Expand Your Ability: Embodiment, Somatics, and Feldenkrais

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Hello there. The show has come a long way in the past 39 episodes, and since it's also the new year, I thought it would be a great opportunity to reintroduce myself in the show. So if you're new, you'll get caught up to speed here. And if you've been a long time listener, I think this episode will tie some threads together and give you a preview of what's to come. Welcome to the Expand Your Ability podcast. I'm your host, Jeffrey Schwinghammer.

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This show explores how to radically change your life through movement, play, and curiosity. I will share my story briefly. I'll describe the three somatic movement modalities that I'm based in, as well as another topic that I'm really passionate about. So first, let me get started with my story. I have had a lot of physical tension and discomfort throughout my life.

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accumulate it from an early age, a sort of self-consciousness and anxiousness and just a general contraction against the world. And it's taken me quite some time to understand it and sort it out and take it apart piece by piece. The layers of the onion metaphor is very apt.

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more and more layers of understanding who we are. And it's been a long process for me. And I could always tell that there was some strong physical component. I could feel it physically more clearly than I could understand how my thinking was related. And so that was my first inclination into, OK, there's something, some relation to the body that is so important.

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that put me on this path to eventually get interested in somatics. All right, somatics. What is somatics? It's not so common a term, so I'll cover it here again. So somatics comes from the Greek word soma, which means body. It's kind of like the opposite of psyche and psychology. Soma is the body. But that doesn't mean we just throw away the mind or anything like that. The soma...

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And the semantics is a move to be in the body, in sensation, and to relate to the whole of ourselves. And how we experience ourselves and who we are in our sensation and in our movement. And it is a way of connecting mind and body together. My Western education upbringing placed a lot of

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uh, emphasis on intellectual production, uh, and ingesting knowledge from the outside, uh, semantics is a different game. This is the rich world of sensation and possibility within our human frame, our physical frame. And it's not just about the individual either too. It's, it's about how the individual perceives others and their environment and the interaction that unfolds between.

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individual and others. So it is about being embedded in your world.

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The particular elements of semantics I like to emphasize are curiosity, playfulness, creativity, and awareness.

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I'll describe briefly the three somatic modalities that I study and that I teach. The three are the Feldenkrais method, Kinesa, and the emotional body. The first one is Feldenkrais. So if you've been listening, you've been hearing this word Feldenkrais a lot. It's a central topic of this podcast.

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And what is it? It's it's about understanding your habits so you can make new choices It is understanding how you embody Compulsive or restrictive not only movements but thoughts to feelings to how how these Patterns inside you shape you how you are shaped over and over by the same patterns and then

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finding ways out, finding ways to see more clearly, and in the process, finding a bit more ease, finding the power that comes through clear functional movement, which is the antidote to being kind of hobbled by the past, right? Like our old movement habits are kind of like a limp after an injury. Even though the injury is healed,

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and we're no longer in that old situation, we still kind of hobble around. There's something in how we walk that still is that compensation from that injury.

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By reducing our overall compulsivity to our habits, we recover our vitality. All of that work and that compensation and those patterns that don't serve us actually drain our mental energy, drain our vitality. There's more creativity and excitement and openness that can come by going through this work. The Feldenkrais method.

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is a movement method, right? It's awareness through movement, but it's more than just movement. People do come to the method to deal with acute problems in how they move. They have pain or injury or they need to improve their performance in some way. But what happens is people stay for the transformation. They stay because

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Wow, this helps me be more the person that I want to be. I like this. You could say that this process is alchemical. You take those lead parts of you and you transform them into gold. Students find themselves pleasantly surprised, right? This work is about surprising you through these unique movement processes that whoa, there's something more here.

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something new here. There's some awareness that I never had before, and insight comes with that. The Feldenkrais Method has a multidisciplinary background. It originated from Moshe Feldenkrais, who was born in 1904 and passed away in 1984, who drew together insights from many different fields, including Judo, Jujitsu, Physics, Mechanics, Yoga, Evolution, Child Development,

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And he distilled them. He wanted to make them actionable and accessible to anybody without any sort of complex overlay. Like here's ways you can move and learn about these really neat fundamental principles that are in your body. He really drew a lot together to put together his work. My primary teachers,

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From my training are Jeff Holler and Candy Canino. Both are excellent in their own ways. I've already interviewed Jeff Holler on the show back in episode 11, a real great deep dive into what this work is about. For further big picture descriptions of the method, I recommend episodes number four, awareness through movement, number 20, the three goals of the Feldenkrais method.

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Number 32, no strain yet gain, which I include in awareness through movement lesson. That's the Feldling-Kreis piece. So let me know if you have any questions. What are you most curious about with Feldling-Kreis? The next somatic modality is Kinesa. I've been taking this course for the past year and I'll be graduated in the next week. So, huzzah to that.

