Facing COVID-19 Together

Updates from the Feldenkrais Project and Twin Cities Feldenkrais during the pandemic

From Nick: The info below is current to September 4. My family and I are safe and healthy and continuing our quarantine practices. My efforts to share Feldenkrais online as generously and widely as possible are also continuing. Summary and newest info are in bold.

A listener comment from Aliza Nizet on our free introductory lesson collection, Getting Oriented, as quarantine began:

I’m a Pilates teacher and I did Lesson 1 of Getting Oriented today on March 16, 2020 – the first day I am not teaching myself because of an effort to protect my family and community from COVID-19 and the first day both of my young daughters are home from school. I have been following the Feldenkrais Project since last fall and know that it is a powerful place for me to find a sense of calm and grounding. Thank you, Nick, not just for making this amazing method widely available but also for your gifts as a teacher, to invite us all in with such ease and grace and clarity. I’ll be sharing the Feldenkrais Project with all my students as a resource to rely upon as they navigate the challenging times ahead.

A note from Nick Strauss-Klein, creator and voice of The Feldenkrais Project:

Since the pandemic began I’ve been regularly receiving notes like the one above (here are some recent ones), both from our audio collection listeners and participants in my quarantine-inspired weekly online public Zoom classes. I’ve learned from these emails and comments that it’s essential right now to keep working vigorously toward our vision of spreading the life-changing benefits of Feldenkrais study as widely as possible, with the help of all our listeners and the generous donors who make this website possible. Please help us share our expansive FREE and Pay-What-You-Can resources!

Now and always, our 50 public audio lesson recordings are available anytime, to anyone with an internet connection, with no paywall or password. Our web traffic doubled when quarantine began and remains high today. I’m overjoyed that home Feldenkrais study is a balm to so many during this crisis. Through the Feldenkrais Project (the FP) and Twin Cities Feldenkrais (TCF) I’m doing my best to offer the grounding, calming, life-affirming support of as many online study opportunities as I can create!

Thanks for your understanding and patience while I run the FP and continue to add content to it, teach the weekly TCF Zoom classes, and do my part as a husband and father of four children (ages 4-14) to maintain a happy home and support my wife’s essential work as a clergy person. Our big three kids remain home, in “digital academy” for school this fall. On the advice of my favorite source of straight talk about COVID-19 (The Osterholm Update) our pre-schooler is back in school and we are watching the situation closely.

FP listeners know how passionate I am about learning, making the world a better place, and communicating clearly and openly. I’ll keep this page updated as the situation changes.

– Nick

Here are topics and summaries for what’s below. Please scroll down to read more. You’ll also find, at the bottom, more testimonials about what the FP recordings and TCF live video classes mean to our web visitors during the pandemic.

• For all listeners: some inspiring statistics. In short, the FP is free to use, available 24/7, and more valued during COVID-19 than ever before.
• Info for FP donors: Thank you for your support! It is critical right now. All our donor benefits are continuing as usual, and we’ve enjoyed two new temporary benefits inspired by quarantine: recordings are available for our three donor “thank you” classes with Q&A discussions, and we’ve enabled more lesson downloads.
• Info for renewing or prospective FP donors: Like what we’re doing and want to help out? Thank you! Due to global economic instability we’re extending our best donation/benefits rates indefinitely.
• About Pay-What-You-Can live video classes: My in-person teaching has been halted by the pandemic, so I’m offering additional online Feldenkrais study in the form of weekly live Zoom classes and their recordings.

Inspiring Statistics:

The world changed in March just as we celebrated our website’s first birthday. Here’s a few statistics about how we’re delivering high quality Feldenkrais study globally:

• In our entire first year we had 24,000 unique visitors, but in Q2 2020 we had 13,500!
• About half our visitors are in the USA, and the rest are from all over the world.
• Getting Oriented, our new collection of short lessons and talks introducing Feldenkrais study, published on March 5, is now our most-visited collection!
• Our online community is engaged: our site has hundreds of user comments, and commenting remains at an all time high since the pandemic began.
• Our Find a Teacher page had almost 1500 views in its first year. We’re generating interest in Feldenkrais Practitioners and classes worldwide, which is part of our vision! Email questions about becoming a Feldenkrais Practitioner are way up, too.

It is amazing, humbling, and inspiring to me as I look at the data and read so many spontaneous testimonials from our users. During this period of social distancing I am continuing all my normal FP activity by putting my limited work hours into sustaining and improving our lesson resource and website, delivering our all our regular donor benefits and our two additional donor benefits during quarantine (three lesson recordings with Q&A sessions and additional downloads) and marketing the Feldenkrais Project’s free resources and pay-what-you-can online classes as widely as possible.

