Expand Your Ability: Embodiment, Somatics, and Feldenkrais

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On this week's episode, I'm excited to share this interview I did with Kelly Cordes of Central Minnesota's WJON radio station. I talk with her about what is the Fallen Christ Method, its benefits for seniors and future seniors, and what does taking a class look like. Welcome to the Expand Your Ability Podcast. I'm your host, Jeffrey Schwinghammer. This show explores how we can continue to mature, become more capable, and wise, and

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until the end of our days. All right, let's go right into the interview. Our next guest, I'm really interested in learning about what he has to say. His name is Jeffrey Schwinghammer, and he's a certified Feldenkrais Method practitioner. I'd never heard of that before. And as a Feldenkrais teacher, he leads group classes and works with people one-on-one to help them move more gracefully with greater balance and strength.

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while cultivating calm and confidence. And sometimes I think, wow, do I need this? You might too. He's the host of the Expand Your Ability podcast and the filmmaker behind the upcoming documentary about the Feldenkrais Method. Jeffrey, thank you for taking some time for us today. I really appreciate that you're here. Yes, thank you, Kelly. It's good to be here. So what is the Feldenkrais Method?

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Am I saying it right in the first place? Yeah, yeah, you're saying it right. Uh, the Feldenkrais method, it's a, it's a German last name named after a man named Moshe Feldenkrais and the work, I'm thinking about how to describe the work today and it's mindful movement classes that surprise you by revealing to you that you're much more capable than you think, that you can move with less tension, uh, with more ease and more grace.

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And thus more strength too. So really this doesn't just have to be for seniors. This can be for anybody that kind of feels like maybe they've fallen behind the eight ball a little bit and not really been on a healthy path, haven't been moving much and are going, gosh, you know what? I'm only 28 or 29 years old and I don't think I'm taking care of myself enough. I don't know how to even get started. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is a process that helps all people of all ages.

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to learn more about themselves and to take care of themselves in a way that they find that they like. And part of that is moving better. Part of that is feeling better through the process. Seniors are attracted to this work because it is so accessible that it doesn't require you to be particularly strong or particularly agile like a lot of other movement practices. This is very accessible.

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And it's focused more on paying attention to ourselves, becoming more aware of ourselves. Seniors tend to have less flexibility, they have less mobility, they have more aches and pains, and they're kind of in a position to have to be more gentle with themselves. So they tend to be attracted to the work. But I say we should pay attention to ourselves while the pains and aches that we have are quiet now.

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before they get vowed later in life. Yep, I totally agree. So how does this Feldenkrais method, how is it helpful for seniors? I guess we've kind of talked about some of it, can you go into more detail?

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yeah definitely so took the thing is and other people have there's a story that we have in our culture that it's something like as we age you kind of expect yourself to just lose abilities yeah new your capabilities over time but if you get injured it you can't ever recover as well as we did before the injury uh... and then like it is just

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put your hands up, what can I do about it? And that's not quite true, that we can continue to learn and grow as we grow older. And so part of that is kind of changing how we think about ourselves. In the Felven Christ method, we don't think of ourselves as an object, as something to be forced upon or pulled or put into shape or fixed or any of that. Instead we look at ourselves as something that we can do.

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as part of us, as a way to relate to ourselves in a more kind and more curious manner. Yeah. So by using less force, we don't engage our old habits of resisting force, and then we're more amenable to change. And so the process in the Fulmincrest Method is really first being curious, then asking questions, and then reducing the noise.

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classes tend to be more observant. We're working with questions, not repetitions. We're not, we're not trying to get in 10 reps and then forget about what we just did. Yeah, we pay attention to ourselves throughout the whole lesson. And we notice what changes emerge. And often they can be quite surprising. Yeah. You know, that people say, Oh, you can't teach an old dog new tricks all the time. And I'm like, Yes, you can. Old dogs can learn all kinds of stuff.

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I've got an old dog named Gloria. So that means we can too. Yeah, exactly. And who, I mean, honestly, I know so many people while we're all aging, but I know a lot of people that are my age or older that are constantly wanting to try new things. But we do sometimes have this mental block going, I don't know. Even my dad has said to me, I used to have a motorcycle when I was 16. It was a Kawasaki 100 or something. And my nephew rebuilt my motorcycle and rides it today.

