Too often people think of their bodies as parts of a whole, and attention will go to the part(s) that hurt.  By the time the pain and discomfort gets attention most are so deep in their patterns they cannot recognize how the pain developed.  Often people in pain will rely on an authority in the hope they will be fixed so they will soon return to feeling better.  The flaw in this approach is usually if the authority isn’t around, there is no strategy to understand and relieve the pain. This is fairly typical and we can all relate to our own personal experiences in this regard.

What we need is to re-evaluate how we think and invest in ourselves

All our body parts are interconnected!  Our moods affect how we feel, how we think and carry ourselves.  Every mental state actually has its own muscular configuration.  When we feel scared, hopeless, confused, annoyed, happy, sad, ecstatic, bewildered, befuddled, in love… each of these emotional states maintain a posture within our structure.  The structure is your skeleton, and it helps guide how you think, feel and move.

Our parts create the whole, which is comprised of the many bodily systems.  There are at least 11 systems: Cardiovascular, Endocrine, Lymphatic, Respiratory, Gastro-Intestinal, Reproductive are a few of the many.  States of being affect our bodily systems and therefore, when one is under stress it snowballs into the entire being.  When we begin to recognize the interactions of our states of mind, our emotions, our muscular contractions, this adds a whole new way of thinking about how our systems are all intricately connected.  Have you ever noticed that when you get really nervous your hands might sweat or you get chilled or start to shake?

A Feldenkrais Practitioner sees the human form as a collection of working systems that includes a personality derived from life experiences and conditioning. Optimizing these systems so they are listening to and working with each other is the mission of any Feldenkrais lesson whether it is a class or private session. With Feldenkrais you will be learning and renewing the skill of how to recognize your patterns to empower and help guide them into a more optimal pattern yourself. Create the awareness to sense an easier flexibility – to move better, in more efficient ways that enable a more comfortable, integrated whole.

If you are open and curious about learning more beneficial patterns, you will begin to awaken your internal sense of self. With enough sustained commitment this will begin to create a sense of self awareness, resilience and potency that will stay with you forever.  All you need is the eagerness to grow and learn a bit more than you already know.  You might be surprised to discover how much you find out about yourself, what makes you tick, what holds you back.

So if you are open and interested in finding easier, more comfortable ways to improve the quality of your life, get curious and look into finding a Feldenkrais Practitioner in your area.  Join a class or schedule a private session to enhance your extraordinary learning experience!  You will be pleasantly surprised to find there is a path to find your own way to a quality of life that keeps getting better.

If you are in the Montgomery County, MD or Baltimore areas I hope you have the interest to join my class delving into these potent self explorations.  What am I looking for?  For those of you out there who are tired of doing the same thing over and over again without much advancement in feeling greater ease and comfort in your bones, your mind and your spirit!  So if you are one of these people I AM LOOKING FOR, please respond and let me know how we can begin to create a world of improvement, one little step at a time.  All it takes is your taking an action in a different direction.  A direction that leads towards your future that can be brighter, moving you forward in a direction of ease, comfort and knowing HOW to create more of this in your life!

Our habits do not have to be permanent.  By changing a habit you realize how much more you can do and believing that it can be different, leads you to a place where you have a choice!

So here is my offering and thoughts as we turn towards Spring and another Awareness Through Movement class this Tuesday!  With Spring comes the budding of life, hope and rebirth and what does Feldenkrais have to do with that?

Have you ever given thought to what is Creativity and what it offers us?

In our current times we have become familiar with the term, Neuroplasticity.  This is a modern terminology that Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais was speaking about in the 1940’s.  Finally Scientists today concur, our brains are malleable, learning tissue, coordinating and creating new connections versus the older, now dismissed belief that we were born with only a certain amount of neurons and once past a certain age our brains stopped growing.   Our modern research has come to realize that our brains create new neural pathways and alter existing ones so that we can adapt to new experiences.  This is the process of learning and how we create new memories and patterns as we live longer.  Our brains keep growing, making new connections – this is how our brains really function.

This is what the Feldenkrais Method is all about!  We are learning how to learn! In fact, we are remembering how to learn, something we did as babies before we could be taught.  We explored gently, sensing and feeling ourselves in our environment, in our daily experiences, creating patterns and habits for how we would respond, react and survive.  How to learn to adapt, not only to new stimuli and stresses but also how we respond to old stimuli that has triggered us, often in not so pleasant ways.  We learn how to create new and improved responses to these triggers and inputs that help us find better, easier, simpler, nicer ways to live our lives.

