Expand Your Ability: Embodiment, Somatics, and Feldenkrais

00:00
dance training, at least when I was young and even in college, like there were still things that were quite oppressive. And that was kind of instilled in me. And so that idea of freedom for me really started to come during Feldenkrais training. That's the voice of this week's guest, Feldenkrais practitioner Sarah Baumert. Sarah's life has been centered around movement, including dance.

00:28
Yoga and the Feldenkrais Method. In this episode, you'll hear about Sarah's explorations into movement and yoga as a child, the power of postures to create new internal experiences, the similarities between yoga and the Feldenkrais Method, and finding freedom in your body. Welcome to the Expand Your Ability Podcast. I'm your host, Jeffrey Schwinghammer. This podcast is about the Feldenkrais Method and how it can give you insights into how you move.

00:58
so you can move more confidently through your life. This week's guest is Sarah Baumert. Sarah Baumert is a freelance dance artist and somatic educator based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is an authorized awareness through movement teacher, certified Feldenkrais practitioner, and yoga teacher. During her Feldenkrais training, Sarah learned how to move to the music of her internal senses as a way to work through chronic dance injuries.

01:29
She has held teaching positions at the Harvard Center of Wellness, MIT, the University of Minnesota, and the St. Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists. She runs the Sarah B. Yoga and Feldenkrais podcast. Alright, on to the interview.

01:48
Hi Sarah, welcome to the podcast. How are you? Hi Jeffrey, good, it's great to be here. Nice, welcome. Yeah, so I'm really curious to start with, you have a long history with movement through many different practices and I guess it'd be great to start with some sort of brief overview of your experience in movement. Yeah, so as I was thinking about having this talk with you,

02:17
and knowing that we may start to talk a little bit about the difference or the way that both Feldenkrais and yoga can complement each other. I was remembering when I was a kid, so I'm a dancer and I took dance classes when I was very young, but I remember when I was a kid, I was very curious about movement and

02:43
you know, to learn about something back then, you either had to go to the library and find a book or you would go to a bookstore, right? It was like books is how you found information or you went to some kind of class. And I remember being at the Barnes and Noble and finding this book about yoga and I was like eight or nine years old and asking my mom, I think she bought it for me and it became like my

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interested in my curiosity for years. I would just sit on the floor of our living room. I'd like page through it, you know, do all the poses and really kind of be fascinated by what the poses would, what the feeling of the poses would bring to me. And you know, when you're a kid, you're usually pretty flexible. So I was able to

03:39
do a lot of the kind of extreme poses that were in this book. And but I just remember that being kind of the seed, one of the seeds of my curiosity of movement. And again, at the same time, I was taking, you know, dance classes as a kid, ballet and tap dancing and things like that. So so that's where I think of my the seed of my curiosity of more like expressive movement comes from. Yeah.

04:09
So you had a sense of being in those poses and you could even sense that they gave you a feeling? What do you mean by that? Yeah, so you know in yoga there's, there's a, you can umbrella different poses in different ways and a really simplistic way of doing it is poses that are back bends or spinal extensions where you're really opening up are more energizing.

04:39
where poses where you're in spinal flexion, you're kind of curling in on yourself. You can think about like a child's pose or kind of rounding into a ball. It's a protective position, right? And so those are more calming poses. And then there's a variety of other categories, right, that you could put poses into. But if we just wanted to play with those two, anything that would be some kind of like extreme backbend, it excites the nervous system. It creates energy.

05:09
And sometimes so much energy that you couldn't fall asleep, or it might be too much energy. So there's really power in the shapes that we make or in the movements that we make. And so that's what I mean by learning or sensing, oh, what did that feel like after I just went into a really big backbend as a kid? Like, oh, now I need to lay down and like breathe or calm myself before I do something else or.

05:38
oh, now I'm going to go into a forward fold because that actually feels good after the backbend. You know, so it was, it was, I was using my own body as an experiment in a lot of ways. Yeah. It sounds like it was really a study, equivalent to anything you do in school. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely. I, you know, I did go on to be a dance major in college. And so as I was growing up,

06:08
After school, I would go to the dance studio that I took classes at and, you know, dance for three or four hours. And that was just a huge part of my life. And I decided I wanted to continue that. And so then when I went to college, it became an all-day process or an all-day practice, you know, waking up early, going to ballet class, and then having many technique classes and getting ready for performances. So

06:38
It really became more so than any other kind of book study, as you might more traditionally think of. My study did become movement. Yeah, language of movement. Yeah, I'm really curious about what you, that path you've been on, how that might have moved you in a different direction than your peers. How does having this sort of internal knowledge, this knowledge around movement or this...

