Feldenkrais and Breathing and Grape Arbors and Life

FELDENKRAIS AND BREATHING
One of the great gifts of life is breath.

Or is it, one of the great gifts of breath is life.

Or, is life breath.

Or, is breath life?

You know, you can get into long and pseudo interesting discussions about, “What is life?” But not here. Not today.

Grape arbor in the Garden Park. Photo: Richard Dale.

Look at this nice photograph. This is the grape arbor I designed a number of years ago, when the garden was just a bunch of dirt and most visitors spent all their time under some nice oak trees in the back of the garden (it’s five acres of land, and the gardened part is – now-- about three acres.) They liked it back there because there was no work. I put in a path, a main path, a central axis and brought the picnic tables from the oaks to the center of the garden. The path was a hit. The path could be better, so I stuck in some grape cuttings along the edge and wondered if they’d grow.

They did.

Then, Richard Dale, director of the Sonoma Ecology Center, whose photographs you see a lot in these blogs, came out and helped me construct an arbor for the grapes with bent rebar. Then the grapes grew up and covered them and now we have a very magical pathway into the garden.

What does that have to do with breathing? One thing needs another. Breathing in needs breathing out. We need oxygen, plants need our outbreath. The plants need the soil, the soil, needs the plants. The grapes grow, breathing in and breathing out. We tend them, breathing in and breathing out.

All this is movement.

The Feldenkrais Method takes this wonderful idea: to move it to be alive, and to improve movement is the improve life.

And an even more wonderful idea: let’s improve this movement and this life, not by Doing it (whatever movement we are doing) the Right Way, but by exploring and learning, by discovering for ourselves, what is a better way, what are possibilities, what are options.

Nature is the model in having many pathways to get to the same aim, whether it is many species to achieve flying or eating up dead stuff, or many ways a grape vine can grow to survive and then thrive.

There are many ways we can grow and then thrive.

One of them is by being aware of what we are doing while we are doing it. Even as I type these words, I can be aware of my fingers moving and the sounds of the keys clicking. Click. Click. Click. Dogs are barking outside, my spine is holding up my head.

I’m breathing in and breathing out.

The grapes are done for the season, it’s Halloween today, the end of October. The day of the dead comes soon. The vines will die back, as if an outbreath in a season’s breath cycle. You breathe in and out, I breathe in and out.

And everyone who has notices the glory of life for thousands of years has noticed the breath and the moment and the seasons. Many have taken the juice of the grape, fermented it, and become even more enthusiastic about life.

So be it.

To breathe and move and be aware is a little slower than wine, but it will get you there, get you high.

And is getting high a big purpose in life?

Not necessarily, but it’s nice, especially if we can get there on our own, if we can release our own “feel good” chemicals inside.

And what’s one of the best ways of doing that? To be kind to others is one. The be at one with nature is another. To learn is a third. This is the goal and the heart of the Feldenkrais Method, taking small (or sometimes large) movements and learning from them about how we are hooked together as human beings, about who we are as breathers and movers in the world, and most especially, who we are as learners in the world. Learning how to improve by being thrilled and fascinating with the process and not worrying about improving.

Breathing in, breathing out and underneath it all: the Earth. Gravity. Holding us down, keep us connected to the Mother, letting us know who we are, creatures in gravity and in air . Light, too, the sun has its own message. Gravity below, light above, food for the grapes and the plants and the people of this planet, and in between, air giving us one thing and the plants another and we are feeding each other, the plants and the people, through our breathing, and other ways.

And sometimes we forget.

And sometimes we remember.

Life on Earth. Ah, good.

Opening Two Habits: Side of the Bed, Reading a Novel

HABITS
Here’s a couple of habits I’ve had an interesting time opening up to new possibilities.

First: which side of the bed I sleep on. For a long time, I’ve known of a predilection for a certain side of the bed when I sleep with a partner. Several times I’ve had the idea of becoming less fixed and efforts to open the habit haven’t taken. In the last six or eight months, though, I build a bed with a nice firm plywood base and cotton futon mattress and tucked it into a small EAST FACING BEDROOM.

The bed is right next to a window. And it’s cold next to this window, since we sleep with it wide open. So it’s the least favorite side of the bed on all but very warm nights. (Sonoma has heavenly night weather. Even when 100 degrees in the day, in gets down to the low fifties at night).

So, Marlie and I now go every other night on the opposite side of the bed and the part of me that only thought I could hug from a certain side, or be ‘comfortable’ on a certain side, has been proven wrong.

A second habit, opened up, comes care of Milton Erickson. He was talking to his students about paying attention to the sort of outcomes you might want and kind of working back from that. He suggested reading a novel from back to front, not page by page, but last chapter first and then second to last chapter and so on.

I haven’t done this with many novels, but it’s pretty interesting. With one, Brother’s Karamazov, it turned a psychological tour de force into a thriller as well, since people reading front to back know who the killer is long before someone reading back to front.


And why the caps on EAST FACING BEDROOM? This is one of a couple of hundred univeral patterns used by human beings going about making really nice shelters and villages and living places for themselves in A PATTERN LANGUAGE, by Christopher Alexander. It, along with PERMACULTURE, A DESIGNER’S MANUAL, by Bill Mollison, is one of those books you can see the whole world through, and transform that world via whole system thinking. Not unlike the Feldenkrais Method, except we don’t have anything written anywhere near approaching these books.

Tai Chi and Feldenkrais, Two Goods make a Better

TAI CHI AND FELDENKRAIS

Tai Chi is Good for you

How come?

• Because you move slow.


• And you pay attention.


• And you are standing up and moving from foot to foot.


• Moving foot to foot is a good movement, e.g. walking.


• You are having to concentrate on arms and legs at the same time.


• You are potentially aware of breathing at the same time.


• Breathing, sensing, moving and attention: all at the same time.


• You are connecting to Earth and gravity and intention and moving.


• You are moving slow.


• You are, if you are in the grove, enjoying yourself.


• This is good, to move slow and to enjoy yourself.


• This can be a fine meditation, a way to take our attention off the usual.


• This can be a fine meditation, coming back to the present.


• This can be good for our health because we get things moving.


• This can be great for our health because we calm and happify our being.


• And so on.

Feldenkrais could assist this process

In traditional Tai Chi, there is always the "right" way to be in each posture, and that's fine, except that in Feldenkrais we learn about learning. And we learn by making comparisons. And so, instead of just putting one foot here and the other back so many inches and to the side so many inches, we could experiment with how it actually "feels," in the good old here and now sensation, to put our two feet in all sorts of different lengths and widths apart.

