New life: learning, or upgrading our robot?

As per my
version of life on Earth:

we have three choices:

high functioning robot

low functioning robot

awake person


The huge temptation
in all the "healing" and "helping" work
is to give people a program
a recipe
a rule
a set of rules
that will get them from low functioning robot
to high functioning

believe it or not
this even happens in the Feldenkrais world,
though hopefully not
in the Wake Up Feldenkrais world

one example of this
is a back help DVD
which luckily I get to return,
and i will return
because though purporting to be
a blend of Feldenkrais and Physical Therapy
ends up giving people
set rules
and set programs for their legs and hips
as the way out of back pain

it might even work,
except this isn't "working"
the way a baby learns to crawl
by discovering and exploring
and having deep organic
natural learning

this is:
I'll show you the Right Way
learning
which is quicker
and maybe makes immediate changes more
obvious,
but in the long run,
you've just substituted a higher level
of automatic behavior

So, now
today's main topic:
a new fad on Feldy Forum
is the combo of Feldenkrais and
when Moshe Feldenkrais met Milton Erickson
whom i've written about in my healthetc blog
( see
Ericksonian hypnosis,
which actually presents a picture of hypnosis
as a more aware process than
I'm critiquing in the following mini-essay)


anyway both are genius
and both access new behaviors
and allow people to make amazing shifts

and here's what i came across in an
old Feldenkrais Journal (#8, 1993)
from an article called
Getting Ourselves Out of Trance
a book review by Carl Ginsburg
of the book :
Trances People Live: Healing Approaches
in Quantum Psychology

(excuse me while i gag myself a little for the "quantum"
bit,
but hey,
this was before Deepak
and the Secret
and what the bleep bleep):

Anyway, here's a central quote from the book:
Really Important,
I opine:

"In the Ericksonian model, I learned that trance states
could be induced or facilitated as a therapeutic intervention
to interrupt the symptom structure
and access
unconscious potentials and resources.

In my breakthrough moment
those puzzle pieces came together in an entirely new pattern:

I saw that although trance states can be used
to evoke resources and change
on an unconscious level,
they can also be --are used--
to create the symptomatology with which we all struggle.

I saw that the person who brings his or her problems
and symptoms
to me
is already in a trance state, and
it is this very trance state that is interrupting
his or her experience of the present moment,
blocking unconscious problems and symptoms.

The therapeutic intervention then involves working
with the trance state
the person has already created
(which de-hypnotizes them)
rather than inducing or facilitating another
kind of trance that may or may not
be pivotal to the patient's symptom structure."

La, la:
this means:
in we go,
in a trance:

do we want to come out with a
better trance
(witness the popularity of trance dance,
and even trance dance yoga)

or do we want to come
out
awake.

rhetorical question
except
that we can be asleep
when we give
what sounds like
the Right Answer

ciao,
chris

p.s.
if you peruse
the links
you'll find one to an article
by Mark Reese,
may his soul rest in Peace,
on Milton and Moshe.

Feet on Ground, Eyes Glued to the Computer

How do we stay awake
while in
this mode
(eyes on the monitor mode)?

Maybe awareness
that we are
doing what we
are doing
while we are
doing it.

and how
to get that awareness?

Practice.

Practice.

Get up walk around.

Break it up.

Remember the middle:
feet on the bottom
eyes and ears on the top

and in the middle:
air and breathing
pelvis and muscles
and movement
even micro mini
not much
movement
if done with awareness

is a lot

yes

Now, Mindfulness, Movement, Healing

We come into this world whole.

And wholy dependent.

With a huge brain,
and lots to learn.

We try this,
we discover that.

Our brains and
our bodies
learn to move,
learn to roll over,
learn to sit up,
learn to crawl.

Words come our way,
we make sounds,
we stumble on words,
we discover the meaning
of that game.

And then,
a sort of sleep descends
we fall into habits,
our dependence
has created habits
huge habits
of addiction to approval
feal of disapproval
we stop exploring
we stop living in the moment

we are no longer whole

many ways to get back

movement
mindful movement
experimental mindful movement

is one of the best

partly because it's away from words,
the way we were when we started
partly because it's so "real"
when we feel how our arm or leg
or spine "feel" (sensing the actual bone
and muscle and blood and movement)
and partly because we spend so
much of our time
in our bodies
but not really knowing we are
there,
which is to say:
here

so,
welcome home
if you want to come home
to now
to movement
to awareness

waking up moving
a nice thing to learn
a nice thing to discover
a nice way to live

ciao

Variety

We can "learn"
by doing something again
and again
and again.

