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!

Many people have asked me, why do Feldenkrais ®Awareness Through Movement ®lessons, after all they exercise or have a regime that they partake of some of the time, well, maybe. So I become really curious as to how to respond to this inquiry. For those of you that know me, you have become familiar with my metaphors and analogies that help provide examples for understanding something that we already know, reflected on something we do not know. It brings us a bit closer to having a moment of, ahhh, hummm, maybe even interesting! Does this begin your curiosity?

So what if we look at it this way. We live in a world which brings to us so much. Some of these things, events, and situations are good, others not so good and others really horrible, yet we are here. How to continue forth to enable something better, nicer, were we not only LIKE the situation more but we LIKE ourselves better!

These things are called stresses, Eu-stress = the good stuff, like getting married, falling in love, a new baby or puppy or kitten, snuggles, kisses and of course chocolate! The other side of this coin is the Di-Stress. In moderation, we need both, it is the balance of the two that enable our experiences being nicer and what we want. When we fall out of balance and remain there too long, we feel lost, stuck and even anxious about ever being able to move into a place we like better.

Stressors affect our nervous system. Small amounts of stress, maintaining the dance to resume balance is one thing but too often what happens is an incremental amount of di-stresses developing, little bits at a time. Each stress we begin to accustom to, without noticing the burden and weight it puts on us. Even though we may not notice it, the stresses are building, little by little. It’s as if you left your engine running, constantly. This continuous running creates adrenaline and cortisols that reeve our body and nervous system up. Over time this depletes our adrenal glands and has us running on empty. It is as if our engine is overheated and ready to boil over or burn up! This creates a burden on you, all of our bodily systems that keep us functioning, now due to this added strain, begin to function less optimally and we feel the weight and effort. Running on empty, having no reserve leads to burn out.

The amount of energy it takes to heal is huge and as we begin to heal, then returning to our daily life, the smallest daily function can deplete us, amazing us as to how can this be the case, will we ever get back? Remember, healing requires lots of energy and consumed energy requires lots of time to reboot so that we can feel restored, refreshed and potent. If we push, feeling good in the moment, we are disappointed to find we throw ourselves back into the depleted state. All we forgot is the time that is required to restore. Each of us are different, our level or tolerance to stressors is very different person to person. Was our stress cup near full at the time of an accident, a trauma, a blow to us? Then there is the question, different for each of us as to how much stress we have accustomed to that has lead us to the brink, the tipping point of what seems to lead us to no return. There is a return but in order to return, we need to notice what is working, little bits and build from there. Instead we want a linear approach of all or nothing, push ourselves too far, too soon and then we are back in the hole!

How much stress is already in our system will dictate how successful our healing is and how quickly our system, our body will get back to harmony and find a good balance between the Eu-stress and Di – stress. Another thing to be mindful of is, something that is working, we usually sense in a brief period of time, the incremental improvement, yet too often we get stuck in doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different outcome. This is known as either insanity or also called neuroses. What we need to be more attuned to is how to be mindful, aware of what is leading us out of the hole, enabling a shift to something more optimum, little incremental steps that lead us forward instead of 2 steps forward and 3 steps back! Do we understand what our part is in this process? Do we begin to recognize our habitual patterns that are unconscious and how to create other more optimal choices? These are choices that lead us to what we prefer in how we think, feel and move, what we like more and want more of!

So attending Awareness Through Movement classes gives you this opportunity to gently, without pushing yourself to the brink, find other, more enjoyable options in how to move forward, out of your past that you are tired of malingering in and into your future of what you prefer seeing, sensing and feeling is possible. It is, simply by being curious with yourself, gentle in how you inquire, creating different possibilities in how you think, feel and move.

Life can be better, even if it is really good for you now, find more that can and will serve you better. Things change and change is the only thing we know for certain. So as the inevitable occurs, isn’t it nice to realize you are more prepared to make the shifts to enable something so much easier and nicer despite some of the not so nice unexpected events.

Come to an ATM lesson, investing in yourself, your future, whether it’s your first to explore or your 100th. There is always something more to know about yourself that can make you surprised and return to a feeling of resilience!