Alice Boyd - Taken Apart and Put Back Together
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On today's episode I have a very special guest. Her name is Alice Boyd. She's a Feldenkrais practitioner and the producer of our documentary. This documentary explores the Feldenkrais method through a student's eyes. Alice is super awesome and I am so proud to have her as a collaborator, as a colleague, and as a friend. In this episode expect to learn about how she came to the method
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and how it surprised her and her inspiration for starting this project. This is the Expand Your Ability podcast. My name is Jeffrey Schwinghammer and I'm your host and guide on your Feldenkrais journey as we explore what it means to be human, what it means to have a body, how we move and how we act in relationship to others and the environment. Before we get to the interview,
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Here's a little bit more about Alice. She is a Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner since 2014. Alice teaches group and individual lessons online and in person in Portland, Oregon. She completed Russell Dellman's Embodied Life Program. And with her husband, poet John Brehm, she leads transformational residential retreats,
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and mindful poetry discussion. Oh, and before I forget, we have a short teaser trailer for the film. It's a preview of our main characters and the look of the film. If you want to check it out, go down to the show notes and find the link. Or go to FeldlandChristMovie.com. All right, to the interview. All right, we're recording. Hi Alice, welcome to the podcast.
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Thanks, Jeffrey. I'm so happy to be here. So, uh, you got to be in the background watching, participating in all the interviews we've done for the documentary. And now the tables have turned and you're in the spotlight. You're in the interview chair. Um, yeah, so this is kind of a treat for me too.
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interview you. So welcome. Thank you. It's a pleasure. Happy to not have that big light and camera in my face. Right, this is a little bit easier of a setup, huh? So I was interested in actually starting off with hearing a little bit of your story. You've
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during our travels, where you talked about your initial experience with awareness through movement. And yeah, where were you? What was going on? Yeah, if you could share a little bit about that. Great. Yes. Sometimes I skipped the first part of the story, which is actually that I was probably about 35 or so.
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Wow, that was 25 years ago. I went to Esalen for a personal retreat weekend and stumbled into a Feldenkrais class. I had no idea what it was about. At the time, I was deeply involved in Bikram yoga and power vinyasa yoga. And I thought the class was a complete waste of time.
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we were not stretching. I was not sweating. I had no idea what good this could possibly be doing for me. And that's kind of all I remember about that experience. And then about 10 years later, when I was in a fair amount of physical discomfort from the many years of intense
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yoga practice that I'd been doing. I owned a yoga studio at that point, I was teaching a lot, I was running the business, I had two teenagers. I was on retreat at Rancho La Porta in Mexico. And I was on my way to a Nia class. And somehow, I got pulled into
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different building and a different room and found myself in another Feldenkrais class. Something about the presentation that the teacher had done beforehand kind of intrigued me, she kind of intrigued me. But I really was not necessarily attending to go to this class. I found myself in
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I was going to a movement class. So of course, I got on the floor and started stretching because that's what you do before a movement class. And when the teacher came in, she said, don't do that. That's not what we're doing here. And I immediately felt like I was doing it wrong. And she proceeded to say that there was no doing it wrong. But somehow I was doing it wrong. I was very confused. And the lesson, again, like I couldn't really
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get what was happening. I didn't have a strong sort of adverse reaction, but I also didn't really feel compelled by it so much. But I remember she did a reference a before and after the lesson reference, which was at the beginning of the lesson, we're lying on the on the floor with our eyes closed. And she said, imagine
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sense yourself in this space. And we were in this big, beautiful, high ceiling room. And I remember feeling very, very small in relation to this enormous, beautiful, you know, high ceiling room with lots of windows. And then at the end of the lesson, she said, now sense yourself in the space. And I remember being quite taken aback because I was, I took up a lot more space in that space. And I had a much clearer sense of myself in the space.
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So that and something about the way I felt when I stood up made me go directly to her after class and say, I'm curious about this hands-on version of this work. What's that like? And we went straight to her office. I had my first functional integration lesson, hands-on lesson, and on the table was a little frustrated that she wasn't
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massaging my tight muscles more intensely and doing the things that I expected to have done when I was on a massage like table. She was handling me very gently moving things very slowly. And, you know, not not bad, but again, nothing that really stood out to me until I sat up at the end of the lesson. And
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mind exploded. I had the way I describe it is that I felt like I had been taken apart and put back together the way I'm supposed to go that somehow I experienced an internal organization that
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and felt light, comfortable, easy in my body. And as, as wonderful as it felt, it was very disorienting, because it was sort of an everything I know is wrong moment where I thought harder and stronger, deeper, more forceful was the way to affect significant change.