It is in practicing these easier patterns of efficiency that we enable these newer or remembered patterns to usurp some of our more obsessive and nagging habits that too often have lead us to chronic pain, different levels of discomfort whether we are calling it, feeling tight, sore, stiff… You know the things you say to express, it’s not so nice.  Are you satisfied with that or are you curious as to how YOU CAN CHANGE that obsessive behavior, did you even realize it was a form of being obsessive?

There are many lessons you can play with and feel right away something nicer!  Come to an Awareness Through Movement ® class and feel for yourself in just one lesson how you can begin to find strategies that make your life easier, nicer and can lead you back to fulfill your dreams that maybe you allowed an authoritative figure take away from you with a diagnosis or simply saying, it’s your genetics, you’re not so young, it’s age related…  Are you really willing to settle for that?  Maybe so but me, NEVER!

It is through my gentle and easy explorations with The Feldenkrais Method that I find and found the vital, potent and youthful me no matter what my age!  And this is coming from an A Type personality who has learned from my experiences of what striving, struggling, pushing, forcing and that old saying that has done more harm to us than good – no PAIN, NO GAIN!  You can make NO PAIN, GAIN possible too if you want!

Look into The Feldenkrais Method, Awareness Through Movement classes or a private session called Functional Integration ® and feel for yourself what you can do to make life so much nicer.  What have you got to lose, your tiredness, chronic pain, fatigue, depression.  Replace it with feeling great, more efficient, getting lots accomplished with more energy, feeling potent, capable and life just gets nicer!

My “elevator speech” – what I do, describe this is a soundbite.  If I can’t explain this in the briefest of words today, I’ve lost ones interest and curiosity.  So what is Body Psychology?  Most know that when one visits a Psychologist, one goes to discuss what’s going on in their lives.  A form of talk therapy to help guide us in how to resolve problems, giving us the support and direction in better learning how to solve and improve our life, right?

When we have aches and pains, physical issues have developed whether chronic or acute, and all we have done to fix the problem has yet to achieve that result, it is very easy to fall into a place of accepting something we’d rather not, becoming complacent and tuning out.  Over time this tuning out or dissociation to ourselves only comes back to haunt us.  When we have pain or discomfort, this is our brains way of telling us to pay attention.  It might not be saying Don’t DO That but rather STOP, Pay attention to HOW and WHAT you are doing it.  What about finding another way?  It is in how we organize ourselves, the ‘Coordination of our Organization’ that needs to be addressed.

We all live in a fast pace world, almost too fast where we wisk through life barely perceiving what we’re doing and what is going on around us.  We are obsessed in doing, achieving and accomplishing so much and yet we never seem to feel how to pause, rest and restore.  It’s in these times of rest that we restore ourselves.  Where we return to a more optimal functioning that is all about the highest quality of life.

I am a Feldenkrais ® Practitioner, a teacher or maybe better put, a coach, an observer and an enabler as to how we find a more optimal way of organizing ourselves – what we think, feel and do.  It all starts in our brains, they are the Admirals or 5 Star Generals that create the information that travels through us to the end destination, our musculoskeletal system.  Simply put, our bones, muscles and all that need to organize and coordinate in order to do all we do!

As infants, we are in a world of exploration, sensing and feeling our contact with the environment and how we connect to it.  Nothing else exists other then finding how to feel safe, comforted, fed and responded to.  Our days are spent in gentle play with lots of rest to allow what we have been exploring to settle in, connect, create linkages so that we can revisit these patterns until they become habitual, something we’re able to do on demand without consciously thinking how to do it.  At that point we  move onto another exploration, creating another pattern, building one atop the other, like a finely crafted structure, we create a secure underpinning and foundation to build upon, unless we have been pushed beyond our developed abilities to strain that creates pain.  As babies, we are living in an exploratory Body Psychology where we sense and feel, searching for connections, ease, simplicity and making our lives nicer, better, more enjoyable.  It’s more than just survival unless our existence is at the barest minimum and only survival is sought.  When that is the case, learning is on hold, we are consumed only with how to survive!

We are learning as infants. We develop patterns with all our 650 muscles and 206 bones plus all the nerve connections in order to function as the highly intelligent beings we are, and yet we so quickly forget what we have learned, overriding this intelligence with a drive to follow the pack, do as we’re told, be the best, go as fast as we can, and a culture that rewards us for “No PAIN, NO GAIN!”.  Why are we surprised that down the road, almost out of nowhere we finally become aware of something not so nice.  It doesn’t have to have resulted from an assault, something sudden, blind siding us that jolted us and we fear, never to feel as easy as we once did.  Often we are told by an authority that this might be age related or our genetics.  How limiting a belief can you abide by?

