podcast – kinesophics

Well, here it is–the last lesson I’ll be teaching for a while. Enjoy the archives! And don’t stop rolling!

If you want to feel really asymmetrical (and who doesn’t?), this is the lesson for you! Feeling asymmetrical, by the way, is nature’s way for you to learn from yourself.  So it’s useful, apart from being fun.

How does your ability to shift weight on your hips and from your feet affect how you can use your arms? Explore what every good fencer knows using this lesson!

We’re finishing up this series—this is the fourth last class perhaps for the next year—with some classic lessons. Whatever a “classic” lesson means! It’s surprising how much of a voyage of discovery a familiar lesson can be.  Side-sitting, your explore how combining different coordinations of your eyes, shoulders, head—and everything that supports all that, down to … Continue reading "Another “classic rotation sitting” lesson"

Lift your head, look around, and see what your legs do. And find out what they don’t need to do. This is more or less Moshe’s SF Evening Classes, lesson 2, for those keeping track at home.

As we start the last 6-week series before my sabbatical, I am in the mood for coming back to the basics–with the fresh eyes I’ve developed and you’ve all developed from doing more Feldenkrais. And from living. The title of this lesson talks about tilting the pelvis. There’s never one answer to the question “what … Continue reading "Tilting pelvis sitting: another recording"

You might think you’re safe from falling over when you’re already lying on the ground. But let’s see if we can’t find a little wiggle room for a few safe tumbles in that concept. For all Haligonians and honorary Haligonians everywhere who are slipping and sliding in the ice and snow!

Aka watching the butterflies flutter by. Enjoy this bonus lesson! It’s AY 534, a continuation of AY 533. The idea that continues through the two lessons is finding the connection between turning your head (and your neck just so) so that everything follows…to your pelvis, to your knees, your feet.

The theme for this week and next week’s bonus lesson is a very lovely connection: how just the right turn of the head and direction of the spine at the base of the neck engages your whole spine and…bends your knees. (Just when I thought I’d finally stopped thinking about the knees.) This is AY … Continue reading "On stomach, face to knee"

This is a change of pace from recent lessons. A little learning about spirals, changing planes, getting from the floor to standing in a beautifully efficient way.

Of course, frogs aren’t bipedal; they don’t stand on extended legs really at all. So this lesson doesn’t have the kind of neurological and functional significance for a frog that it has for us.

All these years, I tell you to go slower, slower, slower–and now fast? Fast, quick, light movements? Astonishing. And just wait to see how your breathing and use of your spine changes. This is AY 447, for those keeping track. And a week is a long time in Canada, lately anyway. The bobblehead joke probably … Continue reading "Opposition on the side"

If this face-down lesson doesn’t add an inch or so to your height (subjectively, if not objectively), I’d be surprised. For those keeping track at home, this is a slow build-up, more or less half of AY473, with some loose interpretation.

Some pretty simple ideas and experimentation. See if it doesn’t make you feel a whole lot more refined and coordinated in your action.

Hmmm…thought I’d long ago recorded and posted this one. No! Somewhere between the low back and the knees, the hip joints play a major role in action. Here’s a powerful flashlight you can use to clarify this area in your self-image.

Well, this is a weird idea of what to do with your head. You’ll glide around the room with a long neck and everything below will feel very well-oiled, as long as you don’t try too hard. For those following sources at home, this is mostly AY 6, though you’ll see some ideas that aren’t … Continue reading "Turning the head around its circumference and in the center"

We’re thinking about Theo Jansen’s wonderful Strandbeests, and how ‘stupid’ the knees are. They don’t need any sophistical neurological control. They just have to unfold at the right moment and be there for the weight of the body to pass over them. How do you let your leg unfold? This version is AY 117, by … Continue reading "Frog’s Legs"

The first lesson of our new Sept – Oct 2013 series: a gentle twisting movement on your side. Some of my comments suggest that you might do the second side (as you go from side to side) in your imagination. This is always a good option when you can’t follow the instructions without pain. It’s … Continue reading "Somewhere in your back…"

You could say there’s a hierarchy of degrees of conscious control in ourselves–our fingers and mouths the most consciously controlled; our legs less so, carrying us along without much thought wherever we want to go. And our breathing, even more so, takes care of itself while we’re doing other things. We’ll reverse that a bit … Continue reading "Lying on the feet turned in, while breathing rhythmically"

Intimately connected to the rotation at the knee of the two bones of the lower leg, we find a new dimension of freedom in the hip joint and an unusual folding of the ankle. This the second of a four-lesson series recovering what are for many people long-forgotten knee functions.

Here we’re sensing how we use our knees–how we support ourselves from the floor–with a few new pelvic clock variations.

Lying face down, can your head wave from side to side like a reed in the wind? Where is your stable point connecting to the floor? For those keeping track at home, this started out as AY 549, which for some reason has the title “lifting the pubic bone,” and then wandered considerably based on … Continue reading "Face down, lift head with free spine"

It’s all very simple, but in another orientation and configuration, it may feel like a challenge! Take as many rests for your wrists as you need.

Remember all that toe-bending a couple of weeks ago? Coming back to the same basic position, we start to see what we can accomplish with the foot we aren’t holding.

Things got a little crazy on Charles Street on Wednesday. Make a circle with your arms, hands interlaced, and now try to lace your legs through this. We didn’t quite get to the point of skipping rope with our own bodies as the skipping-rope. Maybe we’ll do that next week.