In traditional Tai Chi, there is always a "right" way to place your hands and arms in each posture. Instead of just cramming ourselves into the "right" way, we can experiment, a little higher, a little lower, to the left, to the right, what about the elbows this way and that, what about the wrists.

In traditional Tai Chi, a good teacher will spend some serious time alerting the student to the transitions between the postures. With Feldenkrais, this awareness could be amplified, by taking these transitions and even within them creating variation and distinctions and possibilities.

In other words, all the wonderful things about Tai Chi could be made more wonderful with the addition of Feldenkrais. What if the weight, supposed to be 70% front foot and 30% back foot in some poses, was 80/20 or 50/50 or 90/10 ? What if the weight was on the inside of the foot, the outside, the heel, the toes? What about on the toes of one foot and the heel of the other?

And are we following our breathing now, even as we read about this?

Tai Chi, in going slow, already opens us to the possibilities of connecting with ourselves in a deep and profound and healing way. To add the variations and playful learning aspects of the Feldenkrais Work to this, is to simple give our minds and our bodies and our mind/bodies, to say nothing of our spirits, one more chance to expand and exult in this adventure, this adventure of being alive.

Tues. Oct 24: Healing by Learning

HEALING BY LEARNING
What's your definition of healing? To get better? To get rid of the pain, or the sickness? To get back on track toward wholeness? To increase well-being?

It's an interesting thing to think about, especially when we've got something bothering us, and , being normal human beings, we just want the bother to go away.

Here is one of the wonders of the Feldenkrais Method®. That we don't go after "fixing" and we get better results than anyone who goes after fixing.

How can that be?

A friend who came to me to "fix" his shoulder, asked this. He was amazed at the results, how in three days his S (more on that later) and his life were amazingly improved. He couldn't unerstand how could we get such fine results, when we didn't seem to be trying to get results.

We seemed to be working with his brain and his spine and his ribs and his neck and his pelvis and his fingers and his elbows, and every once in awhile, we'd move this "stuff" up at the left side edge of his torso. This "stuff" was what I called all the ribs and shoulder blade and left upper arm and left collar bone, to keep away from the S word, since he "knew" his Shoulder was a huge mess. Moving the S was impossible, but he discovered this "stuff" could be moved quite easily, especially if he initiated the moving from his back and his sternum.

Hmm. We did a little of this and a little of that and the S would get more and more free and not only did we refrain from mentioning its name, we refrained from any movement that was what he traditionally thought of as moving of the S, though he got a nice laugh when I pointed out that there really is no such thing as the "shoulder."

Anyway: we were after improving the whole self, and the understanding of all sorts of moving and almost as a byproduct of that, his S got more and more dramatically "better."

And he asked why. And what came to mind was: think about a relationship that's in trouble. And you decide to fix it by telling each of the warring couple to say, "Please," when they wanted something. Surely that would help, but there's a lot going on in a relationship.

And there's a lot going on in a human mind/body, and to improve any aspect is to improve the whole.

And to improve the whole is to improve any aspect.

Which is to say, the S not only doesn't exist that way the thumb does, but is itself a functional conglomerate. Therefore, to heal the S means to heal all sorts of areas in the body and the mind. (And even to "heal" the thumb in the Feldenkrais way, would be to connect this "part" of ourselves back to as much of us as possible, from toes to nose to brain to breath to ribs. Herein lies the "solution" to all the "carpal tunnel" stuff.)

So, this is it: REAL HEALING IS ABOUT LEARNING, not about adjusting back to some previously unsatisfying and ignored status quo. This man had forgotten how to use his ribs and his neck and his pelvis and his spine and his eyes and his awareness in ways that could make his left S experience a pleasant and efficient one. We set out to learn how to use himself in new and interesting and easy and delightful and useful ways. The more we discovered, the more options he had, and his possibilities for change and improvement increased almost exponentially each new possibility we added.

So in three days, he was "fixed" as much as a friend of his had been fixed with three months of physical therapy.

And with this difference: he is on the way to having two S's that function better than they ever have in his life since he was a young and frisky lad. The other sort of "fix," the get 'em back to normal fix, and he'd have a left S that could function at a sort of get by mediocre level that was what he had in his "good" right S.

So by slowing down and taking lots of apparent detours, we get faster "fixing," because we aren't fixing, we are learning, learning to function and learning to learn.

Cool, eh?

Sun. Oct 22: Habits, Compulsions, Addictions

What a cheery topic, eh? And actually people like to dwell on that. I’m stuck. I can’t get out of this hole. Can’t stop doing this or that. It’s a whole industry.

And hidden under that somewhere is a deeper set of addictions that don’t have to be looked at while we are busy thinking that sugar or overeating or television watching or drugs or work or alcohol is our addiction.

Oh, well.

People are great and people are fools, and me, too, you, too, what can we do?

The effort to be present brings up almost everything, sooner or later, so that’s one thing we can do. And then, sometimes we just get out of our routine enough to realize that we live in some cultural addictions that we might never ever have thought about.

Like squares and right angles. What a world we live in dominated by that.

Or, worrying whether people approve of us or not. This, according to Gurdjieff, is the number one slavery of humanity, or at least according to one man's (John Bennett’s) version of Gurdjieff.

What other people think about us?Do we fit in/ What if they disapproved of us for being imperfect, which they must right, since we disapprove of ourselves for being imperfect and where did we learn that? From Mom and Pa, who learned it from their Ma and Pa and so on.

But is it true? Is perfection what we want out of life?

Is the approval of others?

What does this have to do with the Feldenkrais Method?

Lots, I think.

The whole Method, to my mind, is about turning our habits inside out and discovering who we might be and who we might become if we began to learn and discover new ways of moving and thinking and learning. Pain, unfortunately, rather than the wish to transform, is the initiator to most people’s excitement with this work, but then again, that’s humanity in a rut.

And the rut-ness of the rut, is not knowing we are in it. Alas!

We don’t know we’re in a rut until divorce or sickness or someone’s death, or a near death, or losing our job, or physical breakdown shocks us into realizing that things aren’t so great as we thought they were.

It’s possible to come to this work as an exciting path of exploration and usefulness to others and ourselves.

And what does that have to do with addiction?