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and she had barely touched me. She had handled me, you know, very gently and carefully. And the results were profound. So I knew in that moment, in those moments of walking around after the lesson that this was something I needed to learn more about. Awesome. That's such a great story.
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Would you say a little bit more about where you came from like conceptually or interest-wise before you had that, right? You talked about thinking more force was necessary, right? More effort. What was, what were your interests beforehand? What were you thinking like before?
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trained as a yoga teacher first in Bikram yoga and then in power vinyasa yoga. And, you know, these are both intense physical practices done in heated rooms. The basically the tools I had in my toolbox for care of my body were stretching and strengthening. Those were the the two. Yeah, the two
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tools I would use to take care of discomfort or any sense that, you know, there was tension in my body and, and they worked really well for a short period of time. But then rebound effect, you know, the the tightness would return even stronger. So that was also in the body work that I sought out. So I loved deep tissue massage and
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chiropractic treatments. And the benefits of those were always fleeting, I would I would have relief from whatever discomfort had made me seek out the treatments for, you know, maybe the rest of the day, and then I would wake up the next morning, you know, bound up again, tight tents.
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And my, my mindset, my personality, my way of being in the world was very much one of like, go do it, get it done. If it doesn't, my father used to tease me that doing jigsaw puzzles, if the piece didn't fit, force it.
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So I was very accomplished at using my will to get things done and to use and using force to kind of push through and and make things happen, which, you know, has served me well to to a degree. Sure, sure. So since I've been working with you for a year and a half now, two, two years, has it been yet on the documentary?
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I would not have guessed that history. You tend to be more open, more curious, more let's find out and see. I don't get the sense of kind of hard earned willpower in how you approach this project. I'm curious if you would say...
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kind of more about your path. So you got interested into the Feldenkrais Method. How did that journey go for you? So, let's see, I was at Rancho La Puerta in January of 2014 when I got back to Portland, Oregon, which is where I live. I talked with my then business partner who happened to know someone who...
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knew about Feldenkrais and I connected with a practitioner here. And I think it was the second time the second lesson I had with her, she said, gosh, you know, there's actually a training starting in September. And I knew that that that was what I was going to be doing. There, there was something even though I wasn't, I didn't necessarily have quite the big
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from that first lesson, there was something each time I would do have an FI at that point, I was only doing FI wasn't attending ATM classes yet. But there was there was always some something that would pique my curiosity, something that I would learn about some movement pattern that had been invisible to me before.
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And I really appreciated that way of sort of getting to know myself in a in a different way. So the I was very intrigued and jumped at that opportunity to do attend a four year Feldenkrais training not too far from where I live, I was able to commute essentially.
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to the training segments. And it Yeah, it, it's been a really interesting process. I mean, that was so I completed my training in 2014. And almost 10 years ago now, and it's been this gradual sort of unfolding tenderizing process.
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tenderizing process, softening you up, you mean? Or? Softening, yes. Yeah, tenderizing is maybe not the right word. Softening and not that sounds so sort of binary, hard or soft. It's more like sort of blossoming that, again, rather than having two tools in my toolkit, now I feel like I have so many more. It's not, you know,
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it, I did it forcefully, and now I'm doing it gently, I have a whole range of possibilities, including forcefully, that is at my disposal when it's called for, or I have more of a choice about when to apply force versus that being sort of my only option.
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Right, right. That's a big thing that came up in my training is that we don't just do away with our past habits. We can still utilize them. We just have more we can work with and have more choice to do it the new way, do it the old way. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Then, well, you're a producer, you're producing this on this documentary project, and I really enjoy that story of
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how you came to decide to do a documentary project because that's not something you had done before, right? This is a new adventure, right? I don't know if you ever thought you might have done that 10 years ago, right? I mean, when you first walked into that ATM class, that FI, and 10 years later now you're producing a film. Hey, that's a big step right there, I'd say.