You have a lovely set of twistable floating ribs…I know you do…. Let’s see if we can smoke them out, and change the way you organize the use of your legs at the same time.

This will take your shoulders to new places. Your neck just might notice the change. This is AY 374 for those keeping track at home!

There are a lot of hidden gems in this very simple idea of lying on your back with standing legs and lifting your pelvis…give it a try and see if your back doesn’t get much longer and easier, your arms lighter and more free, your breathing deeper. Go easy to find those gems! Based on … Continue reading "Head and Pelvis"

Probably the most neglected function in modern life is extension–lifting the head to look up, reaching up to touch something overhead. We live in an environment carefully designed to obviate the need ever to do this. And every day we forget more and more what geniuses we were to be able to use our spines … Continue reading "Extensors with a twist"

Harness the power of the pelvis to support your upper limbs — with some twists, bends, and an intriguing mystery with the toes. I’ll try to figure out what all those crunchy noise are and stop them. I think it’s a hair-microphone thing. (This is AY 440.)

A subtle coordination of the head and spine to support the bending of the leg--it just may put a spring in your step in the middle of winter (for those of us in the Northern hemisphere, that is!). You may want to have a few flat, firm cushions or flat, folded towels for under your head as you lie on the side. Depending on the organization of your spine, shoulders, and neck, you may be able to do it without. If your neck is strained, that's an extra barrier to feeling the dynamic connection with your pelvis and legs.

The "dead bird" is a classic lesson. The image refers to the way you hang the arm in front of the face, at eye level or a little lower--with the wrist limp, like a dead bird's wing. I was listening to Moshe teaching it at Amherst. He says, maybe it's an intelligent bird's wing. Not a bird mindlessly using energy or effort to hold the wrist stiff...

We spend a great deal of time concerned with the contents of our head--but its physicality? Its shape, size? What we can sense with sensory nerves and what we can "map" in our self-image? The space the brain rests inside? And how can it possibly transform action and feel so much just to pay attention to these things?

We can go our whole lives without realizing there's some subtle movement of the ankle or use of the sole of our feet that has become a blind spot to us, unavailable. Then we buy orthotics or fuss about the right shoe to push our feet around in certain ways. Try improving your ability with your feet! Sneak preview: we've working on the ankle-neck relationship this week and next.

It doesn't get more "core" than how you organize yourself to use all the nuances and shades of potential action that your pelvis can generate and support. This classic pelvic clock lesson is an essential exploration you can return to again and again.

Drawn from the Awareness Through Movement book, this lesson explores and differentiates the "mechanisms" you use to breathe. Ribs and sternum lifting and subsiding, diaphragm tightening to lower and then returning to its high resting dome. And then shall we turn everything upside down?

Feldenkrais had a general idea about "efficient action"--that you would use all the musculature proportionately to its mass/size. More work in the large, central (proximal) muscles, light refinement from the distal muscles. This lesson explores that fundamental idea.

After a slow season, lessons are beginning again. Here's something quiet, introspective--just a little lifting of a shoulder here, a hip there, a head from time to time. And the basic "directions" that structure the image of the action, while we're at it.

A fall re-acquaintance with the floor. The smoother your roll, the greater the lengthening of your left side--the more cleverly you're organizing yourself for a "reversible" movement.

I'd better get this posted while it's still summer, what with all the summer commentary about how to be your own teacher. Legs crossed, arms in a triangle--how far can you go and still keep your balance? Or maybe that question stops making sense, and you can go wherever you want to go.

Something about phase changes between solids and liquids...that and some good old-fashioned Newtonian laws of motion. The third.

Remember spinning and spinning and spinning in circles when you were a kid? Back when getting dizzy was a fun, mind- and world-altering experience and not an unpleasant crisis?

A little long this one....but early reports describe the lesson as "invigorating" or "a wake-up"! Face down, and figuring out what your feet are doing back there behind you where you can't see them (and how your back is helping).

In this lesson, you'll explore the elements of your own personal bridge (the series of "arches" rising from the floor and the parts of you that rest on the floor, providing support for the arches), and start to play with your arches....raise the bridge, lower it, raise some part and lower others....developing a more supple spine and clearer perception of transmission of forces in gravity, with special bonus organization of the hips and shoulders!

Kicking off a new series aimed at twisting things around, growing taller, and getting that spine of yours more supple. With a special shout-out to cousins who find it interesting to grow taller. This is a variation on a familiar kind of lesson, but it is a new variation, I promise.

This fascinating lesson (but which lesson isn't fascinating?) is (literally?) an eye-opener. Picking up some ideas from [[Violin arms]] but moving closer in to the core, it will show you some connections and some distinctions you probably have never felt before in your shoulders.

Do the last lesson [[From crawling to sitting]] first! This is just an experimental add-on, a little trial of some ideas, an exploration to see what happens, tacked on at the end of the lesson for those who would stay.

A little bit of this with the hands, a little bit of that with the feet... yes, shoulders and hips. But can we put it all together into something functional? For a baby at least? Find spiral transitions and stealth twistings of the long axes of the arms and legs?

By the end of this one, you won't know left from right or up from down. But your shoulders and neck will feel different. Maybe your hips and self too.

You have habits of how you interlace your hands....but your toes? How can you have a habit of how you interlace your toes? Have you ever done this before? Since you were 2 years old?