Well. In the Feldie Forum, this Yahoo group thing for Feldenkrais Practitioners and students in training programs, I raised this issue of Habit, Compulsion, Addiction, partly because someone was coming to town with a book about the drug and alcohol trap (Broken, the book, William Cope Moyers the author). And partly because I’m really interested in my own inner freedom and in the Gurdjieff notion of the imprisonment of humanity in something like an ongoing “sleep.”

Hence the title WakeUp Feldenkrais. This is not a clarion call for dead Moshe to wake, but for me and you and anyone to use the Feldenkrais Method to wake up to our lives in the present.

So habit, compulsion, addiction, define them however you want, are all ways of staying the same. Sometimes that’s good. Nice to know how to stand and tie our shoe. Sometimes it awful. To always think yuk when so and so’s name comes up, or the always tighten our jaw when we are wanting to lift something with our legs, or to always rush when we are given a chance to learn something new or to always stop breathing when someone says something that we haven’t thought of before.

So where is this ramble going today?

A little here and little there, a little everywhere. I’m just about done for today. I could get into food and cooked foods as an addiction, but that’s a big one, and all I’ll say for now is: eat only uncooked foods for two weeks, use lots of soaked seeds and nuts and avocados to get your fat and protein, lots of greens, too, have fun, eat all you want, and see what happens when you step outside of the cooked food thing. The social pressures. The inner compulsions. The straight ahead unconscious habits. The addiction to that rush that the cooked food gives, a certain blandness and heaviness after the initial buzz of food without enzymes that has to be disguised with lots of salt and seasoning.

But step outside that habit, social requirement, whatever you want to call it, try something quite interesting, at the least, for two weeks, and then see what kind of choice you have in a decision like that.

Oh, well. This is too scary.

Let’s talk about something safe.

Sugar. Well, not too safe for some. But still.... sugar

Is nonsense. Eat an apple or a peach or a banana instead.

Ice cream is just what all deserts want to be : fat and sweet. Make the raw version: an apple and some walnuts, raisins and almonds, some sunflower seeds and banana and strawberries in a blender, a date with some tahini on it. This list could be huge. What the body wants for health and what the mind wants for habit can be different, but all the suggested combos, plus zillions more taste GREAT, so that's a help, eh?

This is an addiction that’s not that hard to beat, to the vast benefit of your health.

And what’s that got to do with Feldenkrais? Well, this is a WakeUp Feldenkrais site, so anything that gets us free of any rut is fair play.

And Feldenkrais itself?

If you don’t know what you are doing, you don’t know what you are doing.If you've never gone a day or two without talking, you don't know your habit, addiction, compulsion. For example.

If you have no alternatives, you don’t know what you are doing, no matter how many other people are doing the same thing. Indeed, maybe most likely we are to be blind if almost “everybody is doing it.”

Ciao for now.

Chris

Fri. Oct 20: Oh, Shit: I'm Alive

Back in the old days, good old days, bad old days, days of my life, I lived in Berkeley and fine and amazing city it ‘twas, in and of itself. And I was in a group then, a group of recovering overly “good” meditators who had been rescued by a couple of bad boy Gurdjieff teachers. One, David, had been the teacher of the other, Henry, and that’s a long story, especially when they got into a little guru war, but that isn’t my story here today.

That’s a long story, and this is short.

It’s about some ideas I got from David along the way, who had his flaws and had his charms, and definitely had his insights.

He would talk of the decisive clarity that came into his life when, as a young man, he spent a number of years working in a Jewish old folks home. Not only was it amazing to him, being Jewish, to see how much of his character had come from this culture, but even more amazing was to watch person after person coming to the end of their lives.

And one by one, maybe in the last day, or last couple of breaths, or last week, or last month, they would wake up to their situation and realize: OH, SHIT. I’M ALIVE.”

And from that second until their last breath their life would be supercharged with a gratefulness for living and a lust for living that totally transformed their existence.

David, of course, wondered: what if people realized this now, instead of waiting until the end.

A good question indeed, don’t you think?

Wed. Oct 18: Feldenkrais and the Big Self inside us all

FELDENKRAIS AND THE “BIG SELF”
We come into this world as miraculous beings. We are a genius, really. We can take a self that can hardly move and end up crawling and rolling over and walking and talking and running around and getting into mischief within a couple of years.

We are also socialized beings: when learning to talk, especially, we learn the “right” way to talk, as well as our “native” tongue. We learn to squelch certain phrases and our curiosity. We learn not to speak the truth.

And in our bodies. We learn bad habits by imitating restricted people around us. We learn bad habits by tensing and contracting in stressful situations. We learn bad habits after accidents when we don’t really have the support to heal in a natural way according to our own schedule and are forced into some model of “doing it right,” that limits us from everything else for the rest of our life.

And in our being. We are taught that we “shouldn’t” imagine that we could do such and such. We are taught that this is beyond us, and that that is impossible and that “our kind of people” don’t do this, and that such and such is a “nasty” movement, and that such and such thinking is “ridiculous.”

So, slowly and strangely, we are taught to limit ourselves. Parents, unknowingly, to top all the above off, usually don’t want to be surpassed by their children, so that even happiness can seem an affront and can be conditioned out of a bright and beautiful child.

Then, to top all this off: we go to school, and are taught to sit still, and to keep our eyes focused on The Teacher. We are more or less taught to restrict our breathing, restrict our motion, to restrict our curiosity, to restrict our communication, to restrict our urges, to restrict our individuality, to restrict our creativity. If you happen to think this doesn’t happen in the Waldorf system, go spend an hour in even the best class and you will see huge amounts of anti-wiggling, everyone pay attention to this and this moment going on.

Anyway; we are taught to be small.

And Feldenkrais has said that central to his work is getting us back to the Big Self we would have and could have been had not all these lids and clamps been shut down on and in us.

I was telling the short version of this to a friend last night at the farmer’s market, and she responded, I guess is you get that energy going from all those blocks, that would happen.

I didn’t really feel like taking the time to expand on how much this system goes beyond “energy” and “blockages,” and besides, a good start is a good start.

So, now. On paper, let’s expand that.

We are miracles of learning and a huge amount of that miracle has been shanghaied into learning how to restrict and diminish ourselves. One way out of this might be to do kind of The Artists Way thing, taking inventory of all the ways we were taught to stifle ourselves and whatnot.

Another is, as my friend suggested, just to start to move and from having been so stuck for so long, this will remind us that we are living beings. Thus the famous scene in all the Nerd Breaks Out movies, when the bookworm starts to dance or run or have wild sex or surf, or something showing life and vitality.

