Aging Well: Growing your Repertoire
One workshop with audio recording and one clinic per week
Tuesdays, 10:00 – 11:00 am | Fridays, 10:30 – 11:00 am PST
In Body Wisdom, we say that the classes are ‘lessons,’ not exercises, and we want you to move gently and slowly because that is often the best way to learn. But the truth is, we aren’t teaching you so much as helping you access your own inner teacher. Expanding your repertoire and continuing to learn is all the more important as you start to feel your age—you know that! Age can so often be a matter of having slowly let options go–-through accidents and illnesses, through cultural pressures and because of the habits that might have slowly narrowed your prospects. But it needn’t be so.
Maybe you tripped on a curb, you guarded yourself while you healed, and then you forgot to let the guarding go, until now you don’t move your ankle as much as you used to. As much as you could. Maybe you even forgot how your ankle once moved.
In Body Wisdom, you’ll remember. Your body talks; you listen. And in this lesson that you teach yourself, many of your options can be restored—at your own pace, with your own lifetime of wisdom, and with lots of help and encouragement, not only from your teacher but from your fellow students. It can be as inspiring to observe your classmates limber up as it is to feel it in your own body.
What to expect
These are examples of topics we might address within this series, but the series is not limited to these topics.
1. Balance in Motion: Dynamic Stability
This topic is about improving your relationship. No, not human-to-human relationships: human-to-gravity relationships. What people find through these classes is not only that they stumble less, but they also recover more—and it feels good. It feels safer, but it also feels satisfying, even powerful. Carie supports you in this by guiding you through patient, gentle movements. She helps you become more aware of how you use your weight and of how you orient yourself with respect to 'what's up' and 'what's down'—in relation to our dear challenging friend gravity. By 'awareness' Carie doesn't mean an intellectual, mathematical understanding, but rather an internalized knowing and confidence that will be there for you when you need it.
2. From the Ground Up: Reclaiming Your Feet and Ankles
Your feet are your interface with the ground—mobile, responsive, and intelligent. But most people have gradually limited their foot and ankle movement over time. Maybe you guarded after an injury, maybe your shoes constrained natural movement or maybe you just stopped asking your feet to do interesting things. This series helps you rediscover the mobility and responsiveness your feet and ankles are beautifully designed to give you. Through patient exploration of toe movements, ankle articulation and weight distribution, you'll restore options you may have forgotten you had. The changes ripple upward—when your feet work better, everything above them can organize better.
How Do Body Wisdom Classes Benefit Seniors?
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As people age, changes in muscle strength, coordination, and joint mobility can affect balance. Feldenkrais helps elders become more aware of where they are in space and how they organize their movements, promoting better balance and stability. Movements are not only safer, but easier and more pleasurable.
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The Feldenkrais Method involves gentle, exploratory movements that help to increase flexibility and promote better awareness of the body. This can be particularly helpful in easing stiffness and discomfort and in increasing self-confidence.
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By improving movement patterns and reducing unnecessary tension in the body, Feldenkrais can help alleviate chronic pain, especially in the back, hips, knees, neck and shoulders. It can also help prevent strain or injury from overuse of a small range of habits.
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The method encourages mindful awareness and attention to the body and the entire self, which can help improve mental clarity and focus. It enhances interoception, the sensations that come from within, many of which relate to our understanding of where we are in space. For elders, this can support cognitive health and offer a sense of mental engagement and stimulation—and it is great for balance!
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This approach helps with movements such as getting in and out of a chair, walking, or climbing stairs. This method helps people find the safest, most efficient, and practical ways to get up and down, reach, walk on uneven ground and stablilize ourselves without ‘locking up.’ And it also helps for golf, dancing, paddle sports, swimming…
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Feldenkrais can help reduce stress and anxiety through its calming, mindful approach to movement. It fosters a sense of empowerment as individuals rediscover their capacity for movement and physical possibility. The method is designed to help people find their own easiest way rather than to impose external rules about what is right and wrong.
“An 80-year-old voice is not a 38-year-old voice, but it has 42 more years of life experience and craft and depth.” – Laura Kaminsky
Lucy Shelton will be premiering an opera at the Met at the age of 82. This quotation from her voice coach captures what I wish for in myself and with my clients: that overall, we improve rather than decline with age. That we have the idea that we can improve rather than decline!