Expand Your Ability: Embodiment, Somatics, and Feldenkrais

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Hey there, this episode is for you if you feel any of the following. Do you feel lost, directionless, overwhelmed by choice, or feel powerless to make some lasting change in your life? Maybe you feel inadequate at pursuing what you really, really want? Okay, yeah, those sound like really, really big things to talk about, but I'd like to give it a try.

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I think there's something here that could be helpful. In this episode I will talk about creating a life plan, a document that represents the vision of your life going forward, that can continue to guide you in your future decisions. I will talk about why I needed it, the process I followed, and my experience enacting this process. Welcome to the Expand Your Ability Podcast. I'm your host, Jeffrey Schwinghammer.

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And this show looks at how the Feldenkrais method can help us see our blind spots to develop new awareness of our habits so that we can make new choices. Okay, so before we talk about the life plan, how does this relate to the Feldenkrais method? The Feldenkrais method uses movement to help a person learn about themselves. The movement classes are called Awareness through Movement, and the goal is awareness.

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And movement is the medium. Just like an artist might use medium like clay, or charcoal, or paint to convey a story, the Felton Christ Method uses movement to help people understand their own story. Especially, where are their blind spots? What do they do that is the same thing they do every time, time and time again, without them really knowing that they're doing it?

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The lessons provide concrete experiences to see how we think and act. It's not just the movement that we are observing, but how we are in the process. Why awareness? Because awareness is the gateway to making new choices. Cultivating awareness through this process of curiosity, observation, and reflection can be generalized into other aspects of your life.

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How you are in a Feldenkrais lesson is reflective of you in your life. The goal of the method is to understand ourselves, to shed off compulsive habits and cultivate new choices. And what are those new choices good for? Well, creating the life we would like. You could say that making a life plan is exploring choice.

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on one of the largest scales possible for a human being. Okay, before I continue, how do you feel about this topic? Do you have a life plan already? Did your ear perk up? Oh, this is curious. Or do you somehow object to this idea of planning? One of my teachers, Candy Canino, is a big-time advocate for planning.

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she may just be the ultimate planner. her contingency plans have contingency plans. i wouldn't be surprised if she had a plan for every letter of the alphabet. so she often told us students the following process. make a plan, execute the plan, review the plan, make a new plan. this cycle is straightforward, but if you live with insecurity

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you know that nothing is straightforward and you can make something simple really complicated. So with my past insecurity, I wrestled a lot even with this simple cycle. What kind of challenges did I have? Well, my personal self-protective habit patterns led me to losing the thread, adding way more complexity, pursuing ideas too grandiose or divorced from reality, scattered learning,

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and overwhelm. Let's dive in a little bit deeper on what I mean here. So here's a striking problem that I had. I would go on a trip for a weekend, I'd leave for a holiday, or I'd just get busy and then with some side job and then when Monday would come back around I would have this sense of

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I just kind of felt like what is the thread of my life? I don't know. It's some sort of internal reset and then confusion. Another problem I had was creating a plan but not complicating it, because I would overcomplicate everything that I did. This kind of came out of what I call my hyper creativity. I would generate a plan when I felt enthusiastic.

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Oh this, this, this, this, this, this, and wow I could do all these things! Oh I could learn this, I could do that. I could make a perfect study plan. Or at least it felt so in the moment. But what would invariably happen is that I would ride a wave of subsequent insecurity in relation to that plan. After coming down from that enthusiasm I had making the plan, I would not-

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be so enthusiastic, or I would get interested in something else, I would kind of just forget the plan. I would feel the plan was a tyrant to me, like, yeah I wrote it but it doesn't reflect what I need now. The plan doesn't allow for changes or what I just learned. It wasn't a living plan. And whether or not I followed the plan, I still learned a lot, right? I love learning. I love-

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exploring all this stuff. But what would happen would be that I would zigzag from sort of sparkly thing to other sparkly thing. Like yeah I was kind of going in this general direction that was good but it was these short-sighted interests that took me here, took me here, took me here, this sort of zigzag as opposed to getting larger traction towards a bigger goal.