And then, the Feldenkrais way is somewhat sly and amazing, because it is about unlocking our ability to learn again. To learn, not in the dreary: do it this way kind of copying learning, that will teach us a new skill such as archery or golf or yoga ( and that learning a new skill does huge things for the person, let there be no doubt about that), but the learning that we did when we were a little genius.

This sort of learning is about trying this, trying that, going down dead ends, trial and error, exploring and enjoying. Like a musician trying this tune out and then this and then that, and ending up either Mozart and a Concerto with variations or John Coltrane and his variations. It is the leaving behind of the known, the exploring the unknown, the security to not be “right,” the joy of finding out all sorts of possibilities. This is what a good Feldenkrais lesson is about.

This is the Feldenkrais path to the Big Self, to open up the box on Learning itself, Learning and Awareness as core to life, and from that, everything and anything is possible. Almost. We still can’t fly, but we could learn to walk on a tight rope, if we went in enough steps and took it as the joy of learning and not the I have to do it now to show off to myself or others that I’m okay way.

Learning and Awareness mean a good life, a rich life and an expanding life. Like the child we were whose horizons were continually expanding, we are once again riding the life force of our Big Self.

(Whatever that means. But it hints at something grand, doesn’t it?)


One of my past essays of the Feldie Method spoke to this somewhat tangentially: Intro 3, a New Way of Thinking.

Special Needs Children, and Learning "Challenges"

Sometimes children need help in their learning.

They may have been born with a neurological issue, such as cerebral palsy or a stroke, or brachial plexus. There can be complications in utero or at birth. All sorts of traumas can occur.

For these neurological issues, as well as children with "ordinary" learning challenges (as in reading and math and social adjustment and co-ordination) the Feldenkrais Method, especially the method as refined in the Anat Baniel Method for Children,
(see Overview, Anat Baniel Method for Children)
is the supreme way on this Earth of helping these children.

This is because in these methods, we recreate the natural pathways of learning
and wake up the brain to its possibilities of change and
learning and improvement in a way that no amount of physical therapy or surgery ever can do.

Think of a child learning to crawl.
She or he sees no one crawling,
gets no crawling lessons,
isn't pressured to learn,
doesn't even think about learning to crawl.
He or she just moves this way and that
and learns hundreds of ways to understand
and move
and sense
and coordinate themselves.
And then one day,
wanting to get across the room
or yard
easier,
they just pull together the twenty things
they need
and crawl.

This is organic learning.

This is why this method is so amazingly effective.


For a summary
and continued explanation
see Amazing One on One Lessons

You might be excited to
View videos of Anat's work with three children. This shows work over a period of time and you can see with your eyes the marvelous/miraculous changes the children undergo.
Try this:

Grace, Isabel and Carter Transform and Heal.

---

This work, for a child with learning difficulties,
is the fresh drink they have been desperate for all their lives.
They are not pushed, or prodded, or force to "do it right."
They are not "fixed," or moved in ungentle ways.

They are given small pieces of real and immediately felt learning
(inner and organic "learning,"
not the imposed kind that gives "learning" a bad sound to many children, and adults)
and they begin to renew and change almost before our eyes.

---

Sat, Oct 14: Slave or Free, Breathing, Feldenkrais and the Impossible

20 BREATHS, AGAIN
This is hard. To simple follow my breathing for twenty breaths. To do this when I’m grinding my morning juice (wheat grass and apples, a gobs of fallen apples from all the trees I’ve planted years ago in the Garden Park). To do this when I’m awake in bed in the morning and not quite ready to get up.

To do this and type words into a computer, that is beyond me just now.

Merely, to follow my breathing as I type these words, that’s big one, that creates a huge shift. But to get up from the computer, walk to the front door and back and count and follow my breathing, let’s see if I can do that.

Yes. I can. Five breaths.

Walking is one of the best activities for following and counting the breathing, my breathing, my life, this is my life, am I worth paying awareness to, am I worth that price?

Or am I going to remain shackled and enslaved by the “normal” life of words and worries and preoccupations?

Free or slave.

That’s all that’s at stake.

Hmm. One, two, three.

Let’s see if I can count up to three breaths while writing away just now on this computer here. Even that is “hard,” and “hard,” is part of what the Feldenkrais work is all about: making the impossible, possible.

And what’s the first step in that?

Break things down.

Get interested in the process, not the accomplishment.

Slow down. I have to type a lot slower to count my breathes while typing. And even then it is “hard.”

But when I reign my attention back to breath and count and these words all at one, the project is “hard:” in that very exciting way of how we are when we are on the cusp of learning something we have never been able to do before.

The impossible.

This is impossible, counting my breathing and typing at the same time.
Is that true?

No.

One. I start a sentence and it moves along. I breathe out and then, two, I breathe in. Three, surely that’s cheating to type out the numbers as I go.

One. The “cheating” is what , two, we learn when we get smart to the, three, Feldenkrais Method. One. To do things, two, in the non habitual way, three, so often seems like cheating.

One, no wonder we never change. Two. We have a whole logic set up. Three: do it the way it’s always, one, been done, two, or that’s cheating. Three.

This is fun for me.

Hard. But a little less than impossible.

God only knows, three, how it is for you.

Now I just type when I get to three, three. And again, what do “you” the reader, real or imaginary, three, think about that?

And that too, is at the core of much if not all of , three, our slavery: is the outside approval coming my way.

Lost my count.

Being smart, three, what a lure. To say the smart thing and get lost in the lure of : someone somewhere will approve.

And then, after trying to count the breathing, to simple follow the breath and type is a cinch.

Another Feldenkrais “trick,” to learn something, do this: make it more difficult, do it in a way that is clearly less functional, and then come back to the “natural” way, which will all of a sudden, feel really natural.

One, two three. What a good world.

Ciao.

Marlie Wesner, the Wonderful, the Yoga teacher, the person

Marlie Wesner loves yoga and it comes through, in her teaching and in her practice.

Marlie has been studying yoga since 1981. Her initial training took place in the first thirteen years of her practice within the Siddha yoga ashrams. There she spent 13 summers studying yoga and yoga philosophy with Carlos Pomeda, Douglas Brooks, Sally Kempton and eventually met John Friend the founder of Anusara Yoga in 1989 and has been studying with him ever since. She has also trained with Sarah Powers and Maritza.

