Audio by Teacher lynette_reid

Feldenkrais and his first assistants often taught a lesson exploring flexion as a first lesson in a series. I myself rarely do that!

When I played during the week with the first rolling to sit ATM we did recently, I spent some time on a particular moment in the movement that's always felt stuck for me. And I uncovered something about how I could "unstick" that moment in the movement by varying what I was doing with my pelvis (and therefore my whole spine).

First steps towards going places with the Flexors, aka folding lesson.

This is the second part of the previous lesson; do take your time and come back to this another day!

I 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.

This lesson introduces a technique for "completing the self-image."

What could he be thinking? How did anyone ever come up with the idea that you could lie on your side, top knee in front on the floor, turn your face and shoulders towards the ceiling, and tap your shoulder blades on the ground? It feels impossible - in an entirely unique way for each shoulder!

One skill you never knew that you didn't have...pecking like a chicken!

The "walking lesson" referred to in the conversation on the recording wasn't recorded--it's AY 501-2, for those who have the books. We'll record it some day.

One of the great mysteries of Feldenkrais: how does that "phenomenological weight loss" happen? I weigh x pounds when I arrive for the lesson; I weigh the same an hour later when it's over. How can I feel so much lighter on my feet?

This lesson explores the question at that very moment of shifting weight onto a foot.

If movements of your knees can reach your fingertips, and movements of your fingertips can reach your knees...that must mean we are each one of us a single whole creature, no?

A classic lesson, providing some of the basic vocabulary of our work. Be sure to look at the full skeleton Albinus, rear view of the skeleton and view the image with your kinaesthetic imagination and the questions asked during this lesson in mind.

We can address the eyes in many ways in our explorations: in this lesson their calm, and the quality of our vision of the dark, is a marker of the overall state of the nervous system. See Bourdon's image Eyes and nervous system to feed your sensing and thinking.

It's developmental, it's political, it's another take on the previous week's (unrecorded) lesson. Would you like to think of variations? How about going from a 180 degree turn to a 360 degree turn? How would you develop that movement? "Last week's lesson" referred to here but not recorded is Amherst, Year 2, Tape #31.

Two weeks earlier, we did a lesson (not recorded, but similar to Amherst, Year 2, Tape #31) that involved rolling a full 360 degrees on the floor. I noticed that there was much less agility in the phase of the rolling that was face down--and in that lesson, we spent less time on that aspect. So here's a lesson a couple of weeks later to spend some time developing that agility face down.

My niece is at that stage of figuring out how to balance that big heavy head at the top of a small neck--tiny little vertebrae without a lot of big muscles around them--as she heads off running down the street. It's fun to watch.

This lesson may broaden the resources available to you in keeping a good head on your shoulders!

With a certain obsessive focus I return from three weeks of holidays to come back to the last theme I was teaching....the raising and lowering of the head will be familiar from the Lowering the head lesson.

Watching the local students do this lesson this week was really a treat. It's like watching a room of people giving themselves FI lessons (one-on-one hands-on Feldenkrais).

Where does flexibility come from? Why is it that we can only move so far, and then we stop? Tight muscles? Bad joints?--Or habits?

What does this have to do with lengthening the hamstrings? Holding your feet and rolling from side to side?

Start with this lesson, and learn something you can use to transform any lesson that you do.

This is the first of two lessons from the Agile Awareness workshop in September 2009. The second lesson is Simpler.

Now that we have the idea of the primary image from the first lesson of the Agile Awareness workshop, let's start to refine it and fill it in. There are places in the back, between the shoulders blades and at the base of the neck, that are often a blank place in our self-awareness. This lesson finds and integrates them.

This lessons demonstrates the reach of your fingertips extending all through your spine and chest....and in all directions.

This third lesson in the fingers-to-spine series continues to play with the independence of each finger [second lesson coming soon--the recording didn't work]--in relation now to extension, across the shoulders. This is a rare lesson: we do "both sides at once" from about a third of the way in.

To finish this month of fingers-to-spine lessons, we explore the connection between lengthening and turning along the axis of the arm--as though a gentle pull and twist from the fingers could draw across your spine and move your whole pelvis around your opposite hip joint. We also played with distributing intention.

