A Spiral of Length and Power (Patrons)

This lesson begins in standing.

Once lying on your back, each time you bend your knee and stand your foot take a moment to find clear skeletal support for that leg.

If the diagonal I’ve chosen first (right knee standing, left arm laying on the floor above your head) is significantly less comfortable than the opposite, you might reverse all this lesson’s lefts and rights. Even if the diagonal I chose first works well for you, this is a great strategy for a subsequent listening.

Until you’re invited to act more quickly, all movements are intended to be slow, smooth, and gradual, both when lifting and lowering the hip.

Mentioned throughout but worth emphasizing:

• Don’t let the bent knee tip inward or move down away from you as you lift its hip. It may move very slightly outward.
• When lowering, don’t drop the hip to the floor. Instead place your hip back on the ground with intention.

The brief standing experiment at the beginning (imagining you’re in greater gravity, then lesser gravity) can be repeated at the end, or sometime later today or tomorrow, or any time you’d like to experiment with your own agency in your skeleton’s ability to cancel gravity efficiently.

Shifting our intention toward gathering the ground’s support and clarity up into ourselves as we act, instead of pushing against the ground, can be profoundly helpful for learning to feel and function better in all we do.

It’s a way of tuning-in to a natural phenomenon. Biomechanics teaches that ground reaction forces push up through us, equal and opposite to our weight and acceleration (movement). Or, in the language of Tai Chi, we “borrow” from the earth when moving.

This is a more potent functional conception of grounding than thinking of moving down into our feet with each step, or pushing down into the earth as we act.

A “homework” project, for after you’ve done this lesson

In many Feldenkrais lessons with this one knee bent, lifting the hip movement, you are directed to push your foot into the ground.

Over the years I’ve discovered that thinking of lifting up and through ourselves (instead of pushing down and into the earth) is a better cue for learning to organize effective action.

I recommend exploring how lessons with similar movements change when you emphasize lifting away from your foot, instead of pushing with it.

The difference is explored briefly but starkly in Long Belly, Strong Back: Expanded Workshop Version (Patrons), but you can try lifting up and through from your hip instead of pushing down and in with your foot in many lessons. Your Navigational Pelvis is great for this homework. Or try mentally changing any of the pushing feet cues from our “self-hug” lessons or our “arms like a skeleton” lessons. Find them lessons by searching those phrases here.

You can also try lifting instead of pushing with The Power of One Foot (22 or 36 min, Patrons) and other lessons linked in that lesson’s Related Lessons tab.

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

I’ve chosen not to edit out references to “last week,” which was As Light as a Finger: Games of Weightlessness (Patrons), because these two lessons are so closely related. That one is recommended first, but it’s not a prerequisite. Both appear in that order in our Deep Dive called Grounding for Liftoff.

This lesson was recorded in a FP Weekly Zoom class on August 8, 2023 during a course called Resilience, then edited to improve flow, clarity, and sound quality in this permanent audio version.

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