John Friend’s emphasis on the heart in yoga shines through in Marlie’s teaching. Moving with Grace is what her classes are about, a combination of heart, mind and body. She brings a love of the philosophy to the mind, a love of life to the heart, and a love of moving and achieving joy in the body through the asanas.

She has a strong dedication to awareness in yoga and the use of Anusara universal principles of alignment as a safe way to learn and expand our abilities

As a Feldenkrais advocate as well, she is interested in movement as a way to understand our body/mind unity, and has a strong dedication to awareness in yoga as a safe way to learn and expand our abilities.

Marlie is as well a master gardener and experienced herbalist and appreciates body use in the real world, not just in the studio. People of all sizes and shapes are welcome in her classes, which are of many levels, from level 1 to level 4.

She has two daughters, ages 22 and 25, and raised them without television and deeply in connection with nature. She loves to eat naturally, to be outside, to garden, to knit, to read, and to chant and be in love with life. Sometimes she even loves the big dufus she lives with, of name Chris Elms.

She teaches Sunday mornings at 9:45, and Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 9:30 AM, as well as, for the time being, Monday evenings at 5:30 PM. All these classes are at the Yoga Community, in Sonoma, California.

All her classes start and end with beautiful chanting, a treat to all with ears and a tribute to her love and thankfulness to life and yoga.

Oct.10: Awareness and Saving our Souls and our Love and the Earth (is that all?)

AWARENESS AND SAVING OUR SOULS AND THE EARTH
Wow. What a title, and we’ve already seen: without awareness of the present, we are more or less missing our lives as we live them. That’s our souls: the knowing and loving and appreciating of our life as it is happening. Happiness, often toted as one of the great blessings of human life, this can come only when we are there with our lives.

Happiness won’t come as we rush off to the Next Thing. Happiness can be recycled, in a sweet story of a nice or wonderful or an amazing time in the past, and even here, even here the happiness is the inner glow and smile and satisfaction that comes here and now from the vibrations the story sets off in us.


LOVE:
Awareness can save our souls this way, too: it can lead us back to love. Recall almost any argument we’ve had with someone we so-called “love.”

Here are some characteristics of the argument:
• We don’t look at each other as we argue.
• We say hurtful things.
• We try to make the other person wrong.
• We use a tone of voice or shouting, or both, meant to imply that the person to whom we are snarling is a very bad and worthless and small person indeed.

These don’t seem like the way to love, do they? And what is the not looking at each other about? First, it’s a way of avoiding knowing with whom we really are. Most deep arguments are a rehash of an old issue, and by not looking, our unconscious can keep alive some vague idea of slugging it out with Mom or Pop or whatever we are deeply angry at. Also, by not looking, we can avoid knowing the pain we are inflicting, being selfishly engaged in our own pain.

So how can awareness save us from this? How can it not?

By looking at the person in the moment, we see the one we are really with.

By seeing the pain on their face we can see the results of how we are talking and acting.

By listening to our own voices in the moment, we can realize how hateful and hurtful we are being.

By listening to our words as they come out, we can realize that these words could just as well have been said about ourselves.

By sensing inside ourselves at how tense and devoid of breath and joy we are making ourselves, we have a huge incentive to just shut up, calm down, breathe, relax, take turns talking and listening, and find out what we really want: which is to be back in love again.

And what of the other way of avoiding love in a relationship, the taking each other for granted, too busy to give real attention to each other route? This is better than fighting and hurting, and it’s still not love. It’s convenience. It’s a business. And to come to the present, to really look, to really touch, to really listen: ah, then we can come back to the love that brought us together.


SAVING THE WORLD
This is actually very simple. When we are present, all we need is a good book, or a pleasant stroll, or a plot of ground on which to garden, a walk on the sidewalks or in the woods, a conversation of real listening and sharing.

With that, we don’t need to consume stuff that is made by consuming the earth, don’t need to rush off in our cars to go somewhere else. We are happy here, we are happy now, and that’s enough.

Following the breathing and feeling our footsteps as we walk, and actually listening to other people as they speak and being happy to be alone since being alive is such a love on its own: we don’t need all the extras. We can slow down. We can enjoy life. Simplicity and presence and love and awareness is enough.

Mon. Oct 9 : Awareness and Unawareness

AWARENESS AND UNAWARENESS
One of the annoying things about living in Berkeley in the seventies was the therapists and spiritualists crowd. They were, well hell, we were always going around doing weird things like this:

How are you?

Fine.

You’re just saying, fine. I think the way you are holding yourself shows that really you are angry.

No, actually, I’m having a nice day.

Well, that’s what you think, but underneath it all I sense a lot of unconscious anger.


This could go on and on, until finally, the formerly “fine” person would explode at being harassed and then voila!, the proof, that person had been “unconsciously angry” all along.

That being said: we are unconscious a lot and people do a lot of things without thinking or knowing what they are doing. The most obvious, once you start to look, is which shoe you put on first. We have a leg we stand on more and that leg goes second into pants and that foot goes second into shoes.

But there are habits of holding our breath when we are “trying” something a little out of our league. Or holding our breath when we are rushing something. And if we are rushing a lot of things a lot of the time, we could be, unconsciously, holding our breath a lot of the time.

We can unconsciously get in our car to drive a few blocks, especially the folks in this small town of Sonoma, where everything is within an uncrowded mile on two of everything else. Get in our car without really being aware, without noticing that we are missing the blue sky, or the feel of our feet as we walk, or the balancing and leg powered speed of a bicycle.

We can unconsciously shut ourselves inside all day, even though we could be getting out for a break now and then, or for a nice walk, or putter in the garden. Some people have a creature that is more natural than adults have become and these creatures: dogs on their leash, babies in their strollers, drag the big people out of the indoors.

We can unconsciously turn on the television, or the radio if we are in a car.

Reading, man, that’s one with me, pick up a book or a newspaper, and I’m eating words, and all awareness of my breathing or my arms and legs or my orientation to gravity, bye bye being aware of now.

So what’s this mean?

Are we bad if we are unconscious?

Nah, it just means that we are unconscious if we are unconscious. And if we were strolling down the street, unconscious of our walking because we were transfixed with the clouds, that would be one thing. But to roar across town in our cars, yapping away on a cell phone, or thinking with worry about what we are going to say when we get wherever we are going, that’s another, rather sadder state of being unaware. To me.

And the sad thing is the only thing: our lives. This is what we are missing. Our lives.