And is that "learning"
or training?

Sometimes,
maybe language drills,
when we are older,
and that over and over
especially if it's in a song,
or something,
maybe over and over
is necessary.

And hey,
even here:
make the words in a song,
make them combine with moving,
make them into a game,
make it the way
it was
when we learned
the first language
first time around:
make it interesting,
make it fun,
give some variety.

Hugely interesting study
in a book called Mindful Learning.
Kids who had the usual boring school,
were divided into three groups.
They were given a complicated mural to look at.
Group one: sat and looked.
Group two: sat and looked and shuffled feet.
Group three: walked at diagonals toward and away from the mural.

In this study, the group that shuffled did second best,
and the group that moved,
and had a variety of viewpoints did the best.

Here's the interesting take.
With a group of Montessori kids,
used to milling around,
the kids who sat and studied the mural
did better than the kids who milled around and studied.
So,
even though my bias
is toward always letting kids move,
this study shows:
even the milling around
can become one
more way to be a robot,
and if you break the milling around
habit
and give a new
choice:

better learning
takes
place.

So, now:
sitting at the computer.
What are our (say that aloud)
habits,
and how can we shift?

You experiment
and let me know.
I'll experiment
and write about it in a couple of
days when I rotate around back to this blog.

Keep enjoying the other two:
SlowSonoma.com
and
Tai Chi Yoga Health Weight Loss

and maybe even sneak a peek,
though the rest of the gang is
way slacking,
as ananda2007.blogspot.com"

ciao
chris

Healthy Backs, and Being Present: Or Once more: Discovery vs. "Doing it Right"

I'm reading a not very good manual that purports
to combine Feldenkrais and Physical Therapy.

Maybe it does
do the combining,
but this is what that means,
at least in this instance:

Yes,
help is on the way:
Just learn about yourself,
and how you move
(so good, so far),
and keep a tight ass
and tight lower belly when
you do anything interesting.

Tight ass as in squeezing the rectal muscles
together.

La, la.
Tight assed
is a phrase that describes,
with unfortunate accuracy,
how many people go about
shielding and tightening themselves
against the novelty
and wonder of life in the moment.

So:
what do we have in this tight assed
tight gut approach:
a "short cut."
Create tension,
make things too firm
for any real mobility,
and then you can
"stay out of trouble."

At what expense:
really sensing how to move,
really sensing how a back
and how hips work,
really learning about yourself
and the wonder of being this
marvelously unstable and hence
hightly apt for all sorts of amazing movement
creature
called a human being.

So:
heck:
wake up to now,
and use variation
and discovery to learn
about your self
and your awareness
and your back.

Or tighten down
the hatches,
approach yourself
as a machine
needing fixing
and "help"
yourself
by becoming more limited.

La, la.
that's no real choice to me.

Ciao,
Chris

Happier Backs

I did a whole series on backs,
back in February and March of 2006,
on the slowsonoma.com site,
here's the first one,
Backs and Breathing.

After that there are four more.

Is there anything more to say
about backs?

Of course.
Either our back feels great right now,
or it is out of the picture,
which means it's doing its job of holding us up,
or
it hurts.

Let's get fancy:
either we are aware or our backs, or unaware.
I'll say, aware is better,
even though better is relative to lots of thing,
and awareness is better
whether it,
the back,
our back,
feels good
or not so good,
or in between.

And more fancy:
it hurts,
means
I hurt.

The pain
is in the brain.
Even though it certainly can feel
as if it
is in our back.

Okay:
how to have a happier back.

Move it.

Slowly.

In six directions.

What six directions?

Six easy directions.

You figure them out.

And then do yourself
one more favor.

Actually, do yourself hundreds of favors,
today
and every day:
and include this one:
as you move your back slowly,
discovering six different directions and ways
to move your back,
listen to your back,
sense your back,
not as a "back"
but as a whole bunch of vertebrae.

Sense them,
one by one if you can.

Ever been to one of those awful yoga classes
where the teacher has you leaning forward,
and then says,
"Come on up, vertebrae by vertebrae,"
and then two seconds later they are on
to the next instruction.

As is two seconds is all it takes
to sense twenty four vertebrae.

Hmmm.

Take your time.

Move slow.

Find out some vertebrae
you weren't as familiar with
yesterday.

Learn to know
and love yourself.

Make sense of
yourself.

