This Feldenkrais Project 5th anniversary event includes
- Project Update: Where we’ve been, how we’ve done it, and where we’re headed next.
- Lesson: Reversible Diagonal Lengthening and Lifting, with “Piano Playing” Fingers and Toes (back-lying and front-lying)
- Talk: Nick summarizes Lesson #2, “What Action is Good?”, from Moshe Feldenkrais’s book called Awareness Through Movement.
Descriptions and replay links are below. Complete lesson notes are below all the replay buttons.
Please join the conversation by sharing your own questions or comments near the bottom!
Everyone can access this event’s FREE talk summarizing “What Action Is Good?” by Moshe Feldenkrais. Just scroll down!
The rest of this event is bonus video content for our donors. You can learn about it in the notes and comments below, but to access the lesson, update, and discussion replays you’ll need to join The FP as Member or Patron. Learn more
If you are a Member or Patron, please log in:
Feldenkrais Project Update: The FP at 5! (30 minutes)
What we’ve accomplished, how we budget and fund the Project, how to make the most of current and upcoming donor benefits, and where we’re headed next.
NOTE: We talked about so many things, but I missed these two important questions in the text chat:
Full hour-long lessons are challenging for my body and also for time some days. I wonder if this is a block for others, in terms of your marketing question.
I agree! Some shorter lessons would be appreciated. And if there was a way to filter the search results by time would be useful.
ANSWER: I’m happy to share that filtering by duration is part of our new search & filter! There’s a brief demonstration of this by screenshare during the update, but if you try it yourself you’ll see that as of now we have 30 lessons that are well under an hour.
I do have plans for more short lessons in the future, but I believe the one-hour format is the right default. I find a quiet hour creates and harnesses learning opportunities that only arise in the nervous system after about 40 minutes or so.
It’s not always possible, of course. A while ago I wrote about how to breakup hour-long lessons in a blog post titled Don’t Have an Hour? You Can Still Enjoy a Lesson.
Lesson: Reversible Diagonal Lengthening and Lifting, with “Piano Playing” Fingers and Toes (49 minutes)
Back-lying and front-lying, learning to lightly and easily lift overhead arms and long legs from the floor by finding accurate support from the ground, clear skeletal lines of skeletal support, and proportional muscle tone (using the large muscles to do the large work, and reducing the unnecessary efforts of small muscles). Ends with experiments with “reversibility,” by which Moshe Feldenkrais means three dimensional course changes at will.
Comfort & Configuration:
As always, but especially in this lesson, please limit the size of the movements to only what feels comfortable. You don’t actually need to lift your limbs! The after-lesson discussion below includes some inspiring commentary from a student who, for comfort, chose not to lift any parts of herself at first, then discovered how profound newfound abilities arose due to her taking care of herself patiently, and letting the lesson unfold.
Other lesson notes are below.
Lesson discussion, and other topics (27 minutes)
We discuss sharing The FP; why this lesson works when other attempts at this function haven’t; the benefit of not knowing where a lesson is going; “I can’t do this” feelings; communication and teaching styles; Feldenkrais and learning to love yourself; Feldenkrais for victims of trauma, and for feeling safe in one’s body; Feldenkrais compared to meditation; why it’s easier to work with the body patterns than the mind; technical vs esoteric language in Feldenkrais teaching; the neuroscience of learning; the safety of as-literal-as-possible descriptions of subjective experience; the marketing challenge of promoting self-reliance.
FREE Talk: “What Action Is Good?” (20 minutes)
Based on Lesson #2 from Moshe Feldenkrais’s book called Awareness Through Movement.
The YouTube version includes context commentary if you’ve just done the lesson above
Or listen to this permanent free audio version, lightly edited for our ATM book collection:
Discussion and wrap-up (5 minutes)
We discuss the density of Moshe Feldenkrais’s writings, Anat Baniel’s lovely work with children, and other pediatric Feldenkrais work.
Other lesson notes
Curiosities:
I designed this lesson to complement my “What Action Is Good?” talk, linked above. It includes detailed descriptions of the biomechanics and learning at work in the lesson. The talk is valuable before or after the lesson.
Context:
This special event took the place of our Q1 2024 Patrons Quarterly Conference, as we wanted to share the FP’s 5th anniversary update with all donors! Learn more about Patrons Quarterly events here.
The “What Action Is Good?” talk is being edited into our permanent audio format and will become Lesson #2 in the ATM book collection.
This event’s lesson was designed to expand on Lesson #3 in the ATM book collection, Some Fundamental Properties of Movement.
Related Lessons:
Some Fundamental Properties of Movement (unlocked for all through May 6). And check out that lesson’s related lessons tab.
Additionally, Refining the Shoulders and Hips (45 min, Patrons) is closely-related and very helpful for working out the torso origins of lifting the limbs. There’s more related learning in its related lessons tab, too.
Source:
This is a homebrew lesson based on
- My understanding of Lesson #2, “What Action Is Good?”, in the ATM book
- The fact that Moshe Feldenkrais follows that lecture immediately with Lesson #3, Some Fundamental Properties of Movement. My rendition and Feldenkrais’s text don’t emphasize its diagonal prone steps this much, but there’s a lot to learn by expanding on those steps.
- My own personal history of learning to play the piano “from my back” was the source of the reversibility experiments.
- Feldenkrais Trainer Jeff Haller’s beautiful related work in a lesson he calls Minimal Lifting.
Please don’t share the replay links except for the talk. The others are intended for current Feldenkrais Project Members and Patrons.