Fri, Oct 6: The Thich Nhat Hahn Meditation, Awareness, 3

THICH NHAT HAHN MEDITATION
This is a sweetie.
Sit, or stand or walk or do the dishes or eat your food.

Don’t talk.

When breathing in, say to yourself, “Breathing in, I relax my body.”

When breathing out, say to yourself, “Breathing out, I smile.”

That’s it. In some Feldenkrais circles “relax” is taken as a vague and useless construct, and this can be substituted:

“Breathing in, I sense and enjoy my body, looking for ease and pleasure.”

“Breathing out, I smile and enjoy the world, looking out for the wonder and miracles of life.”

Something like that. This can certainly cheer up one’s day, as well as keeping one in the present.

Enjoy.

Thurs, Oct 5: Awareness, 2: The Morning Gurdjieff Meditation

THE MORNING MEDITATION, GURDJIEFF STYLE
Sit on a chair or the edge of your bed with your back relatively straight. Close your eyes.

Start sensing your right toes, completely, inside and out, all the bones, muscles, fluid, skin, anything you can sense..

Continue that sensing and add on sensing the rest of the right foot, from toes to ankle, with your attention moving as if in cross section up your foot. Begin to move this way, sensing up your right leg.

Sense the entire right leg, eventually, adding on bit by bit and keep all of this in awareness.

Keeping the right leg in sensory awareness, go to the fingertips of your right hand, and slowly sense your way up to the right shoulder, again, as if in cross section and including all the bones and muscles and fluids and flesh and nerves and pains and delights, include it all and fill in the right arm.

Sense completely your right arm and your right leg.

Keeping these in awareness, start sensing at your left shoulder and slowly and deliciously work your way down to the fingertips of your left hand.

Sense the right leg, right arm and left arm all together.

Keeping these is awareness, begin to sense at your left hip and sense aware and attention your way down to your left toes.

As long as you want hang out with sensing all four limbs as completely as possible.

Then, keeping this inner sensation, add on awareness of sounds coming in your ears. Have a split attention, to the inside of the four limbs, and to the outside sounds coming in.

Then, keeping all this, open your eyes and add on attention to and awareness of reflected light coming into your eyes.

Stand up, go about your day and keep the four limbs in sensory awareness as well as an awareness of sound and light.

Wed. Oct. 4: Awareness ( and Gurdjieff), Part 1

AWARENESS
Awareness is an interesting word. Like nervousness, or anxiety, or fear, or even happiness, it is a noun trying to cover the territory of a living set of feelings and perceptions and doings. Is there such a thing as awareness?

Or is it that we are aware?

Or are we aware-ing?

To say, I have “awareness” makes it a thing, like I am holding a “cat” in my lap. Even the word ”cat” doesn’t go far in giving the reality of this furry, purring, aloof/ demanding creature in our laps, but at least a “cat” seems to be one thing hanging out in one locale. But the “awareness” I have, where do I have that? And how do I know I have that? By awareness of my awareness, perhaps? And how do I know I have that? By awareness of awareness of my awareness, perhaps?

Awhile back, Idries Shah put out a bunch of fine books, including The Way of the Dervishes and The Sufis, and then about three Nasrudin books. Nasrudin is a Middle Eastern character, found in Jewish folk tales as well as Sufi. He is either a figure of wisdom, or a fool, but his stories bring something to light. As in the famous story, of the man, Nasrudin in the Nasrudin stories, outside, looking under a light for his key. And where did you last have the key, asks another.. In my house, says Nasrudin. Then why are you looking under the street lamp? Because there is more light here, replies Nasrudin.

Or the story, also a Gandhi story, or a mother bringing a child to Nasrudin/ Gandhi, asking for N/ G to tell the child to stop eating sugar. “Hmm. This is more difficult than it appears,” says N/G, “come back in a week.” The Mom comes back, child in tow, a week later. “Give me two more weeks.” Back she comes. “Another two weeks.” She comes and N/G looks sternly at the child and says, “Stop eating sugar.” The mother, exasperated, asks, “Why didn’t you just say that the first time?”

“How did I know it would take so long to stop eating sugar?” asks Nasrudin/ Gandhi.

Another fine Nasrudin story: N is meditating by a creek, gets thirsty and commands a goblet of wine to appear in the air, from which he takes a drink. A stunned would be student begs to learn Nasrudin’s secrets. “Very well. You must perform a task. Which do you want? A difficult one or an easy one.” “Oh, the difficult one,” says the eager student. “Big mistake,” says N, “and here’s the task. Build a fence between your house and your neighbors that will let you chickens get into his yard to peck around, but will prevent his chickens from getting in your yard.”

“Impossible,” says the student. “I told you that this might not have been the best choice,” replies Nasrudin.

And on and on.

These books often have strange and fanciful illustrations, some seeming to be barely about the story at all. In one, Nasrudin, getting progressively smaller, seems to appear behind himself, looking forward at himself, over and over and over.

As if I or you or he or she was aware of themselves, being aware of themselves, being aware of themselves being aware of themselves.


So that was why we took a Nasrudin detour. Ostensibly. Perhaps those other stories will come in handy.


The Sufis have an idea that there is another order of reality, an order of which we are not ordinarily aware. Gurdjieff, who followed a great deal of the Sufi Way, states that mankind is asleep and that until we wake up to this condition, we can be lead down any seemingly rosy path to world wars, genocide, wasted lives or ruining of a planet.

He appears to be right.

He also posits a grim alternative, with a seemingly fanciful cause. The seemingly fanciful cause, and who knows, this could be a metaphor for something else, is that as the earth is fed by the sun, so the moon needs to be fed by the earth. And there are two ways to the moon being fed. One is by human beings waking up to consciousness, and that very consciousness, which we haven’t defined yet, feeds the moon.

However, the grim side is that, lacking enough conscious people on earth, the moon is feed by dying creatures, especially dying humans, and in a world full of more and more humans, many of them dying in ridiculous and grizzly ways, his strangle parable seems to contain elements of some sort of haunting truth.


So what is consciousness? What is awareness? Moshe Feldenkrais split the two. One was for knowing where you were in the world when you woke up from your nap or your night’s check out. This he called consciousness. The other, to be aware, was to know the here and now pieces of your ongoing actions. In one book, he speaks of not just going up a stairs, but knowing how many steps you are taking up the stairs. That is awareness.

I’d add, to know, in sensation, where you were on the right foot or left and whether you were breathing in and out and what color were the walls and what sounds were in the room, as you went up the stairs was awareness. Or consciousness in the Gurdjieff story.

