Expand Your Ability: Embodiment, Somatics, and Feldenkrais

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If you've been listening to the show for a while, you will have noticed that at the end of each episode, I encourage you to share the ideas you hear in the show with a friend. And I say that doing so helps us deepen our learning. In this episode, I'll give more of an explanation of why. Welcome to the Expand Your Ability Podcast. I'm your host, Jeffrey Schwinghammer. And the goal of the show is to support you with tools and ideas around learning and embodiment.

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so you can open up your capacity for choice. In the early 1980s, Moshe Feldenkrais, inventor of the Feldenkrais method, gave a professional training about his method of self-development in Amherst, Massachusetts. He guided around 200 students through his awareness through movement classes. The training attracted a lot of professionals from the sciences,

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psychotherapy, and other fields. And Felton Kreis' work was new and challenging to the students. It asked them to think in a different way.

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Of course, the students drew upon what had worked for them in the past, what had worked for them in their other studies. They got out their notebooks and tried to copy down the movement instructions because that's where they thought the real work was. They were fixated on transcribing the lessons. Get all the details because you don't want to miss a thing. And Fulton Christ didn't want people to spend their time.

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writing down anything during the lessons. Doing so would take them out of their personal, individual experience. The note taking would distract them. You see, they were trying to achieve the goal of being a successful student or a prepared practitioner. If I take these notes, I will be ready. This is what I need to be ready. I need to have the transcript.

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I need to have his words exactly.

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And for Feldenkrais, his method was an attempt to circumvent our habits, including our habitual way of pursuing goals. Why? Because when we have a goal, we narrow our experience. We frame the world as, am I getting closer to the goal or further away? Am I succeeding? Did I do a good job? Am I a good student?

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As well-intentioned as pursuing a goal is, it also blinds us, and can frustrate us, too, when we're not reaching our goals. Now the Felonkrais method is about entering into a non-goal-directed frame for the sake of learning. When we are in a goal-directed frame of mind, we are engaging our habits that we have around pursuing goals, too.

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And in doing so, we skip over new possibilities. Pursuing goals is the opposite of play and open-ended exploration, both of which we need for rich learning. So Feldenkrais' goal was to undermine your habits, to bring what is so compulsive and invisible to your personality into awareness so you can wake up.

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and make new decisions. Now to be clear, I'm not saying do not have goals. Yes, we can have goals. We should have goals in life. But by removing our goal-directed nature in the present moment, we open ourselves up to learning something new. A common refrain in my training program was that everyone experiences a different training. There is as many training programs as the number of people in the room.

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Yes, we are all moving through the same lesson, but the lessons grant all of us unique learning opportunities based on our own life history. So if that's true, what do we do instead? If taking notes about the specific instructions moment by moment is not helpful, what do we do instead?

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to set aside the notebooks during the lesson. Afterwards, go outside and talk with other students. Find out what was meaningful for them, what did they experience, and you share too. Our individual history and cultural background will make different aspects of the lesson more salient to us. We will make different associations than other people because of the life we've lived.

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With my background as a filmmaker and a storyteller, I have a different perspective on lessons than other people who come from engineering, let's say, or psychotherapy. And so why not tap into that rich experience that other people have? Learn from them. What did you notice? What was meaningful? What, what was interesting? What was surprising about that lesson for you?

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Another thing he had suggested was writing down your experience of the lesson as if you're writing a letter to a loved one. Now when you write a letter to a loved one, you wouldn't share the boring details. You would share what was rich and meaningful for you. You would share in such a way that you would make it relevant to them. You would tie your history, your knowledge of them and their interests and match it.

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with your learning, what you just experienced.

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Translating our experience into words and to be heard is powerful. It reinforces our experience and makes it more real. The mental work of translating our internal experience so that we can be understood by others helps us encode our experience into memory. It's another layer of learning. And it's actually learning through a creative act.

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put that all together into words. This is why I make sure to build in some time at the end of my awareness through movement classes for students to share about their experience. So when you attend your awareness through movement classes, please share about your experience. Have your voice heard. I love it when the students in my in-person class describe their experience during the lesson. It's a lot of fun.

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Now, admittedly, I had been really, really shy during my training. The big group was too intimidating for me at the time, but in the small groups I shined, and this could be true for you too. Find someone you feel safe with, and ask them about what they experienced. Share about yours too, and I'm sure your teacher would love to hear from you too. Of course, this isn't limited to-

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to awareness through movement classes. Also share about what you're learning, like through this podcast or other courses you're taking or what you're creating in your life. Don't keep your knowledge to yourself. Don't be a passive learner. Share your learning so you can learn more. Before I let you go, I'd like to share a few things with you. Please sign up for my weekly newsletter.

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to learn about how you can join my online awareness through movement classes and other upcoming courses. I'm also offering one-on-one private sessions online. You can sign up for a 30 minute free discovery call to find out if we're a good fit. All the information you need is in the show notes. Just check that out in your podcast app. My final question to you today is, what's one thing you've learned recently?

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And who can you share that with? Send them an email or text or give them a call. Thank you for your attention.