Essence for “Experts”: Your Navigational Sternum and Pelvis (Patrons)

In the initial nodding of your head north and south, relax your mouth and jaw in addition to your breath and eyes. It can be helpful to let your teeth part as you nod up. When nodding down, maintain a sense of spaciousness your airway by limiting the size of the movement.

NOTE: Click the next tab for other important information about your experience and self-care.

• “Essence” means these 30-minute versions review the essential learning of a particular lesson, explore essential relationships in ourselves, and illustrate the essence of Feldenkrais ATM study in a distilled format.
• You are an “expert” if Feldenkrais is a regular part of your life, and you’re familiar with the source lesson: you’ve explored and valued the full-length version at least once (even if it challenged you), and you have some memory of it.
• You don’t have to be a pro, or feel like you’ve mastered the source lesson. Rather, this version is a chance to review and learn more, for people who are familiar with it.
• Your familiarity with the source lesson’s movement cues and images allows us to get more directly to the essence of the lesson, and emphasize the essence of the Feldenkrais Method in it.
• It’s assumed you know how to be kind to yourself and explore thoughtfully, no matter what’s asked of you. You know how to respond to challenge and discomfort with wisdom, patience, and curiosity, instead of cultural conditioning to use force, speed, or self-judgment.
• Finally, it’s assumed you know and love the space between stimulus and response in which action is composed. You can hear an instruction, then feel and shape your intention as it propagates from your imagination throughout your body…all the while inhibiting the urge to immediately “perform” what was asked.

Though cues to lighten and engage your feet are on the back burner in much of this lesson, your learning from Your Navigational Pelvis is an essential ingredient. When you take your pelvis east and west, for example, use both legs to create this: one lightens, the other engages.

In standing, sometime shortly after the lesson, you might explore leading your sternum very gently in the cardinal directions, and along diagonals. Doing this softly while sensing the details of how your balance adjusts is a natural expansion of the lesson.

For an improvisational review later, you might expand your supine knees bent sternum explorations into compass arcs and then circles, first with just the skin, later with a deeper touch. How do your head and pelvis relate? Can you come to a point of initiating circles of your sternum “from” your feet (it’s really your hip joints), like at the end of Your Navigational Pelvis?

Feldenkrais essentials emphasized in this lesson:

• We don’t need a preamble to practicing Feldenkrais, just a moment to shift our attention out of the near ubiquitous narrow, objective track of Western life to a more open, welcoming focus. We invite our awareness to embrace our whole internal and external environment moment-to-moment, and this opens the door to neuroplastic change. With practice, this needn’t take long. Eventually it can take no time at all, and – as long as we’re not hurried or harried – we can have the sense that we’re almost always practicing Feldenkrais.
• Exploring and improving the relationship between head and pelvis was always of primary importance to Moshe Feldenkrais. This lesson illustrates subtle possibilities and relationships of the thoracic with both ends of the axis, creating a more integrated spine.

After a brief break some Patrons and I reflected on this lesson – and Essence for “Experts” lessons in general – in a 5-minute recorded discussion.

This lesson is found in Patron Treasures, our collection of lessons exclusively for Feldenkrais Project Patron-level donors.

It’s designed to expand on details of Your Navigational Pelvis and merge it with another kind of learning that’s been important to me (see the Source tab).

Familiarity with a few other lessons is also helpful. See the Related Lessons tab.

It was recorded in a Patrons Quarterly meeting on September 14, 2025. Don’t miss the recorded lesson discussion linked at the bottom of the Curiosities tab!

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