Level Up
4 lessons, 4 audios, free clinic + a new body
June Zoom Series: Timing and Sequence → Grace and Power
Tuesdays at 11 a.m. east coast US time
+ Sundays at 3 p.m. eastern time for the optional clinic.
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.
Coming Up
May: Timing and Sequence → Grace and Power
There are so many ways to refine your moves. One of the most powerful is to be aware of how you sequence. Is it that you glance, turn your head, move your shoulder girdle, rotate your pelvis, shift your weight on your feet? Or vice-versa? When you bend, do you simultaneously let go of your extension, or is there a useful lag, or do you not let go at all? (Ooof!) How do you couple your gait or stroke with the rhythm of your breath? How much influence do you have over which rhythm you engage? And how does your tempo affect your learning, your playfulness and your mood?
In this series, bring your timing into your awareness.
Thinking about this for July or August: Getting Past Movement that Fights Itself
(June will be ‘Practical Happiness’ over in the Flexible Relief section….)
Most people focus on what's moving, but the real secret might lie in what stays still. When you lift your foot, how does it shift your weight elsewhere? When you reach overhead, what supports you? This series reveals how your body's opposition patterns - the automatic way one part stabilizes while another moves - determine whether movement feels elegant or effortful. You'll *feel* for yourself that every action has a counter-action. When you are aware of these forces and in choice about how you want to use them, movement becomes almost magical, weightless.
If You Want to Get Your Greek On…
Chronobiology (Timing) and Human Connection
When it comes down to it, chronobiology—our timing—is about coupling. There are timing templates you are born with (such as suckling, breathing, gait…) that come a bit prefab but are amenable to refinement and change. There are mix-and-matches that couple one pattern (breathing) with another (swinging your arms). 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 from tempo to tempo. 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 the fast CPG is different from the slow version. And all your systems—nervous, cardio, endocrine and even immune—know those differences, participate in those differences, respond to those differences. 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. Inn 21st c terms you could call it managed decoupling. This is not static. It isn’t just about refining the conjunction of two movements, it is about integrating the dynamics of two tempos. (And yes, making you a more elegant, more responsive, stronger athlete.)
That connects to findings in the movement synchrony literature which suggest that effective coupling sometimes requires relaxing prior coupling.
This has Central Pattern Generator (CPG) implications that Feldenkrais probably didn't have language for: what looks like "learning to move your shoulder independently of your ribs" may be, mechanistically, a temporary decoupling of CPG-linked oscillators that are normally phase-locked. The learning isn't adding a new movement — it's a mind-cluck that loosens up the old patterns without necessarily kicking them to the gutter. Refreshing them.
The athletic application is interesting because high-level athletic timing arguably involves extremely precise selective coupling — some segments phase-locked tightly, others deliberately freed — and 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.
In subsequent classes we can explore how your internal timing and coupling may be the same mechanisms that we use to connect with others… coupling, entraining, matching rhythms…. more eccentric new research and wild speculation to come!