Pelvis Lifting and Rotating on Its Axis, Part 2 (Patrons)

Prerequisite: Explore Part 1 and the visual demo in the Curiosities tab below before doing this lesson.

After a visual demonstration (in the Curiosities tab) and a review of rolling vs. rotating, you'll dive deeper into more intricate and athletic variations of lifting the pelvis and rotating it on its axis, all toward softening your thoracic and reorganizing your torso and hips. As always, ability develops through improved awareness, proper distribution of effort, breathing and suppleness, and the precise use of the support surface—never strain.

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Before you begin read this for practical tips and your responsibilities, and check out Comfort & Configuration below.

Recorded live in a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement (ATM) class, this lesson is copyright Nick Strauss-Klein, for personal use only.

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Less emphasized in Part 2 but even more important: remember to breathe, and sense and play with the ground contact of your ribs and shoulders as you lift and rotate your pelvis.

Whenever one or both knees are bent they should be quite bent, so that your foot or feet are relatively near your buttocks, if comfort allows. In this position the foot or feet are always about the same distance from your midline as your hips.

“Thoracic” refers to the body region of your ribs. Your thoracic spine is the 12 vertebrae below your neck and above your lower back. Each thoracic vertebra has a pair of ribs attached to it.

When lifting your pelvis, take care to enjoy the full support of the soles of your feet, not just the heel or toes. Additionally, during the one-knee-bent variations, be sure to keep your knee pointed at the ceiling, not leaning inward or outward, as you lift your pelvis asymmetrically.

The audio recording picks up immediately after this brief visual demo of rolling vs rotating/twisting on the axis:

Note also how, in rotation, the back of the ball slides along the floor in the opposite direction from the front. You do this with your head and pelvis in this lesson.

In discussion after this lesson one student noted with delight how often she felt like she was doing dance known as The Twist. It’s an accurate way to describe many of the actions of this lesson, especially how your bottom rotates behind the axis of the spine.

Finally, here are the three types of attention, according to meditation teacher Martin Aylward:

  1. Spotlight attention
  2. Handling attention
  3. Embracing attention

From the Waking Up app.

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

Part 1 can be found here.

It was recorded in The FP Weekly Pay-What-You-Can Class on April 15, 2025, in a sequence of lessons emphasizing the role of Presence in learning. The live recording has been edited to improve flow, clarity, and audio quality.

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2 Comments

  1. Sara on July 5, 2025 at 3:10 am

    Wow. These two parts together provide such a good way of experiencing how upper and lower body can more freely move around each other. The place where thoracic spine meets lumbar now feels wonderfully mobile. And I also see how much pressure can be taken off my hips joints if I move my pelvis and spine more fluidly.

    Reply
  2. Julie Turner on July 5, 2025 at 6:01 am

    Thank you Nick. This is such a wonderful pair of lessons.
    It is funny how often the right thing comes along at the right time.
    I have a tetchy little sensation in the middle of the right side of my spine which sends its tendrils out into my shoulder and arm, and hip and leg – I call it my ‘doing tension’ -years of right-sided doing and (especially at school for me) with underlying anxiety. There is often an accompanying sense of never being able to get it to speak to me and tell me what it wants, if that makes sense, it’s like an itch that will not be scratched!! I have felt it and worked with it for years, but recently I have been going very deeply into the actual spine and especially the relationship between the front and back of the spine as well as into the very centre and what wonderful mysteries and intelligence lie there. So when you said, in Lesson One of this pair, that Feldenkrais said that this lesson was not about the pelvis but about the thoracic vertebrae, that statement opened a doorway for me into experiencing the spine in that area. You mentioned that there is a lot of stuckness in that area for us Westerners – I believe that is to do with being educated to ‘do’ rather than to ‘feel’, to react rather than respond, and to cut away from the nature of the heart in a more metaphysical sense.
    When I walked after the first lesson, I was aware of the usual lack of fluidity in that area and how that had changed..I feel that this has taken the heat off the tetchy sensation and its accompanying frustration because the sensation begins even further back in myself than I thought, and it is back there that I can begin to make the changes. The ‘doing’, becomes more fluid, more natural and freed of deep-seated anxiety after these lessons. Even if that is only temporary, I am aware (after some years of Feldenkrais) that the learning begins to change things more permanently
    The other reassuring thing is that it is us all not just me!!
    Anyway thanks again. I love the references to meditation now, it is where all of this awareness leads in the end – and ultimately to a knowledge of ourselves even beyond the sensations of the body.

    Reply

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