries through this thought: maintaining the rounding of the spine while shifting weight and "coming up on each leg" is remarkably potent as a means of reeducation of the generally over-working and poorly-organized extensors.

50:50 minutes (11.64 MB)
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