07:08
felt, experienced, how did that differentiate from other peers that didn't go down that path? Was there something different there for you?

07:19
Yeah, you know, I think I noticed this a lot with my family because many of my peers are dancers. So we do have a similar language in a way, or we understand each other in that way. But particularly with my family, I think I mentioned to you that I always kind of felt like the weird one who was like in the corner of the living room rolling around on the floor and...

07:47
Nobody really understood, like, why does she always need to roll around on the floor? But then, you know, later in life, I also found that there's a...

08:02
I had to learn how to use my words basically, because I was so used to communicating with my body, whether that be in a performance or, I mean, even as I might be teaching, I started teaching yoga really early on in my adult life while I was a professional dancer. And so even in teaching, I was still able to use my body in some way in the teaching process. And then,

08:33
being able to speak, being able to use language is so important because that's how most people communicate. And so in order to either share the practices or to explain the practices, being able to use verbal language, which can of course be really limiting, but that became quite important. So I don't know if that really answers your question, but I do feel that there's a deep intelligence that can come from

09:02
knowing the body and from a movement practice and that that kind of body intelligence isn't always as valued in our culture. And so while I was focusing so much of my energy on that, I also realized like, okay, well, in order to do certain things in my life, I can't just rely on that. I have to also be able to.

09:31
you know, use my brain if you will or use my words. It can't just be communication through the body, which is what I just felt so comfortable at doing. You know, I didn't want to have to speak for a long part of my, it was like, oh, okay, I'll go on stage, I'll move or I'll go into class, I'll move. But great, I don't have to talk. And that was like really my comfort zone. And so,

09:59
you can see how that might be different from what other people focus on in their life, in their studies, in their expertise. Yeah, absolutely. My own history is coming from more abstract or ideas, being in the books to movement, and so it's really exciting to hear your story for me. You're coming from movement the other direction, like kind of two bridges meeting.

10:27
I just find that really fascinating. I think a lot of people are learning to be in their bodies when they haven't been in their bodies so much. That movement is still a pretty new experience, especially movement outside of just straight exercise or sports, exploratory movement. What is it like to try and teach people, to inform them of the value?

10:57
of movement intelligence? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think that that is what really helped me find my literal voice is when I started teaching, I realized, oh, this is like a speech that I'm up in front of a group of people for an hour or more and I'm talking. And that, again, that wasn't my comfort zone.

11:26
And I could always fall back on my ability to maybe demonstrate, at least in a yoga class, right, because in Feldenkrais we don't demonstrate. But I think what really helped me is the relationships that I had with people and really wanting for them to be able to feel good in their body. How do I communicate?

11:53
these ideas or these concepts or this way of feeling or this way of moving with words. So I got very curious about that. And I actually think that what helped me is, and this is kind of the origin story of my own podcast, I was teaching in Minneapolis, I was teaching yoga, and then I moved to Boston and my students in Minneapolis were kind of bummed. And one of them said, why don't you start a podcast?

12:23
And this was back in 2006, 2007, when most people did not know what a podcast was. And I thought, well, I'm not so sure about that. You know, I'm not the kind of person who like wants to be famous or is showy in any way. So I thought that's kind of putting myself out there more than I want to. And he bought me a voice recorder and he helped me kind of figure out how to do it.

12:49
And so I did, I started to record a couple of my live classes that I was teaching in Boston and I posted them on this podcast and I don't know who really started doing them, but for sure my students were doing them. And I think at that point there were like two or three yoga podcasts. But what the reason I'm talking about this story is that obviously in a podcast there's no visual.

13:19
the poses, assuming that it might be to somebody who had never taken a yoga class before. So I can't just say a pose and they can go there, right? And I'm also very interested in using imagery and the feeling of the pose and the energetics of the pose. So knowing that I was teaching a class to somebody who had absolutely no visual really helped me hone how I could be very clear in my verbal instructions.

13:49
And so I think I just got practice in that. And even if I was teaching a live class, I had that in mind that, okay, there are people in the room right now that I can kind of speak to, but assume that they're not seeing me. And even then I started to just not demonstrate in my classes, which some of my best teachers would do that as well. They would just walk around and they would watch. That way you can observe the student more. So I think that really helped me.

