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.)
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Hi Lynette,
Thank you again for another great lesson! I am quite a new Feldenkraispractitioner -graduated May 2012 -Malmö 3/Alan Questel, and your recordins are very useful for me! I will leave a contribution to your webside as soon as I get home to Norway. Now I am on vacation in south of Spain, and using your recording to prepare my class that is just after coming home. Bringing the iPad and a small speaker makes it possible.
A couple of questions to this ATM; is it an AY -lesson? In case -which #? It is done just on one foot, what about the other? For people having done very little
Feldenkrais, would it be an idea to do some on the other foot too? And what about -in the midle of the lesson, doing a circle with the ancle in sitting -for clearifying the movement? The ancles are a pretty “woolen” place in my selfimage -and doing and seeing in another position makes a difference. The lesson could be challenging for the lower back -do you have any comments?
This was a lot, Lynette…. Please answer just what you find time for.
All the best.
Marianne, Norway
Hi Marianne,
Great to hear from you! This is AY 304. http://feldynotebook.com/The+foot+and+its+movements+in+space+AY304
Some people do recommend that you do two-sided lessons with new students. In this lesson, I’d do the walk around in the middle in any case. It’s a great opportunity to feel differences.
You can do anything of course–try it in sitting. Play with it and notice whether there are tradeoffs for advantage of getting the visual feedback more easily (without the awkward position of looking over your shoulder to check). You may lose the clear reference points of the ceiling (your foot is parallel to this) and the floor (your lower leg is vertical to this, and your knee stays in its spot), which help you feel the directions of heel in particular, and keep you from twisting your foot from side to side–there is a really strong tendency to substitute this twisting instead of the turning the lesson looks for. Also see whether when the leg is crossed (if that’s how you’re going to get the foot free from the floor to do the circles with the heel) you restrict more the relative movement of the tibia and fibula, the two long bones of the lower leg. I don’t know in my recording whether I really brought out how much he emphasizes the foot staying parallel to the ceiling. That makes quite a difference to the organization of the movement.
It can be possible to do a lesson with different positions and the more simple idea of lifting the inside and outside borders of the foot, like AY 251.
We see a lot of TV series these days set in Malmö! (Wallander, The Bridge.)
Lynette