Whatever the word: there is the ongoing possibility. We can know, now, which finger is touching the keyboard, which parts of our skeleton are pushing most directly into earth or chair or floor. Whether our breathing is going in or out. What is the shape of our body. Where we are tense and where we are relaxed in this body.

We can know, sometimes, what "thoughts" are floating through or obsessing our brains.

This is the great veil, it appears. The chatter of words, flurrying around in our noggins. Usually, we can only be aware of all this chatter when we make an effort either at inner quiet or at focusing our attention on something real, and then noticing the difference, or the interference, realize that our attention has been chatter bound for the last twenty minutes, or four years.

This chatter is hardly ever in isolation, which is to say, it is not thinking, of the Einstein sort: if I were on a rocket and it shot out a beam from a flashlight then what would….

The chatter is almost always of the rehearsal and complaining and nagging and attacking sort. Attacking ourselves or attacking others. Pleading our case with others. Or demanding that others shape up and apologize or yield to our entreaties or see it our way, or realize how wonderful we are, or at least realize they were wrong for thinking we were so bad, or even more pathetic: a plea that someone stop accusing us of something which we imagine they are accusing us of, and they aren’t.

Which is to say this chatter is around the crux of what Gurdjieff calls our core slavery: our wish for outside approval and fear of outside disapproval.

And here might be a good place to recall the Byron Katie Prayer: “If I had a prayer, it would be: God spare me from ever needing or wanting the approval, appreciation or love of anyone else who isn’t in the mood to give their approval, appreciation or love.”


And here we are back at the Nasrudin chicken story, believe it or not. Because when other people’s chickens get in our yard and bother us, this is other people driving us crazy with being just how they always are: selfish or stupid or ambitious or not interesting in what we are interested in or not seeing things our way. This is the basis of a good life, often: allowing the “failings” of other people to be their business and not taking it personally.


And what has this got to do with being aware?

Everything.

We can be saints, and let other people go because we are so full of love and compassion, we see how much they are suffering from their nonsense. Or we can withdraw our attention from the world of concepts and judgments (the outside streetlamp) and come into an awareness of the present moment (inside our own house), and then we don’t have room inside the old noggin for all that torturous chatter. We can figure out how to stop eating the sugar of blaming and demanding other people and come home to this breath and this movement and this sensation.

To be aware is to be present. That’s enough. It seems so little. It’s not.

Big Picture, Pain and Beyond, with the Video Bigger Right Below

PAIN, FELDENKRAIS AND WAKEUP FELDENKRAIS, THE LURE AND THE WAKE UP
This video is short and sweet and smart.

It shows clearly how the Feldenkrais Method is a system of learning to connect the mind/brain and body back to being what they always were and forgot: one system. The way out of pain is not to shove through, nor is it to manipulate from the outside. Nor is it even to manipulate from the inside with some well meaning set of physical therapy “exercises.” Nor is it, and this will get me in trouble at home, to use “yoga therapy” to get “correct alignment.”

The Way Out is the Way In.

To go inside, go slow, and reconnect, to awareness, and to the way we function when we move as a unity, and the way we move when we learn what is the next stage in our possibilities, this is the way of the Feldenkrais Method.

The Way Out is to discover our habit and to discover at least two alternatives to our habit..

If we always do things the same way we always did, we’ll always get the same results. If we have an organization that is bringing us pain, and we do it a Little Harder, we’ll get pain. If we get a new hip and keep moving the ways that wrecked the old hip, we’ll sooner or later wreck the new one. If we move in ways that tighten and ache our back, and go get stronger in the gym, we’ll just be able to be stronger as we continue to tighten and ache ourselves.

Only when we begin to play with and explore alternatives to our habitual ways of hurting and paining and frustrating ourselves will we come to real improvement, that can lead to whole other ranges of activities.

This is to say that the goal of Feldenkrais isn’t just to undo the pain, make it go away. It’s to lure us into reorganizing and getting into the learning mode, so that we can not only move with more ease, but can do and explore and learn things we’ve been putting off for years and years. More good stuff on this, care of Anat Baniel: Anat on Pain Relief.

Where the goal of yoga often seems to get better at yoga, the goal of real Feldenkrais is to get better at life, all of life, not just the life of dancing and walking and moving, but ALL of life.

The Way of WakeUp Feldenkrais is the way of Awareness

.
It’s the way of the Feldenkrais Method, too, but I’m putting the main emphasis there, because with real awareness, we can begin to really sparkle and transform and glow in our lives.

The pain, in this paradigm, is a lure, just as wanting and wishing to be an even better golfer or tennis player or musician (even if you are already the best in the world) is a lure, a lure into the miracle of coming to the present and being at one with our discoveries and excitements in the moment.

Slowing down and wanting less for the change
because we are so enthralled with the present,
this backing off from the goal, backing back to Now,
enables us to change faster.

Weird but true.

Okay: here’s the big show:
down below.
Don't know how to code it into this page yet.
Oh, well.
Learning is baby step at a time, often.

Enjoy.

What is The Feldenkrais Method®?

One word: Learning.

An Awareness Through Movement® lesson. Photo by Rosalie O'Conner.

Two words: Neural rewiring

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Hey: Want to experience "learning" and "neural rewiring" via a short Feldenkrais Lesson
(via the Anat Baniel Method)?
Then try now, the free intro lesson at

Desk Trainer

A fun little cartoon guy will give you a 5-8 minute lesson
and you can feel better already,
and then you'll have an EXPERIENCE
of neural rewiring and learning.

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Three words: Awareness through Movement

Four words: Learning how to Learn

Five words: Transformation thru slow, aware movement

Six words: Expanding horizons thru Learning and Awareness

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For a List of Many
Fantastic Benefits,
see:
The Glories of Feldenkrais

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The New Website of the Feldenkrais Guild
has excellent routes to understanding this amazing method.

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And:

Here's more of how I point to:
What is the Feldenkrais Method?

One sentence:

• This is a system of mind/body whole self learning
  based on how we learned
  when we were a genius,
  which is to say,
  how we learned to roll over and sit up and crawl and walk and talk when we were babies.


Two sentences:

• This is a way of learning how to learn,
  based on the primacy of movement in life in genera
  l and human life in particular.


• Our brains are set up to learn,
  and moving is the most primary way
  our brains were set into motion (literally and figuratively) to learn,
  and learning by moving with awareness
  is the quickest and sweetest way
  to radically improve almost anything in our lives.


