Expand Your Ability: Embodiment, Somatics, and Feldenkrais

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On today's episode, we'll be talking about a topic that I love. And that topic is how the Feldenkrais method gives you wild and crazy dreams. Not every night, but you can tell. You can tell that somehow the work has shifted something inside you and it plays out in your dreams. It's really cool and it's one of my favorite things that I feel like no one really talks about. So let's talk about it here.

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today.

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Welcome to the Expand Your Ability podcast. I'm your host, Jeffrey Schwinghammer. This show explores how there's much more to us than what we can imagine. What we need is a process to help us keep growing. On this show, we explore the Felwing Christ method as a process to help us expand our abilities. Let's get pleasantly surprised. Before we dive in, I'm curious.

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What is your dream life like? Do you remember your dreams, or do they fade away quickly? Most of the time for me, my dreams just slip away like sand through my fingers. But not always. Sometimes I have seasons when the dreams are more memorable and feel meaningful, like I'm really sorting something out. And I can tell that there's something I'm learning.

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through the Feldenkrais method, through movement, that is inspiring these new dream insights. So in this episode I will tell you about my experience with dreams, I will talk about how I think the Feldenkrais method affects your dreams, and my recommendations for how to work with your dreams. So I've gone through multiple seasons of having more vivid dreams.

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thanks to this work. One of those times was a summer a few years ago when I was living in the Hills of Southern Oregon. This was during my Feldenkrais training early on during the program. And I was immersed in these Feldenkrais awareness through movement lessons, these explorations. And I played with these ideas throughout the day and even in the evening right before bed. And I think it was for about three months.

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that I regularly had vivid dreams. And this was so unusual for me. Like generally speaking, before this big season of dreams, I generally didn't remember my dreams. I had a sense of them, but they would fade away quickly. And in this season of dreams, it was just mind blowing. I would have these dreams with complex interactions where I felt present in them, but I wasn't quite lucid dreaming.

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It was, I was there, I was witnessing, I wasn't really controlling everything. But as I was in that space, watching these interactions play out, I could feel the emotional tone in my body.

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And when I would wake up, I would still remember the dream and the feeling I had in the dream. And I could feel that emotion, that corresponding muscular tone or tension in my body. And I could tell whatever emotion, well, it was more than that. But it was like these pieces of my story or my identity that was old and familiar and kind of tucked away in the recesses of my experience.

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that like they were coming out to play, coming out to be reconsidered. These emotions, these experiences, they represented these childhood moments of frustration and fear and insecurity, shame and embarrassment. It was just no longer buried. It was kind of dug up. It was right there on the surface.

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And the dream imagery mostly didn't have a direct visual association to past experience. I mean, it wasn't like I was living out these old memories. Not every time. Most of the time I wasn't. But when I woke up I could remember how this feeling that was from this dream was related to memories of old incidents. I could make the tie.

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more consciously when I was awake. And often this would usually bring tears to my eyes. It was like I have never really felt through this emotion before in the past. I'm guessing when I had it before, I must've tried to stop feeling it, terminate the emotions by shutting them down somehow through physical tension.

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And now, being older, more mature, more capable, I could give myself some closure on those emotions. And a little bit later I will describe more specifically what I would do in waking after a dream.

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So how is it that Feldenkrais awareness through movement could affect our dream life? What are dreams? What is the relationship here? So I don't think dreams are random and I don't think they are literal either. To me they are like a collage of emotional tone and meaningful symbols.

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drawn from our experience. They're like these, this nonverbal representations of your inner life. The memories that you have play out in these wild ways. But why? I think it's something like your mind is piecing together your, your experience, your life, problems, solutions, trying to organize what is this?

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world we're in, what do I do next? It's taking apart your conceptions and putting them back together in new ways. I think this is how it's, it's, it's this free process we get as living human beings, that it's how our minds continue to adapt to the world, to continue to use our imagination and creativity to, to live.

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Our internal life is layered and interwoven and connected with associations. Through learning movement and felincrisis, we are adjusting the musculature and thus our neurology in a profoundly deep way. It's like changing the bedrock foundation on which all the other patterns of our life – thinking, feeling, and sensing – stand upon.

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Changing the muscular foundation affects the relationship of these other patterns. What was rigid has now become less rigid. The musculature that was rigid in relation to thinking, that is also rigid, in relation to emotions that are also rigid, now become less rigid, more malleable over time. Now,

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Like, what do I mean by rigid exactly? I mean, I don't mean like tense in a physical way. I don't mean stiffness in a sort of, uh, oh, I'm feel stiff today. I mean, rigid in terms of patterns that reoccur. Are you rigid in a compulsive way that these patterns arise time and time again? Do the way you think you have the same.