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Kinesa is a creation from Feldenkrais teachers Lavinia Planka and Kandi Kanino. They take their 40 years each of Feldenkrais experience, plus their experience in many other fields including theater, physiotherapy, esoteric practices, yoga, storytelling, anatomy, everything, to create this kinesa process. And how is it different from Feldenkrais exactly?

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Philvin Christ had a strong emphasis on functional movement, exploring through movement. And, you know, he had distilled down these movements from other practices, Judo, yoga. You didn't have to go and believe anything about being a yogi or a Judo person to receive the benefits of finding these movement principles within your own body. He peeled away notions such as

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energy, key, chakras that can be found in these other methods. And the emphasis comes to the physical body, the muscular, the skeletal relationships, the sensation, how you perceive yourself, which is all good. And in Kinesa, that's still all there, but becomes a smaller aspect of the whole picture. In Kinesa.

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Lavinia and Kandi call them the seven bodies. The seven bodies are the physical body, the emotional body, the mental body, the creative body, the energetic body, the archetypal body, and the alchemical body. You can think of a light hitting a prism and then separating into a rainbow of colors. And that's kind of like these seven bodies, different perspectives. They're different languages.

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different interpretations of experiences. And having a multitude gives you a great way to get into the different nuances of the human experience. Different people have different languages, different emphasis on how they experience themselves, how they lay out the world in front of them. And Kinesa is just a wonderful way to meet people where they are.

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How do they think about their bodies? What helps them find a sense of power inside? So it's about functional movement, and it's about expression. It's about creativity. It's about changing your own narrative. It's about embodying your values, and perhaps archetypes too. It's about engaging with all these different processes that go on.

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that I think are implicit in Felnic Reis and Kinesa makes it much more explicit. The past two episodes that I released around reflecting on 2023 and what value will you carry into 2024, both of those somatic explorations were inspired by my training in Kinesa.

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So I take these elements from Feldenkrais, I take these elements from Kinesa, and I bring them together. Something I want to highlight that I think is really great about Kinesa is that you're not asked to believe anything special for Kinesa to work. Instead the seven bodies offer different entry points for different people, different way of languaging to meet people's needs and their requests.

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In addition to the seven bodies, Kanisha is based around seven principles. The principles are power, presence, breath, balance, sensation, perception, and choice. These seven principles become another way to look at our experience. How did this somatic lesson affect my sense of presence?

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How did it change my breath? How is my perception related to my choice? And so forth. You can hear my conversation with Lavinia in episode 23. We talk about her experience as a longtime practitioner in the Feldenkrais Method and her experience in many other fields. I hope to have her on again soon to talk about Kinesa specifically.

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Alright, so that's Kinesa. Let me know what you're curious about. Might be kind of new, might be kind of interesting for you. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Let me know with an email.

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The next somatic modality I want to talk about is the emotional body. I was introduced to the emotional body as one of the previously mentioned bodies in the Kinesa process. The emotional body is actually derived from a whole other modality outside of Kinesa. And I was so impressed by the material that we were trained in Kinesa that I wanted to dive into it further.

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taken a course this past fall with the founder and teacher Laura Bond. The goal of the emotional bodywork is to teach people to access the emotional effector patterns. Emotional effector patterns are these precise breathing and muscle patterns linked to specific emotional feelings. Each effector pattern has three parts. There's the breathing aspect, the facial expression,

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and your posture, your overall body movement. And all three parts work together to create one effector pattern. And this stimulates the nerves, the cells, the organs. And that pattern creates a sort of basic emotion to express throughout the whole body. And these are biologically your patterns. Everyone has these six emotional patterns.

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these effector patterns. They are numbered in the emotional body system in a particularly unique way. They're numbered as 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, 3A, and 3B. And I know that doesn't seem very helpful because you're like, what are these emotions? But that's actually super deliberate. Because emotions are

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exceptionally subjective. In English we have a bajillion words for different emotions and nuanced emotions. So the pattern remains the same, but your word usage might change. So let's just name the patterns somewhat nondescriptly here, 1a, 2a, etc., because you experience it. What you experience is important as you go through the patterns.

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These are all fundamental emotional effector patterns that we are born with. And all the complexity of the other emotions of our lives are a diversity. They are diversified out of this emotional palette. And we can develop a rich mixture in between. And so the work is also about detangling

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the patterns that we have that they can get distorted, right? So perhaps there's something about this pattern where I can't actually show aggression or anger without collapsing into some sort of sadness. Right? And so if, if one pattern is kind of tied up with another pattern, or there's a

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excess tension in the pattern, you won't have the clarity of that emotional power. It won't be able to serve you. And you'll go back into old habits that way. And so this is so great because it takes Feldenkrais' ideas and then opens up this whole new world to your emotional landscape.