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And I could rationalize that I am a very curious person and I'm very engaged, but without creating a sense of consistent traction forward for myself, that created further stress and confusion and led to me having a sense of inadequacy. I didn't feel I was reliable.

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I stumbled for a long time trying to sort this out for myself. Last fall I came across a book called Living Forward by Michael Hyatt and Daniel Harkavy. This book offered me an approach that was really helpful, and I'm going to describe my experience here. To be clear though, I have no affiliation with them besides having read their book, and I'm happy to share what I've learned from the book too.

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Now, it's been a while since I've read it, and I might get some details wrong, so please forgive me. The book lays out an approach to creating a document that is your life plan. The document contains two main aspects, the eulogy and your accounts. The eulogy is just that. What would you want people to say about your life at your funeral?

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This is sort of the aspirational part of what is the image of your life well lived. The second part are the accounts. Well, the accounts in this book are basically categories. What are the five to nine important categories that you will give your attention? And for each of these accounts, you'll describe your mission statement. What is the goal of the account? You write some.

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short vision of success, describe where you are starting and what are some near term goals to work towards? What will you do daily to move forward? And you can include some motivational quotes. So okay, what kind of accounts are we talking about? It could be anything really. This is where you choose what's important. What is actually like valuable to you. So it could be family. It could be a specific person.

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It could be your career, it could be a project you're working on. You just choose what are those accounts, and probably preferably less than like nine or something. Not too many. When it comes to writing the life plan, the book advises you that you do this in one sitting, and not to split this writing over multiple sessions. I agree with this. I wrote my life plan.

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in one setting sitting at the library and yeah there was some sense of pressure to do it within four hours or five hours or whatever but

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it really fends off perfectionism or getting it right or any of that. To have a set time to start and finish, like that's good enough.

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So what I ended up with was a document that was maybe 10 or 11 pages long, and not full essay length pages either of course. I mean the eulogy was a full page, but the rest of the pages were more like a series of statements or bullets. Some of the categories I chose for myself were around health, growing and learning, friendships, career, connection to nature.

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As you're listening to this, you might think, Oh, really? So I'm going to write all my life plan in like, in an afternoon? And... How am I going to do that? And how am I going to get that right? Okay, it's important to consider that this life plan is a living document. Something you can tweak every quarter, and then do a full rewrite once a year. You don't have to be perfect with the plan.

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because you have the opportunity to modify it as you learn more from your actions. Ah, there's Candi's insight. Make a plan. Execute the plan. Reflect on the plan. Make a new plan.

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The most important thing of this whole process in my opinion is their advice to read the life plan daily for 90 days. And by read it I mean read it out loud. This piece is huge and necessary. And so much occurs in reading the plan daily. For me it was like a roller coaster. Because it was so easy for me to feel skeptical of the plan.

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to feel that what I wrote was impossible, so why bother? Each read brought me face to face with the challenging feelings that bubbled up as I saw the delta, the difference between where I was and where I wanted to be. I believe that this difficulty was there in the past as well. Because in the past it was so difficult that what I did was I just didn't think about it.

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I think this is why I would sort of forget my plans. It was easier to not think about it than to experience the difficulty of being aware of that gap of where I am and where I want to be. And I tell you, on some of the days it was really, really difficult. It burned. But eventually that burn subsided. I could watch.

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as I was doing this daily read how my own eagerness would overextend me. I would get so many ideas and I would pencil them in. Oh, this is good. I got to remember this. And the text would get so thick with all these penciled in modifications. And at times this made reading it a real drag. I could feel how my own eagerness was...

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creating so much work for me to just read it daily. And this was helping me understand the discomfort of the way that I overextend myself, and that leads to overwhelming myself. Ooh, and here's the bright side. A magical part of consistently returning to read the life plan is that my natural inventiveness, my creativity, began to work with me though.