14:17
learn how to explain and be more clear in teaching movement. Right. Let's explore more of the differences. You were kind of drawing out this difference between yoga and Feldenkrais. That yoga generally has some sort of demonstration, Feldenkrais doesn't, and you were kind of practicing this way of describing how to

14:46
be in these poses without a visual, would you say more about what yoga is to you, what Feldenkrais is to you, how you find them similar or different?

15:00
Yeah, absolutely. So with yoga, there are asanas or poses. And even that word pose, it's seemingly static, where awareness through movement, it's, well, the name describes it. It's awareness via moving. And it's not very common that in an awareness through movement class, you are.

15:27
static, you're staying in one place unless it's the body scan or you know something like that. And so those might that might be kind of the biggest difference that you could see from the outside. And yet the way that I like to teach yoga and this has definitely come from a lot of inspiration from Feldenkrais is that within each pose even if even if you are hanging out in a pose

15:56
maybe not hanging out, but inhabiting a pose for many breaths, that there is still a specific kind of energy or internal movement, internal sense of movement, of course the movement of your breath, but even perhaps it's an isometric action, muscular action, and playing with how you can find a sense

16:26
being in a pose that requires some kind of effort or activity, right, to stay upright or to hold the pose, which is something that we do all the time in Felgenkrais. Finding that place of moving with a minimal amount of effort, finding the ease within a movement, but also not going to that place where you're just totally relaxed, right? So you're playing with the tonus, the muscular tonus.

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as you're moving. So there's all these different aspects that I've learned from the Feldenkrais method and have either brought to yoga or when I learned them in training, I said, oh, this is the same as this other thing that I'm doing over here, you know, finding the middle ground in yoga, like that balance between effort and ease. It was something I was teaching long before the Feldenkrais method, but it's just these similar concepts that are kind of parallel to each other.

17:25
but are introduced via different forms. So I find that they really compliment each other a lot. And of course it depends on how to teach, how it's taught. Yoga is such a big word now and there's so many different varieties and forms. So I think it really depends where Feldenkrais is like a more nuanced way of practicing something and yoga is this huge umbrella term. But that's...

17:54
That's one way I like to think about them as being similar and different. So there's a, I don't have much of a yoga background, just a few classes here or there. My sense is, yeah, when there is that pose, there's a sort of endurance quality, but you're also mentioning a playful quality. Can you find it easy even though you're in this pose? Is that a fair way to put it or is that...

18:23
Yeah, yeah, I definitely I hope that there's a playful quality. I the breath is is focused on quite a lot. You know, if you're holding your breath and oppose, then that means I always say that the pose is done for you, like you've fatigued out of the pose and you may want to rest or shift positions if you're not breathing anymore, clearly. And, you know, some

18:52
forms of yoga are moving from pose to pose to pose, like one breath per movement quickly, and other other practices you are holding things, you know, I'm kind of an in between because I do love movement. And so I like to use Feldenkrais concepts or, you know, explore things in a Feldenkrais kind of way to get the student to

19:18
understand something kind of like an experiential anatomy situation at the beginning of class so that maybe they have a better sense of how their scapula can move on their back and then take that into a pose that uses the scapula in a particular way and so then they might have a better physical sensorial understanding of how to do that. And so

19:45
That's where, yes, I think there can definitely be a playfulness in it and a way of finding that freedom or that expansiveness in the pose so that the pose, even if you are holding it and there is some effort in holding it, it's not making you smaller. Sometimes when there's a lot of high tone in the body,

20:09
it sort of draws us inward and makes us feel smaller. Like how can we feel very expansive even when there is some effort to hold a pose? Right, right. Yeah, that's something I'm very attentive to just in my own awareness of myself habitually through the day. What experiences, what events tend to make me feel small or large and being in the practice of, well, I can be small, I can be large.

20:37
and to go between them, that I can be more nimble about that experience. How do your students think about the Felman Christ edition? Was that an easy addition to bring into their yoga practice?

20:56
Yeah, I think with my longtime students, you know, I even before I was a certified practice Feldenkrais practitioner, I was using some ideas from lessons, I loved doing Feldenkrais lessons and then grabbing a couple of things and going how, oh, this is going to really inform triangle pose or this is going to really help with, you know, some some anatomical concept.

21:25
that was hard to grasp for people in a specific pose. And so for a long time, I was sort of just filtering in some of that work and those ideas. And I always got quite good response to it. And so then, you know, and then my students knew that I was doing a Felton Crace training. And so I started to, you know, teach a kind of...