Have fun.
Tune in next essay here
for more hints as to the six possibilities
for a back,
for your back,
for my back,
for the back side of our joy.

ciao,
chris

What Yoga and "Yoga Therapy" always misses

People are learners.

People learn by inner experience,
by testing one thing against another,
most of all,
by having differences,
that they notice,
and play with,
and learn to clarify.

In Yoga,
even good yoga,
even slow yoga,
gentle yoga,
people are given these choices:
The Right Way
to hold a pose.
Everything else.

That the "wrong ways,"
include hundreds, if not thousands,
of possibilities of
information,
is always left out of the picture.

Thus,
I'm out to teach,
DNA yoga.

See entries here and at SlowSonoma.com

Yoga as if we had Brain, Heart and Spirit

One way I've started to call it,
the yoga
I'll be teaching
is
DNA yoga.

Discovery, Nature, Aware/ Ananda Yoga

Discovery,
for taking advantagege of my training
(4 years of the "basic" training,
and then another 700 hours beyond that)
as a Feldenkrais Practitioner.

The Feldenkrais Method®,
is a method of learning to
think,
move,
feel better,
via
being more aware,
and taking the emphasis
off of "getting it done,"
or "getting it Right,"
or "making progress,"
and bringing us back to a state
of learning
and discovery,
the state we were in when we were young
and a genius, say from birth to a couple of
years old.

See my
What is the Feldenkrais Method? One word, two word,,, one sentence, two sentence, and so on, brilliant little collection
of ways to look at the method.

Anyway,
working with me
in either DNA yoga,
or "regular" (which means wildly creative and transformative)
Feldenkrais "work,"
or in the Work of Byron Katie,
and Discovery will be there
deep and firm in our joint unfolding.

Okay,
that's discovery.

And N.
NATURE.
I'll be having classes outdoors as much a possible.
All this hiding inside four walls,
cutting ourselves off from blue skies
and real earth,
and grass and
soil
and wind
and the elements:
nonsense.
Insanity.
How can we be sane
in a world
when we are always cut off from the world.

that's part of the NATURE part.
Another part:
Discovering what our human nature is.
To feel.
and to sense.
and what is the difference?
To make sense of something,
what does that mean?
To live in gravity.
What does that mean?
To have breath of which we can be conscious
or unconscious,
what does that mean?


A
is Ananda Yoga
or Awareness Yoga.
Or both.
Ananda yoga
is how I was trained
and certified at the 200 hour level
required by yoga alliance.
(compared to 800 hours for the "basic Feldenkrais" training).

Ananda yoga is about
being relaxed
and sending spiritual energy up your spine.
If that doesn't make sense,
it's about being relaxed,
even in the midst of efforts
and continually bringing awareness inside of yourself.

One way it does this is with affirmations.
For example,
the affirmation in what's called "Child's Pose"
(Balasana)
is
"I relax from outer involvement
into my inner haven of peace."

This not only accentuates and deepens
the posture,
but gives a big hint at what Ananda yoga is about.

Another posture,
warrior 2
is a strong and joyous pose.
It's affirmation is,
either
(my version)
"I open gladly to the strength and glory
of being Alive."
or
the official version,
"I joyfully manifest
the power of God."

So, come to a class,
you'll love the affirmations.

And between poses
you rest,
and say the affirmations again.
This isn't about getting sweaty
and using yoga like going to the gym.

This is using yoga
for spiritual and emotional strengthening.

Though,
with the Feldenkrais
and awareness emphasis,
you will get more flexible,
much more readily
and EASILY,
than in normal,
do a bunch of postures
and always fuss with DOING IT RIGHT,
and never slow down
and really learn yoga.

This is yoga to learn,
to transform,
to enjoy,
to connect.

Deeply.
To yourself,
to others,
to the Earth,
to Spirit,
to your Higher Self.

This Moment

You can,
and I did,
go to a Feldenkrais Guild
conference,
and most of the time,
most of the people,
including me,
were asleep.

They went through the motions,
said the important
and smart
and sometimes
interesting
stuff,
but mouths opening,
whether for food in,
or words out,
even leading
so called
Awareness Through Movement
activities,
not aware,
not awake
not now.

Time to wake up.
In the lessons.
Out of the lessons.

Is this true?
No.

But it's what I'd prefer.
Looking for 20 people
who really want to wake up.
From that,
start a community,
based on Feldenkrais
as waking up
and Byron Katie
as waking up
and connecting to Nature
as waking
up.