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For me, in the past, I've felt muted with some emotions, unable to bring forth the emotion I needed. And with the emotional body, I found out why. I can understand, oh, as this is happening, I'm also bringing in this, and I'm doing this. And well, instead, OK, I can practice.

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Outside of a situation that demands emotion, I can practice the emotion, get clear about it, be able to turn it on and turn it off, and then I can reshape my experience that I'm more available, more free to feel, to adjust my feelings as I go to, to modulate the intensity of my experience.

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I think it's really rich. I'm really excited about it. I'm excited to incorporate this work into my teachings as I go forward. And I have an interview with Laura Bond, the founder of the emotional body. It'll be on the podcast soon, in a few weeks. So please stay tuned. We'll get into some of those patterns. Let me know if you have any questions on the topic. I love to hear them. Is this something you're interested in?

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So those are the three somatic modalities that influence and inform me in how I teach, and what I talk about here on this podcast. So Feldenkrais, Kinesa, and the emotional body. There's another topic that I've brought up on the podcast that I'm super interested in as well, and that's attachment theory. This isn't something I'm certified in, but it has been a consistent field of study for me in the past 18 months.

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I find the framework so helpful for understanding how insecurity develops, and how insecurity becomes a predictable constellation of behaviors, and how people pursue or avoid intimacy, that is, emotional connection with others. And it affects their ability to give and receive love. What has been super clear in my experience is how my own historical habits, these muscular

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of restriction and depowerment has made it difficult to connect with others. The somatic methods I've talked about, Feldenkrais, Kinesa, emotional body, are powerful approaches to connecting with self and then connecting self with others. To work with your body gives you access to so much resources, and you become far more insightful into what's going on for you that you can intervene and make new choices.

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You can slow the insecurity down and open up new possibilities. The attachment framework is so helpful because we need frameworks for what good secure relationships look like. Because if we've grown up being insecure, we've developed these sort of compensations and muscular habits, these habits of action. And there's also this void of.

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What is good behavior? What is the behavior that over time helps you feel more comfortable and more secure with other people and them with you?

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So if we don't develop new relationship skills, we'll actually remain rightfully insecure because our environment, the people around us, are also insecure in relation to us. So by changing and strengthening our inner life, we can use that newfound strength to improve our relationships so we all get stronger and more secure. And semantics helps us embody values.

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like integrity and honesty and vulnerability, so we can spread that support to other people, spread our security outwards, which solidifies our internal security as well. I have two episodes on the topic already. You can check out episode 35, where I talk with my mentor, Adam Lane Smith, on what do secure relationships look like. And then I also give a brief introduction to attachment theory in episode 31.

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Are you curious about attachment theory? Let me know if you have any questions. Love to hear from you. Next, I'd like to describe a couple things I'm working on. The first is, to go back to Feldenkrais, I'm working on a documentary film about the Feldenkrais method with my fellow practitioner, Alice Boyd. A long time listeners will know from episode seven that we had a conversation and we heard about her story. So go check that out.

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In this film, we're trying to pull a lot of threads together to help people understand the origins of the Feldenkrais work, some of the whys of how Feldenkrais works, and to follow along with the experience of a student as she goes through the work, as she goes through the one-on-one functional integration work and the group classes, the awareness through movement work. We did our principal filming.

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earlier last year in March. And we're well into post-production. We've had three feedback screenings to help us refine and dial in the story. It's quite a bit of work because we are ambitious with the story. We do wanna fit in a lot of elements. And so it's taken us some time. It's a wonderful experience working with Alice and I can't wait to share with you. And it might be a little bit of a while. We were hoping to finish by May.

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And at this point, it doesn't seem likely yet, but we don't have a new release date. But finishing it as soon as possible is our goal. The final thing that I wanna share is about opportunities to work with me. And all of these opportunities will be in the show notes. You can learn about doing one-on-one sessions with me online. You can email me about working with me in person in the central Minnesota area.

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And I'll be launching a course in the next few weeks, which I hope you'll attend. I will be weaving together felincrisis, kinesa, and emotional body into somatic movement processes that can help you develop awareness, insight, power, and ease. A part of the course will be to help you develop your own embodied somatic process that you can do each day briefly, a way of checking in with yourself. And it won't be through

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rote movements. It'll be something that we can work together to create, that you can meet yourself as you are each day and learn about yourself and tend to yourself and be playful and curious. If this is something that is interesting to you be sure to join the newsletter to get the most up-to-date information. All of these links will be in the show notes, and if you enjoy the show I encourage you to support the show.

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Please leave a five-star review in your podcast player, and if you'd like to donate, I welcome that too. All right, so that's the show I have for you today. Thank you so much. Here's a question for you. Of all the things that I've shared today, what are you most curious about? What do you think is next for you? Thank you for your attention.