If you want to feel really asymmetrical (and who doesn’t?), this is the lesson for you!
Feeling asymmetrical, by the way, is nature’s way for you to learn from yourself. So it’s useful, apart from being fun.
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Rolling arms
How does your ability to shift weight on your hips and from your feet affect how you can use your arms? Explore what every good fencer knows using this lesson!
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Tilting pelvis sitting: another recording
As we start the last 6-week series before my sabbatical, I am in the mood for coming back to the basics–with the fresh eyes I’ve developed and you’ve all developed from doing more Feldenkrais. And from living.
The title of this lesson talks about tilting the pelvis. There’s never one answer to the question “what is this movement?” but there’s a lot to be said for this as an exploration of the idea of how your back relates to your knees. And the surprising places that can take you.
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Frog’s Legs Variations
Of course, frogs aren’t bipedal; they don’t stand on extended legs really at all. So this lesson doesn’t have the kind of neurological and functional significance for a frog that it has for us.
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Getting to know the hip joints
Hmmm…thought I’d long ago recorded and posted this one. No! Somewhere between the low back and the knees, the hip joints play a major role in action. Here’s a powerful flashlight you can use to clarify this area in your self-image.
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Frog’s Legs
We’re thinking about Theo Jansen’s wonderful Strandbeests, and how ‘stupid’ the knees are. They don’t need any sophistical neurological control. They just have to unfold at the right moment and be there for the weight of the body to pass over them.
How do you let your leg unfold?
This version is AY 117, by the way.
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Lying on the feet turned in, while breathing rhythmically
You could say there’s a hierarchy of degrees of conscious control in ourselves–our fingers and mouths the most consciously controlled; our legs less so, carrying us along without much thought wherever we want to go. And our breathing, even more so, takes care of itself while we’re doing other things. We’ll reverse that a bit in this lesson, making the breathing the subject of conscious control and monitoring, while we do quite unusual things with out legs…the hands and mouth can take care of themselves!
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Folding ankle on the outside
Intimately connected to the rotation at the knee of the two bones of the lower leg, we find a new dimension of freedom in the hip joint and an unusual folding of the ankle. This the second of a four-lesson series recovering what are for many people long-forgotten knee functions.
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Picking up again the idea of holding the foot
Remember all that toe-bending a couple of weeks ago? Coming back to the same basic position, we start to see what we can accomplish with the foot we aren’t holding.
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Taking the foot through the ring of the arms
Things got a little crazy on Charles Street on Wednesday. Make a circle with your arms, hands interlaced, and now try to lace your legs through this. We didn’t quite get to the point of skipping rope with our own bodies as the skipping-rope. Maybe we’ll do that next week.
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