Expand Your Ability: Embodiment, Somatics, and Feldenkrais

For over a decade, my job has been to edit videos, to film videos.

And something that I have been attentive to is while editing videos, historically, I could get quite cranky and not pleasant to be around.

That doing my work at the end, I was just not better off after doing the work.

Sometimes I could have pointed blame to an unfair producer for asking for too much, but even without a producer, sometimes I'd just be in a prickly mood by the end of the session.

In the midst of creating work, creating videos for work, I was also creating my own unpleasant experience.

It didn't help me work.

It actually burnt me out over time and generated feelings of resentment, to say the least.

So luckily, I've been getting better at attending to myself while I work, that I don't create so much this extra unfortunate discomfort.

And I'm curious, does this happen for you?

Are there the necessary activities of your life that you have to do and that when you do them leads you to feeling crummy afterwards?

And does this interfere with your relationships?

This can be a big deal when many of us work from home now too.

This episode is about what we create, whether or not we know it.

Welcome to the Expand Your Ability podcast.

I'm your host, Jeffery Schwinghammer, and I'm a Feldenkrais practitioner.

This podcast explores how the Feldenkrais method can help us set aside old habits and embrace our human creativity and to move toward our dreams.

In this episode I will talk about how we are all creative, fundamentally creative as human beings.

And I will talk about what gets in the way of creativity, how the Feldenkrais method can help us with creativity.

And finally, I close the episode with a movement exploration to help make these ideas more concrete.

So real quick, before I get started, I'm working on an online course and I need your help.

I want this course to be meaningfully helpful for people, and so I'm doing many, many research interviews with people like you to learn what people are struggling with.

What are the challenges that you have.

What would you like to help move your life forward?

Is there some way that you feel stuck?

However you want to define stock.

Do you feel stuck in some way?

My goal is to help you find the internal resources to create what's meaningful for you.

These research interviews are only like 20 minutes long or so.

So send me an email at Jeffrey@expandureability.

com and we can set something up.

Okay, sweet.

Let's get started.

So let's reframe creativity a little bit.

Creativity is not just for artists.

I was artistically inclined as a kid.

My favorite thing to draw were dinosaurs, sharks, and sonic the hedgehog.

In high school, I stopped drawing so much.

I went to art classes, but I stopped drawing in my free time.

I even have a memory of being made fun of in class.

I don't remember the chain of events exactly, but I do remember closing myself off over some time, closing myself off from drawing.

My creativity wasn't squashed, it just shifted into video editing.

And then later emboldened and strengthened in my Feldenkrais training program.

So I watched other kids reject that they have creativity.

They say that they're not good drawers, they're not good writers, they can't, they can't, they can't.

And my sense was that people were walling themselves off from their own creativity, putting on blinders.

And to be fair, I do this too still.

I like to be a musician.

I like to be more of a dancer.

And that does feel out of reach still for me.

But maybe not forever.

I don't think it's.

.

.

This is really about becoming a professional artist.

I think humans are creative through and through and we can become more creative because we actually are already creating whether or not we think of it.

My cousin, so I have this cousin and he's great.

He's this avid hunter and fisherman and he's one of the most creative people I know.

He's always excited to talk about what he's learning, about in hunting techniques or how How to better prepare for boiling syrup next year, how to improve how he smokes or fries the fish next the next meal.

He's continually tailoring his process with everything he does.

And I see the joy in his eyes as he shares his new creation.

I'm not sure he would naturally use the word create or creation or any of that, but clearly that's part of his gift.

He's really tapped into the growth curve of being creative.

And I think we can take this growth-oriented creative way of exploring and turn it in towards our own personal experience.

And quite frankly, this is what the Feldenkrais method is about.

What is it that we want to create with ourselves, with our relations?

How specific, how beautiful, how elegant do we want to make that?

All right, that sounds cool.

But what gets in the way of being creative?

And wait, didn't I just say before that everybody's creative?

So how can anything get in the way of creativity, aren't we always creative?

Well, we are all creative.

We all make choices and those choices have consequences and they generate what we experience next.

The way in which we make choices around our loved ones comes back around to us in how our loved ones return their care or the kindness we give to them.

They return that back to us, right?

And so we can create more beautiful relations or through our creativity, more detached, disconnected relations.

And this is true for with inside ourselves and with others and with the environment too.

An important phrase to bring up here is one that I've brought up on the podcast before, and that is the self-image.

