Expand Your Ability: Embodiment, Somatics, and Feldenkrais

Welcome to the Expand Your Ability Podcast. Your Explorers Guide to You, Your Activities, Your Possibilities, and Your World. Welcome. My name is Jeffrey Schwinghammer and I'm your host. This is the first episode of this podcast and thank you for coming to take a listen.

So in this episode, I want to talk about a few topics. Who am I? What is the Feldenkrais method? And what are my goals for this podcast?

Off who am I? My name is Jeffrey Schwinghammer, and I'm a Feldenkrais practitioner. I graduated last fall, before this I was, and still am, a filmmaker making videos for documentaries, nonprofits, companies, and so I've been in the business of making films and rarely have I ever been the subject. I always have been like nope I'm behind the camera I'm in the editing room. And so this is me living out expand your ability.

I'm doing much better now, but it wasn't always the case. For a long time, I had a lot of physical discomfort, tension, anxiety patterns, and you know I still do. I still work with those things. And in the past, it was really bad. It was really like I couldn't actually sit at the computer and edit for longer than a half hour. That's how at its worst, that's how bad it was.

I really got myself in some downward negative feedback loop cycles where my own anxiety contributed to my own anxiety. And so what really helped me was coming across a lot of different methods and modalities, But the one that really stood out to me was the Feldenkrais Method. Because the Feldenkrais method looks at who we are, what we're doing, and then proposes new possibilities bit by bit. And so I was so, so just enamored, so curious, so, so just struck by the possibilities of this method. And each lesson is designed that you just get in where you can.

And what I found was there's a lot I can't do. There's a lot that my old history, my old tension patterns don't permit me to do. And that's what is going on. There's something that I'm doing that I'm not sure I'm doing. And it's been this long journey, as my teacher Jeff Holler says, it's a long apprenticeship to learn about ourselves. And so I've been on a long apprenticeship, and I've learned a lot, and I'm still learning, learning never ends, right? So that's why I'm here.

I want to share what I've learned. I want to share what I am learning, and I want to bring it to a lot of people because I think this method is so ahead of its time still. And so maybe that's a good transition point to talk about the method.

So the Feldenkrais method, it's got a funny name, a Feldenkrais method, what does that even mean? Well, the Feldenkrais method is named after a person, Moshe Feldenkrais. And he was a Ukrainian Israeli physicist, black belt in judo before pretty much anyone. And he was a pioneer in a field called somatics. We would say it's called somatics now, which is an exploration of mind and body of what are the extent of the human potential.

And if you were to summarize the Felicomethic method as simply as possible, it's something like using curiosity, aka questions, to evoke awareness and define new possibility, new possible adaptive patterns of action, reaction, interaction that are outside of our human history, our own personal history, by history, I kind of mean that baggage.

You know, that all the ways that make us, us, are particular manners or behaviors, those things that we might think are on changing in us. Well there's a lot that can actually, we can go in and tinker around a bit and update some of these old patterns. And this particular method goes in through the body, goes in through our sensation, our movement, because it's really there that is the deepest, most felt part of ourselves.

Yeah, there's ways to go in using words, using concepts and ideas, but through the body goes to the deepest parts of who we are and I think any method of personal improvement needs to have a real solid understanding of our own movement in our sensation because everything about us is manifested in our body. It's just impossible otherwise.

Now I will talk more about these ideas through this podcast and I'll try to clarify and elucidate all these ideas. Speaking of which, my goals for this podcast are to provide one-on-one fundamental ideas. What is this method about? What does it look like to be in this method? What does it feel like? What is the arc of learning like this? And I want to be your guide. I want to open up this door and give you the keys to the kingdom.

And it's important, I think, to any fellow and prize practitioner and student is how this work can change your daily life. How it can bring more curiosity, more fascination, more wonder, and more appreciation for how we do what we do and how we can do what we want to do. So that will be a part of this show as well. I'm going to have on guests. I have a whole list of people I want to talk with. So my teachers, other practitioners, my peers, students of the work, and more, other experts in other fields too.

My own personal interest right now is expanding this work to look at relationships. How can we improve our relationships by increasing our sensitivity, increasing our achievement, increasing our discernment, and also I want to encourage all of us to be more playful and to have more fun.

One more thing, I am a filmmaker and I've had the great opportunity to begin a collaboration with fellow practitioner Alice Boyd. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and her and I have been working on a documentary about this method, Moshe Feldenkrais about his ideas and a real live students experience interacting with the method and learning on screen with us. So I'm really stoked about that. We're hoping for it to be released in 2024. I'll be sharing updates about that as we go.

So in recap, this is the expand your ability podcast. I'm your host on this adventure. Truly it's an adventure into who you are, what you do, what you want to do, and who you'll bring along with you. I have committed to making this podcast weekly, so please hit the subscribe button and join us for the ride.