I don’t say there isn’t truth to this belief.  What makes one age before their time and another does so much better?  One might say it’s my genes.  Our DNA does have something to do with it, yet there are potentials that don’t trigger and situations that are triggered by what we do whether intentional or unaware.  Over time, the “No PAIN, NO GAIN” philosophy has too much baggage in it to be in our best interest.  What if we could sense and feel a concept like, ‘NO PAIN, GAIN’?  Think about it!  No infant of any species pushes themselves to strain and create pain.  This is only experienced in the dire need of survival, not as a process of growth and optimal living.  The strain and pushing over time, although might have yielded some benefits like winning a race, getting a raise or promotion, increase cardiovascular circulation but at what cost?  There is always a price to pay and too often it comes years later in the experience of chronic pain.  This is the deterioration and wear and tear of our foundation.  Our skeletal structure which is the underpinning of our support and all our parts, over time deteriorate before their life expectancy.  What do we do?  Well we have some wonderful Allopathic medicine that can come to the aid for repair but that repair has years and years of habituated compensations built into us by now.  These patterns don’t just go away.  Remember, they are unconscious once they become a pattern and in order to create more choices and patterns we need to become aware of what we’re doing.  Too often we think we are doing what we intend and quite the contrary, we are doing the opposite.

That’s where Body Psychology comes into the equation.  When we take the time to ask better questions as to what we’re doing and how we are doing it, the ‘Coordination of our Organization and the Organization of our Coordination’, that enables us to create a more enjoyable, likable, nice experience called YOUR LIFE!  Find more optimal ways to improve the quality of your life, not to simply make it ok, make it something that you really like.  Be willing to dream again and reclaim yourself, finding more ease and comfort in how you live  that maybe you thought was in your past.  Is a limiting belief that leaves you feeling hopeless, old and sore what you are settling for?  You can choose to make it better but first you have to take the time to return to a place of listening to notice the little things and from there create more optimal ways that grow exponentially to create the life you want!

Body Psychology is Feldenkrais and Feldenkrais is Body Psychology !  Come feel what you’re missing!

“Health is our ability to realize our avowed and unavowed dreams”! (Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais)

How do we come by our individual habits whether they be in how we think, feel or move ourselves? This is the story of our lives. Some of our habits serve us well and some hold us back, limiting full expression of our wishes and dreams.  Too often we don’t even realize what is limiting us!  Our individual story, our history of what we interpret happened to us defines our experience of the world.  Our story encompasses a litany of emotions of love, nurturing, abuse, trauma, accidents and pleasure.
“Life is movement. Improve your movement and you will improve your life”! (Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais)

Movements originate in our brain. The brain has a “blue print” for every act we intend to do. When we want to change our habits or ways of action, it is not the muscles we need to change. We have to change our brain’s habitual patterns that activate and organize the muscles. Dr. Feldenkrais, through research and his own experiences, discovered a way to make this possible. He devised a way to change habits that get in our way and improve them with new more beneficial ones that will become as natural to us as the ones we come to realize don’t serve us as well.

Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais – an Israeli physicist, engineer, scientist, Judo master and the originator of the Feldenkrais Method, introduced his work to the United States in the 1970’s.  The premises of his work was not about prescribed movements as in dance, Pilates, Yoga or Tai-Chi, but rather about the natural movements we learn as babies and use every day as adults to function optimally as humans.  The more optimal we function, the healthier we remain.  This doesn’t mean we don’t get sick but rather that when we do, we move through it faster, easier with less prolonged symptoms.

Dr. Feldenkrais’ method has given ordinary people the means to make the activities of their daily life more pleasurable and pain free.  It enables one to expand their range and quality of movements regardless of age, diagnosis or physical conditions. And now, decades after Dr. Feldenkrais’ innovative approach to improving our quality of life, we now see that all the latest brain research agrees with Dr. Feldenkrais about the importance of healthy, well coordinated movements to the health of the brain.  Makes no difference whether we are babies, minors, adults or senior citizens.