This phrase was used by Moshe Fölnichreis to describe the wholeness of our sense of self, and that includes our biological inheritance, our bodies, our genetics, our cultural inheritance, what we learn from our parents, our teachers, and so forth, and then also our own self-directed learning, what we choose to learn more about.

Now we are born with a particular disposition, our culture molds us, and then eventually we take greater and greater control of where we direct our lives.

And right in there is nestled the creativity of our lives.

In the long scheme of our lives, what do we leave behind?

And that's something like our legacy.

Our legacy is what we create over the period of our lives.

Our self-image is broadly our sense of self including our history our biology and our education and it's the sense of what is possible for ourselves what we feel we can do what we believe is possible.

Your self-image is you in and all of your layers.

It's your character.

And it's also largely invisible, hidden away in unconscious habits and choices.

It's in the thoughts you continually have, the reoccurring feelings that move through you, and even firmly rooted in how you move through the world.

It's through your whole being.

Like, okay, how is it that it's how you move through the world, if you're out on some street and then you see your friend coming from way off down the way, there's just a silhouette and you can recognize your friend so clearly just by the way she moves, you don't even need that much detail, just the way she moves embedded in her movement is aspects of her personality, recognizable features and we all have that in our movement.

Now these habitual ways of acting are like taking the same way to work each day and not really bothering to consider another side road.

It's not until there's construction one day blocking your path that you're forced to take a new path and then you go "oh wow I haven't taken this route I didn't know that there was this road behind this door and hey wow I didn't know that this new store popped up.

If we take the same path over and over again, well, we continue to create what we've always created.

Creativity lies in taking these new paths and steering away from our common course of action.

This is a particular strength of the Feldenkrais method.

In Awareness Through movement lessons.

The lesson is co-created between the teacher and the student.

The teacher has a vision for how the lesson will go, what are the learning themes, the educational goals, the movement ideas, the personal awareness that they want to bring.

And the teacher watches the students and then tailors the instructions, tailors the awareness questions to help illuminate it, what might not yet be seen by the student.

The student is invited to discover for themselves, first what they do, and then to create something new.

And it's so much fun watching students, especially at the beginning of the class, when they all make these different decisions.

So they all heard the same instruction, but they all have these different decisions.

Their individual life history leads each one of them to make different interpretations of the direction, and thus they make different movements.

This is certainly not good or bad.

The context of the class is not to be judgmental in any way like that, but what is funny is that through the course of a lesson, students actually become more alike in their movements as they find more supported, more graceful movements.

My job as a teacher is not to correct each person into some proper movement.

Instead, I often use the variety of choices that people make as a way to inform all of us.

So sometimes these students will have different variations that they're doing just instinctively, and then I will offer these variations as something for everyone to try.

Having more options available and how you do an activity allows you to be more adaptive in more situations.

The Feldenkrais method evaluates movements based on different qualities such as ease, comfort, the inner sense of support.

What's available possibly in moving?

In the course of the lessons, guide people out of their habitual mode of moving into larger, more holistic movements.

Throughout the lessons, students track shifts in how their body touches the ground, how they feel inside themselves, how they sense themselves.

They track things like the ease of rolling their head or the size and quality of their breath.

And all of these are just indicators of what are the choices they're making in the lesson and how that's having an influence on them, how that's creating their new experience.

Shifting how people feel in their bodies, how they are supported by their skeleton in new ways, changes their mind space, changes their feeling space.

And in this new space, new insights can come forward, a new creativity can come forward.

Let's talk about becoming a better connoisseur our experience and have some direct experience too.

The choices we make create our experience for us.

As we understand this relationship, this cause and effect, we can choose better and more desirable choices so that we can act more in accordance with our long term goals and values.

Let's make it clear how the choices we make lead to changes in our experience.

will do a simple movement exploration and all you need is a place to stand and then to lie on the floor.

Make sure you have some space away from furniture.

Go ahead, pause, take a minute, get situated and come back.

I'll be here.

Alright, so please be in standing and here in standing, since how your feet touch the floor.

Yeah, right, let's just ask some questions about different things we can pay attention to.

So is your weight towards your heels in this moment, towards your toes, more on the outside of your feet, the inside?

Do your feet feel like mirrors to each other?

Or does one foot have a distinct different experience?

And once again, it's not about right or wrong here, it's It's just noticing what is.

And then make note of whatever difference you notice.

And then sense up through your legs the bones that support you and come up into your pelvis.