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Would you tell us about your experience of coming to this idea? Yes, really. I'm so grateful and absolutely not. Ten years ago, I never would have dreamed that I would be involved in making a documentary film about the Feldenkrais method. Just trying to explain what it was to my family and friends was...
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challenging enough, which is a piece of my motivation. I mean, over the years, my efforts to, you know, convey without talking someone's ear off about what what this is, and the potential of this work is has been quite challenging. My husband and I actually came up with a little a little elevator spiel, which now I can't even remember because any any attempt really to distill it into something
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very brief, inevitably leaves something out. So, so this thread of sort of the, the frustration and exasperation of trying to convey the, the truth essence of what this work is about, has been with me. And then in
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February of 2020, my husband and I, he's a poet and we lead retreats together incorporating Feldenkrais movement lessons meditation, and he teaches a form of poetry discussion that's that's really sort of embodied and mindful. And they're, they're wonderful. We had a just a fabulous group in Mexico.
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remember when we were flying out of Puerto Vallarta, they asked us if we had traveled through China, and we were all a little mystified why they might be asking us about any travel to China, and then of course, we got back to the States and the pandemic hit. And the world as we knew it shifted. And in the early days of the pandemic, when there was so much fear and
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losing their jobs or trying to figure out how to sort of pivot and maintain an income and maintain some sort of patterns of life. I really got in touch with how
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how resourced I was thanks to this practice, which I often tell people, you know, the the Feldenkrais method, these lessons, it's, it's more like a meditation practice than it is like an exercise regime. The the idea is that we do the lessons much as we do sitting meditation, but the intention is to take
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what we learn into the rest of our life. So I realized that I was able to navigate this period of fear and uncertainty with a bit more composure, a bit more grace and
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and that the transition to online teaching and relating to students and colleagues was actually something that I was open to and curious about. Whereas in the past, I had been quite resistant to online teaching and online classes and things. And I
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I mean, so that was six years out of my training, I felt like I was really starting to embody the work in a way that, again, with this sort of cataclysmic event, I got to see more
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sort of grown and evolved thanks to this practice. And then- Did you see a contrast between your own experience and other people's experience? Is that what you mean that you saw, that you could tell there was something there for you?
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Um, more just the contrast between how I probably would have responded to the pandemic six years, eight years, 10 years earlier compared to at that point in my life. So it was really more in me the shift. And then the other piece of the story is that so with this
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appreciation for the practice and this way of staying connected with my students because the online classes actually work very well. And even the individual sessions online were working well. At that point, oh, another thread is Mark Reese's wonderful biography about Feldenkrais had come out in 2016, I guess, and
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I had...
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in reading that come to a much deeper appreciation of Feldenkrais' genius and breadth of experience and knowledge and the extraordinary life that he lived. And yeah, just amazing the different threads of schools of thought and threads of learning that he wove together.
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into this method. And then early in the pandemic, I watched a documentary film that was released about the life and ideas of David Bohm. Infinite Potential is the title of that film. And a light bulb came on because they incorporated biographical information about Bohm and interviews with people who knew him and
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enough of an explication of quantum physics to give a sense of the the significance, the essence of that work. And I thought, why is there not a documentary film about Moshe Feldenkrais and the Feldenkrais method, and immediately started asking people if there wasn't some sort of a project in the works or
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who might be someone who might take a project like this on, isn't this a great idea? And everyone was very enthusiastic about the idea, but no one knew anyone who was a filmmaker. And yeah, there was just some sense that, well, I don't know how to do this, but I have the passion for the work, and I have friends and relatives
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know something about filmmaking and I can find help and support. And yeah, why not put this out there and see what happens and then I met you the rest is history. Yeah, we got connected through Anna Wolf. And yeah, what good fortune. I had been dreaming about making a documentary about the method. I mean, since sometime.
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I had some sense for a long time, but it was in 2018, I think, or 2019 when I was early in my training process. I was like, just ideas would bubble up. It just kind of felt inevitable. And then you come along, you come knocking and it was, got started. It's been a long process and it was meant to be. It's meant to be. Yeah. Yeah.
