the feldenkrais method with lynette reid
These are live recordings of Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lessons. Here are some suggestions if you’re not sure where to start or how to find one you want to do.
– You can click the “SERIES” link in the menu above to find the lessons organized in the series in which they were taught.
– The tag cloud in the right sidebar is one way to find lessons. It is highly descriptive: the tags tell you, for example, that a lesson is face down and involves twisting or addresses explicitly the idea of the self-image or reversibility. What the lesson will do for you — improve your breathing and voice, your walking and running, your sore back or knee or ankle — is very personal. It’s what you discover from the lesson. So the lessons aren’t tagged that way! Your live, local Feldenkrais practitioner can give you customized advice about how to approach a specific problem and work with a specific lesson to address it.
– You can click on the tag “beginnings” to get some ideas about where to start.
The recordings are a side-product of the live lessons in Halifax, Canada — they’re not professionally recorded. You can find on the web many lessons for sale that have been professionally recorded to a high standard. On this site, older recordings in particular may have poor sound quality.
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!
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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?.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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. 😉
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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?
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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.
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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!
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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!
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