Humans and Learning: Our Core Activity, Maybe

Adults learning in a Bones for Life class.

HUMAN BEINGS
Human beings start out as babies. You and I started out as a baby. We knew hardly anything. We didn't know A, didn't know B, didn't know language, didn't know how to touch our nose, didn't know how to deliberately move our toes. We were more or less a blob.

We lay there. We knew how to curl up, the famous "fetal position," having, as that time in our just born lives, spend most of our "life" inside the dark, warm tropical waters of Mom. We knew sounds, but light was new. We knew movement, but gravity was new. We knew ????, who knows what we knew, and breathing, ah that too was new.

Light.

Breath.

Gravity.

Learning all about those. Learning how to bring our hands deliberately to our mouths, how to grasp something, how to move our eyes and focus and find where the voice and sound is coming from. Explorations in gravity, lifting this part of us and that, learning to roll over, which always means pushing off against the floor or Earth. Learning to lift our head as we lie on our belly, which means getting muscles in our back (and pushing the belly into the ground), which means learning to bring our head to vertical, which means beginning to shift our gaze right and left from an upright head.

Rolling around.

Messing around.

Learning.

All sorts of learning. Somehow we are fed. Learning who does that, and when and how it comes about. Being held, hopefully, picked up for feeding, picked up for love, cuddled for the joy of it, carried for the usefulness of it. As we are carried we feel our body moving, we feel the big body moving, we learn things, about our spine, about the Earth and the force through the spine of the one holding or carrying us, we learn our edges, we learn to be in contact. We are always exploring.

Always learning, and sleeping. And playing.

It's a wonderful life, but someone has to do it. The babies, the babies we were, this is how our life starts.

We learn a lot. Each little bit helps us learn more complicated things. We push down into the floor or the Earth with our hands, with our feet, with our elbows, with our chests, with our backs.

Learning, learning, hundred of things we are learning about how to move the fingers and toes, and arms and legs and neck and chest and spine and pelvis. We don't have many muscles in our arms. Our pelvis has the big muscles, so we use them the most. We are "centered." We are "grounded," and then one day, we put together 30 of the several hundred things we know, and we are crawling, zipping across the room.

Why do we crawl?

To meet in inner "developmental stage?" No.

To be like the other people? No. They are walking or sitting around.

To please the Big People? No. Later, walking will be an ego trip for some of them when we Achieve that, but crawling, nah, that's our game.

We don't copy. We don't know we are going to crawl, and then we do. Why? To get across the room or the yard or the dirt quicker. We've got important sticks to pick up, or cats to grab, or fallen cherries to put in our mouths. We crawl to expand our living.

This is why we keep learning. To expand our horizons. And for the pure joy of it. Learning is what we were designed to do.

This is why a life without learning is a life on the way to dying.

This is why the explorations and small movements and new configurations and delight in awareness and discovery of the Feldenkrais Method® are so good for keeping us young and vital and able to expand in all sorts of areas in our life.

Good.

Learning, Play and Love

LEARNING, PLAY AND LOVE
Okay, here's the thing:

I'm interesting in giving people a chance to tap back into the way they learned when they were very young, when they transformed themselves from blobs into crawling, walking, sitting up, rolling over, talking beings.

This didn't come about by getting in balance.

This didn't come about by "relaxing."

This didn't come about by "going with the flow," unless the flow is a flow of life, a flow of playing around, a flow of messing around, a flow of discovery.

The flow of life: to learn, to create new and more complex and interesting and fun possibilities.

When I talk to a new client, or an ongoing one, I always ask: What's good in your life? What do you want to improve in terms of physical moving and functioning? What do you want to improve in terms of your whole life?

Because once you can make small and clear and amazing chances, you start to realize that the sky's the limit, that all sorts of changes, and even miracles can take place.


This work is about playing and learning and love. Those are what distinguish this from yoga, which does help strengthen and occasionally points toward love, and sometimes even involves play, but the emphasis, over and over and over is The Right Way to do something. There probably is a Right Way to crawl, but a child never learns this by having someone show it: here do it this way, it's the Right Way. The child discovers. The child uncovers, uncovers how its own muscles and brain and skeleton can skedaddle across the floor most easily in crawling.

The learning is by sensing and discovery. That's real learning.


And if this way is about Play and Learning and Love, what are the means?

Going slow, deepening awareness, honing to pleasure.

Slow, awareness, Pleasure, and add variation, which is what keeps it from getting boring, and keeps the learning alive.

Doing something slow enough to be able to try out new and unique and different paths of actions.

Being aware, so it's not just mindless movements. Brain research has confirmed: Movement + attention grows cells in the brain. Movement without attention has no affect.

Pleasure means the life is rewarding you for being here, for being now, for doing this in a way that feels good. That's why we were given pleasure, not to go on hedonistic binges (though those are useful once in awhile), but to bring our awareness to when we are living in a way that is clear and true to our real natures.

Variation keeps the awareness interested, keeps the pleasure in the momement, keeps us learning instead of grinding away at something we already know.

This is about Life, which is why it's about Love: it's about loving life enough to learn to be more fully and joyfully skilled and involved in living our lives.

Play, learning and love via slow, aware and pleasurable. Yes .

---

PLEASE BE WELL:


Pleasure
Ease
Awareness
Sensitive Strength
Enjoyment

BE

Waking up to now.
Embracing Change.
Learning to learn.
Loving to move, improve and transform.

Nature, Big and Small

NATURE
We are part of Nature and we are a living Earth unto ourselves. What does that mean?

We can take a walk. The sky above, pleasure for our eyes, food for our lungs. The Earth below, something solid to move our walk forward, a place to get literally "grounded." Trees to give us pleasure, and oxygen, and maybe food, and often shelter for our flying and insect and other wildlife friends. The ocean to cool us and inspire us and evaporate water to the skies to create the rain and snow that we and the plants use to drink and stay alive.

Nature outside.

Nature inside is our bones and our nervous system, a brain that loves to learn and can sometimes get in a rut. This is our life. This is us, we can be aware of legs and arms and spine and eyes and ears and nose and mouth.

We are something like a little Earth unto ourselves. We have the rivers and the air in us, we have the solid and the liquid and the gas, we have electricity and we have this quality that is harder to pinpoint out in nature: awareness.

Animals, of course, have awareness, but this awareness is not like a river, not something you can see or touch or taste.

And yet it is core to who we are and what it means to be human, and for many creatures on Earth, what it means to be alive.

And why do I talk about this Big Nature out in the world, and this smaller, and equally amazing Nature we carry around in ourselves?

I talk about this because I enjoy and find useful the idea of Now, Nature and Love. Actually, I quite love this idea.

And sometimes connection to Nature means the obvious: get up off this chair, leave behind the computer, go to a door, open, walk out into the sky, find a place where my feet can walk that isn't paved, breathe the air that the trees and winds can provide.

And sometimes, inside, I can tap into awareness of being in this body, in this now, and notice my breathing, or my seeing, or the sensation of having a skeleton and arms and legs and spine. I can notice the rise and fall of my belly as I breathe. I can hear the sound of keys clicking as I type this into the computer. I can notice the weight of my body of my Sitz bones as I sit in this particular chair at this particular time.

I am alive.

You are alive.

When we sense that and are aware of that in our bodies, right now, we have also come back to a real time connection with nature.

This is good, I think. How about you?

---

PLEASE BE WELL:


Pleasure
Ease
Awareness
Sensitive Strength
Enjoyment

BE

Waking up to now.
Embracing Change.
Learning to learn.
Loving to move, improve and transform.

Feldenkrais as Brain Work

FELDENKRAIS AND MOVING AND THE BRAIN
I'm reading now, Train your Mind, to Change your Brain. It's a lovely tour of all the "new" discoveries in brain research, pointing more and more to our brain's ability to create new neurons, create new pathways, create a whole new way of perceiving and functioning in the world.

This is what the Tibetans and Buddhists have known for centuries, and the book is build around the explorations being held over the years between the Dalai Llama and western scientists, especially scientists in neurobiology and the fields around it.

Gone, gone, gone are the ideas that the brain is hardwired. In rats, monkeys and people, new brains cells can grow throughout life. Of course, if you do the same old thing, the brain can just scoot along the old pathways and everything is the same: living in the rut, literally.