Chronic tension of the lumbar and neck extensors is a fundamental pattern of limitation. This lesson addresses these areas actively and passively, with ingenious variations that address some key "hidden spots," particularly in the upper back and neck.

The spine will only be as flexible as the ribs attached and the sternum allow it to be--and those will only move if they can see themselves moving relative to the pelvis. This lesson addresses that whole relationship.

Oddly enough, this lesson takes place largely lying on the back. So "on the side" doesn't refer to the position of the lesson. This lesson follows on the lesson On the side, the sternum becoming flexible, which "really is" on the side.

The last two classes (On the side, the sternum becoming flexible and On the Side, Bending and twisting the chest and spine) had everyone in class talking about our lack of clarity in side-bending. First, what it is when simply standing or lying flat on the floor, to maintain the face in the same plane in sidebending.

This is the first of two lessons in the Integrating Life and Action workshop, March 2010. I keep talking in this lesson about how your breath "accommodates itself" to your actions and positions in the world. This strikes me as a little strange as I listen to it and do the lesson.

Beyond the breath, many processes of digestion and excretion take place constantly as we go about our lives. This lesson plays with the actions of the voluntary sphincter muscles--these curious muscles around the eyes, the mouth, in the pelvic floor that don't open/close joints or pull on bones, but that open and close orifices. It's not as weird as it sounds.

The theme this month is "Finding Length." Here's a suggestion for working with this lesson. You might do it first in a very casual way where you pay attention only to getting comfortable with lying on your side with your legs in the positions described. Don't make too much effort with the arm/chest/chin directions on your first go through. Come back a day or two later, and do it again (fog horn comments and all), and now that you're not so much occupied with your balance on your side and your leg arrangement, you can play with the lengthening movements and the arms/chest/chin in a lighter and more refined way.

When we fold forwards (flex) we think of this as shortening. But every shortening involves lengthening. You can lie on your back and take your knee and elbow towards one another--and that involves a certain level of challenge in lifting lefts and head. This lesson takes a familiar idea and does it in a different orientation -- sidelying -- and in this very low-effort environment, more refinement is possible.

This is the second lesson in the April 2010 month of lengthening lessons.

Factoid verification, after the lesson. There's actually 26 bones in each foot....making one quarter of the bones in the human body, but nowhere near 66! And here's your sensory and motor homunculus images to contemplate. You feel more in your feet than you control, a feature shared in a more extreme form by teeth, gums, and genitals, which don't appear on the motor homunculus. And you comparative control some parts in greater detail that you actually sense in less detail. (Click the image to see.)

First class back on Cornwallis Street, and a classic, though perhaps challenging, introductory lesson. Refining control of the pelvis from the core, and relating this to some fun activities you may not have enjoyed since back before your memory starts...

I hope you can all enjoy the boost to my recording volume and clarity brought on by using the iPhone plus HT Recorder!

This is the first of two lessons in the January 15 Workshop: Weight and Weightlessness, 2011. We're in sidelying, finding how to manage the weight of the long leg in various directions/configurations.

It's a mash-up of Mia & Gaby's lesson (1977 #9) and Moshe's AY #232 (minimal movements lying on the side, for those following along at home.

The second lesson is Walking backward--or in a recording from a couple of years ago, Walking backward.

This is the second of two lessons in the January 15 Workshop: Weight and Weightlessness, 2011. In the first lesson, Lifting a long leg, we were in sidelying, finding how to manage the weight of the long leg in various directions/configurations. This got us using our spines and relating ourselves heel to pelvis to head.

Now we're on to weightlessness: finding the reflexes in standing and the lengthening of the head up and forwards as the hip joint goes back and down, to turn walking into a gentle springing orchestration of reflexes.

This extensor lesson may have you seeing the world in a whole new way. What other limitations in the world are limitations in your own organization?

Oh dear; philosophy and sociology rear their heads. I'm not really into personalizing responsibility like this. Let's have a long blog post about that when I'm not heading off to catch a plane.

I'm surprised I haven't recorded this one yet--a classic lesson, with a few quirks specific to the San Francisco Evening Class notes I recently acquired. In the first two weeks of the current series, we've done lessons heavy in one direction or the other (flexion, extension); this third lesson puts a twist into things--and gives us a whole new level of coordinating flexors and extensors.