Yes.

Who knows
what will happen,
and now is always happening.

Good.

What to say about the Glories of Feldenkrais?

Feldenkrais the man,
bless him,
dead,
and he left us a system of
teaching,
and exploration
and learning.

So,
here we are,
in a world that is in a mess,
and how can Feldenkrais
help with that?

Learning to see things
from at least three points
of view.
That's a good start.

Finding our way
back to our
"bodies"
not as muscles and bones to shove around,
but as marvellous dancing and learning
and loving
organisms,
through which we can taste
the sweetness of life.

and in that state of sweetness
be kinder
to ourselves
and others.

And the fun
of learning
how to do
something "hard,"
the famous
"making the impossible, possible;
the possible, easy;
the easy, elegant,"
quote.

This is a nice way
to go about living isn't it?

Finding
and cultivating
and honing
a sense
of ease
and grace
and elegance,

in our teaching,
in our learning,
in our living.

Good living
can be very simple

and Good living
is going to be necessary
to save the world.

and good living
is going to be one of
our return routes
back to our basic
nature,
which is happiness,
and love
and sharing,
and ease.

So,
take a walk.
Roll around
and remember the Feldenkrais lessons
we have learned.

Be easy,
be happy,
be learning.

Ah,
good.

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.

Letter to a Wonderful Parent of a Special Needs Child

ENCOURAGEMENTS AND CONGRATULATIONS
As you know, you are already a wonderful parent. You adore Your child. We watch him and encourage him and delight in him and enjoy him and take care of him and talk to him and listen to him and love him to bits. And he is worth all this and you know it and he knows it. So, obviously, you will keep being this way.

You also have a wonderful ability to focus on what he is doing well and what he is learning and skip the trap of “what’s missing.” What’s missing is just another way of saying: lots of opportunity to learn, but that is the case for all of us. As Feldenkrais said, We are all handicapped. We all have limitations. And the fun is, not beating ourselves up about those, but taking all the time in the world to slow down and learn the next wonderful thing we are going to learn.

Along these lines, buy the Anat Baniel DVD on backs, and CD on Necks, and do one of the movement lessons every day. Maybe the first time through, do each lesson for two days, but keep doing them, over and over and over. Each time you will learn something you didn’t yet know. Every time I do them, after years of doing them, I learn something more.

Here are some hints to keep the learning alive:
What is your pelvis doing?
What is your lower back doing?
What is your spine doing?
How are you breathing?
What are your ribs doing?
What is the relationship between your head and your pelvis?
How is your breathing going?

If you can go slowly, and gently and be aware of all those seven things, you will always learn, you’ll have a meditation on being now, and you’ll continuously improve the quality of your own thinking, being and moving.

As for Your child: when he is sleepy, and not so full of frisk and vigor, say before nap and before night sleep, do, gently, gently, slowly, slowly, any pieces of any of the lessons with his body. Any movements that you know feel really nice and connecting and interesting and pleasurably to you, gently guide him through. No doing it right. No efforting. Just the pleasure of moving and having different areas waking up to each other. Go slow, and feel in yourself how the movement might be feeling in him. If you come to a tense or tight or restricted zone, where he doesn’t move as well as you might, do less. Go slower. Just hint at it.

All will be fine. Touching is good.


I will make a couple of diet recommendations. I have years of study in this, but no certification and anything, and some proof in my own health and whatnot. Follow or not as your intuition and good sense recommend.

I’d suggest getting off pasteurized dairy. Since we are lucky enough to have two stores selling raw organic milk, get that. Yogurt can easily be made from that milk. Get quart jars, put about an inch of yogurt that you already have in the bottom, add the raw milk, stir and sit in a sunny window. Within a day, you’ll have new yogurt and will never have to buy it again. Kefir (Sonoma Market carries a raw brand as Qeffir, right next to the raw milk, though often sold out) is even healthier than yogurt and made in the same way: add raw milk to an inch of the past stuff and it makes itself.

Warning: these all feed tooth decay, as doing all the other sweets. So do the tooth brushing thing and maybe even teach him how to swish out his mouth with water. On the sweet subject. You are already sugar free, which is great. Honey is fine in small doses, but sweet from inside fruits and sweet veggies is best.

Hardest possibility: drift away from flour products, cookies, pasta and even bread ( gasp, and again, go slow and as fits what feels really right for you). Go for whole cooked grains of rice or wheat or oats and barley or whatever. Not as convenient. Way out of normal, and maybe check Sally Fallow and Nourishing Traditions out to get some encouragement if you want to edge toward this.