And sense where your pelvis is over your feet.

If one side of your pelvis is more forward or backwards or overall tilted in some way, okay, interesting.

Just notice what you notice.

And is there some relationship that your pelvis is the way your pelvis is because of the way your feet are?

Or somehow there's a relationship there.

Is that true?

Oh, maybe I'm more on my left foot and yeah, that's leading to something in my pelvis.

Okay.

Whatever you notice is good enough.

Then continue sensing up your spine into your ribs, your shoulders, your head.

And where is your head in relationship to your pelvis?

Is your head tilted forward to the side turned a little bit that you're looking to the right or to the left?

Well, it's not bad or anything like that.

And I wonder if there's some relationship to how your head is, to how your pelvis is, to how your feet are, right?

the way your feet touch the floor, the way your pelvis is over your feet, is all related to how your head is.

Okay, cool.

We don't have to fix it.

We don't have to do anything about that right now.

But when I brought up the idea of self-image earlier, this is a way of seeing your self-image.

In this moment, right now is a slice in time of your self-image.

how you stood up, how you put your feet, how your weight is balanced are all essentially out of your self-image.

It's not anything super fancy, it's just, that's you, this is, you got to this point somehow.

And this makes sense for you to stand in this way for some reason, and all of that is nested in your self-image.

All right.

And your self image is quite malleable, probably more than you think.

If you would, please come and lie down on the floor.

Lie with your legs long, your arms long.

So in standing, there was the way your feet were, the way your pelvis was, the way your head was.

And I'm just curious if lying here on the floor, do you have some sense of how you were in standing here on your back because you're kind of like in standing.

It just, we've taken you from being vertical to being horizontal, right?

Is there some way your pelvis and your head are situated that, oh yeah, it's kind of like that in standing.

Whether or not that's particularly clear, that's okay.

If you would please check the space beneath your low back.

How much space is there?

Could an ant go underneath?

Could a hamster go underneath?

How much space is there beneath your low back?

And then if you would please bend your knees and stand your feet, and what happens to your low back?

Does it go closer to the floor or does it lift from the floor?

If you didn't quite catch it, go ahead and lengthen your legs.

Sense the space.

You can even put your hand underneath, underneath your low back, and stand your feet again.

Just see.

Did something change?

So my bet is something did change.

To stand your feet is to make a choice.

And that creates a new experience for how you touch the floor.

Go ahead and continue just to be clear for yourself.

The lengthening of your legs and the standing of your feet changes something in how your back touches the floor.

Changes the distance of your low back to the floor or the amount of pressure there.

And so this choice of standing your feet creates a new experience for you.

That's all.

creates a new experience.

We don't have to put a value judgment on it.

We've created something new.

Now with your feet standing, notice where your feet are.

You've made a choice in where your feet stand and how your knees are over your feet.

The particular distance from your feet to your bottom and how far apart your feet are from each other.

And that choice has created a certain experience with your back on the floor too.

So let's play with this choice.

So with one foot, let's say the right foot to start, go ahead and lift the foot and set it down somewhere else.

Anywhere, a little bit out to the side, let's say, to start.

Go ahead and pick it up and set it down.

and wait.

Listen.

How does that change your experience of the floor?

Go ahead and set the foot back in the where it was.

Wait, listen.

Go ahead and set your foot out to the side again and do this a number of times and does your breath change?

Do your eyes look in a different location?

Look toward a different location as you put your foot in a new spot.

Does the pressure beneath your shoulders change in some way.

How about the back of your head?

And go ahead and choose some new places to put your right foot.

Place it somewhere new and listen.

You can have your right foot go closer to your left foot, more to the inside.

You can have your foot closer to your bottom or further away from your bottom.

Try both.

And watch as your breath changes with the movement, the quality of the volume, the size, where in your body is your breath.

Just listen.

Very good.

Very good.

Go ahead and stand your foot, your right foot back somewhere that is the most comfortable, right?

Because you have some internal sense of stability, right?

Where is that just right place where you put your foot down and your knee, your leg feels supported?

Yeah, what is that like?

'Cause if you put your foot too far out to the outside, I think you can tell somehow internally that that's not quite as supportive.

There's something a little bit compromised with that foot placement.

It's not necessarily bad, but it's not as clear when you find the right place.

Try another place that's deliberately off the mark, maybe to the inside.

Yeah, it just doesn't quite have the same support, right?

And then go ahead and find the just right place.