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Rather than pursuing short-term shiny objects here and there and scattering my creativity, I became more and more directed. My innate creativity was becoming more and more directed to solving the problems of the life plan. And that was really cool to watch. Like, wow.

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Now, I had some help with this process. I'm a part of a support community where I posted my check-ins in our Accountability channel. After reading the plan each morning, I'd make a simple post in that channel saying today's day number and maybe a comment about my experience. I collected some entries from those 90 days, so let's take a look at a sample of them. Day 3

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Felt a bit dispirited as I read it today, but I read it anyway. Day 8. Had my hand on my heart and imagined a hand on my back. This made it easier to feel my long-term vision. Day 9. Today's theme was being with my skeptical heart and inviting it to stay open. It's interesting watching my mind think of ways to revise the document, to simplify it, to refine it.

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I don't feel any rush to go do some edits on the computer and reprint it. It feels more like I'm testing out what is true. Day 17. The theme for today's reading was soothing myself through some fear, as I imagined what I desire. It's like, of course I haven't pursued my dreams yet, when my heart can readily constrict at the thought of them. Day 23.

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I noticed around halfway through reading, I must have got triggered or something. I got spacey and disconnected by the end of the read. Day 39. Felt the most calm today in my body yet. My presence felt cool and I even woke up early too. Day 57. Quicker read. Thinking about how I can believe in the plan myself more consistently. Day 64.

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Appreciating that for several of my life plan accounts, I have a weekly activity to keep growing there, and most of the rest I have plans to act on over the next couple weeks. Day 77. Thinking about simplifying my document again. Day 78. There's a lot I'm aiming at, so to keep things simple, I just acknowledge if I'm doing at least one thing toward each of my big goals this week.

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Day 84. Quicker read today, low emotional tone. Been practicing imagining with greater ease last night. Found some more clarity.

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Day 85. I'm noticing that I'm worrying less about acting on the life plan since substantial ailments are being held in my weekly plan system. Day 89. Feeling a bit fatigued. Feeling both that I am moving toward my goals and feeling that they are as far away as they ever were before, but I'm sensing more clearly that this perception is a habit regardless of my progress.

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in that last note was a big insight, a big awareness that I can have a perceptual habit. I can have this habit of considering that I'm not good enough, that this inadequacy that I feel is not accurate to my progress, because on some days I could feel my progress is good, I could acknowledge it, I could actually see it, and then on some days my goals feel so far away.

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Having this life plan help clarify how I am in relation to my own plans. What I can trust in my experience and what sort of sensation, what sort of perception I can question. Okay, to conclude, in this episode I covered the first 90 days of my life plan experiment. Doing this daily reading for 90 days.

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revealed to me with clarity the habits I had around envisioning the future, while providing an anchor to support me as I detangle those habits. And through the whole process I found a lot of evidence for myself that I am reliable. I could count on myself to execute my plan. I really hope that you consider this process for yourself.

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I continued reading it daily for another 90 days before shifting to weekly readings. I also modified the formatting to better suit my needs, which I could perhaps talk about some other time if you're interested. If you want to check out this particular book and read it, I will have it linked in the show notes. I highly recommend that if you do this, that you have some sort of simple accountability system.

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send a text to a friend daily like I did. Could be a perfect way to do it. So you could say, day number one, check mark. That's it. They don't have to police you or make sure you do it or anything. It's really, really good to know that someone is there witnessing you in your process. Yeah, you could also add in a line or two about your experience each day.

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I would like to give a thanks to the members of the Attachment Circle, my support community who helped me during this process. Special thanks also to Rebecca and Nick who were open to me enthusiastically talking to them about the life plan. It's exciting for me to see them do the life plan too. I invite you to talk with a friend about the ideas in this episode. Conversations help us nurture what we are learning.

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Do you have a life plan? Do they have a life plan? Do either of you object to this idea and for what reasons? Hammer it out. Sort it out together.

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I have one final question for you today. In the life plan format I described before, it includes a eulogy. So what are three sentences you would like people to say about you at your funeral? Thank you for your attention.