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I'm curious, how has it been so far? We've done a lot of traveling. We went to Israel, where Moshe Filming Christ lived, for a large portion of his life. And we've filmed with practitioners there, also in California, also in Hawaii, in Seattle. So, we've done a lot of traveling, we've done a lot of filming. Yeah, how has that been for you?
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Anything you've learned? Anything I've learned. How long do we have? It's been, it's been such an adventure. It really has. And it's I mean, you've been just extraordinarily patient with me in training me and being sort of assistant schlepper setup.
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person, this is how you work the sound system and the lights and the, you know, as much as I've learned about the the technical side. I really appreciate that. I think really the the biggest, the most important piece for me is I had from early on in this process, and I think
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you know, we have a good compatibility around this, I've really, I've really wanted this to be fun, and an adventure in the best possible way. And it doesn't mean that there aren't challenging moments or, you know, obstacles we have to overcome. But again, this
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the tendency to force and to push and to will things to happen is so strong in my DNA. And I really wanted to embrace the opportunity to take on a project and to learn and to do something big in a very different way different from my sort of habitual ways of
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past habitual ways of doing things. So really practicing, trusting the synchronicities, I mean, meeting you was a big one that you had already been sort of imagining this project and have the wealth of experience that you have. And the easy going nature that you have. I mean, that that's just
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fantastic. And then things like we talked on zoom for I don't know how long we had talked before the trip to Israel, but a year probably. And at some point, I just remember thinking and my husband was teasing me to you just got to start filming at some point. You can talk about this forever.
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But you've really just got to start filming. And in that moment, I think I'd had a conversation with my sister about how expensive tickets to Europe were and prices are going up or something like that. In that moment, I just had the inspiration to go online and look for plane tickets to Tel Aviv. And there was this window of opportunity between when your training ended and another big trip that I was gonna be taking.
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And I snapped up the plane tickets and thought, you know, we can always move them or cancel them if we need to. And yeah, rather than.
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thinking about that for a really long time and talking with you about it for a really long time and should we shouldn't we on I mean, just sort of trusting that I had that impulse, I bought the tickets, we were going to figure it out. And, you know, as you know, the trip unfolded in ways that I really worked hard to plan it all out and schedule every day.
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I don't think we could have done all of the things that we ended up being able to do when we were there. Yeah, yeah, 100%. That's been a learning experience for me in this project is some things only come about after you do something. Like we go there, we show up, and people come out of the woodwork. Like things happen, right? There's a, there's a...
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There's an enthusiasm, there's an excitement that comes with action. And also clarity. As we begin to film and do interviews, we figure out, hey, this is working. Hey, this is not working as much. And yeah, we definitely couldn't have got to the filming that we've done in Seattle recently if we didn't do all those other steps beforehand. So...
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It's a one big learning process. Absolutely. Well, I think this is a pretty great place to stop for our first conversation. I'm sure we'll have many more down the way. I'm curious where people can learn more about you. This has been really fun and I do hope we have more conversations down the way. Indeed. So my website is alisboyd.com.
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You can email me at alice at aliceboyd.com, visit my website. And you work in Portland, Oregon in person? I work in Portland, Oregon, yes. Excellent. Yeah, and the film website is feldinkreismovie.com and you can visit the website and sign up for our newsletter.
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with updates on the release date and events that we're planning around the release of the film. That's right, we're aiming for May next year, May 2024. So if we continue to have good fortune, perhaps that will turn out. Yes, Moshe's 120th birthday, May 6, 2024. Awesome. Thank you so much, Alice. Thank you, Jeffrey. It's always a pleasure.
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Alright, that was the first interview here on the podcast. Many thanks to Alice for being with us. If you want to check out the new teaser trailer that we made for the documentary film, you can see it at FeldenKreisMovie.com. The link is in the show notes. And of course, please follow me on Instagram where I expand on the topics of each of these episodes.
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Because having conversations about what we learn is so helpful for us to learn, I invite you to start conversations with friends or family around the topics in this episode. What surprised you? Was there something in Alice's story that was similar to yours? Or did you see something that's possible that you didn't think was possible for you? Share that with someone you care about.
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A question I have for you is around the use of willpower. Alice shared in her story that historically she was really about using willpower and force to make changes for herself. And I'm curious if that's true for you. How often do you use willpower and force to get the results that you want? And what other options do you have available to you?
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Thank you for your attention.