The ideas behind all the Feldenkrais and Anat Baniel work are fantastic. My wakeup-feldenkrais.blogspot.com (here we are) site has many, many essays which can help you, as does Anat’s at AnatBaniel.com. Even here: go slow, integrate, take it in, make it true and real and pleasurably for you.

If you stay fine and learning and growing, Your child can’t help but keep improving. Keep noticing and delighting in his small changes and don’t get hooked into what other people think. This is the greatest slavery in human existence anyway. What other people think is their business, and we make ourselves miserable when we believe what they think and feel has anything to do with us. See thework.com, and Byron Katie’s work to get emotional freedom.

For now though, if anyone ever again asks, “What’s wrong with your child?” answer back: What’s wrong with you?

Because in looking at the deficits instead of the possibilities that’s what’s wrong with the questioner (or us, when we go to that mode). Your child has a lifetimes of delightful learning ahead of him. So do you. So do I.

Whoopee!

One 11 minute "cure" for depression.

I'm writing a book of 21 short "cures" for depression,
shifts out of the funk
and into some other state.
I'll post one of them occasionally,
and beyond that, you get to wait
and buy the book,
or come to me
(or call)
for private sessions
that will involve a number of modalities,
including Feldenkrais, the work of Byron Katie,
connection to Nature, Gestalt Therapy, and more.


PRAYING, WITH OR WITHOUT GOD
This is the second 11 minute “cure” for depression, or distraction, or worry, or anxiety. Or, the second ongoing and wonderful meditation you can add to your life. You will learn more about yourself, how to be at ease, how to be present and how to shift your state by participating in this practice. Practicing what? Being alive, and having awareness and trying/ learning new things.

As before, use a timer, and sit on a firm chair or a stool. This time, if at all possible, sit outside in such a place that when you look up you will see the sky or some sheltering tree above you.

1). Sit comfortably at the front edge of your stool or chair. Click on the timer. For the first one minute either accentuate any bad feelings you have, or if you are feeling fine, dredge up something to feel bad about and go through the usual ways of making ourselves feel bad: Have a bunch of words in your head that go over and over about how something “should” or “shouldn’t” be different. Tense even more any tightness in your chest or jaw or belly. Notice any constriction in your breathing and make that worse. THEN STOP THESE AND SHIFT TO MOVING.

2). Fine. Now begin, as in #1 to look up and down. Do this now as a progression, adding on more and more of yourself in your awareness.
• Look up and down with your eyes.
• Notice and allow your chin to go up and down.
• Begin to arch your spine as you look up, and fold forward your spin as you look down.
• Let your belly come out and air come in as you look up. Let your belly come in and breathe out as you look and fold down.
• Allow your pelvis to rock to the back of the Sitz (sit) bones as you fold forward and look down, and allow your pelvis to rock to the front of the Sitz bones as you arch your spine and look up.
• Sense your feet on the ground as you do all this.

3) Keep doing all of the above, and see if you can hold them all in your awareness as well as the world that you are seeing as you look up and slowly look down and slowly look up.

4) Take breaks now and then. Just sit calmly, upright and follow your breathing and maybe even close your eyes. Then go back to the up down meditation.

5) Put your hands in prayer position, palm to palm, fingers to fingers. As you look up allow both hands to come first to face level, and then easily and slowly a bit higher each time, if this is comfortable. If it is not comfortable, imagine your hands coming higher and higher.
As your head and eyes come down, let your hands in this prayer position rotate so that they point to the ground. You can try variations on how far you’d like to go with your hands: just to your lap, between your knees, down toward the floor/ ground, and all the way to the floor. How far doesn’t matter, and what is enjoyable and useful is the your hands are in the up down rhythm of your spine and breathing and eyes and head and neck.

6) This can be tiring physically, and mentally, so take lots of non-movement breaks, but not breaks from an attitude of wishing continuous awareness of your breathing and your spine and your feet on the ground. (Breath and gravity, the everywhere all the time available meditation.)

7) If you want to add to this, then as you bring your prayer hands up, let them come once a little to the right as your spine rotates and arches in the going up, and then the other time let them go to the left as you come up.

8) As before, sometimes when everything is moving to look up, let your eyes look down toward your chin, and when everything is moving to look down (folding forward, nose and hands toward the ground, belly in) let your eyes look up as if trying to see your forehead.

