The Power of Feldenkrais, Plus Ananda Yoga

The Feldenkrais Method, and Wake Up Feldenkrais
is superb at this:
allowing us
to come to the moment,
allowing us to train
and improve our awareness,
our brain,
and alongside that:
our grace and ease
in moving.

Yoga, of the traditional sort,
is pretty good at giving us
a guiding path of
how to place of bodies
in positions
that allow us to feel more full
of life,
a little more flexible,
more in tune
with how great it is to be in a body.

Ananda Yoga,
with an emphasis on affirmations
that accentuate and hone the poses
into arrows of direction,
directing our energy in
and up the spine
to our brain,
directing our attention
to higher emotions
(One, for example is,
"I radiate love and good will
to soul friends everywhere.")
and to
the Higher Nature in either ourselves
or some Higher Spirit (God??)
in the Universe.
(for example:
"With calm faith,
I open to Thy light.")

So with Ananda Yoga,
with not only have the body
and mental awareness of most yoga,
but we have a deep confirmation
and accenting of
the emotional
and spiritual basis of yoga.

And with a Feldenkrais companionship,
we have a deepening of
the immensely easy
and pleasurable
improvements in
awareness
and thinkng
and moving
that can come from a system based
on learning and discovery
rather than that old trap
of "Doing it Right."

the mirracle of life

Ananda Yoga

Yoga Training

I'm in a yoga training at the Ananda Community in Northern California.

Many daily essays about this are sneaking through at slowsonoma.com.

It's a long story,
and fairly interesting because this style of yoga,
Ananda Yoga,
emphasizes bringing energy into and up the spine in
meditation to open "higher consciousness."

All a bit or a huge batch suspect in the Feldenkrais world,
but that's okay.

What's interesting from the Feldenkrais perspective
is how little
even in a fairly astute
and definitely not
of the huff and puff
and strain
school of yoga,
how disconnected
these smart, wise folk
are from the human organism
as a work of art
as a functioning organism,
not so much bone and muscle,
but paths of movement
and modes of learning.

That's actually all I'm going to say
today,
except they keep talking about stretching
muscles.

What is so hard about perceiving a muscle
as something either long and at rest
or working and contracted.

If contracted, it doesn't stretch to get long,
it stops contracting.

If a muscles is chronically contracted,
yanking (aka stretching ) it can only
tear it.

If it can be coaxed into stopping it's chronic
contraction
by the many amazing techniques of our method,
then the muscle
1, has more length over which to shorten when it does,
giving it more power
and
2, stops wasting time in efforting to chronically contract.

Less waste means more energy
for us
and less pain.

Nice.

Freedom

We have habits.

We put one shoe on first.
We put one leg into our pants first.

We hold our breath when trying something
"new"
or
"hard."

We have certain habits of how
we move
and what parts of our pelvis
and ribs
we bring to the party
and whta parts we leave out

we have habits of straining
and stressing and forgetting
about learning,

habits of getting lost
in "how does it look"
to others,

habits of being too much in
a hurry
to slow down enough
to sense and be aware of ourselves
in this wonderful
amazing
moment.

WakeUp Feldenkrais is about coming beyond
these habits,
to learning,

learning not only to move
with more ease
and variety

but learning how
to go about learning
to re-invent
and transform ourselves
by one easy and elegant
creation of options
beyond the confines
of old habits of moving
thinking and feeling.