When a researcher at Cal took rats breed to excel at mazes home, he noticed that with some handling and more varied environment these home rats seemed to thrive. They ran the mazes better. Their brains increased in size by 20%.

Moshe Feldenkrais(1904-1984), years ago, was telling people not to believe their diagnosis, but to start with what they could do, and in small and novel and non painful and highly aware ways, expand from there. And the crippled learned to walk, and the severely retarded ended up getting two Master's Degrees, and the stroke victims came out of their comas and went on to living and moving better than they had before their stroke.

From that back pain and shoulder trouble is a simple puzzle to solve.

And to excel at something someone is already good at, yoga or skiing or tennis or golf, this too, is wonderfully easy once this Way is understood not as body work, but brain rewiring.

The brain was meant to learn how to do things in easier and more elegant ways. Watch a baby going from awkward and extremely limited to a runaround yap-yap little tiger a couple of years later. This is the learning I speak of when I say the core word to explain this Way is Learning.

We aren't talking the boring learn from books learning.

We are talking the kind of learning when you finally learn a tennis serve, or first make love, or understand how to do the crow pose in yoga. This is learning that requires a core understanding in our deeper selves.

This is real learning.

This is brain food.

This is fun.

Come give it a try.

---

PLEASE BE WELL:


Pleasure
Ease
Awareness
Sensitive Strength
Enjoyment

BE

Waking up to now.
Embracing Change.
Learning to learn.
Loving to move, improve and transform.

Awareness and Attention, and ....

BEING AWARE
It's easy to say Awareness. Just as it has become a cliché to say, the Here and Now. One of life's sweet ironies is that you or I can say Here and Now, and just be chattering along in robot mode.

Which is to say, we can be saying Here and Now, and nodding our hearts and heads vigorously to the idea, to the faith, to the Way of Being Present, and all the while not be present.

Dang.

If we could just mutter: Be Here Now, and we were here now.

Of course, the words might awaken in us a realization that this is possible and might well encourage us to examine: am I here, right now. Am I Aware of myself in this moment?

And how can we tell?

It seems as if thinking about being present should give us good points in that direction, Brownie points, good little boys and girls points, to be sure, but what is the flavor of being aware?

I went the other day to visit a Feldenkrais® Training. I'm already a Practitioner, but after you've done your four years and 160 days of training, there is still plenty more to learn and to relearn and to re-view. So the trainings have a policy of allowing practitioners to drop in at half price and re-experience whatever is being taught. As in all trainings the combination is moving with attention lessons, and moving other people lessons and the theory and ideas behind this all.

This particular day, Dennis Leri, who was my primary trainer in my 160 day program, was the guest trainer in another program that was very near its final weeks. He brought up the distinction between attention and awareness. According to him, this was an important distinction for Moshe Feldenkrais.

(If you wish, see perhaps, Dennis' website, Semiophysics, its series of articles on the influences on Moshe Feldenkrais, from Judo to Gurdjieff to engineering and Darwin, some a bit challenging to read at Mental Furniture, and his quite amazing article on the core of the Feldenkrais Way, a copyrighted article Learning How to Learn.)

So let's see if we can experience the difference between attention and awareness. Right now, in the famous and elusive and always available (no extra charge, though usually extra effort required) Here and Now.

Here and Now we can shift our attention into sensing our right hand. We can feel the bones, the shapes of the fingers, the warmth or lack thereof, the general muscle tone, the feelings of nerves and blood and whatever else might be in there. The quality and specificity of our sensing might vary greatly from person to person and from day to day, but basically, we can do this (Now): sense our right hand.

And now we can do this. Shift our attention from in our right hand to inside our left hand. Sense our left hand.

This is a shift, this brings us into the present: first sense our right hand and then sense our left hand, and we can even go back and forth.

Very often in Feldenkrais lessons, a little movement goes a long way to helping to interest and hence focus our attention, so we could, say, first not only sense our right hand, but move slowly our thumb and little finger together and apart. We could do this a number of times.

Then we could rest and remember what that felt like and imagine doing this in our left hand.

Then we could begin to move our left thumb and left little finger together.

All this we can do with our attention.

What then is awareness?

Part of awareness, as I understand it just now, is a Knowing that we are Doing Something when we are Doing it. So as we sense our right hand and move the thumb and pinkie, we are aware of ourselves as a larger unity and we are aware that this is one of the things this larger unity (our ME) is doing.

We might even be aware of a sense of This is Me, doing this, as we move slowly our thumb and pinkie.

Why do I keep saying slowly?

Because once we start to crank something out, we often lose both attention and awareness.

Anyway, back to awareness: we move our right thumb and our right pinkie together and apart. We notice this. (Awareness). We stop. We notice how our hand feels when we stop. (More awareness.) We imagine doing this on the other side. (Another kind of awareness.). We try it out on the other side. (More awareness).

And on top of all of this, we can be aware of our awareness.

This is pretty cool, I think. But, you might protest, thumbs and pinkies are no big deal. Well, tell that to someone who's had a stroke, or wants to improve their guitar or piano playing. Or wants to improve their awareness. Anything that helps us know ourselves as alive right now and knowing what we are doing and feeling and thinking and sensing right now, is a rightful tool on the path to Awareness.

And what good is Awareness anyway?

Stay tuned, it might be good for lots.

---

PLEASE BE WELL:


Pleasure
Ease
Awareness
Sensitive Strength
Enjoyment

BE

Waking up to now.
Embracing Change.
Learning to learn.
Loving to move, improve and transform.

Happiness Now

HAPPINESS NOW
When's a good time to be happy?

Well, right now, that's a great time.

And if we are honest with ourselves, we'll see that we often are not so kind in when we allow ourselves to jump into that golden place.

No, first we have to do the dishes, or get the work done, or make the bed, or avoid making the bed, or make "enough" money, or "finish" whatever important "thing" we need to finish so we can stop worrying about getting done whatever it is we need to finish.

Does that sound like circular thinking?

Well, it is. Thinking about the "to do" list in the future is a great way to postpone happiness until some later time, which, not so surprisingly, like some rainbow toward which we are walking, always seems to recede into the distance.


Somewhere, over the rainbow, then we could be happy.

What a story? And is that a useful story, or a story to keep us stuck in a life of toiling away?

And what if we are happily engaged in our careers, and our pursuits, and our afterwork meetings. Well, if we are really "happily" engaged, then we aren't putting off happiness. If the career and the pursuits and the meetings are all with the price tag of … Happiness Later, Sorry 'Bout that, then we get to ask:

Is that price tag one we want to pay?

Is that a price tag we need to pay.

Pay. Pay. What do we owe. I've written before about happiness

( Happiness as a Choice),

and happiness now ( Happiness now),

talking about that sneaky feeling as if happiness now was some kind of sin, as if that was too easy, as if we really didn't deserve this.

But that's all a story, this set of words about happienss later and the pursuit of happiness and all that hoey.As the Work of Byron Katie part of Wake Up Feldenkrais behoves us to ask: Is that true?

Because these essays aren't about Feldenkrais per se. They are about Wake Up Feldenkrais. You can cure your back or shoulder or stroke or cerebral palsy, or vastly improve tennis, golf, skiing or yoga. And the deeper goal is to wake up to the moment. This moment, all moments.

And when we are really in the moments, though we don’t' talk about happiness, because chatter about abstract states takes us out of immediate experience, but because we are present, and aren't doing all the habitual things that keep us unhappy, we are back to the amazing default of real life on earth: happiness.

Believe me?

No. Don't.

Find out for yourself.

Experiment. Find the habits and thoughts that make you unhappy, and create variety and options and alternatives. Use the Work of Byron Katie to undermine and find the truth behind our stories. See what's left.

It may well be Happiness Now.

---

PLEASE BE WELL:


Pleasure
Ease
Awareness
Sensitive Strength
Enlightenment

BE

Waking up to now.
Embracing Change.
Learning to learn.
Loving to move, improve and transform.

Awareness Though Movement: Some wonderful things to do in the morning

AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT® ::::::
A BASIC HAPPY MORNING WARM-UP
Key to all the Feldenkrais work, is the increasing of awareness, and the easiest way to do this is to move slowly, and gently, with lots of attention and curiosity.

Lessons either in groups, or one on one, where the primary focus is on verbal instructions guiding movements that led to discovery and ease and awareness are called Awareness Through Movement® lessons.

