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.
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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In this lesson, we’re organizing the eyes and extending the spine–with some adjustments to the head-neck relationship on the way.
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In this lesson we slowly develop circles of the shoulders and hips on one side.
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Kicking off our first fall 2011 series with a lesson differentiating the eyes.
WARNING: I was playing with a non-standard interpretation of the arm/hand position. Don’t bother–it creates strain and doesn’t contribute to learning. Use the “normal” dead bird position (arm lifted forward and bent in the elbow, hand hanging loose in front of the face, so you look at or just over the back of the hand).
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+Movement+of+the+Body
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.
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