Discover Yourself from the Ground Up

Originally taught live over six months, Discover Yourself from the Ground Up is now available as a set of recordings you can work with when and where you choose. You'll begin with your feet and continue up through pelvis, spine, and shoulders to your head. Or choose your own path through the lessons.

Feldenkrais® offers a unique, profound way to examine and change your habitual and often limiting patterns of moving. You learn most movement practices from the outside in, by imitation. In these lessons, you’re invited to learn from the inside out. Take your discoveries into another movement practice or your everyday life.

All you need

• A blanket or mat to lie on, with enough space around yourself to make a snow angel or Vitruvian Man.
• Occasionally, a chair or stool to sit or lean on.
• Clothes loose enough to move in. 

Rules of the road

These lessons help you discover what you've overlooked, hidden capacities, muscles, and bones. To feel/find what you've overlooked, you'll need to:

• Slow down.
  Compare how much you learn about a place when you're driving 70 miles per hour down the freeway vs. walking through a forest. How much more do you hear/smell/feel?
• Do less.
  When you make an effort, you won't experience anything new: you'll simply do what you already know. And you're here because you want to learn something new.
• Pause often.
  Neurologoists know that learning requires varying between two phases: active learning and passive learning. Pauses allow you to assimilate what you've learned.
• No pain is gain.
  If you're feeling pain, do less. Do a quarter of what you think you can, at a quarter of the speed. Or imagine the gesture: yes, you learn when you imagine. And pain does not help you learn: you already know enough about pain.
• Have fun.
  If you're not enjoying yourself, stop. Take a break. Try a different lesson. Re-visit the lesson another day.

These lessons aren't exercise. They aren't meant to build strength. They meant to help you learn about yourself, and then take what you learn into the rest of your life. Which could mean into your strength-building training, or your gardening or learning the ukulele.

How to approach this group of lessons

So many ways to play! Here are a few suggestions:

• Do a lesson each week. Spend the week looking for elements from the lesson in your daily life. Or perhaps re-visiting the beginning of the lesson.
• Do a lesson every day.
• Dive deep: create your own intensive and do several lessons in one day.
• Record video of yourself walking before you start a group of lessons and again at the end.

Questions? Please shoot me an email!