The movement lessons, called Awareness Through Movement® are done lying on the floor, in all different orientations as well as in sitting and standing. The movements are easy and gentle to explore.  They are designed to awaken in you what you actually do and how to make whatever you do feel easier and more comfortable.  Too often we think we are doing one think and in fact are doing something quite different!  It’s as if we are saying yes and no at the same time!

Where are you holding, where do you feel tension? Do you stop breathing? Do you habitually stiffen your jaw when you move? How much or how little do you feel yourself, is it only when you hurt?  How much of your whole self participates in a movement, do you actually use all of you? Poor Neuro-Muscular and skeletal use limits our physical, mental and emotional life. They also limit our performance, be it in athletics, music, dance, theater, or in anything we do even if it’s something like bending down, reaching for something on the top shelf, or turning to veer into traffic or park.

So what if you believed for a moment that you could enhance an improvement in how you think, feel and move, what would it be worth for you to reclaim some of your sense of vitality, potency, being able to do what you want, when you want without pushing yourself to the limit, straining, stressing, striving only to regress into discomfort?

Why not search for where you can find an Awareness Through Movement Feldenkrais class and join in, come lie on the floor and feel what a difference it can make!

What comes to mind when you think about the “S” words.  Often we smile and think of the explosive word that releases tension in a frustrating moment.  What about the words that are so pronounced in our culture of stretching, straining, stressing and striving.  You know the dictate of, “No pain, no gain” – REALLY!

I’d like to transition our focus to the “S” words that have created so much more for me.  Think about exploring something, especially when it’s new with the focus of Safe, Satisfying, Sensing ourselves, Slow to notice what we’re doing or at least attempting to do, Small to discern little differences, Smooth vs. jerky, Soft instead of jarring ourselves and Subtle.  There are so many other “S” words to add to this list like, Silky, Sexy, Slippery, Skillful, Sliding….  When we take the time to listen, we can find a better path to travel from which we can hone our skill, improving and developing speed to go fast, strong without difficulty and finding that with NO PAIN we create a massive GAIN!  No baby pushes to the point of pain, they stop, recalculate and begin anew.  This is what we did when we were babies until maybe we were taught how to strive, stress, stretch ourselves to the limit and pay a hefty price in time.

So next time you are interested in going to the next step, “Slow down, you move too fast, gotta make the morning last just trippin down the cobble stones, lookin for love and feelin groovey”!

Here’s what I keep learning, more and more each day!

Our capacity to COMFORTABLY GET DOWN to the ground and COMFORTABLY GET BACK UP AGAIN is serious stuff!  Maybe you notice in yourself or certainly in others around you an anxiety to get to the floor and back up again.  As adults we rarely go to the ground and play around “down there”.  For many of us it scares us.  Fear of pain, a difficulty in figuring out how to do something we use to do but don’t feel as safe because of stiffness, or maybe there’s concern about losing our balance and falling?  Any of this sound familiar?

When we lose this curiosity to play and ground-time, what happens is a decrease in our ability to function efficiently.  Fear of falling becomes the norm and we slowly lose our independence.  According to new scientific research, it can even determine how long we live!

When we learned how to move and get up off the floor for the first time it happened by accident.  Think as a baby -> infant -> toddler, how you had to discover balance, skeletal support and muscular efficiency.  We didn’t think about it, it just happened, standing up on our own two feet for the first time, it took us by surprise!   In truth, it took lots of time with lots of curiosity that fueled our play, our explorations to continue to figure out how to do something that enabled more in our lives.

When we give up on this play time, the result is too often a stiff body and rigid mind, neither of which can bend and play, or discover an invent like we once did.

Unfortunately, most of us have lost this curiosity and desire to play with our body and imagination in the way we once did.  We might diligently work out, reps and sets, doing our exercises but is this with awareness or are we just in a pattern where our brain tunes out?

Remember how as a kid we made believe for hours, fantasizing in our joyful imagination of what could be.  Can you remember how that made you feel, the endorphins and good hormones that fueled our healthy growth?  Do you ever wish you could revisit those moments of feeling so good, free an uninhibited?

When we keep exploring with awareness the richness and diversity of movement that our body can offer, it opens up richness and diversity in both thought and creativity! When we cease this richness and diversity, our body and brain get dull along with it.  You know the saying, “Don’t use it, lose it!”!

Here is what I keep learning and share, continue to explore new and different things that you have a desire or interest in.  Do little bits at a time, bring your attention and awareness to what you are doing.  Anat Baniel, a phenomenal creature of learning from the origins of The Feldenkrais Method (R) speaks of “Awaring”.  Just like playing, thinking, feeling, sensing, loving, we need to keep our attention with mindfulness in action, just like any verb/gerund.