Throughout this blog, if you following the label Movement Lesson you will find many mini Awareness Through Movement lessons. If you come to my Monday intro class, at the Sonoma Ballet Conservatory, you'll experience them more in depth.
(See Current Offerings.)

Here's a series of movements, that if done slowly and with curiosity and awareness will led you to a richer, more aware and more ease full day.

ROTATION.

1) Gentle rotate your head side to side. In this and all subsequent instructions, go only to 80% of your limit, with 300% of your usual attention and awareness. Try to easily and enjoyable sense, SENSE, sense what is moving in you and how that feels and works.

2). Rest always between movement. Now put the right hand on the left shoulder and the left hand on the right shoulder and gently and easily rotate the center of yourself right and left.

3)Rest. Then experiment: center and head to left and right together, and center and head in opposite directions. Go slow, not to crank out a Twist, but to learn about yourself, about sensing and about pleasure.

4) Rest. Then move the hips in rotation. If you are sitting this can be done by moving the knees forward and back. Do this slowly. Learn about your pelvis.

5). Rest. Then move hips and center and head in various combinations. Go slow. Enjoy. Discover.

FOLDING AND ARCHING

1). Nod your head up and down.

2). Rest. Again put the hands on opposite shoulders. In this configuration nod your center, your ribs and torso and sternum up and down. Less with awareness is 50 times better than more done mindlessly. And safer. And happier.

3). Rest. Now move center and head up and down both together and in opposition. If this is confusing, go even slower and with less effort. Breathe and enjoy.

4) Rest. Now tilt your pelvis up and down. Tilt your tailbone under, bring your belly in and rock on your sitting bones to the back of your pelvis. The push your tailbone out and bring your belly forward and rock on your pelvis to the forward part of your sitting bones. Go back and forth. Wake up the power center, the sexual center, the moving center of you.

5). Rest. Try various combinations of head, center and pelvis is this up and down, folding and arching dimension. ( Want help: come for lessons!)

TILTING AND SIDE BENDING
1) Tilt your head side to side. So that the left ear goes down and then the right ear goes down, as your face and nose stay looking forward.

2) Rest. Put your hands again on opposite shoulder and tilt your middle side to side.

3) Rest. Combine and oppose head and ribs in tilting.

4) Rest. Tilt your sit bones from side to side, once lifting the left side of your pelvis and once the right. Do this slowly, with breathing and ease and awareness. Again, this pelvis is lost to many of us, sadly and with many consequences in painful backs and dull lives.

5) Rest. Try out various combinations of head, center and pelvis in the titling mode.

YOU CAN DO THESE STANDING, LYING, SITTING, DOING A FORWARD BEND, DOING ANY YOGA POSE.

Life is rich and creative is you let yourself be.

( See Movement Lesson for a batch of these mini-lessons in this blog.)

---

PLEASE BE WELL:


Pleasure
Ease
Awareness
Sensitive Strength
Enlightenment

BE

Waking up to now.
Embracing Change.
Learning to learn.
Loving to move, improve and transform.

The Feldenkrais Method® and Rolfing; or Functional Integration® and Structural Integration

ROLFING AND FELDENKRAIS®
Many people have heard of Rolfing and the Feldenkrais Method®. Many more have not. Or, as I like to say, optimistically: not yet.

A lesser number know the names Ida Rolf, who, it is quite clear, is the founder of Rolfing. Likewise little known is the name Moshe Feldenkrais, the founder of the Feldenkrais Method. Ida Rolf at least has the advantage of one name that is vaguely familiar, whereas those of us who have completed a Feldenkrais Training, and become a Feldenkrais Practitioner, have to endure endless, Huh? responses to the name Moshe Feldenkrais and the work. Though this is changing and a surprising number of people have heard of Feldenkrais, rhymes with nice.

Rolfing involves a series of lessons, often ten, done with the client lying on a table. The lessons have been associated with deep and sometimes "painful" work, but the word is out, that this has changed greatly. The goal of the lessons is in their title: Structural Integration. The structure of a human body in relationship to gravity can be greatly improved, according to rolfers, by deep and clear work in the myofascia in a way to clear out stuck and structurally inappropriate patterns.

Many successful outcomes have resulted from Rolfing.

See, if you wish, Wikipedia on Rolfing and Wikipedia on Structural Integration).


FOR FUN
THIS IS WHAT THE FELDENKRAIS® GUILD,
bless their hearts,
minds
and learning centers,
has written
in their PRESS RELEASE on
Rolfing®, Structural Integration and the Feldenkrais Method®.
Check that out,
if you are in the mood.



The Feldenkrais Method has two modes to improving human life, one, called Awareness Through Movement®, involving lessons wherein the student moves in aware and deliberate and curious and usually slow and often novel patterns, and from these "lessons" learns more about how to move and function in the world and in their movements in new ways. These so called Feldenkrais Exercises can be useful to a dancer or a person recovering from a stroke or a child with cerebral palsy or a weekend gardener with a sore back or a professional athlete with an aching shoulder.

The other mode, called Functional Integration, is the Feldenkrais parallel to the Structural Integration of Rolfing.

The work is done by touch guided manipulation of a client on a table.

The touch is aiming to produce a difference in the organization of the client.

However, in Feldenkrais Functional Integration "lessons," we aren't treating, or fixing, or rearranging anything but the wiring in the client's brain. Our aim is to create new pathways of connection and possibilities of movement.

The difference is obvious from the words, Structural vs. Functional Integration helps explain the difference of Feldenkrais from not just rolfing, but good yoga (not flop around yoga or work yourself to death yoga), in that good yoga and Rolfing are both concerned with alignment, getting the best alignment into our human structure.

We move the skeleton and the awareness. We aren't concerned with undoing any tissue.

In fact, it could be said that we say:

the issue isn't in the tissue,
it's between the ears.

In the Feldenkrais Method, we are concerned with function, which is a huge word, and can be anything from lifting an arm that has been laid low by a stroke, to crawling for a challenged child, to skiing better for someone who wants zest back in their life, to being able to run or dance again for another zest seeker. The Feldenkrais path is one of learning, and though we often imagine an ideal path of moving, the goal is not to "correct" or "fix" anyone, but to open up learning and options and possibilities, so that the person, as a learner, can discover easier and more pleasurable and more efficient ways of functioning in the world.

Many successful outcomes have resulted from both pathways of the Feldenkrais work.

(See , if you wish more learning on the Feldenkrais possibilies,
you might enjoy
almost any of the links in my links section to the left.
As starters, why not peruse....

The Feldenkrais Method® in wikipedia

Feldenkrais.com

and my own What is the Feldenkrais Method®? )


Whatever you do,
Please be Well.

---

PLEASE BE WELL:


Pleasure
Ease
Awareness
Sensitive Strength
Enlightenment

BE

Waking up to now.
Embracing Change.
Learning to learn.
Loving to move, improve and transform.

An experiment in Rolling Up to Sit

AN EXPERIMENT IN ROLLING UP TO SIT
1) Lie on your back. Do a sweet and lovely scanning of your entire body. Notice how long your legs feel and what differences there are right and left. Notice the same for your arms. Notice where your spine is touching the floor or earth and where it is not. Notice how you are breathing and what the general shape of yourself is right now. Notice your pelvis and spine and head as a connected line of yourself. Notice the ribs and your shoulder blades. Notice whether you like to notice what is "painful" or what is "pleasant" or just "what is."

2). Roll onto your right side. Bend your legs slightly so you are more or less stable. Put your right upper arm under your head if necessary for your comfort. Now, straighten your upper, left leg down and your arm, left arm up, so they make a line up and down.

3)Now, do this little play around thing, of bringing your left arm and left leg toward each other in front of you and back to neutral, which is straight up and down. Notice how you use your back and stomach to do this.

4). Rest. On your side or back and just notice any differences.

5). Come back to your right side as in 2, and now bring your upper arm and leg back. As with all Feldenkrais play/ learning, and the many essays herein: small is as good as large, slow is much better than fast, and if you aren't aware, you are just a donkey cranking out motion. Go to 80% of your limit with 300% of your usual awareness. Go back with straight left arm and left leg and notice how the rest of you participates in this. Enjoy this. Soften this. Allow any extra effort to be dropped away.

6). Rest on your back and notice differences side to side and in how you are lying now from the beginning.