21:52
sample class of just Feldenkrais. And so that they could get a sense of, okay, this is what a Feldenkrais lesson is when it's a pure Feldenkrais and how that's different from some of those little explorations that we're doing at the beginning of a class. And, you know, it's been interesting. I think some students do both now with me. They really appreciate the awareness piece that comes to them in a Feldenkrais lesson.

22:22
and then they still like the yoga class because it gives them something different. It has a kind of a different energetic feel to them, but they see the benefit in both. So it was really a pretty seamless shift into doing some Felde Christ with the students. And I think a really nice way to help them, yeah, just be introduced to what that could be like and that for some of them, you know,

22:51
even if it's a gentle class, the poses might still be too much for them. And so, or somebody might be going through an injury or something like that. And so, the Feldenkrais lessons were always going to be a little bit more accessible. But even so, I think Feldenkrais taught me how to make yoga more accessible as well. Wow, yeah. That's an interesting kind of play, right? That this other method can be helpful.

23:20
for this particular method or modality, I suppose you could call it. What do you think is the goal of yoga? How would you frame that? And what is the goal of Feldenkrais? Are they alike? Or what are the end goals for the two approaches? Yeah, that's such a large question, Jeffrey. I mean,

23:46
That what's the goal of yoga could be answered so many ways by different people. For me as a teacher, it's really just helping people feel good in their body. You know that there's a there's a strength component. There's a mobility component, right? So stability and mobility of balance between those two to create some kind of internal support that allows you to function.

24:15
and do what you want to do in your life. And I think that we could say the same thing about Feldenkrais. It creates an ease, it can help with mobility, it can also help with stability. Hopefully it does help with stability. And I just say that because sometimes people think, oh, it's just this sort of like relaxed. Sometimes I've heard it described as lazy yoga. And I think after studying with Jeff Haller,

24:44
we could say that it's quite definitely not that, right? That there is like, there is a component of how to be really potent and engaged in a way that's kind of an appropriate tone for the situation that you're in. And so I think that the goals of both for me are really similar, are incredibly similar, just to help people feel good in their body and supported.

25:13
and to support their nervous system and to move their nervous system in the way that needs to be moved, right? Not everybody needs to calm down more. Some people need to actually like find a little bit more alert energetic quality. So that's for me is what I aim to bring to my students. Right, so not only to feel good, but to be ready internally somehow.

25:42
or to change one's internal state to meet what they have to do next? Yeah, yeah, to be able to be in any situation and kind of know how to navigate your own self and know how to self soothe if you need to self soothe know how to

26:09
you know, like stick up for yourself or find that sense of internal confidence in a situation if you need to find something like that. And I think that both practices can really help with that in so many ways. So I don't know if that explains it a little bit better. Yeah, yeah. There's the feeling good, but also there was something you were telling me beforehand around feeling free.

26:37
feeling free in your body. I was curious if you would kind of share a little bit about what you think about feeling free in your body. What does that mean? Yeah, so it's a question that I started to just ask myself and it was after actually hearing that word many used many times by movement practitioners or you know written somewhere and

27:07
I think it goes much farther beyond feeling good or like feeling out of pain. I think there's sometimes there's an expectation that we could be pain free and I don't know if that's true for everybody. And so kind of I think it goes far beyond that, that it has more to do with being able to make choices and make your own decisions and have agency.

27:36
over what you do with your body. And so that's what really got me thinking about freedom and just how so many people, not because of their own self, but because of outside forces, of some kind of oppressive forces, whether that be a person or a government or anything like that, don't have that sense of being free in their body. Like they may be able to make certain choices about their body. And

28:05
in terms of movement or what they do with it, but, you know, certain populations, people in the world don't have that at all. So I kind of started to think about that in a much bigger way, beyond just a method, you know, a movement method. And also, you know, in relation to my story,

28:33
As a dancer, I grew up and had a lot of capacity with my body. I could do things. The choreographer asked me to do something. I could mostly do it. I would do it even if it was painful. Because otherwise you don't have a job, right?

28:59
And or I would do it even if I didn't want to do it because it was my job. And I remember in my Feldenkrais training, my training director was Aliza Stewart. And she told this story about a dancer who was doing Feldenkrais and, and said something like, my whole life I've been moving in a way that other people have asked me to move or.

29:29
I've been moving in a way that others have told me to move. And she could do it, right? She could do virtuosic things. And, but it wasn't until taking Feldenkrais classes that she realized the way that she actually wanted to move or the way that she did move, right? How does she move and what felt good, what felt pleasurable to her.

