Difficulty: Most Accessible

10m

Long Belly, Strong Back Workshop Discussion 1 (10m)

Nick and students discuss the emotional overtones of this workshop, the difference between lifting up and through from your standing foot and simply pressing it, ground reaction forces, and more.
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6m

Long Belly, Strong Back Workshop Discussion 2 (7m)

Nick leads a little postural experiment and speaks to the "psycho-social-sexual stuff" of this material, and a student offers wisdom from a female perspective.
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38m

Long Belly, Strong Back: Short Version (38m)

This simple, powerful lesson is designed as an antidote to pervasive cultural messaging about flat stomachs. The truth is that tensing and withdrawing your abdomen severely limits freedom of movement, contributes to anxiety, and can even affect digestion. Feel for yourself the ease and potency of a long belly and well-organized back, and unlock profound benefits for spinal health, hips, shoulders, posture, confidence, athletic skill, and everyday actions. Framed by explorations in standing.
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60m

Skillful Scapulas Make Graceful Arms and Hands (Patrons)

In this mostly back-lying lesson you'll discover lighter, more graceful arms and hands as you learn to support and counter-balance their movements by skillfully engaging your scapulas. Later you'll integrate your pelvis and legs. This lesson has surprising benefits for posture and confidence, and improves everyday activities like cooking, typing, and playing an instrument.
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60m

Rotating, Interlacing, and Integrating the Hands, into Palms Lengthening Overhead (Patrons)

Reduce anxiety and organize your nervous system by refining simple, pleasurable actions of your hands, arms, and shoulders. Integrate them better with your head and eyes. Eventually expands into lengthening your whole self, with surprising effects on stability. Framed by brief explorations in standing.
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63m

Arms in a Hoop, with Continuous Ground Support (Patrons)

Back-lying, feet standing. Explore turning and twisting movements of the shoulders, pelvis, head, and eyes with arms held in a loose hoop in front of you, and find a flowing sense of ground support through your feet and back. Framed by detailed experiments in standing which connect your mat learning to upright life.
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60m

Breathing for Liftoff (35m + 25m, Patrons)

This pair of short lessons is designed to be completed together the first time, or with a short break between them.
  • Lesson 1 - Reduce tension and anxiety and free your breath by sensing the details of how you hold and release it, then explore a new image of exchanging air with the environment.
  • Lesson 2 (begin at 34:00) - Experiment with the elasticity of both the ground and your breathing apparatus, and directly experience what physicists call ground reaction forces.
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20m

Talk: What Action Is Good?

This is the only one of the 12 lessons in Moshe Feldenkrais’s seminal book Awareness Through Movement that's a lecture, not a movement lesson. As Nick summarizes and explains it, you’ll learn about continual refinement, “reversible” action, finding ease in strenuous actions, sensing skeletal mechanics and shearing forces, proportional use of musculature, the effects of self-limiting labels, and what Nick calls the “positive snowball effect” of longterm Feldenkrais study.
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60m

Lifting Like a Baby + Simultaneous Lifting (Patrons)

Discover how baby-like games of effortlessness can make you a more poised and potent adult. Starts with explorations of how you first lifted your head while lying on your belly in your crib. Then in back-lying you'll learn to quietly, precisely lift and lower parts of your body while studying details of ground support, muscle tone, and reversibility of movement, leading to a discovery of surprising "new" baby skills at the end. Begins with a three-minute talk about the perceptual paradoxes of "effortless" movement.
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14m

Talk: Feldenkrais for Self Empowerment

Nick shares the nuts and bolts of why Feldenkrais is so helpful for self-empowerment: how it enables us to shed both anxiety and self-protection habits that are no longer needed, how good skeletal organization in gravity literally empowers our musculature, and how to tune any ATM for more self empowerment benefits.
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