Yeah, yeah, okay, that's a little bit better, right?

Then please slowly lengthen your legs and rest.

We've made this small, very small, set of experiments of your feats, of where the placement are.

And does that change your experience?

Have you created something new for yourself?

Compare the length of your legs from your right heel to your right hip joint and the left heel to the left hip joint.

Does one leg feel heavier or lighter than the other in a new way?

Does the right side of your back feel different in some way compared to the left?

Okay, just notice what you notice.

Go ahead and stand your feet, bend your knees, stand your feet, and make some similar observations with your left foot.

Where did you choose to put it?

And go ahead and try a place to the outside.

Take a new place, set it down, and just listen to what sort of experience this creates inside side of you.

Does your spine move in some way to make this to happen?

You can have your left foot a little bit further away.

A little bit to the inside.

A little bit closer to your bottom and try a few more places.

Set and wait for a moment.

Listen.

Listen to the shape that it makes inside you.

The shape of your skeleton, the shape of your muscles, the placement of your head, the shape of your breath.

And find a place now that feels just right.

Yeah.

Okay, that feels more supportive.

I like this here.

And if you would please, roll your head a little bit right and a little bit left.

Gently, just to see what sort of quality of ease is available for you in this moment, nothing too much.

And then go ahead and move your left foot to the outside where it's less supported.

Yeah, just keep it there for a moment.

Like nothing too crazy just to the outside and then try rolling your head here.

What's that like?

Does that, does the placement of your foot create a change for your head?

Go ahead and put your foot in a new place.

Roll your head into something change in the quality of rolling your head.

Anything, really.

Anything you notice is good enough.

just so you sense that there is a relationship between the choices you make, whether you're conscious of them or not, such as the placement of your foot, creates a change in the experience of movement in your head, let's say.

All right, go ahead and lengthen your leg and rest.

excuse me, lengthen both of your legs and rest.

And compare the length of your legs, the felt sense of the weight of your legs or the lightness of your legs, how your pelvis lies on the floor now, how your back lies on the floor, of your head and what point touches the floor.

And I wonder if some change in how you experience the floor is emerging compared to how we started this movement exploration.

Do you touch the floor in a different way, even after some small movements of your feet.

And it's not just the movements of your feet, it's the tension you gave to those movements too.

Slowly please, if you would, roll to your side, come to sit, and then come to stand.

Take your time, take Take your time and come to stand.

And check in with those three parts of you.

How your feet touch the floor.

If you're towards your heels or towards your toes, inside or outside of your edges of your feet.

Sense up into your pelvis.

left, right, the tilt, that's changed in some way since the beginning.

If the relationship that your feet have with the floor has changed and thus your pelvis has changed and what if you scan upwards through your spine, through your ribs, your shoulders to your head.

Has the placement of your head changed?

Hmm.

Right?

You've created for yourself a new experience.

And so this is just an experiment into changing our experience, into creating something new with a longer lesson or a series of lessons, we can really craft something that could be quite helpful.

We could create something very novel.

But here's just the basic workings.

It's not just that your feet change and thus you create a new experience, but it's the whole process of experimenting with many positions of the feet that then created on the whole, a more holistic change in our experience.

It's not just what we do, but it's also the process that we're in.

So go ahead and take a walk around or rest line down, do anything you like and if you would please continue to listen as I wrap up the episode.

I started this episode by sharing how I have historically been cranky while I work and edit and yeah this still can happen but I'm way better at not getting into that mode.

This sort of crankiness is the result of decisions I didn't quite know that I was making, that we're stacking over time.

And that's why I can feel so tough to get out of a funk like that.

We can detangle ourselves over time so that we're more clearly creating what we want and not creating undesirable experiences for ourselves.

And this for me isn't about being perfect.

It's this This is about becoming more free and adaptive so I can be more reliable for others.

It's continually noticing where I'm at, naming it, and choosing time and time again to act in a new way that I find preferable.

How can I create the experience that I want to have?

With more awareness, a softer approach to work, and more reliable tools to calm me down, I can smooth my transitions between work and play.

So I hope this episode has opened some new doors for you in terms of how you think about your experience, how you think about the choices that you make, and what is it that you really want to create.

Because having conversations with others helps us to continue to deepen our learning, I invite you to take the ideas in this episode and share them with a friend or a loved one and to create a space for which you both can learn and have insights together.

The question I would like to leave with you for today is, what is the experience you would like to create for yourself?

Thank you for your attention.