7) Come to your side again and now combine 3 and 5, so the arms and legs first come back and then forward. Notice our spine and how to use your belly in and belly out to help with this.

8) Rest.

9) Come to your side again. And now, bring the legs and arms as if they were a line, so that as the left arm comes forward, the left leg comes back, and as the left arm comes back, the left leg comes forward. This is fun, and even so, go slow and see how in one position you want to roll toward your belly and in one position your want to roll toward your back. Allow and enjoy this. Feel the deliciousness of this movement.

10) Rest and notice differences, side to side, now from the beginning.

11) Do 9 again, and, as you roll forward with your left arm each time, allow your head to come along with your arm as if your head is going to come along the floor toward your right knee. You can even try gluing your left arm to your left ear as you bring your arm forward and sweep your hand along the ground, get a sense of more and more of a circular motion to this side. Glue your head until it arrives as near to your knee as easily possible and then let your left arm continue a little farther in its circling.

12) Rest. And notice. And enjoy.

13) Now, as you go back to what you were doing in 11, allow your left hand and arm to keep coming toward your legs so far that your head comes near your right knee, your left hand goes on farther than your knee and your left leg keep counter balancing your arm, so that you end in a position where you need only to arch your back at the end of this move and your are up and sitting. THE KEY IS KEEPING YOUR HEAD LOW AS LONG AS POSSIBLE, UNTIL YOU ARE WAY AROUND NEAR OR AT YOUR KNEE. THEN SITTING IS A NATURAL FOLLOW UP. From sitting, think about how to reverse exactly what you did, head going first to knees, and hand along the floor and upper leg in counterbalance, as you come back to your side.


I'll post pictures on this in a couple of days, but for now: try to figure it out just as an experiment you get to completely figure out from within.

Slow Down

In our rush to get so much done,
we forget a minor detail:
this now
right now
is our Life.

One of the sweetest and best ways to
return to now
and our life
is to slow down.

If you've already done Feldenkrais you realize how important this is:

If you don't SLOW DOWN,
you are going to be stuck
in always doing something the way
you always did.

THE BRAIN / SELF CANNOT LEARN
IF WE ARE DOING THINGS FAST,
OR EVEN AT THE
HABITUAL RATE.
(that's the word the keeps
us same old same old:
HABITUAL.)

Habit means
that the action,
like tying our shoes,
has gone on
"automatic,"
which is fine for lots of things,
who wants to re-learn shoe tying
or tooth brushing each day.

But to learn
and hence become more than
what we are now,
we MUST
SLOW DOWN.

Think about doing a rush job
of
learning to
TIE YOUR SHOES with the
opposite string first, in
opposite top down positioning,
and you'll realize it's impossible.

And yet,
when someone gets a system,
that is super powerful,
such as the Feldenkrais Method,
or the Byron Katie Work,
or my evolving
Wake Up Feldenkrais Work,
a system that fascilitates transformation,
(not just remediation)
by slowing us down,
and allowing,
that is ALLOWING US,
TO BE NON-HABITUAL,
the tendency is to rush through,
do it the old ways,
get it over,
feel secure,
and learn nothing.

That feels familiar
and even "comfortable,"
though often this is a miserable sort of "comfort,"
but it is the known.

See today's essay at SlowSonoma.Com
on learning and knowing.
On how,
if we already know it all, we don't need
to learn anything
and can
stay the same.

Alas the age old problem:
we say we want to change
the hell we are in,
but darned if we are willing
to change anything about ourselves
to help this take place.

We want to change
without changing,
and this often means:
rushing through something.

or
( a big favorite, stay the same strategy)
BEING TOO BUSY,
TO HAVE A CHUNK OF TIME
TO COMMIT TO DOING
SOMETHING NEW,
IN A NEW,
AND SLOW
AND TRANSFORMATIVE WAY).

So:
if you are doing yoga
or Feldenkrais
or Desk Trainer:

GIVE YOURSELF 10-40 MINUTES A DAY,
slow down,
breathe,
expand awareness,
do the work with
DELIGHT,
AWARENESS,
JOY,
DISCOVERY,
PLAYFULNESS,
AND NO AGGENDA TO "GET IT RIGHT."

Make awareness the core of what you are doing.

Do the thing twice
do the Desk Trainer twice
do the yoga pose twice
do the Feldenkrais movement "many times."

Slow down
it's okay to feel delicious
it's okay to learn
it's okay to allow the brain a chance to learn
it's okay to allow the new and vital
and real
and enlightened
in you
to have a chance to wiggle up to the light,
and
Shine.

---

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CURRENTLY OFFERING THESE CLASSES

ONGOING POSSIBILITIES:

THE TWENTY TWENTY TWENTY PROCESS
Combine 20
Functional Integration® Lessons
( Amazing, Gentle, Transformative
Individual Lessons)
+
20 Minutes a Day of HomePlay ( not Homework)
=
Move, Think and Feel
TWENTY YEARS YOUNGER!

---

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COMING WORKSHOPS

WONDERFUL RELATIONSHIP
April 29, 12- 6 PM


Amazing Parenting
May 20, 12-6 PM


• Improving Backs, Necks, Shoulders
Sports, yoga, health and Learning
June 17, 12- 6 PM

---

More Details
at
Workshops and Classes, Coming Up

---

---

INTRODUCTORY CLASS:
For the brain
for the "body"
for moving with more ease
for healing
for learning
for fun.

Monday lunch break class
12:30-1:20 PM

$20
includes touch guided and movement lessons
come wishing and willing for transformation
SONOMA BALLET CONSERVATORY
off Broadway
around the corner from the Post Office
and the Art Museum,
the little side street between.

---

For amazing and transformative
and gentle
one on one lessons,
called
Functional Integration®
seeIndividual Lessons
•

---

PLEASE BE WELL:


Pleasure
Ease
Awareness
Sensitive Strength
Enlightenment

BE

Waking up to now.
Embracing Change.
Learning to learn.
Loving to move, improve and transform.

What is the Feldenkrais Method®? and What is WakeUp Feldenkrais?

What is the Feldenkrais Method?

One word: Learning.


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

Two words: Neural rewiring

Three words: Refining Our Awareness

Four words: Learning how to Learn

Four words: Increasing Our Self Connection

Five words: Transformation thru Undoing Stuck Habits

Six words: Expanding horizons thru Learning and Awareness

---

SEE

THE GLORIES OF FELDENKRAIS
FOR A HUGE RANGE OF POSSIBLE BENEFITS

---

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 general
  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.
  

---

Books on the Feldenkrais Way, c/o the Feldenkrais Guild Bookshop

---

See, if you haven't yet:
U Tube Short Wonderful Video on the Feldenkrais Way

---

Or
Wikipedia, on the Feldenkrais Method

---

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What is Wake Up Feldenkrais?

One word:
Feldenkrais®.

Two words:
Waking Up

Three words:
Learnng New Options

Four words:
Expanding joy and effectiveness

Five words:
The Work of Byron Katie

Six words:
Transforming Lives thru Learning and Awareness


See More at
What is Wake Up Feldenkrais?

---

The Feldenkrais Method is a learning system
that
enables people
to transform from
poor to fair,
from fair to good,
from good to great,
from great to greater.

In the words of Moshe Feldenkrais:
"Making the impossible possible,
the possible easy,
and
the easy elegant."


In what?
Traditionally the Feldenkrais Method has been used by
people
who want to improve and transform the
quality of their movement in life,
from a cerebral palsy child who has very little useful movement,
to an adult with a sore shoulder or back,
or someone getting older and frustrated to no longer be able to do some activity they used to love when they were younger,
to someone who
excels
at music, sports, yoga ,
even at a world class level,
and wants to become even more excellent.

It has also been widely experienced
that Feldenkrais work
increases everyday joy,
decreases depression and anxiety,
and can
radically improve thinking
and problem solving abilities.

With an in-depth exploration of this work,
people often realize suprising
and dramatic changes
in their life,
changes they didn't even know
they were hungry to make.

Moshe Feldenkrais:
"What I'm after isn't flexible bodies,
but
flexible brains.

What I'm after
is to restore each person
to their human dignity."

How is this done?

This is a learning system,
and brains learn best when awareness is heightened,
pain is minimized,
interest and curiosity is heightened,
novelty is encouraged,
and pleasure and success are ongoing.

