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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Hooking the big toe and passing the knee
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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Flexors, aka folding
Feldenkrais and his first assistants often taught a lesson exploring flexion as a first lesson in a series. I myself rarely do that! Partly because the movement challenges me at all my weakest points; partly because these lessons are the most likely lessons to remind people of doing a workout. So no matter how many times you say “do less; feel more,” people work hard. I gather from transcripts of Feldenkrais teachers three decades ago that it was the same story then.
I attempted to up the volume on the sound this week; let me know if this helps. It seems to have made the file size larger, even though the lesson is shorter, so I apologize to those of you with dialup connections.
Typical to the Feldenkrais Method, even though I just told you all about how the general body pattern of flexion (anxiety) is the cause of all sorts of ills of modern society and the human condition, this lesson refines and clarifies our ability to do this thing (that we already do so much of) well. In this way Feldenkrais aimed to be a polite conversational partner: let us talk first about what already preoccupies you. After we have done that for a while, we can talk about something new.
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