The Evolution of Motion
The Evolution of Motion workshop xplores the basis of effortless upright posture. It is a workshop that focusses on developing quality of movement.
The Feldenkrais Method is a system that gives you more awareness and control of your body.
More awareness and control might sound like a funny statement. You may say, “I am aware of my body and I can control it.” Well that’s true .. but it’s a matter of degree. Many people learn to control their body as if it were a car with only two gears – fast as you can go or stop.
If you don’t pay attention to the way you move, you may become flexible or stronger but if you stop your practice the benefits fade away. If every time you move, you seek to improve it’s quality it makes a change to your image of both yourself and the way you move. The benefits of this continue even if you stop practicing.
The truth is that your body is not a budget vehicle ready to start breaking down the moment it’s out of warranty. It’s more like a race-ready Aston Martin that comes with it's own internal maintenance crew .. and it contains your brain which is the most complicated and perhaps least understood structure in the known universe!
Most of us don’t even get near our potential as human beings. We learn enough about our body to get by, but only just. A feature of the Feldenkrais Method is that awareness of movement is more important than the movement itself. It’s not done to move. It’s done to explore the way you move. Each lesson is an exploration of functions that are often taken for granted. The way we roll, the way we reach, the way we stand.
If you observe people in the street you will notice that many of them stand or move with odd alignments. This can create a huge amount of unnecessary wear and tear. A great deal of the back and joint pain people experience is preventable. It’s a direct consequence of the excessive wear and tear arising from inefficient posture and movement.
The thing is it's not just the personal dramas of your body. Look at us as a culture! We are a species in desperate need of the next great leap forward. How much time do we have?
Gaining more awareness and control of ourselves has an evolutionary imperative.
Paying attention to our experience of life through the body is a fundamentally important daily activity as your body is a question rather than a foregone conclusion. Feldenkrais once remarked that most people behave as if their future has been irrevocably forfeited by their past. Of course, the opposite is true. At any moment we are capable of acting in new ways. Life, if we are awake, is a process of life long learning. Asking questions about the way you move and how that relates to the way you experience life through your body, is something that can make a huge difference to how you live.
The developmental sequence of our early years made a huge change to how we interacted with our world. Consider life for a baby who can only lie on the spot compared to one who can crawl or one who can walk.
We reach the end of that process by about 5, go through our education system and then for many, it’s all downhill from there. We’re too busy! But what are we missing out on?
What can we discover? Learning to move in new ways changes our brain and continues that developmental process. Refining our capacity to move in a way that suits our structural predisposition enables us to be more in touch with who we are. It enables us to discover the things that come easily - the flowers of our mind that once realised give us the sense of a life well lived.
Email me if you are interested in this workshop for your area or if you have any questions.