This system is about increasing our options,
in moving, thinking and feeling,
about experiencing,
in real, physical and mental experiments,
how we can be more than we were but a few minutes before.

In the Feldenkrais Method
there are two categories of work, roughly.
One, called
Awareness Through Movement® lessons,

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

involves verbal instructions,
to which a person (often in a group) follows
slow and interesting movements that
heighten awareness,
decrease stress,
increase pleasure and ease in moving and thinking,
and connect us more to our
here and now
physical and mental selves.

For upcoming classes, see Current Classes and Offerings

The other, called
Functional Integration® lessons,
involves touch guided sessions
on a low and firm but comfortable table.
The client/ student is fully clothed
and is moved in
gentle and
interesting and
pleasurable
ways
that reduce pain
and increase mobility,
self confidence, and
leave a sense of a shift to new level of organization.

These lessons are as pleasurable as a massage,
but are for the brain as well as the body,
for the Whole Self, really,
expanding your sense of yourself,
opening new ways of moving,
and thinking,
and feeling.

Opening you to freedom
to begin to become more of what you
really want to be.

For prices and details,
see,
the end of the essay on
Back, Neck, and Shoulder Pain, One on One Lessons

or see the Posting:
Functional Integration, Amazing and Transformative Lessons

---

---

For another option,
of how to understand Awareness Through Movement
and
Functional Integrations,
see:
Feldenkrais.com.

---

---

Contact Phone: 707-996-1437

Email Chris Elms, M.A.

Photo: Luke Mogelson

---

---

You can also try the Awareness Through Movement lessons,
in a mini-form,
via the computer cartoon program
Desk Trainer.
Here the lessons are 5 to 8 minutes long and the first one is free. The program costs $30 per year.

In this very blog
there are lots of instructions for small
and medium length lessons.
Just
click on the label: Movement Lesson
and a batch will come up for you
to read
and have some
learning time.

There are a bunch of articles in this blog,
and at Feldenkrais Guild Articles,
and at almost all the Feldie Sites listed in the sidebar to the left.

See especially the slightly difficult,
but worth the trouble, articles of Dennis Leri, my trainer, at Semiophysics

BOOKS:

The best to start with is Relaxercise
Go to the end of their list of books by practitioners.
Actually, while you're there A Guide to Awareness Through Movement, has detailed pictures and instructions, and
A Busy Person's Guide to Easier Movement
has gobs of short, useful lessons.

Also wonderful,
and with a GREAT explanation of the Method:
Awareness Heals.

Then would come: Awareness Through Movement by Moshe Feldenkrais, himself.

And also by Moshe, and quite wonderful,
The Elusive Obvious,
which is what the Feldenkrais Method is all about. (I.e. We live in gravity. We have two legs. We are tall, cylindrical beings,
and so on.)

CDs and DVDs as well as books, via:

See Feldenkrais Resources.

Achieving Excellence.

Excellent CD on necks, joints, backs, and DVDs on Back, and Special Needs Children:

The Anat Baniel Method.

Contact Phone: 707-996-1437

Email Chris Elms, M.A.

Going from -1 to +3 in ten minutes, or less....

SHIFTING BY GOING SLOW AND AWARE AND SMALL AND SMART

1)
Most people are functioning, but they really don't feel good and happy in their bodies. Sitting in chairs, watching television, worried and full of stress and then exercising either mindlessly or with a sort of punitive self-punishing "it's only real if it hurts" kind of attitude, they are "getting by," "doing okay," "everything's fine."

Ho hum. …. This is the way life is set up for many people.

Little bits can do a lot. Change is near, as near as awareness,
awareness plus very gentle movements.
Gentle movements that require attention, and delight by bringing
us back to our here and now brain/ body/ heart selves.

So: change is near and easy:

If you go slowly and you experiment and are willing to discover
the wonders
of being in this wonder
ful
life.

Throughout this blog there are mini-lessons, or mid-sized lessons, and all have to do with noticing and awareness and self discovery.

2)
a)For example:
Come sit at the front edge of your chair. It's probably best to move it away from your desk.
Now, slowly and with delight in being you,
move your right shoulder slowly forward. See what else of yourself participates. (E.g. ribs, pelvis, eyes, neck, and so on)

Pause in neutral and sense yourself. What has changed? What do you notice?

b) Now move your right hip forward by moving your right knee forward. What else participates?

Can you feel your spine and ribs taking part in both these movements.

Pause in neutral and sense yourself. What has changed? What do you notice?

c) Now try bringing your right shoulder backward. Do this a number of times, slowly and with pleasure. Again, see how
much pleasure and learning you can bring to this.

Pause in neutral and sense yourself. What has changed? What do you notice?

d) Now try bringing your right hip backward, which means you have to shift your weight over to the left hip while you bring your right hip and knee back.

Pause in neutral and sense yourself. What has changed? What do you notice?

e) Now, slowly experiment with both shoulder and hip forward, and both shoulder and hip back.

Pause in neutral and sense yourself. What has changed? What do you notice?

f) Now, slowly, and just little movements are fine to get learning going in your brain:
bring your right hip forward as you bring your right shoulder back (small, small: make it delicate and aware).
Be simple,
move small. Just come back to a neutral.
Do this a number of times,
remembering to breathe,
and look for ease and learning.

Pause in neutral and sense yourself. What has changed? What do you notice?

g) Now, slowly, take your right hip backward, in little
aware movements,
as you bring your right shoulder forward at the same time
and same rate.
Just do this, an return to neutral, a number of times.
Again, easy and aware does it.

Pause in neutral and sense yourself. What has changed? What do you notice?

h) Now put f and g together, moving both ways with both parts.
Shoulder back as hip comes forward
and
shoulder forward as hip comes back.
This is NOT a stretch,
except for the awareness part
of our brain.

It's a chance to learn
and enjoy
and slow down
and reconnect
with skills that will help
lots and lots that you do.

Go slow.

Go small.

Go with discovery and following your breathing.

Pause in neutral and sense yourself. What has changed? What do you notice?
Getting up and walking around
is another very nice way to notice differences
after a lesson.

Enjoy your you-ness, and the new-ness you may be experiencing.

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The Glory of Being Human: Bones, Brains, Gravity, Learning

To be human is a miracle. And we can make our lives even better.



THE GLORY OF BONES AND BEING HUMAN
We have a skeleton.

This is glorious, because with the skeleton we can see from four or five or six feet above the ground, and we can walk, and make love, and plant a garden and move ourselves around in the field of gravity.

Gravity is always there.

I love to laugh at the We Create Our Own Reality people, and say: okay: hold a rock in front of your face and create a reality where the rock doesn't fall toward the ground, eventually. All the tricks of throwing it in the air, and having a shelf under it, still: gravity is there. It's not invented in our minds.

It's part of life on Earth.

That our parents could or should have been nicer, that is a matter for speculation. That we live on a planet with gravity as a daily and constant occurrence

We have gravity and we have two legs.

What does that mean? It means we are less stable than a four legged table or a dog or a horse, or even a three legged stool. We are instable, which means we can move easier than if we were stable.

And another reality is that babies don't know how to crawl, how to roll over, how to bring their hands to their mouths, how to sit up, how to walk, how to talk. A million people can put all the best vibes into the holiest baby in the world, and it's still going to need to learn how to move in the ways of a human.

Which means it will discover gravity. It has no choice. It will discover movement, almost always, and when it starts to move, the baby will start to discover that different ways of moving bring about different results.

The baby learns.

Without learning, human life would stay at more or less the sucking blob level.

So we have gravity, we have two legs, we have two arms, we have a spine, ribs, pelvis, head, arms, legs, hands, feet, toes, fingers, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, tongue, hungers and thirsts inside us, an ability to track inside ourselves (as we learn it) where the arm and hand and leg and spine are. We have muscles that move the bones around.

We have a brain that is learning how to put all this together and crawl across the room.

We don't know we are going to crawl.

We discover this.

This is what this work is about: discovering huge new possibilities that we didn't even know were there and available for us. And we do it like a baby: little steps, lots of learning, lots of play, lots of discovery, no real demand to "do it right," an openness to the new.

We are learning creature, with skeletons and muscles and amazing brains in a field of gravity.

We are, as we grow, amazing creatures for who all sorts of things that we might have considered previously "impossible," (as crawling would be to a two week old baby), can become possible.