Now that online-only Feldenkrais is a continuing reality we’ve gotten used to together, I’m sending fewer emails to the Feldenkrais Project email list. Current subscribers can also opt in or out of certain kinds of emails I send.

For Feldenkrais Project donors:

First and foremost, on behalf of our worldwide community of thousands of listeners, and my family and I, thank you for your support! The Feldenkrais Project’s 50 free audio lesson recordings, though obviously not designed for this crisis, have nevertheless emerged as an ideal resource for many people who are struggling. This ongoing collaborative effort (which we so intentionally named a “Project”) is more important than ever before. We are 100% funded by your donations! I am deeply grateful for what our freewill funding model has enabled us to offer the world during this time, and proud of the donor benefits we are able to offer you.

The coronavirus has created a financial crisis in addition to a health crisis, and I know your financial situation may be changing. We make it as easy as possible to start and stop recurring donation support for the FP any time. As always, I ask donors to think of contributions to the FP like movements of a Feldenkrais lesson: please don’t do anything that creates strain.

We’ve recently added Send-a-Check and Venmo options to our Simple Donation method (no login to remember, no benefits). It was previously just PayPal.

If you have a question about donation or benefits, or want to do it differently than my usual options during this unusual time, please contact me.

On a personal note, my livelihood is unstable right now like so many people’s, and I am profoundly grateful for your support of the FP. When I voluntarily ended all in-person teaching on March 13 I gave up much of my income, most notably the major portion provided by my one-to-one, hands-on Feldenkrais Functional Integration lessons. My family and I are blessed that over the last year a growing percentage of my work hours and income has been the FP. If your donations aren’t a strain and you choose to continue them, please know that they are directly supporting our family, and not taken for granted.

In gratitude to our donors, early on in the pandemic we offered three Zoom meetups for live video lessons and Q&A discussion. Feldenkrais Project Members and Patrons can access the three recordings here:

Donor “Thank You” Events

We’ve also recently enabled more lesson downloads for Members and Patrons:

Read “Making Lemonade Out of Lemons” blog post

If you’re thinking about renewing donation, or donating to the FP:

Thank you! I have extended indefinitely our first birthday celebration offer to receive our best donor benefits at our launch year rates. FP Patron-level donors receive at least 16 new lesson recordings per year and other awesome benefits. You can become a Patron by donating $18 monthly, or donate quarterly for effectively $15/month, or make a yearly contribution to receive Patron benefits for $12.50/month!

The benefits for Members are great, too: you can download all the lessons in our primary collections (50 currently), and enjoy our full lesson notes, including cross-references so you can pursue a personalized line of study. There’s also our new benefit, the donor “thank you” event recordings mentioned above. Finally there’s our advanced search and sort page, which makes it easy to find exactly the lesson you’re looking for, any time. You can join the FP as a Member for as little as $3/month.

Learn About FP Donation

About Pay-What-You-Can (PWYC) TCF Live Video Classes:

My quarantine-inspired efforts to teach my previously in-person Twin Cities Feldenkrais (TCF) classes online are separate from the FP lessons and donor benefits that comprise most of this website.

For clarity I normally keep the FP and TCF separate, but since all my teaching is online nowadays (and time is so tight in my household) I’m consolidating my efforts here at FeldenkraisProject.com during quarantine.

It’s amazing to be together in shared time and intention as I lead Feldenkrais lessons by videoconference! My regular in-person students and I are happy to welcome you to our virtual classroom. The testimonials have been amazing, and here’s a free sample recording of a live video class. It’s a mini-workshop I offered on March 16 called Organizing Your Feet for Balance, Posture, and Power.

I’m using a pay-what-you-can model for live video Zoom classes, and you’ll receive a recording whether you attend live or not. You can learn about Zoom, see what classes are upcoming, and buy recordings of past lessons here:

Learn about PWYC Classes

To make the world a better place and keep our now global online classes rooted in our local community, we donate 10% of gross proceeds for these classes to local Twin Cities (Minnesota) charities. My family and I have made our August donation split four ways, between these three organizations we donated to in June and July in response to systemic racial inequality and injustice and the looting damage to our community: mninjustice.org, isaiahmn.org, welovestpaul.com, AND our longtime favorite charity, neighb.org. We’ll continue with the same distribution for 10% of September’s gross proceeds for Zoom classes.

