Expand Your Ability: Embodiment, Somatics, and Feldenkrais

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When I was in my early 20s, I had the good fortune to teach English in Japan. While I was there, a group of friends and I went to Fuji-Q. Fuji-Q is an amusement park at the base of Mount Fuji. Its flagship roller coaster is called Eijin-Aika. Eijin-Aika translates to, hmm, maybe not.

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Maybe not this roller coaster, maybe I want to go to a different one. If you haven't tried awareness through movement yet, I wonder if you get that feeling. Eh, maybe not. In this episode, I'm going to give you everything you need to know to feel confident when you give awareness through movement a try. This episode will also be helpful for those early in their practice and

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people looking for a refresher on what is ATM. My name is Jeffrey Schwinghammer, and this is the Expand Your Ability podcast. This podcast is an explorer's guide to you, your body, and your behavior through the lens of the Feldenkrais method. Okay, let's get started. I will be talking about four things. What is awareness through movement? What is your role as a student?

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What to bring or where, and what does it mean to give awareness through movement a fair trial? First, what is awareness through movement? Awareness through movement is the group class part of the Feldenkraismethod. There's two aspects. One is group classes, and one is one-on-one private sessions. So in the group class, you have one teacher, the practitioner,

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and multiple students. The Awareness Through Movement lessons were invented by Moshe Feldenkrais. Today there are many thousands of teachers who continue and expand upon his work. The goal of this work is to offer a space for you to become curious and exploratory in the context of your body, in the context of movement. The Awareness Through Movement lessons

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use movement to help you cultivate your awareness. And why would you be interested in awareness? Well, the more awareness of what you do and how you do it gives you the opportunity to change if you want to. If you want to change something about your behavior, something about what's possible for you, it's a process of you getting to know yourself in such a way that you can then influence yourself.

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in the direction that you desire. Teachers in this method use invitations. Invitations to invite you to try something new, to look at your own experience, to pay attention in new ways. Through this invitation, this invitational approach, it gives you the space to be an individual, to go at your own pace.

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to explore what is interesting to you. Some unique aspects of this work in comparison to other types of fitness or movement or learning paradigms is many types of fitness and movement classes have a monkey-do style of teaching. The teacher does the movement and you try to imitate as best you can what they're doing.

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That's not the case here in Awareness Through Movement. In the Feldenkrais method, the teacher generally doesn't perform, doesn't present or demonstrate, and all of this is general. The teacher doesn't show you how to do it, but gives you the invitation to find the different pieces and put them together to make the whole of something.

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that as a class you're aiming at. The class encourages you to be in the process, to not focus on the outcome. Now you might say, I'm interested in outcomes. I want good outcomes of spending my time on this class. Yes, there are good outcomes that comes through this process. But the way the class is designed is if you don't focus on the outcome, something so new

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and something so precious can emerge through the process that you couldn't have even imagined at the beginning of the lesson. You are more in the position of being an explorer or a scientist or a detective in your own experience. And you don't have to compare yourself with how the teacher is, how your fellow students are, the whole space.

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orients you to your own experience. How are lessons structured? Lessons generally are structured with some sort of reference movement near the beginning and a similar reference movement at the end of the lesson. And that serves as your comparison. Think those commercials of the before and after. The before is all black and white and the

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after is all brilliant and colorful. It's kind of like that. You have some sort of before and some sort of after that can surprise you. And this actually happens multiple times during the lesson as well. There's opportunities to observe your experience and see how that changes. In a live lesson, the teacher is paying attention to the students and adjusting the lesson, adjusting the movements and the directions.

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to help each of the individual students in the lesson. What do students report at the end of the lesson? Each student in each lesson will have a different experience just because everybody's an individual. Everyone has a different history, a different way of learning and sensing and all of that, that lessons have different outcomes for different people.

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And so some of the things people say at the end of these lessons are, they feel more supported. They feel more grounded, centered, relaxed, taller, confident, lopsided. They feel easier in their movement. They feel lighter. They have a freer breath. They feel more powerful or they feel more calm. It's really something for you to discover for yourself.

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There are many teachers in this method. There's a great diversity of teachers and styles. I know teachers that are very precise and very direct with their language and focus on the anatomical movement parts of the work. And I know teachers that are much more soft, invitational. I know teachers who use images.

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and story in such beautiful ways. I know teachers who are very precise and sophisticated in their language. I know teachers who are playful and spontaneous. Okay, now onto the second point. What are your responsibilities? What is the student's prime directive? First off, be curious.

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Each lesson invites you into a new aspect of your experience, and there's something you can pay attention to, something you might not have noticed before. What's there? If we come at these lessons in a sort of, I gotta do this and I gotta do that, and if I do it I get this outcome, there's a sort of rigidity in that. How can you be curious with your experience? Also to become patient.

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How can you be patient being in a space of not knowing what's going on exactly? Where is this lesson going? Am I getting the benefits? All these questions can take you out of the process. How can you get comfortable and ease into the process? It's a big deal to go easy on yourself. Your history might have taught you that you need to work hard, effort hard, push yourself.