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particular thoughts time and time again, you begin to become familiar with your own emotional life. Oh, I'm having this feeling again and it's more me than the outside world. Or I tend to make the same sort of movement or gesture time and time again in the same situation. And that's not bad. We have to have habits.

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And to what degree are we rigid in these habits that it does not permit us to learn new habits? That's the issue. And the Felon Christ method is about dismantling the rigidity of our compulsive habits to make the space available for something new. And I think in our dreams we work out this something new as well. When we shift all this musk-uture,

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and shift our way of thinking about ourselves and shift our way of feeling and sensing ourselves, it can't help but affect our dream life too. As we expand our self-image, our capacity to act in the world, so too do our dreams and our imagination of what's possible expand. And I think that's a precursor for future new possibilities.

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So what do we do if we have such dreams? If we wake up and we're just, wow, there's something there for me to pay attention to, what can we do? Well, here are some ideas and recommendations. Now, first off, should we act on our dreams? Are they a sort of prophecy or literal or a sort of revelation? I'm not so sure on this. That's not my experience.

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I think they are a great source for information though, whether or not it's literal and we should act on it. I don't think that's necessary. Should you bust out a dream analysis book and look up the symbols? Should you go see a dream therapist? Maybe, maybe, but I'd like to encourage you to keep it simple at first and put together the associations with the resources that you have.

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through journaling perhaps, or through conversation with a friend. There's something individual in how you've made these associations. Something so individual in the life that you've lived. So when you wake up after a dream, what are the memories that you draw to the foreground and what is the emotional tone that comes with them? So when you wake up, I recommend that you don't move.

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I find that if I move when I wake up, that movement shakes up my muscular tone and then causes the dream to evaporate more quickly. So if you stay still, the dream has a better chance of staying intact. Next, keep your eyes closed. It reduces outside information, outside disturbance.

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keeps you more present with your internal life. And then scan through your body, move your attention through your body and locate the emotional tone and the muscular tone associated with this dream. How does it live inside of you? And I would often find that there'd be some center of feeling in relation to the dreams message or the dreams theme.

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And if you can, rewind and reimagine moments from the dream. How do you feel? Are there other characters? What do they do? How do you feel in their presence? And look out for moments where old feelings emerge. Do you feel embarrassed, self-conscious, judgmental? Do you just want to leave? Are you desperately wanting to be helped?

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Are you confused and frozen? Look for moments in the dream when you do something new, you know, something that gives you that feeling of, Oh, I can do that. Wow. I have this power, especially something that affirms your life. Do you call for help when you need it? Do you take some powerful action? Do you stop harm from happening?

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Do you protect yourself? After rehearsing and walking through what you remember about the dream, get up and go to a journal and some paper and sketch out using words and images, simple drawings is fine, what you remember. Be with the internal sense of muscular and emotional tone. Use that internal sensation to check your words to see if they match your experience.

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that you find the right word that matches that experience. This is about awareness. Shed light on these hidden patterns, and they will bring to consciousness new possibilities. This might take several dreams to unravel what's going on behind the scenes, so let it take time. In conclusion,

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dreams are a wonderful source of information. One, it reveals to you your experience of your life and like where you still maintain challenges. What are the themes of your dreams and what does that mean for your life? Where do you get stuck in your dreams? And then it also is a representation of new learning, especially if you're in an

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an awareness through movement class and you're in a continued practice of learning these new possibilities for yourself. How does that inform the dreams? How does that reveal, yeah, something is really changing in me in this deep, profound way. For me, I go through seasons of this. Sometimes I don't really remember my dreams, and at other times I can feel how these dreams come in and

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They're just more vivid, more tactile, and when that happens, I savor them. I take extra time in the morning to be with that emotional tone, to be curious. What does this mean for me? What sort of insights does it offer me? For those of you listening that have been in a Feldenkrais practice for some time, have you had these sorts of dreams? I'd love to hear from you if that's true.

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And of course, as a disclaimer, if you haven't had dreams like this, it doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong. Sometimes they come, sometimes they don't. It's totally okay if you've never had dreams like this. If you haven't yet signed up for my newsletter, I'd love for you to do so. You can get to my newsletter in the show notes. I have this free downloadable guide called The 9 Surprising Benefits of the Feldenkrais

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Go ahead, please sign up for that. You get the guide and then you also join the newsletter. You'll be able to hear about my future class offerings if you'd like to join me in class. In the show notes, you'll also see a question form. So if you have a question about the Feldingkrais method that you'd like to have answered, well, send me the question. I love to answer it here on the podcast. Here's the question I would like to leave with you today.

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I described in this episode my experience of my dreams, and what I think dreams are and their value. Is that true for you? What are dreams for you? I invite you to take this question to your friends and family and see what they think about it too. What sort of dream life do they have? And as always, thank you for your attention.