This is a recording you can come back to and add your own embellishments: turn your head with and against; the same with your eyes (make four combinations of head/eyes....). Add some see-saw breathing. Stay with your knees to the side and lift/lower each shoulder, or lift your head with your interlaced hands, or slide your head and arms from side to side (side-bending). The challenging thing when making variations by yourself is to choose one or two simple ideas and stick with that, with the same patient pace of exploration you get in the recordings.

The recording quality is not the same as the last few weeks--I was missing my mic, so recording just with the internal mic on conference room setting.

This "classic" lesson (we call the theme the "dead bird" lesson) works in sitting, and shows the surprising power of the eyes to organize movement--or, perhaps better, your willingness and availability to move.

This isn't the first pelvic clock lesson I've posted--it has some special nuances, ones that let you study your own patterns and biases in control of your pelvis in action. Check out other versions at: http://www.kinesophics.ca/diyatm/atm_themes/pelvic_clock

This lesson works in internal rotation of the hips, and shows you how much that has to do with your shoulders....neck....head.

In this lesson in side-lying, you refine control of your legs while finding the subtle ways that you can use your spine and trunk for this fine control.

I haven't decided whether this lesson is about attaining freedom from/using the floor, or the amazing things that happen if you refine a pathway for the lower leg that stays parallel to the spine through a range of folding and extending. Or what. It's a follow-up on a missed recording two weeks ago, but don't worry. We could have done this one first anyway.

We're off to a rolling start with this four-week series in April-May 2011. This recording has some introductory and framing comments for new-comers about the developmental and learning approach of the Method. And you probably haven't had this much fun trying to do something seemingly impossible since you were 8 months old or so. Find yourself a little more space than usual for this lesson.

This is the first of three amazing lessons that get right to core matters. There was an interesting conversation after class about how people found the "spine as skewer" image--did it connect or not? One student said he was imagining the meat (tofu?) on the shish kebab was sort of folded or bunched up, and it flattens as the spine "skewers" it. Play with the idea!

Two days after the 2011 Canadian federal election, we have a deep exploration of the dynamics of tilting and looking left and right.

Somehow I missed the obvious point that looking right drives your knees left, and looking left drives your knees back right. All those liberals who voted conservative at the last minute, driven by the rise of the NDP.

This lesson is a further exploration of the ideas we started with Skewering the spine in the chest.

I almost don't want to post it--I made several mistakes in teaching it. I'll list them here, and you can adapt around as well as possible while listening to a recording!

1) I talk about the flexing and extending of your right ankle "shifting your whole right side." This is the wrong image. It's still a lesson of "skewering the spine", but from one foot. (It gives quite a different idea to think of shifting one side up, rather than thinking of shifting the whole torso, the spine--but just from the one foot.)

2) When you have your arm overhead, you should spend some time continuing the movement, and looking towards your hand as you push up from your heel so that your knuckles advance on the floor.

3) When you're face down, also do the movement with your arm long overhead, so that the push from your toes advances your arm--and look up towards your hand as you lengthen it.

The latter two points will start to connect in some relationship to turning your head, which should help set the stage for the upcoming step of taking your head under the bridge.

This lesson--a version of the first lesson Moshe taught at San Francisco, and the first lesson in my training--takes the idea of lying flat on the floor and shows you how rounded you really are in that situation. This is the first of four classes that are going to develop some refined control from the core.

When you have to balance on your knees, you really start talking to your hips and spine about what they're up to and whether they're talking to one another. None of that fine adjustment in the feet, the bones of the lower leg, the knee joints to save you.

You never know, in life, when you're going to be stuck up against a wall and need to reach into your back pocket. If this function concerns you, this is the lesson for you.

On the other hand, you may have more generalized interests, like ungluing your shoulder blades, freeing your neck, or undoing patterns of holding in the abdomen that limit everything else you do. This lesson can help you with those things too.

The grand finale--a proposal that focuses you on generating movement from the core. In other lessons we roll or transition with the push or pull of our limbs, or at the very least their weight carries us along. Here everything is kept very close to home, and you have no options left but to move from the core and lengthen the spine.

