Level Up
4 lessons, 4 audios, free clinic + a new body
October Zoom Series Tuesdays at 11 a.m. east coast US time
Timing, Gait and … Human Connection?
Your coach has taught you technique. Your trainer has built your strength. Maybe you have plateaued or maybe you are feeling too much wear and tear. These Feldenkrais lessons can help you use what you have developed in a more integrated way.
Reclaim the joy of your favorite sport. Through movement explorations in these Body Wisdom classes, you’ll discover how changes in organization can create significant improvements in pleasure and performance.
When your paddle stroke gets more efficient, or you generate more power in your tennis serve, it can be a manifestation of the more elegant organization working alongside your existing skills. The improvements come from your own discoveries about how you want to move.
Note: these classes are not about teaching you the right way to angle your stick or paddle or blade. They are about using movement as a way to become more aware of what you do. And from that awareness, the ‘right’ move, for you, emerges. Thus what you learn in these classes serves you in all your life: not just specific awareness of how one move could be done more efficiently, but the approach to listening to your body and finding not just ease and power and agility, but also intrinsic pleasure.
When it comes to leveling up in your favorite sport, does that include kayaking and other paddle sports? Check this out.
If You Want to Get Your Geek On…
Chronobiology (Timing) and Human Connection
When it comes down to it, chronobiology—our timing—is about coupling: breath and stride, rotation and flex, smiling and squinching the eyes. We are born with timing templates—starting with suckling—and then, throughout our lives, we adapt and refine rhythmic movements, expanding on those templates. In this class you’ll learn how to influence those pattern combinations.
There are ‘territories’ of tempo. You could say ‘gears’ but that doesn’t capture the profound differences: The physics of a rapid walk are different from the physics of a slow amble, and the mood and purpose are distinct, too—survival, play, learning, work, performance. Even the chemistry of fast pattern coordination is different from the slow version. And all your systems—nervous, cardio, endocrine and even immune—have to coordinate—to couple—to make that happen.
Your tempo has a mood. It has an attitude. It has relationships.
Feldenkrais used "differentiation" to mean moving one part independently of its usual coupling. Then, when you re-integrate, you aren’t just combining two things in one tempo. You are integrating the dynamics of two tempos. His method gets you knowing this for yourself, in your bones—as we’ll explore for real in class and in movement.
High-level athletic timing arguably involves extremely precise selective coupling — some segments phase-locked tightly, others deliberately freed. The skill is ‘knowing’ (even if not at a conscious level) which is which, moment to moment. A paddle stroke is a good example: the power phase requires a particular coupling cascade through trunk, shoulder, arm; then the next phase needs to decouple much of that to maintain balance, release some of the first stroke tension and prepare for the next stroke. When you unglue muscular systems and then bring them together to rediscover their potential for interplay—that’s marvelous. Letting go, knowing how you let go, is as important as knowing how to push.
This experience and refinement of chronobiology isn’t just athletic: it flavors how we relate to others… joining, separating, entraining, matching rhythms… the cadence of conversation.
But why geek out? Come feel it. Come feel the results.