For March, April, and May we donated to our favorite charity, Neighborhood House. It’s a local Twin Cities food shelf and community support center with amazing mission, vision, and values. I received this note back:

Neighborhood House has been helping families gain social and economic well-being for more than 120 years. We are grateful to Twin Cities Feldenkrais for contributing 10% of revenue from their live online classes to Neighborhood House. These contributions allow us to help families with basic needs when they are in crisis and to provide educational opportunities for the entire family. Learn more at neighb.org. Thank you!

More of the inspiring emails and Facebook posts received during the pandemic:

Feedback from a participant in our April 21 class (you can pay-what-you-can for a recording here):

Before the plague, I was taking lessons from you at the Marsh, and continue to do so most Mondays and Tuesdays on Zoom. We don’t have a camera on our computer, so I cannot participate in that way. However, I do see and hear you, and others, and am getting some amazing, mind-blowing results. In particular this last one, Tuesday 4.21, which made me feel as if I had a body transplant. Upon standing, I thought, “Whose body is this, and what did you do with my old one?”

Thank you, Nick, very much. As long as my luck holds, I intend to continue to take classes and to learn and change.

Feedback after our April 17 lesson and discussion (here’s the recording) for Feldenkrais Project donors (Member and Patrons):

I loved your lesson yesterday…. This morning when I woke up I had a pleasant conscious awareness of my breathing in the stomach region. I love that about Feldenkrais; unknown regions coming into awareness, expanding the inner space of the body and becoming more and more alive (and calm at the same time).

I’ve been enjoying your audio lessons for a long while, and for me it’s a blessing that now I can also be part of your live video classes. It’s fun to share the classroom with you and people in their homes from all over the world in these online sessions. I also liked your introduction and the discussion afterwards. Thank you for your generosity!

Short quotes from many students:

I am so grateful for the FP – it’s been a mainstay of my study for over 3 years now. I just discovered your “walking collection” in the “straight from class” section, and am really enjoying it. I’ve been needing a series to do, something to focus on during the quarantine, and this is just the ticket.

Also wanted you to know that I am in love with your classes and have passed your website on to several other people who need help at this time! I am over the moon grateful and will become a member or patron very soon.

In gratitude 🙏

Just wanted to thank you for an amazing class today! Thank you for your hard work and for giving me the possibility to take the class in these uncertain times of social isolation. It was inspiring!

Hey! I’m a dancer from Finland and have been using this resource as part of my home routine during the current crisis. It’s been super helpful. Thank you so much for making Feldenkrais available in this way! For now the method is not particularly well known in Finland and often tuition is economically beyond the reach of a performing arts professional to attend regularly. Anyway, have not donated yet but will do. THANK YOU!

First, I’d like to thank you for a wonderful first-time experience with your free on-line live class the other day. You’re amazing in how you explain things so clearly.

I cannot express enough my gratitude to you & your concern for helping others. You are a rare man, not looking for the almighty dollar but to serve others with your loving heart.

Bless you & your family.

I am almost 83 years old and experienced Feldenkrais years ago when I was a psychology student. I am thrilled to see what you are doing at this stage and getting yourself on line…it is so awakening to “feel” what goes on in my aging body. Since all of us are monitoring the future due to the Virus, it is very confusing. I am happy to have sessions at home

It’s amazing to me ur ability to give so thoroughly completely and continuously.
I imagine you already give A LOT to your family and still have more, endless it seems to give to you classes, it’s like the strega Nonna pasta pot!
Well know you are appreciated. My pelvis has never felt as level as after Tuesday’s lesson. And was wonderful to connect to all your ppl.
With much gratitude

From Beth, San Rafael, CA, brand new FP Patron:

Many, many thanks for sharing your outstanding live Feldenkrais class with the general public this morning. What a wonderful way to start the day and to feel a sense of connection, not only with our bodies but with the rest of the world as we hunker down.

I’m planning to contribute to your Project and applaud your vision to bring Feldenkrais to all, particularly during these unprecedented times.

To good health and equanimity!

From a Facebook post to friends, shared with me by a participant:

My daughter and I just finished a free live online Feldenkrais class together at home. It was rejuvenating! There were 120 people in the class from all over the world – Spain, Australia, Germany, Israel, the UK, and all over the US. It was inspiring to see people trying to take care of themselves in this crazy time. I’ve been doing Feldenkrais private lessons for five years and it has changed my body and my life. It is a neuromuscular reeducation. My instructor, Nick Strauss-Klein, has created the Feldenkrais Project to create free lessons online. You can become a member for more benefits but there are dozens of lessons online for free. As we are all cooped up for awhile and need to stay sane and healthy think about giving this a try. I promise you won’t regret it and you might even become a life-long devotee like me and many others.