9) Take breaks after you engage in the eye and nose separation. And then go back and feel more aware of your eyes when they easily and gently lead the movement. Sometimes you might want to just arch and fold without the hands, and then go back to using the hands. It’s your ten minutes. Keep them pleasant and interesting and full of gentle awareness.

10). When the timer says that ten minutes are up. Sit for awhile with your eyes closed. Enjoy that feeling.

11) Then, to come to standing, fold forward over your knees so your weight comes to your feet, lift your butt off the chair or stool and come to standing. Then take an easy and pleasant walk in as nice and as natural a place as you can get to on foot from where you are right now.

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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.

CURRENTLY OFFERING THESE CLASSES

"To make the impossible, possible;
to make the possible, easy;
to make the easy, elegant."
Moshe Feldenkrais.

MOVING EASY
MOVING SMART
FOOD FOR BRAIN
BODY
AND
SOUL.

Mondays until June 18
at the
SONOMA BALLET CONSERVATORY
around the corner from the Post Office

Monday June 25
skipping July 2, and then
Mondays
from July 8 on into August,
at the Field of Dreams,
shady area between upper and lower levels,
(bring a mat or blanket if you don't
want to lie on the grass)
12:30-1:10 PM
Bring a Mat or Blanket
Dressed Comfortably
Be Enthusiastic about Learning, Feeling Better
and Expanding your sense of Enjoyment


Wednesdays
until June 20
OLSEN PARK
(west of W 5th, on bike path,
or on Linda St. just west of W 5th)
10-10:45 PM

Then August 8 on in Olsen
Park at 9 AM.

Cost: sliding scale : $10-20
Seniors (65+) sliding scale: $5-20.
First class: $5-10.

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

What this work is, what it isn't, glories to all.

Baby apples. Nature on the Way to becoming even more of
what it was meant to be.
Is this happening in your life?

JOYFUL POSSIBILITIES
VIA
THE FELDENKRAIS WAY,
THE WORK OF BYRON KATIE,
AND
WAKE UP FELDENKRAIS.

What this isn’t.

This isn’t body work.

A massage is sweet and nice and will bring a return to ease and a contentment and relaxation. But it will not help you organize to a higher level so that you will stop doing whatever the pattern is that got you into the aches and pains in the first place.

Feldenkrais lessons will, because they focus on the core muscle, the one between the ears, called the brain, the most amazing creation in the universe, an instrument capable of going against the laws of thermodynamics, the law that things proceed toward less and less order. The brain creates order, makes sense of the random chaos of the world. The brain is how we come to crawl, and sit and stand and talk and skip and jump.

Forgotten how to skip?

Don’t feel so free and happy in the back and breathing and neck anymore? If you want to upgrade your whole nervous system, then Feldenkrais lesson, either the group lessons called Awareness Through Movement®, or the one on one lessons called Functional Integration will help. Hugely. Amazingly. Almost miraculously. Miraculously.

This holds for a host of issues. See: The Glories of Feldenkrais.


Feldenkrais is not about fixing or balancing. Your energy will be more balanced, but as a result of your functioning at a higher level. A baby on the way to crawling is not into balancing energy, she is into expanding her understanding of who she is and what she can do in the world.

This works for people who have had strokes, people with balance issues, people who have had accidents, people in pain, people who are great at something and want to get better. In sports, or yoga, or teaching of some activity. Golf. Running. Basketball.

This is a way of turning the clock back, because we are tapping into how we were, discoverers and creators and experimenters, when we were young geniuses and our pleasure and goal in life was learning, real learning, not book learning, not learning what someone else told us to learn, but what came up from inside our wish to live.


And what is Wake Up Feldenkrais?

The Work of Byron Katie teaches ways out of emotional suffering that are as effective and easy as the Feldenkrais work is at getting us out of physical suffering. And like the Feldenkrais Way, the work of Byron Katie is about coming to a wholeness, coming the a realization of how amazing we are, it is about learning and change and transformation.

I consider this work an extremely valuable adjunct to the Feldenkrais work, a way of clearing out the stories and beliefs that keep us from being all we can be.


And I find that when I am in the present and am connected to Nature, that this too helps me be a full and happy and amazing person, a possibility for each and every one of us.


This is my hope for those who get involved in Wake Up Feldenkrais. To wake up to the moment. To wake the nature. To wake to health. To wake to happiness. To wake to improvement and delight in expanding our joy and our capabilities and the depth and breadth of our lives.

Ciao for now,
Chris

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.