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Well, so now I'm in my fifties and my dad's riding that motorcycle. He's, he's almost 80 and he comes up to me and says, you want to take it for a spin? And I automatically say, I don't know if I can do that anymore. And my dad is in, you know, he's almost 80. He's, he's riding it. Why couldn't I be riding that? Just because I haven't been on it for a while. But those are the kinds of things we tell ourselves that, um, y'all, you just can't because now you're here and what if you fall, you know, it's kind of a bad way to put your mind in.

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They know that mindset. So, um, all right. So this is helpful for seniors for a number of reasons. Uh, it's not just, uh, the physical side, it's building your confidence that you should have as you get older. Absolutely. And I liked your story there about, um, the stories that we tell ourselves. Yeah. And I think that can be so almost invisible, so sneaky in our experience that we

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begin to wall off our own possibilities, our own potentials. And part of that is that it's the nature of habits. Because most of our habits are actually quite invisible to us. Oh, that's true. Well, we get up in the morning, we walk, we run, we do all these activities, and we kind of don't really know how we do these movements. We just have these habits that allow us to live, that allow us to speak.

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And part of those habits are ways of thinking, ways of relating to other people. And all this really stems from how we grew up as kids. And so the lessons we learned in the past stay with us until we can become aware of them. And then we can be able to gently question them and then begin to rewire these old ingrained habits that constrain our thinking and our movement.

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Yeah. So how do you go about doing this? I mean, can you walk us like through what a first class or experience would be like? Yeah, so in the film and Christ method, there's like hundreds of lessons like Dr. Moshe film and Christ. He was a judo black belt. He was a physicist. He was into engineering and mechanics and he took all of his life experience and created all these

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people move in different ways. Using the whole body in all the infinite ways are 200 some bones and our 600 muscles can relate into all these infinite movements. So each lesson can be very different from the one that came before. And also related in some ways. As you continue to be in this work, you begin to see all the connections. And so generally a class,

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begins with some sort of observation, some sort of reference movement. Often it's, how are we in standing? How are we over our feet? How is our balance? How is our ability to turn and look at these fundamental functional movements? Could be walking too, could be reaching. And then you kind of bookmark that, okay, that's how we are now.

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just as you are we don't have to judge that uh... the lesson is often on the floor sometimes it's been sitting sometimes it's been standing but often we use the floor the the lesson unfolds a few of those movement direction died so i'll offer that to students of i don't care please if you would making movement like this and then by doing a number of times

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begin to realize all the parts of our body that are in that movement it'd be something simple lake listing reports it could be something like reaching with your hand and you know i was not just the hand that moves it's shoulder the chest the body and then we add in all these variations we had in all these other world what about this what about that

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you know i have an intention to create a more and more larger more comprehensive the image of movement for the students but it's a student's own exploration the guy from there because they all have unique individual histories everyone is an individual in terms of what what they've experienced the injuries they've had the stories that they've learned

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an individual relating to themselves in a new way. But then, by the end of the lesson, the instruction is such a way that we can all kind of come to some new understanding of ourselves. And that often leads to a better balance, feeling taller, feeling more centered, feeling lighter, all sorts of things. Okay. Now you teach at the Whitney Senior Center a couple of times a week, right? That's right. I teach on Wednesdays and Fridays.

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Okay, Wednesdays and Fridays. So people say, I would like to, to, you know, explore this. Do they have to wait for a certain time to jump in or do they just any time is okay? Or do you have a certain number of people or is it all online? How does that work? Yeah. So it's in person. Uh, it's Wednesdays at one 15 Fridays at 12 15. I recommend people go reach out to the Whitney senior center about signing up. Currently all of these classes are dropping. They are.

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Um, each, each class is, you can approach it as your first time. I will bring you in. I will give you what you need to know during that class if you're new. And then I'm also trying to connect lessons that, you know, each week and each month that I thought lessons flow into each other, that you also be rewarded by continuing to explore the, see these patterns as they, as they unfold from lesson to lesson. Okay.