In Body and Mature Behaviour, Moshe writes about the "fixing" of the trunk for the movement of the limbs--not, as we imagine, the general immobility of "core stability," but finely calibrated to the direction of action, and with the least possible sum total of work in the muscles:

"The trunk by itself is normally not rigid. It consists of two smaller parts, the almost rigid thorax and the pelvis. Thus, before any significant movement can be made, it as necessary that the thorax and pelvis should be more rigidly connected [so that, as a unit, they will be the heavy part and the action of the muscles joining limbs to trunk will move not the trunk but the limbs]. And the stability of the whole body relative to the ground should be increased in the plane in which work is to be done. Among all the numerous possible configurations of the segments of the body in each case there is a group in which the total amount of pull in all the muscles of the body is the smallest." (p. 54, beginning of Chapter 7)

You can think of this lesson as an exploration of that idea.

Kicking off our first fall 2011 series with a lesson differentiating the eyes.

If you're a seasoned Feldenkrais person, I'm curious what you think about the arm position as I teach it here. Looking back at the lesson in the ATM book, it's ambiguous between starting with the arm long and bending as you turn, and starting with it bent. I'm curious what you think about trying it this way. Discussion at Feldy Notebook: http://feldynotebook.wikispaces.com/Movement+of+the+Eyes+Organizes+the+M...

You'll also notice that I actually mess up the instructions for eye-head differentiation. Mea culpa. See above outline at Feldy Notebook (or the ATM book itself) for the right variations.

In this lesson we slowly develop circles of the shoulders and hips on one side.

In this lesson, we're organizing the eyes and extending the spine--with some adjustments to the head-neck relationship on the way.

In this lesson focused on the eyes (so to speak), we take our eyes through the range of divergence and convergence--looking at objects near and far away.

We've been focusing (so to speak) on the eye in its functions of vision and leading action of the whole self--now, let's weigh (so to speak--is the pun tired yet?) its simple physical existence: our grasp of the eye in our self-image.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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!

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.

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?

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. ;-)

Holding your big toe in a hook formed by your index finger, you pass your knee from side to side of your elbow. What lets your knee do this? What gets in the way? As usual, it's a surprise how little your actual hip joint, and how much your spine and chest and head have to do with this.

The kayak image isn't Moshe's; it's local colour. We specialize in local colour in Nova Scotia. Meanwhile, I doubt there's a better lesson for lengthening your neck, greasing your hips (how did that happen?), changing your walk, and reorganizing the use of your arms. Check it out.

You'd think this is about the legs and the hips. But we're focusing on the hips and shoulders in the context of the whole. Your shoulders are certainly finding all sorts of new connections for supporting and enabling action in this one. Maybe it's really about the ways that both your hip joints and your shoulder joints really start somewhere around T8...

Local class participants note the whitewashing! I edited out all evidence of my arriving late for class.

We typically make too much effort with the dominant hand, and hold too much strain in it in resting. This lesson gently differentiates the hand and forearm, explores the subtle movement of the humerus resting in the shoulder blade, and transforms the whole dominant side of the body.

Want to know more about handedness? Check out the book Right Hand Left Hand (http://www.righthandlefthand.com) by Chris McManus, and my blog post including comments at Which Side?.

Explore some of the remarkable agility you have in your hands and wrists. And while you're at it--who knows?--your neck may lengthen and shoulders re-organize.

I tried a slightly different recording arrangement to get rid of the annoying scratchy noises--it made them worse. Will try to fix before the next class!

You have habits of how you interlace your hands....but your toes? How can you have a habit of how you interlace your toes? Have you ever done this before? Since you were 2 years old?

By the end of this one, you won't know left from right or up from down. But your shoulders and neck will feel different. Maybe your hips and self too.

A little bit of this with the hands, a little bit of that with the feet... yes, shoulders and hips. But can we put it all together into something functional? For a baby at least? Find spiral transitions and stealth twistings of the long axes of the arms and legs?

Do the last lesson From crawling to sitting first! This is just an experimental add-on, a little trial of some ideas, an exploration to see what happens, tacked on at the end of the lesson for those who would stay.

This fascinating lesson (but which lesson isn't fascinating?) is (literally?) an eye-opener. Picking up some ideas from Violin arms but moving closer in to the core, it will show you some connections and some distinctions you probably have never felt before in your shoulders.

Kicking off a new series aimed at twisting things around, growing taller, and getting that spine of yours more supple. With a special shout-out to cousins who find it interesting to grow taller. This is a variation on a familiar kind of lesson, but it is a new variation, I promise.