beginnings

In this six-week series in January-February 2011, we were following along (more or less) with the lessons Moshe taught in an evening class for the general public, during his first training of practitioners in the US, in San Francisco in 1976.

1. Tilting Pelvis Sitting
2. Extensors
3. Coordinating Flexors and Extensors
4. Classic Rotation Sitting
5. Rolling Arms (not recorded)
6. And a last class out of sync with the SF Evening Class, but one I wanted to share with the group, and a nice return to a theme of the first lesson: A Clock

This excellent intro set focuses on control of the pelvis in the context of global movements, before homing in on the shoulders.

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?

The elusive and the obvious

Feldenkrais called one of his books “The Elusive Obvious.”

We feel changes the course of a Feldenkrais lesson that are so surprising that we feel some extraordinarily mysterious event must have transpired. It may feel almost embarrassing to discover how banal was the shift that created the new experience: a realization that turning the head may affect the shoulder, or that the foot can, contrary to a lifetime of practice, be allowed to shift a half-centimetre for more optimal transmission of forces. Such small learning of the obvious, all variations on the discovery that we are one organism connected in our parts and unified in sensation and motor control, can indeed have results for the person that are astonishing. Particularly because the deepest changes happen at the edge of awareness or into our blind spots, where something is so fundamentally new to us that we can't put it into our old familiar words, capturing it feels as elusive as picking up a spiderweb.

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