Three sentences:

• We are alive and amazing and
  have a brain
  that loves to learn.


• By going slow
  and minimizing effort
  and looking to reduce unnecessary effort
  and concentrating on the process rather than achievement,
  we can radically improve
  the quality of our movement and our being.


• This work,
  being about learning,
  consists of lessons
  and these lessons can be with verbal instruction,
  as Awareness Through Movement® lessons,
  or touch guided lessons,
  called Functional Integration®


Four sentences:

• A man named Moshe Feldenkrais (1904-1984)
  had a smart and curious nature
  and loved sports and thinking
  and wrecked his knees and
  set about learning how to heal himself.


• He succeeded.


• The ways he discovered involved returning
  to a discovery and playfulness
  as well as understanding that we function as mind/body unities
  and that connection and relationship
  and inner functioning/organization were what brought about change.


• He discovered,
  and created ways for others to discover,
  inner learnings and possibilities of transformation,
  for both "body" and our whole lives,
  that had previously been considered "impossible."


Five sentences:

• Human beings,
  more than any other creature on this planet,
  are dependant on
  learning
  to become who they are in life.


• Some of what we learn is stupendous,
  to walk, talk, play dodge ball, find a mate and
  some of what we learn is "bad habits,"
  ways of moving and interacting and thinking
  and feeling that
  contradict
  our having a rich and full life.


• A man named Moshe Feldenkrais, 1904-1984,
  discovered, in the course of healing his own wrecked knees,
  that by focusing on the learning that takes place in the brain and the brain/body,
  he could achieve spectacular results
  in people as varied as children with cerebral palsy
  and star professional basketball players
  or world class musicians.


• Freedom from being stuck
  in habits and patterns that aren't working,
  can be achieved by
  learning OPTIONS
  in ways we move, think and go about living.


• This system can seem "slow,"
  because it focuses on the little places
  that are missing in our inner connection and awareness,
  and yet, because it fills in these missing areas,
  is much "faster" at achieving
  real and organic and long term improvement
  and transformation.
  

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An Awareness Through Movement® lesson. Photo by Rosalie O'Conner.


Here's my winter 2007 update on a brief view of
What is
THE FELDENKRAIS METHOD

The Feldenkrais Method® is a system of mental and physical (and by extrapolation, emotional) improvement based on discovering natural and easy and efficient and pleasurable ways of moving our human mind/bodies. The mind and body are not seen as separate in this system, and the core of improvement comes from awareness, exploration and the discovery of new and non-habitual ways of learning and problem solving. This system was invented by Moshe Feldenkrais (1904-1984) an Israeli physicist, engineer, biophysiologist, educator and judo master, who, in curing his “incurable” knees, found that his discoveries in engaging the nervous system in learning how to learn and integrating ourselves as a whole organisms could help people in many levels.

These levels of improvement can be viewed as subsets of Moshe’s famous definition of the aim of his work:

“Making the impossible possible; making the possible easy; and making the easy, elegant.”

Thus this work has many years of being useful at one level, that of severe limitation, say cerebral palsy or stroke recovery; and at a second level, that of helping people with aches and pains (back, shoulder, hip, etc.) recover their prior mobility; and at the third level, of making the good even better, for artists, athletes and musicians and other high performers who wish to enhance an already excellent state of activity.

The discovery, learning and awareness that are emphasized and developed throughout this work give rise to a view of possibilities far beyond “bodywork.” Once the practice of impossible to possible to easy to elegant becomes repeated over and over, a sense of opening of horizons and possibilities in many areas of life is a common occurrence.

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And here's what some others have to say. It's a big system, kind of like ( in many, many ways) answering the question:
WHAT IS LIFE?

Learning How to Learn copyright 1997, by Dennis Leri, my Feldenkrais Trainer. Maybe read this one first.

The Legacy of Moshe Feldenkrais by Anat Baniel

What the Feldenkrais Method Is and What Does it Do? via the Feldenkrais Guild

Overview, on the Guild Site

Felden What?, by Larry Goldfarb, PhD

Overview by MaryBeth Smith

Walking on Volcanoes a poetic exploration of the Feldenkrais Method by Lynette Reid

and

How Long Does is Take? by Gabrielle Pullen

Here's some prior, longer versions I've written over the last couple of years:

Who was Moshe Feldenkrais?

A New Way of Learning: What Is, Possibilities and Feldenkrais

Feldenkrais and our Big Self

Intro Number Four: Learning as the Core

Intro Number Two: The Elusive Obvious, Movement is Central to Life

Feldenkrais Work as Science, Judo, Learning

Feldenkrais and Judo and a little history

What is the Feldie Method, Differentiation and (always) more

If you do a blog search of SlowSonoma.com on Feldenkrais, you
are bound to find many more essays.

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I offer lessons
Sometimes in the group format called Transformational Movement Lessons
or Awareness Through Movement Lessons.
(Next Class: March 18- April 8, 4 Sundays, Noon-1PM,
at the Yoga Community, $52 for the series, or
$20 drop in)

And always available are lessons
in a one to one format called
Functional Integration®.

In Functional Integration lessons, you lie, fully clothed, on a comfortable and firm low table while I move you with extreme gentleness and precision.

This is not massage. Not physical therapy. Not chiropractic oriented.
Not body work.
This isn't about "fixing."

This is brain food, and body learning, and heart food, and soul food.
This is about transformation

This not only feels great, but provides opportunities for your mind/ brain/ body system (i.e. you) to learn new
and
easier
and
sweeter ways of functioning.

These new ways not only
begin to undo and transform stress
and our old habits of tensing and contracting and limiting ourselves,
but
you begin to function in better ways
in other areas of your mind/ body
and your life.

This work is transformational,
enjoyable
and almost miraculous.
You deserve this, I believe.

My training consists of the "normal" 160 days
to become a Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner
and
an additional 126 days of training
including 49 with Anat Baniel
and
years of training in Gestalt, meditation,
nature centered healing, hypnosis, and more.

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The initial commitment will be for at least 4 lessons.

The rate is $100-160 per lesson. $70-130 per lesson if on consecutive days.
Thursday morning is a low income, low fee clinic, lessons are $40-60.


Give yourself the gift of improvement,
from fair to good
or
good to great.

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Call for an appointment 707-996-1437

Or Email me


Thanks, and I hope this is a beginning of a wonderful transformation in your life.

Chris