29:56
And when my trainer told that story, it was like such a light bulb going off in my head because even in training, it was like we would be doing really hard lessons, like Aikido rolls and headstand and stuff like that. And she was just challenging people and I could always do everything. Like I could, for the most part, perform the lesson. But did I know what I was doing? So it was like I had to...

30:27
really slow down and listen to the very first part of any movement proposal of any cue from the teacher. Because you know that very, very first moment of organization of any movement is so key. That first moment of initiation. Like where do you initiate? Do you do it from your jaw or from your, do you hold your breath or do you like clench your belly?

30:56
That tells you so much about whether you're well organized or not. And so even though I could perform the lesson, I don't know if that makes sense, but I think you know what I mean. Just like, yeah, I could show you the movement. But I was doing it at first, you know, at the beginning of my training in a way where I wasn't really like listening to that very beginning.

31:23
Or does this feel good to me? Because I was so trained to just do what I was told to do with my body. So do I want to do that? Do I want to reach my arm that far? Do I want, you know? So I had to start to question that, which was just like a totally new way of experiencing my body. Because it, you know, dance training, at least when I was young and even in college, like there were still things that were quite oppressive. And...

31:53
that was kind of instilled in me. And so that idea of freedom for me really came, started to come during Feldenkrais training. And this is something that I didn't experience very much in yoga training. My yoga training still felt like pretty disciplined in a way of like, you know, you're going to move your body in this particular way. And so

32:22
it wasn't until Feldenkrais that I was able to even enter that way of exploring with my body. And, you know, up until then, like the 10 years before my Feldenkrais training, I was in, most of the dancing that I was doing was improvisational forms, like really like freed up forms. So it's not like I hadn't been exposed to like other ways of moving and freeing oneself.

32:51
from a really specific technique, but because it was still kind of in the umbrella of dance, I still had the techniques behind me when I was improvising still. And so something about Feldenkraisen, maybe it was that I was with a group of people that were incredibly diverse, diverse in their movement capacities and also age range and...

33:19
what their professions were before they started to study Feldenkrais. It was really diverse. It's not like I was in a room full of dancers. So I was able to kind of put that dance hat, like put it aside and, um, enter into a new place for myself. And that's when I think the, that word freedom or that idea of freedom started for me. Right. There's this image that was coming up for me as I was hearing your story.

33:49
of like you could say there's a simple simple way of thinking of bodily freedom am i in jail or not right like that's the obvious oppression am i constrained by walls but what you're really pointing to is a bodily freedom that's like a behavioral freedom that is that is nuanced throughout your whole body and it's and it's not just what you've learned from

34:19
framing, whatever dance form, even if it's not impressive, it's got some sort of external authority to it, right? And that persists internally over time in your behavior across time until you can really question it. And we might not realize how much we're acting out other people's authority. Yeah. Absolutely.

34:47
my internal authority matched my external authorities, even if I didn't want it to, right? And so it was kind of a retraining of those habits, which we know happens in Feldenkrais. And...

35:06
It was a slow process to realize that, that my internal authority was even being oppressive to myself and that it didn't need to be, basically. And it still is a process to this day that I'm sure many people can relate to. Thank you so much for joining me for this conversation. I'm curious how people can follow you or learn more about you.

35:34
Yeah, so like I mentioned, I do have a podcast that is still, I'm still posting things many years later. So that's one way that's some free content. I don't interview folks on that, but I teach yoga classes and Feldenkrais classes and kind of a blend of the two as well. So that's a nice resource for folks. And then my website is body-matter.com and

36:04
That's where you can find things like my online courses. I have a library of classes, if that's something that people are interested in. And then I do my one-on-one sessions in Minneapolis. So you can find all that info on my website. Thanks, Jeffrey. Many thanks to Sarah for such a wonderful conversation. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Please make sure to go down to the show notes to find the links to Sarah's website, her podcast, her Instagram, and her newsletter.

36:35
Does her story resonate with you? Does it reveal something new for you? Because having conversations is so helpful for deepening our learning, I invite you to talk with a friend or family member about the ideas in this episode. On a final note here, I'm curious if you would do me a favor. I'm working on building an online course in the next couple months, and I really wanted to be informed by people's needs. What are the challenges they have?

37:04
Where do they feel stuck? Would you have a conversation with me so I can hear your story? It would just take 20 minutes or so. Send an email to jeffrey at expandyourability.com and we can set something up. I look forward to hearing from you. Here's the question I'd like to leave with you today. Do your past external authorities, your teachers, your coaches, your directors, whoever,

37:33
still inform how you move today. Thank you for your attention.