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Discipline yourself in a very kind of rigid way. You might have a lot of shoulds. I should be this, I should be that. I should be able to do all these things the teacher is saying. You might be judgmental of your own experience. You might compare yourself with others. All of these ways we've learned to be with ourselves and with others come into these lessons.

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they can gum up the works. They can interfere with the experience. And so it's a practice of coming back to going easy on yourself, going smaller or smoother or more gently, especially if you have pain. There's no reason to go into the pain in this work. You don't have to effort harder to get the results.

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Definitely share with the teacher whatever difficulties you have, maybe you have injuries or limitation or surgeries. Share them with your teacher so they have a better understanding and they can modify the lesson to help you too. If you're completely unable to do something, you can flag down the teacher and say, hey, can you help me out here? I don't quite understand. Or

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Do you have a modification for me? Because this isn't working for me. And as a student, a really great thing you can do to help your own learning and to help others learning is to share your experience. At the end of a class, often there's a space to report in on, hey, I'm noticing this. I'm noticing that. Or during this lesson, I had this insight. Or this is my takeaway from this lesson.

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By sharing your experience, it helps reinforce your own learning, and it helps other students learn from your experience. Now, you might say, That's nice, but I'm kind of shy, and I don't really want to stand up in front of people, I don't really want to say stuff. You don't have to. It took me a long time to feel comfortable doing that. I had such entrenched patterns of feeling small and reserved.

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that I didn't share much at the end of class. With time, I have been able to step more and more into that. And that can be true for you too. Next, what to bring and what to wear. So in this work, you are very much welcome to wear your casual clothes. Whatever you wear for work or going out, all of that's open game.

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provided you don't feel restricted in your movements wearing them. And perhaps pointy bits like belts you might want to take off. When you go to an in-person class, you can expect to lie down on some sort of mat. The mats that are used in the Feldenkrais method are more like blankets. You know the moving blankets for furniture? That's a perfect type.

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So often in-person classes will provide that or some other type of mat. At home you can just use a blanket or anything that's soft enough for you to lie on, yet is still somewhat firm. Feldenkrais people are very resourceful. So we like to use non-standard equipment. There isn't a brand of particular type of equipment that you need to get or anything like that.

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using books or towels or sometimes a chair or a stool. Very practical around-the-home objects. Usually the class will tell you if you need to bring anything special. Normally just you is enough, so it's very accessible in that way. And one small note for those of you that wear glasses, totally cool.

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You will often be invited to take the glasses off because this work looks at our habits, and actually we have habits when we wear glasses too. So if you take the glasses off, you're giving yourself an opportunity to experience something less constricted, less modified by the glasses, and that can open up new possibilities for you. Now let's talk about what it means to give this work a fair trial.

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I really encourage you to give yourself a decent number of lessons to understand what this work is about. Since there's hundreds of lessons, hundreds created by Moshe Feldenkrais, and every teacher is basically designing and crafting lessons to meet the needs of their students, you will have a different experience each time.

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you go into a class. That means just experiencing one lesson, it might not speak to you. You might need to go five or six or even a few more lessons to get an idea of what this process is, what are the possibilities here and find something that resonates with you. It's not a one and done kind of thing. It's an exploration.

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really treat it as, hey, where can this take me? So please reserve your judgment for a decent number of sessions. I'd recommend at least five or six. Classes are often offered in series of four to six lessons, so that could be a good way to start. Then you can experience an arc of multiple lessons, a story.

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A series is basically you focus on a theme, a functional idea, some sort of movement for an extended period of time. It just dials you more into the specifics because you have more time to do so. And as I said earlier, this is a new thing and it might not be so clear at first, but give it time.

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and do what you can to reduce any need to get to outcomes right away. That's the biggest hurdle and opportunity of the work.

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I also recommend that you try a live lesson, whether in person or online, because in a live lesson, the teacher will be adapting the lesson to you, as well as everybody else in the class. And then you have the opportunity to share with each other, as I mentioned earlier in this episode.

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Since there's so many types of teachers and teacher styles in this work, I do recommend you try at least two or three teachers. You might find one speaks to you more than the other, and that's totally cool. All right. That's everything. So to recap, awareness through movement are group lessons that you can do in person or online.

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The emphasis is on your unique individual experience and what you can learn through the process. The job of the student is to be curious and to play and to be easy on themselves. Less effort actually leads to better outcomes. Please do share with your teachers any challenges you have and share with your class your experience. These are lessons where you can wear casual clothes

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and you really just need space and a floor. And please do give this work a fair trial. Give it a decent number of lessons to see what the potential there is for you. I hope this was helpful. Let me know if you have any questions. You can find me at expandyourability.com and on Instagram at expandyourability. I invite you to go out and try an awareness through movement lesson.

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wherever you can find it, especially if you can do it locally in person, that's great. And also there's a lot of wonderful opportunities online to give this work a try. Who knows, it might be the best roller coaster you've ever been on. A great way to learn is to teach other people. What did you learn in this episode that you thought was interesting? Or you thought was new, or somehow surprising? Go ahead and share that with someone you care about.

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conversation is a really great way we can learn together. The question I would like to leave you with today is, what are you curious to learn about? What are you interested in? And how can you bring that question to an awareness through movement class? Really, it could be anything. Thank you for your attention.