If you’re new to Feldenkrais paradoxical (“seesaw”) breathing lessons, please explore Freeing Your Breath and Spine (16 or 37 min) first.
All the movements of this lesson are intended to be gentle and comfortable, always getting lighter, smoother, and easier, even when cues refer to pushing volume around inside your torso, “bearing down,” or moving swiftly. It was taught in an experienced Feldenkrais class where I assumed the students would self-limit.
Near the end you’re invited to decide if “that’s your lesson!”, by which I mean that if you feel you don’t want to do the final more difficult variations, don’t do them. Rest and enjoy the changes you feel. If you continue listening, you can simply imagine the final variations.
It’s always better to come back to a lesson again another time instead of pushing through difficulty and compromising the ease and improvement you’ve already discovered.
The word “chest,” as I use it in this lesson, is meant three dimensionally. Think of your whole rib structure or upper torso instead of the front surface.
It’s important to note that the type of breathing explored in this lesson is not a prescription for how you should breathe. Nor is it “the Feldenkrais way” to breathe. It is only a tool to mobilize your breath apparatus and cultivate your awareness, so that your breathing can more fluently adapt to all of life’s demands.
In recordings of Dr. Feldenkrais teaching this lesson he is often more specific about how to coordinate inhaling and exhaling with the seesaw movements of the torso.
To follow the book’s more ambiguous text, in this rendition I’ve often left it up to the student, inviting you to play with your options in many variations.
There are four options: as you draw in your belly and expand your chest is that when you breathe in, or out? Or you can seesaw as you hold your breath?
The fourth option gets some emphasis in his text: can you breath “independently”? In other words, can you separate the rhythm of the seesaw from the rhythm of your breath? This one is particularly tricky, and needn’t be emphasized the first time through. Neither do you need to go through all four options in each variation.
To avoid unnecessary difficulty you may wish to mostly use the one or two ways that are most accessible, especially the first time you do the lesson:
- Draw in your belly as you inhale, expanding your ribs in all directions. Compress your upper torso as you exhale, expanding your lower torso in all directions.
- Hold your breath and move the three dimensional volume up and down your torso.
Later, when you become more skillful you can pause the recording any time to play with more options. Feldenkrais makes a brief, ambiguous reference to this late in the lesson: after exploring sitting and holding your lower ribs he writes simply “reverse your breathing.”
This lesson is one of 12 in Moshe Feldenkrais’s 1972 book Awareness Through Movement. The Feldenkrais Project has a collection of lessons from this source.
It also appears in our Breathing with Vitality Deep Dive course.
It was taught in the context of a Feldenkrais Fundamentals class which was designed to be a practical study of Moshe’s Awareness Through Movement book. Study tips for the book are here, along with info about where to get it.
The brief reference to “the last two weeks of lessons” refers to live classes that were recorded and are available in our collections: Some Fundamental Properties of Movement (Patrons) and Folding, Foundation, and Length (Patrons) from our Legacy and Alternate Lessons collection.
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While taught in my own words, this lesson comes directly from Moshe Feldenkrais’s 1972 book Awareness Through Movement.
Sometimes there is a word I can not understand ie , in this lesson at 21′ 13 I do not understand an important word sisa which is often mentioned ? What am I doing in this case Thanks a lot
I think that word is “seesaw”, a children’s playground toy that is a board balanced in the middle: when one end goes up, the other end goes down. This is like the two “ends” of your torso in this lesson: your belly raises higher from the ground and your chest flattens, and then your chest raises higher from the ground, and your belly flattens.
see-saw
Helped with hick ups too 🙂
Oh, paradoxical breathing is so challenging for me! My first lesson 6 months ago made me run from any other lessons until this week. I’ve got the basics now that I’ve done a handful of lessons, but can’t release extraneous muscles while doing it. My diagonal breathing is pretty lame. The side-lying paradoxical breathing was just too much for me and that was the end of this lesson today.
Don’t be afraid – this is probably the “hardest” incorporation of the seesaw breath awareness technique in any of the lessons on our website. No need to push forward with breathing lessons, and you’ve been wise to do others instead! When the time is right have you tried Breath, Belly, Back, and Hips: Connecting to the Earth? I’m also thinking of the lessons in the red and blue boxes in our Breathing with Vitality course. They explore breathing in other ways (not seesaw).
Oh my gosh, this lesson is so hard! I guess because it has so many counter-intuitive parts! Very challenging. I wasn’t clear (and perhaps this made it harder) if when we were doing the seesaw breath if it was always supposed to be random and not connected to the breath in an organized way. We played with this and I took the play for making that the way to do the breath throughout the rest of the lesson. This really complexified it for me. I think the practice helped loosen some diaphragm adhesions or stuckness I have had for many years. I’m very curious what the effects/result will be after a few days, weeks, months, etc. Thank you! I’m planning on doing the entire Book Lesson series and am following your recommended order. I’m a little scared that this is the first one recommended being the “most accessible!”
Great feedback, thank you! I’ll review this one’s text and audio, and add a note to the Clarifications tab to answer your question (UPDATE: Done, but in the Curiosities tab instead).
Don’t worry, I think you’ll find many lessons in this series more accessible than this one, if coordination of the seesaw breath was the challenge. It’s a very unique exploration among these lessons.
I usually label “difficulty” of lessons based on the physical challenges of the positions and gross body movements for the average student, so there’s an enormous “your mileage may vary” because we’re all so different. I’ll definitely consider changing how I label this one after reviewing it. (UPDATE: I moved it into the More Complex category for these 12 lessons.)
I always feel a bit apprehensive about the paradoxical breathing lessons, as I find them more mentally/emotionally challenging. I’ve spent a lot of time focused on calm abdominal breathing and somehow I feel some anxiety about “ruining” that. I decided to approach that apprehension with curiosity as I would any other sensation during lessons, and actually managed to enjoy it (albeit split up into two half sessions). The only thing that surprised me was the very last variation bent over and hugging the chest, caused me great physical discomfort which lasted a while after the lesson, as if my back- and neck muscles went into a sudden spasm. Surprising as I’m hypermobile so I didn’t expect it. Might need to revisit this lesson sometime and explore that a bit more…
Funny thing is, at night in bed I was ruminating over it and whether or not I’d class the lesson as a positive experience that brought me something. As I was thinking about it I noticed I had subconsciously positioned my head and neck differently than usual allowing for more moving room around my ribs. So I guess it’s had an effect.
I agree with a previous comment from someone else, at times (very few though) it wasn’t clear whether or not to synchronise breath and seesaw in any way, so when an instruction came to separate the two I found myself thinking “wait, I was doing that, did I miss an earlier instruction?”
Great timing for that last question: I was writing the new Curiosities tab above, in answer to Anna’s question about coordinating the seesaw and breath, when your comment appeared. In short, Feldenkrais is frequently ambiguous about this in his book version, so I am too, but I wrote out a suggested approach in the Curiosities tab.
Kudos for diving deeply into a lesson that’s personally challenging. I thank Feldenkrais every day for the beautiful practice of bringing honest curiosity to our apprehensions. I also share the experience of processing ATMs in bed, especially the ones that nudge me farthest outside my familiar patterns. Sometimes I find myself spontaneously playing with new images and micro-movements in the twilight state between sleep and wakefulness.
That surprise last step in seated is one of the curveballs common to this collection, part of what makes these lessons more difficult than many others on this site. You might find Thinking and Breathing (Patrons) and Breathing with Floating Ribs and Sternum (49 min, Patrons) useful.