The impossible becoming possible, the possible becoming easy, the easy becoming elegant: this is what this work is about, this wakeup feldenkrais work. And it is not just about moving easier and sweeter and more elegantly.

It is about learning how to transform into a larger and more complete being.

This is good work.

This is fun.

This is thrilling.

This is available, to you, to me, to us all. Give a call if you are inspired to change and transform anything in your life.

Learning to Turn, Learning to Learn

LEARNING AND MOVING, TO THE LEFT
1) Sit toward the front of your chair. Both feet on the ground. Breathe and notice how it is to be in your chair and in your body and in your mind. Look around yourself to the left and to the right, as if to see something back there on both sides. See how this feels and how this goes.

2) Come to the center and rest.

3) Put your right hand on your left shoulder and your left hand on your right shoulder. Now turn to the left in two ways: one as if all these ribs didn't matter and turning was just about the head, and after doing that for awhile, turn as if your chest and ribs could help with the turning. Do three times of each way, back and forth, letting the differences be interesting to you.

4) Come to the center, lower your arms, and rest. See how you feel now in your self.

5) Put your hands as in three, though starting with the left hand first. Turn about halfway to the left, and look at whatever is in front of you. Let's call this: The View. Now, gently, slowly, easily and with awareness and curiosity, move your head right and left, while keeping your eyes fixed on The View. So, head moves, eyes stay focused on The View.

6) Come back to the center, arms down, rest.

7) Switch arms, come half way, and now, keeping your head pointed toward The View, let your eyes go left and right to both sides of this.

8) Come to the center and rest.

9) Switch arms again, don't worry if you can't keep this straight, and again go half way. This time, slowly, slowly, slowly, move your head to the left as your arms and chest go to the right (just do a little, this is for the brain, not for showing off to some Inner Critic), and then move your head to the right as your arms and chest go to the left. Do this a number of times.

10) Come to the center and rest. Turn around to look behind yourself to the left and see if a difference is showing up from the beginning.

11) Put your right hand on your right thigh, and your left hand at your left hip. Turn to the left, and as you turn, let your right leg come forward, and your left hip come back, so you are involving your pelvis in turning to the left. Do this slowly and with awareness and pleasure.

12) Come to the rest and rest. Visualize turning to the left with the involvement of your pelvis and without the involvement. See what difference it makes in imagination.

13) Put your hands again as in 11, and turn to the left. Now experiment with two ways of involving your pelvis. In one way, you tense and pull in and tighten your stomach, and in the other you push out and relax your stomach as you arch your back a little while you turn. Do each enough to find the pleasant and easy way to do this.

14) Rest and see how you feel. Visualize your eyes going left and right. Visualize your head and chest going to the left. Visualize your pelvis and back participating.

15) Now, simply turn to look around yourself, both to the left and to the right. Notice how you feel and what you seem to be learning.

16) Come to stand. Walk around and see if you feel different inside of yourself.

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This is a more detailed, and slightly different lesson than the first one in The Desk Trainer Free Intro Lesson

Watch the Baby Show us How Amazing We All Are

U-tube, Helen Elizabeth video of Baby

Moving our pelvis, waking our Life

PELVIS
Elvis moved his pelvis and started a revolution: Ohmygod, white people can move that thing, too.

This is good news: we all have a center and if we are going to be "centered" we are going to connect with that center of ourselves a few inches below the navel.

We have legs.

We have a spine.

Between legs and spine comes the PELVIS.

This makes for many possibilities, in living and moving.

AND LEARNING.

And right, now, this now, now, we can do this:

Notice how we are sitting on our pelvis.

Notice how our spine comes up from our pelvis.

Notice how our legs come out from the "hip" area of the pelvis.

And we can begin to move, learn, improve, delight, unstress:

1) Pushing our belly out a little and rocking a little forward on our pelvis. What does that encourage us to do in our spine and ribs?

2) Bringing our belly and navel back and rocking toward the back edge of our pelvis. What does that encourage us to do in our spine and ribs?

3) And, for the delight and learning of it, many times, slowly, eyes closed, paying attention, rocking back on our pelvis and letting our spines follow into a new shape, and then rocking forward on our pelvis and letting our spines form the opposite shape.

4) Back and forth. And, hey, since this is about learning try these two: One: when the belly goes out breathe in. Two: when the belly goes out breathe out. At first do a bunch of times belly out breathe in and a bunch of times belly out breathe out.

5) Then get fancy and alternate: belly out breathe out, and then belly out breathe in. All the while feeling the shifting in your pelvis and your spine and your ribs and your head and even your feet. Notice the little changes.

This is life, this is learning, this is relaxing, this is undoing stress, this is coming to the present.

This is connecting your self to yourself in sweeter ways.

This is good.

Thinking and Non-Thinking and amazing Video to watch

THINKING AND Non-Thinking
AND:
WHAT MAKES A GOOD LIFE?

On a recent posting at a forum for Feldenkrais practitioners, someone presented a link to a rather amazing U tube video. At first you don't know what the hell is happening: this person is kind of buzzing around and doing "weird" things, touching this, waving her hands through water, flapping of hands, touching things with her face, tasting things, smelling, rocking back and forth, scrapping this and that, creating sounds and rhythms and patterns.

Kind of like the things those of us who used to get stoned found infinitely amusing. To watch water whirling in a sink, or a leaf blowing in the wind, a cloud floating by, a traffic light change, to make a little sound of this rubbing against that, and of course: music in bright and full brilliance.

Okay, the world of immediate experience.

Cool, and sweet, the world behind and before "thoughts," if thoughts are defined as "thinking," which is a tenuous proposition, to say the least.

Then the person, silentmiaow, has a narration of typed and spoken (maybe a machine is doing the "talking") words that explain that she (I think she's a she) has her own way of thinking and in her world, letting herself interact fully with the world physically in an immediate and non-socialized way is a kind of thinking.

And she's quite pissed at being categorized as a non-person because she won't get with talking language. She thinks people should learn her language and much as she should learn theirs.

That makes sense to me.

The language of being a baby, or being stoned, or being "autistic," or being "in a trance," or being "primitive," or being a "mystic," is a quiet language, a here and now language deeper than and free of words, a far more powerful language than the yapping kind. Ask anyone who's had good sex, and a nice dance or ski run.

This is one of the wonders of a good Feldenkrais lesson: people come back to their senses, they follow real movement and real sensation in the real moment.

However when silentmiaow calls her activities "thinking," I'm not so sure. Exploration, yes. Satisfying interaction with reality, yet. But "thinking," maybe not.

And, and, and this is important: what most people call "thinking," is not thinking either. Words are not thoughts. They are symbols that can hold and point to thoughts and usually don't.

Observe most cell-phone or regular phone conversations, or party conversations, or, if we are honest: most conversations: blowing of chatter from one void to the other. Gurdjieff compares talking to the shit of the top brain, where breathing out is poop for the middle level and the real poop is the exhaling of the body level.

Or, if we observe our mental chatter in meditation, or while driving a car (if we don’t' drown it out with the radio and music) or even taking a walk in nature: blah, blah, blah. And no real thinking going on.

One of the reasons I left, many years ago, the therapist crowd in Berkeley to join the building crowd and then the landscaping crowd, is that if you build a deck, you can see you've done something, same with a garden. So much of "therapy" back then, before Jay Haley came along, and then Byron Katie, was just getting words to pretend that they were understanding, and they weren't.

Of course, in a good Feldenkrais lesson, you under stand how to stand better at the end, and the understanding is not verbal and the lesson may well have had nothing to do with standing, and yet something in you has "learned" something.

Does thinking have to do with learning?

Is thinking for helping facilitate learning?

Is learning the result of good thinking?

Is thinking promoted by having something to learn?

For example: you want to stop eating ice cream, but you crave it. Could thinking be something like noticing that ice cream is fat plus sweet and what healthy ways could you make that for yourself.

Eggadds, is "resistance" coming up at the thought of doing something other than a habit we say we want to stop?

Ah, so thinking and learning may well have something to do with going out of old territory, getting out of the ruts, leaving the compulsive patterns behind.

This is a good start for today. Too many words and we'll think we have the answer, when the question seems sweet to me: what is really thinking?