I do this daily, playing, exploring whatever I do with a freshness and newness to everything.  I bring an Awareness Through Movement (R) into everything I do, with intention and pleasure.  In doing so I keep my mind and body active, freer and happier!  Wishing you the same!

As we age and mature, what are the thoughts that concern you the most?  For some it is a fear of falling, others realize they are beginning to forget details, or they can’t do what they use to do, or want to do.  How often do you speak about what you use to be able to do instead of focusing on how to do more of what you really want?  We make excuses that attempt to sooth our discouraged spirit, lick our wounds so to speak.  Do you often find that you are talking about yourself as what you used to be able to do?  What are you not learning here?

We now know that our brains are constantly developing new neurons, the building blocks of life.  Many decades ago this was refuted although there have been many great thinkers and leaders of this work that were establishing this thread as far back as the 1940’s.  Dr Moshe Feldenkrais was writing his “Mature Body and Behavior” then, following up with “The Potent Self”, all engaging in this process of learning.  Today there are programs that explain all about Neuroplasticity.   What does this mean?

Our brains have the capacity to continue to develop new neural pathways.  We know and continue to see that those who continue to engage in new acts, functions, learning new things, are curious, are the ones that stave off modern day illnesses that take away our vitality: Dementia, Alzheimer’s, even Parkinson’s Disease, or maybe it’s the aches and pains of Arthritis or a full recovery from surgeries.  When we stop learning, using ourselves as we did with interest as we did when younger, we lose what we don’t use.

You want to know how to stay feeling younger, more vital and vibrant?  Do new and interesting things!  It is a mind set of You Get to Do this, instead of the “have to”, should, or if only I could mindset.  What is it you really would love to do that you make excuses for not doing because of some trauma or ache or pain?  What’s your excuse?

Find the things that engage you that instead of saying, “if only I could” or “I use to be able to do that”, if it’s something you would love to do or simply have an interest, give it a go!  It’s not about being cavalier, rather listening and figuring out how would I make this possible?  We did this as infants, figuring out how to do something we desired, it’s called survival!  We used ourselves, efficiently, with all of our sensory organs (telereceptors in our head: 2 eyes; to ears; 2 nostrils, our mouth and also the end of the alimentary system, the other end, and then all of our kinesthetic sensory touch abilities).

Engage in life again, being curious, doing new things that interest you.  Notice the language you use, does it serve you well or does it derail you to stay stuck in your known.  From our known there is comfort at first but too quickly it turns into complacency and stagnation.

Move into life, do things that give you joy and open your horizons again.  Since you are reading this it means something intrigued you to read on.  How many varieties of activities and new interests do you open yourself up to?  Do you find yourself only doing what you know how to do, never engaging in new things to give it a try.  Do you only try something once, poo pooing it and then take a pass or do you become curious as to why some really LOVE it, what are you missing out on?  What do they see that you don’t? 

Find where to begin and begin at the beginning, learning how to learn, not thinking about if you are good enough, learn how to “make the impossible possible, the possible easy, the easy pleasant and the pleasant elegant!”  It’s your birthright, don’t give up, it’s your life, I hope you live it to the fullest!

There are so many ways to take care of yourself, especially in this hot summer heat wave but what if you are injured, paralyzed or dealing with a serious health challenge, can water therapy help? The answer is yes! While in the water we are more buoyant and able to maneuver without the added weight of gravity pressing down on us. Especially when there is the need to rehabilitate, water or hydrotherapy is a reliable way to do the work in awakening our brains, nervous and musculoskeletal systems, in fact, all of our 11 systems that make up the human bodily functioning but that’s not just for us!

Many years ago I took my beloved Shembala, an English Black Lab for hydrotherapy to aid and improve her elbow dysplasia.  By the time we became aware of this condition it was too late to attempt surgery.  That is often done when the dysplasia is in the hip but elbows are another story all together and if a surgical intervention is to be considered it needs to be while they are still pups.  The results were impressive.  Shembala regained much mobility and although we could never get rid of this condition, we improved her ability to function and live life to her fullest while we had her in our lives.  And now here’s another story of a 6 year old cat named Nazzaning.  To learn more about this wonderful success story of Nazzaning who after an accident suffered with a paralyzed front paw and quickly rehabilitated the use of his arm and paw/fingers with hydrotherapy. To learn more, click here.