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I would love to ask you, and I know that you have a podcast, it's called Expand Your Ability, and I think it sounds really, really interesting. How did you ever get started doing this in the first place? Sorry, with the podcast specifically? Oh no, just with- Or the Feldenkrais work? Yeah, with the Feldenkrais work. Yeah, so I came to Feldenkrais out of my own need. Ever since being a teenager, I felt kind of awkward. I felt very-

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tense. Actually, my voice was very just tense and kind of constrained. And it really affected me. It was really difficult to be with. And I was, something's off. I'm not, you know, I was in, I was in swim, swimming team in the cross country. And I wasn't as fast or as capable as the other kids. And I was like, I don't, I mean, I'm trying as hard, but it's not working.

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i don't know what i did to create all this tension and so i had to explore and eventually came across the fulmincrisis method and i read uh... most of the fulmincrisis through awareness through movement one of his big books on the work and just the way he described how we grow up as kids how we learn to behave and our own relationship with movement and efforting and habits

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I was like, there's something here. And that's kind of how I got into it. So how old were you when you just started discovering like, oh, I'm so glad that I was able to do this. Because this sounds so familiar to me. I tried everything and we've kind of made fun of it. I mean, I tried sports in school and I always said, my dad would laugh and laugh and we try to make fun of it. But I took out, tried to do swimming and I tried to swim, keep up with everybody. He said, she had this long lean body.

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But she would swim and swim in the same place and never get anywhere. And that's really how I was with running and swimming. I tried, but I think I was trying so hard. I don't know if people thought I wasn't, but I was trying so hard and I just was not moving. Right, right. And that's the thing. We can try so hard. And if we don't move in a particular efficient way, we're...

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spending all that energy for nothing. It actually works against us. And that's why we get that's the wear and tear that we get as we grow older is all that way we effort that's inefficient for our mechanical functional bodies. And so more effort doesn't mean better results, unfortunately. Calibrated effort does lead to better results. But in terms of when I how old was I? I mean, I was

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teenager wrestling with these into my 20s. I think it was in my early 20s, I came across the book and then it's been this zigzag continued exploration until about five years ago where I was like, you know, I want to go all in on this. This seems so helpful. So that's when I started my training program. I just think it's wonderful. I'm glad that you did. I know that you have a website to

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Because it sounds really interesting. It feels like everybody can go, okay, I have something I can learn from this or maybe this is where I'm at and this sounds like the way for me to get to the next point. Absolutely. My goal with the podcast is to introduce the filming Christ method to everyone that like these ideas are so paradigm shifting that they take some time to understand it takes some context and this takes takes a little bit of like pondering and thinking about

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reflecting on your own experience. So I hope to offer that with the podcast. Come on in, check this out, see how it could be helpful for you. So from, from your perspective, since you know, something you've been exploring, if somebody comes in this, how much time do they need to give it to get started? Like how long would a session or a class last? Right, right. So a class is generally about an hour. One on one sessions are generally about an hour. But in terms of

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Really giving the work a fair trial, I would say go to six to ten classes because then you can start to see the breadth of movement possibilities. You begin to see what can, all the different ways you can feel at the end of a lesson, all the different ways you can sense yourself. Because it is so different than how we normally think, it actually takes some time to like, okay, what is this?

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Yeah. And to see those patterns on phone. All right. Well, Jeffrey, this was a blast having you on the show. Again, the classes that you're offering at the Whitney senior center are Wednesdays at one 15 Fridays at 12 15. Just contact the Whitney senior center to learn more. Yes, that's right. And if you'd like to learn more on your own, uh, go to Jeffrey's website, expand your ability.com. It's very interesting. You can check it out. All right. That was the interview. It was a lot of fun for me.

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And I will admit I was pretty nervous beforehand, but I thought it turned out great. It was really great practice for me to better and better describe the method and its benefits for seniors and all people. My goal is to inform as many people as I can that there is much more choice and ability available to them. Do you know someone that could benefit from these ideas? Please share this episode with them. What's one thing that stuck with you in this episode?

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I invite you to share it with a friend. Talking with others is a great way to forward our learning. If you want to learn more about the Feldenkrais Method, you can download my free guide, The Nine Surprising Benefits of the Feldenkrais Method, and you will find that link in the show notes. Alright, my final question for you today is, what do you want for yourself as you age?

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Thank you for your attention.