Oh, and back to silentmiaow: to me a life in an apartment and with no connection to nature, doesn't seem worth living, whether as a "talking" person who yammers on the phone and watches TV all day, or an "autistic" person, who waves ribbons around all day.

What I want to know is:

How could this life be bigger and more full?

That seems an important question to me, once she gets over the furor at non-thinking people passing themselves off as thinking people, and wasting their time judging her. She wastes her time judging them. And around the game goes.

Time for The Work, anyone?

Ciao for now:

Chris

The Enemy Game

The Enemy Game, a Sad Illusion:

On the radio just now a fellow is talking of how pleased he is that the Dixie Chicks won a batch of Grammies, and he's going on a bit about how reviled and outcast they were for speaking up against the war.

The same old story: me Good, enemy Bad. Kill enemy, of outcast enemy, or don't speak to enemy, or boycott Enemy's records.

And then yesterday I was reading in the New Yorker about a TV show which I don't watch for two reasons: one, I don't watch any television; and two, I wouldn't really go for a show that shows that increase people's tendencies to hate and think that life will be okay if we just kill enough "bad guys." This is an ancient and sad story, this idea that for good to succeed, lots of energy has to be spent focusing on, hating and killing the so-called "evil." (And yes, every once in a while Hitler comes along and has to be stopped.)

On this TV show, called 24, Kiefer Sutherland plays an anti-terrorist agent who gets to win the hour each and every week, by torturing in some cruel and illegal way the Bad Guy.

And some people love this.

Oh, well.

That's their minds. It's too bad they have a vote, but hatred sells, having an enemy to focus on always has been the way to avoid going inside and seeing what we can delight in and improve in ourselves.
Which brings us to good old Wakeup Feldenkrais.

Things come up. Habits get more and more out of touch with how we could move if we were to move in healthy and easy and efficient ways. And because of these out of tune habits, we get back aches, or carpal tunnel, or neck pain, or get persuaded to have knee or hip operations. And then we can have the enemy to defeat: the pain in the back, or neck or wrists, or hip or knee, or we can have an opportunity to discover what learning is like.

So that's the old way: back pain = enemy, and how can I destroy the enemy.

The the new way? The Wakeup Feldenkrais Way?

To see the back pain as a signal that we have gotten into habits of moving and holding ourselves that are causing a pain in our back. To see this as a great chance to relearn how to use the core muscles inside our brain,
to relearn,
to understand,
to discover,
how a back is not a "back," but 24 separate vertebrae,
and if these vertebrae
and the pelvis
and the ribs
and the eyes and feet and hips
all start to function harmoniously
the way we did when we were a kid

then:
not only will the "enemy" of back ache go away,
but we will rise to levels of grace and movement joy
such as we haven't had since we were young,
or may never have had.

So we are "fixing a back",
we are learnign again how delightful is a life
where learning is at the center.

We get not only improvement in the area of complaint, but we start to get the idea that life is a grand experiment, and that if we explore and learn enough, there is almost no limit to what we can improve and create.

So. If you haven't tried desk trainer yet. you might want to: Give it a go, in their free trial lesson. There in five to eight minutes you can begin to rewire your own brain and experience for yourself the power of learning via movement plus awareness plus going slow in new and interesting ways.

And as you and I go about out days, let's see if we can wake up to the present, and explore different and interesting ways of going about our moving and thinking and feeling.

Ciao
Chris.

Improvement for the Joy of It

IMPROVEMENT
Improvement can be fun. Improvement can be torture. A lot depends on what we are up to, what our motivation is.

Are we disliking who we are and wanting to improve to dispel our self dislike? This seems like a cruel sort of internalization of a parent who is always telling a child they are not good enough, and to "try harder." Alas, in this situation, the harder the child tries, the more the parent, consciously or unconsciously knowing they have a sucker on their hands, raises the stakes and demands more efforts, always lifting the hurdle to approval just out of the child's hands.

This, as an aside, what was happened to me when I got to Caltech, which with MIT, is the premier science and brain college in the country. After busting myself to get perfect grades, that true to the above scenario, were never quite good enough for my parents, I arrived at Caltech only to realize that the ante had been upped hugely. It was a school full of people who'd busted tail to be tops in their high schools, all now busting tail to top each other.

No thanks, I said after a couple of years and went to an easier school.

Back to improvement: there is another kinds besides the striving to be better because we or the internal parent or the real parent or all three don't think we are good enough.

This is improvement because it's fun to learn, fun to learn a handstand or a headstand, or to skip again, or a new language, or a little bit or a lot of playing some instrument, or how to move ourselves more gracefully, or think through problems that baffled us before. It's fun to have new skills and new abilities and new challenges, that we want to rise to for the pure joy of figuring it out and mastering it ourselves.

This is the sort of person I'm looking for as clients. Those who not only want to transform their hurting shoulder or back or neck, but can get excited about improving their whole state of being and moving and relating to themselves and the world.

Those interested in transformation for the joy of being more in touch with and skilled at living and moving and thinking and feeling in life. This is the people I welcome and wish for in my work.

To be small, or to expand

To be free is an interesting matter.

Lots of people have their ideas of what you should do and how you should do it. To ignore all of them, might mean a traffic accident or two. But to spend a life placating and bowing and scrapping so that others and their obsessions with order and control and their inner pictures of the disaster lurking around the corner if things are done a new way: ugh.

We can't live that way.

At least I can't.

:::::::

In the Feldie world, you can find people, even I, sometimes slipping into "doing things the right way," and basically we simply get ourselves out of that trap and move back into the world of discovery.

This is a fine trick, a fun puzzle: how to allow people to understand and use this work, this Feldenkrais "Way" not just to "fix" a sore back or shoulder, but to begin to repattern and reorganize themselves to move more effectively as a body and a body/ brain and as a being in a complicated and sometimes constricting world that seems set up to keep people small and less than they could be.

This work could be about waking up to the vastness of our potential.

I invite you to join in the work in that way.

Life and Love

LIFE AND LOVE
Well, folks, this is one of those late night blogs, where the words either come easily, or not, and we'll discover as we go along how that's going to go.

When you love someone, the nice thing is this: it's about them, and if you really love them, it's really about them and so you are free.

Let's switch the pronouns: when we love we are free. Because why? Because we don't have to be concerned about how we are doing, or are we good enough, or what the other thinks about us: we just think about how great the other is and how much we want them to be happy.

That's love. It's not about us, it's about them.

And in Feldenkrais, if we do the lesson "right," it's about the other person, not about how smart we are, or how connected to them or ourselves we are (though that will certainly help), but about how much they are learning.

A lesson means: the client learns.

And what does the client learn: to move more easily, to connect to themselves in a more full and sweeter way, to be happier and more at ease in their own body. They could learn to like and appreciate the wonder of themselves. They could learn that they have dreams that they've put on the shelf that all of a sudden seem worth dusting off and pursuing. They might learn that it's okay to change, okay to try less hard, okay to pay more attention, that it's wonderful to be present, that it's sweet to pay attention to themselves.

Which is to say: they can be learning to love themselves from brain cells to tippy toes, from in breath to out sigh, from hard bones to invisible awareness. Self love. Self awareness.

It's all about their learning.

It's all about their happiness.

Sounds like love to me.

(That was easy. Hmmm.)

Byron Katie and the Feldenkrais Way

THE WORK OF BYRON KATIE AND WAKEUP FELDENKRAIS
In the Work of Byron Katie, which we'll call BK work for now, you take your habit of suffering and apply the mind to undo the suffering that the mind is creating for itself.

In the Work of Wake Up Feldenkrais and the Feldenkrais Method we take our habits of constricting and disabling our abilities to move with ease and grace and we find options, that allow the brain to come to easier and more pleasant and efficient (which means less effort) ways of moving.

In the Gurdjieff work, Gurdjieff says the function of the intellectual center is to compare.

For anyone who's had rough times in life and looked at themselves a bit, it has become obvious that the comparing game is at the root of much if not all suffering: wanting to have as much money or sex appeal or youth or fame as so and so, wanting someone to not treat us this way but some other way, demanding that reality not be this but that.

In Feldenkrais, we use this ability of the mind to compare and click that in to learn: how does the right side compare to the left? How does it feel and work when we turn our head to the left and shoulder to the left, vs. how it feels and works when we turn our head to the left and our shoulders to the right. We compare our sensation and image of ourselves throughout a lesson. Each time we notice differences, we have given our brains and our Selves food to learn new and easier and more pleasant ways of being and moving and breathing and learning.

