Neuroplasticity: Feldenkrais X-Files
One workshop with audio and one clinic
This class is for inviting flexibility in spatial, societal, logical, illogical, aesthetic and creative endeavours. It is a mind-cluck, often a pleasure and sometimes a torrential confusion of epiphanies, insights and delights. In Body Wisdom, movement is used as a way to invite awareness. Carie will often ask you a question with a meta-question--not just ‘do you feel how your ribs expand?’ but ‘how do you feel how your ribs expand?’ It is your a wareness of your awareness that flirts with the brain’s habitual approaches. And when you think differently about how you think, a mental analog to supple muscles can be the result.
These lessons are all about slow, gentle, meditative movement--just as the other channels are--but in this series, Carie will emphasize what she calls ‘brain flips.’ Instead of thinking about your self-image from the skin in, can you construct an image of your movements as though from space outside of yourself to your skin--what artists call negative space? Instead of using visual imagery, can you map yourself as though with a tuning fork, through vibration, using your ancient vibration wetware instead of your visual wetware? Can you shed the use of visual muscles when engaging in non-visual cognitive tasks--and how does that feel? Can you construct a ‘moodscape’--noticing not just how movement changes your sense of your fleshy self but also your sense of your emotional body? Do some of your inner senses have trouble reconciling their data--often a source of trouble when balance goes by the wayside? Can your awareness influence that reconciliation?
Again, there is a strong similarity with the other channels in that you are the real teacher. You choose what you want to keep and what you want to slough off. You choose what’s right for you.
What to expect
1. Script-Flipping Your Brain: From Focused to Peripheral Gaze
Your brain has multiple ways of processing information, but in our culture, we typically use visual processes even for nonvisual tasks - a useful, sometimes tiring, implicitly biased cognitive habit. (For instance, a visual bias is that you can’t see around corners. An auditory bias is that you can hear around corners.) In this Series, explore the relation between your fleshy eyes and their muscles, your visual processing patterns, your sense of bodily self, your sense of emotional self and your intellectual habits. If you have balance issues (literal or figurative) or eye strain, this would be a particularly good series for you.
When Your Brain Forges New Rules: How Movement Influences your Social Processing
The perceptual shifts you experience don't stay confined to movement - they ripple through how you approach problems, make decisions, and navigate the social stream. This series explores the relationship between knowing where you are in space and knowing how you relate to other people, other circumstances and other mindsets. Current research suggests that flexibility in our sense of where we are in space can affect our versatility socially, emotionally and cognitively. In a playful, gentle way, learn about your own gaze and how it shapes your life, and, because in these classes you are the ultimate teacher, decide where you want to be more supple and where you do not.