And the Katie work, as I've laid out many a time:

Judge your neighbor.
Write it down.
Ask four questions.
Turn it around.

So already, we are taking our suffering and doing something with it. We are judging and not hiding from our judging. We are writing down and slowing the mind to the actual accusatory words. We are asking four questions. We are turning it around.

And the four questions?
1) Is this thought true?

2) Can I absolutely know that this thought is true?

3) How do I react when I believe this thought is true? Or, how do I react when I attach to believing this thought is true?

4) Who would I be without attaching to believing this thought is true? .

Notice, that like Feldenkrais there is no: This is the Right Way vs. this is the Wrong way. It's comparing and discovering that set us free.

In the BK work, first two questions get us to compare our thought as if we considered it set in stone reality and if we realize it might or might not be true, i.e. that it is a belief arising in our mind, not in reality. If we believe gravity will pull a rock toward earth, we are in pretty safe grounds. But if we believe our spouse should be more friendly to us, this is a construct from our own (very human) mind, wanting a more pleasant world.

So the first two questions begin to undermine the Righteous certainty that is always part of our suffering. Is it true? Can I absolutely know it's true? These allow us to separate the thought out from the world, separate the world as we want it to be, from the world as it is.

And the third question, this is our brain on the belief. (Recall the TV commercial, years ago when I watched TV: this is your brain on drugs, this is your brain off drugs. Similarly, question three and four are: this is your brain /mind/self on the belief. This is your brain off.). We write a list of all the consequences of believing say, that so and so should like us more. Say: we feel sad and angry and hurt and weak and like attacking them, or ignoring them, or gossiping about them. This is how we are when we attach to the thought.

And then question four: who would we be without the thought? Again, no rule to give up the thought, just to try it out, what are we like without the belief, the attachment to the thought?

Thus our mind can compare and without forcing and effort, just like in a Feldenkrais lesson, the system naturally picks the more easy and less stressful pathway.

And to give ourselves a full upside down option, we do the turn around. Girlfriend should listen to me more, turns around to , I should listen to girlfriend more. Husband should be more considerate of me, turns around to I should be more considerate of husband.

What can we learn from that?

And how many Feldie lessons blossom when we do a movement in a way totally contradictory to the "natural" way? Moving head to the right and eyes to the left, we give the brain a chance to discover something, to rewire, to learn, and suddenly: our neck is softer and easier. We didn't "try" to soften our neck.

So, we don't "try" to be nicer to others in the BK work, but we begin to get way free when we realize: Hey, I'm thinking so and so should lay off the criticism and I'm criticizing them right and left, what's wrong with this picture.

So freedom by taking habits and running them through variations and options and new ways of feeling and seeing and understanding the world. What nice paths these two offer us.

And this,
always this:
in both these systems,
there is no outside teacher.
The ultimate authority is the learning
and realization that comes from within.
Always.

The Porpoise of Life 2

WHAT IS THE PORPOISE OF LIFE?

We learn by slowing down, and slow Sonoma dot com is about the huge advantage of that, but then we like to zip along on our bikes, our trash the tennis ball around, or roar down a ski slope, or laugh our heads off at a silly movie, or run across a field for the pure joy of running.

Life is to be lived.

Which means: getting outside.

Which means: going full speed ahead sometimes for the thrill of it.

Which means: playing and not being initimidated by authority or what other people think,
or any ideas of what we think is right or wrong or a "mistake."

Which means: having fun, being silly.

So, while going slow is an absolute necessity to the learning that takes place in the Feldie work,
we need to let 'er rip every once in a while, to gain the Feldenkrais idea
of living a full, rich and wonderful life.

So let's go at it like this:

Feldenkrais is fantastic for taking neck and back pain and showing someone how to become a person who doesn't live that way anymore.

And at an even better level, the work is for those who want to take a realization that they can transform from pain to no pain and go for a life where they can transform humdrum into excitement, unhappiness into happiness, a mediocre life into a fantastic one.

This is the porpoise of life: to live life, with fullness and richness and zest and joy and vitality.

This is what WakeUp Feldenkrais is about. And this is what you'll get if you come to work with me.

A Big Dream: Land, Love, Earth and People Healng

A VISION
During my Feldenkrais training I kept coming across statements from Moshe Feldenkrais to the effect that this work was the work of liberation, that it was about the fulfillment of our "vowed and unavowed dreams." For a long time I thought that was too farfetched.

And then, all of a sudden, halfway through my training I find myself running for City Council. An unavowed dream: to make a difference in the public world, a dream I'd been nibbling away at with rather intelligent letters to the editor, and my work of reclaiming dull and messy land and turning it into the Sonoma Garden Park.

But here were all these people running for City Council and no one was talking about ecology the way I wanted to hear it talked about, as something you lived daily, not just paid lip service to as you drove a mile to go to meetings about the War for Oil. And I thought that people had to start thinking about being more present and into the life of Simplicity and Now if they were going to talk about Quality of Life (which everyone running for office in super quaint Sonoma talks about).

So I ran, on a Slow Sonoma platform: slow down our car speed, our building new homes speed, our rushing around in our lives speed.

I didn't win.

I got a lot of ideas out.

Along the way, a vowed dream of mine has become to get better and better at doing the Feldenkrais work with myself and with other people. For this I've begun to take advantage of the knowledge of Anat Baniel, who some in the Feldenkrais world like and some don't.

People have their opinions. I can see why people might have problems with Anat, but her teaching is glorious, so I've decided to redo a complete training with her, and her training is 90 days in ten 9 day (two weekends and the week in between) segments.

In the first segment several vowed dreams are coming true: to do something wonderful again with my son, who is now 30. I suggested that the transformative aspects of how Anat goes about her work might be useful for the stuckness he's having in his acting career, and he and I have always liked doing physical things together: tai chi camp, and one summer he worked for me in my landscaping business.

Anyway, he's in the training and it's great to be with him.

Another vowed dream is to improve in this work, and that's coming true, too.

An unavowed dream, one I didn't know I had, was to be in a large group of people I really liked, and to have a bunch of those people be good food eating nature lovers like me and a bunch of those people to be men (since most yoga, Feldenkrais and gardening things are almost all women). Anyway, the group is large and varied and very wonderful to be in.

And now: the big dream.

To create a Transformation and Healing (Healing Earth and Healing People) Place on a large piece of land, to create a place where the three passions I mention in my profile come together.

1 )My passion for nature and growing my own organic food and helping the earth with permaculture and a lifestyle as free from the car as possible.
2) And my passion for the Byron Katie work and other pathways that allow people to be happy and present and communicate in ways to have not only happiness for themselves, but happiness in relationship.
3) And my passion for this Feldenkrais Way work, this work of liberation and transformation by getting back into the joy and delight of learning and moving and thinking and feeling better and better.

So: big piece of land.

Housing for staff and guests of totally green sort.

Growing our own food and meat.

People who come can commit to silence at times and to being present. They can work in the garden, or not.

People can come to be quiet and connect with land and nature and themselves, or can participate in yoga (of a brain / heart / body sort I wish to invent) and Feldenkrais and the Anat Baniel Method. And in Permaculture trainings. And in Byron Katie and relationship healing and enhancement training.

So good food, good land use, good learning, ecology, classes outside and in nature, people living the life of now, nature and love.

A big dream.

I don't know how it will happen.

Your reading about it and maybe responding might be part of that.

Now, nature (of brain / body selves and the big nature) and love. Love of self and others and nature and learning.

A place maybe where autistic children can have a school of transformation and learning. Maybe we can pay for the low income kids with grants and with fees from wealthy individuals who want to golf or ski or relate to their spouses or nature better. Who want to thrive inwardly as well as outwardly.

A place where parents of special needs children can learn the Awareness Through Movement / Transformational Learning Lessons. I place where people can retire and not be off in some idiotic home. A place where we can make a difference by living the difference.

And a place where a big group of people, those living there and running the center and doing the gardening and changing the sheets (people can change their own, actually) and doing the work, can live together as community, relating to nature and now and love in ways that will surely sometimes need improvement and just as surely will sometimes by glorious.

Friends of the Earth and Friends of Each Other and Friends of Ourselves.