Where are you?

Are you at the beginning of your year- looking forward to the new days and new possibility?

Or are you heading toward the end of your year - looking forward to celebrations with friends and family?

Whichever group you fall into, we all can use this time as one for reflection, the beginning of a new year, and ending to the old year.

Moshe Feldenkrais said, “If you don't know what you do, you can't do what you want.”  This thought runs throughout in the Feldenkrais Method®.  We race through our busy lives, but do we really know where we are? Do we know how our current actions can cause pain, decreased balance, decreased endurance, or stiffness? 

Every lesson we do addresses this. Every Awareness Through Movement® lesson starts with what’s called a “scan” or a “check in.”  We do it at the beginning and end of each lesson so that we can know where we started and how we changed.  A scan gives us a baseline, it is  a mirror or an x-ray. The scan helps us feel our restrictions and how we limit ourselves by our patterns of holding. There cannot be a path to improvement if you don’t know what you are already doing, what your pattern of movement is.

                                                                  

If you were able to scan and assess yourself easily, you’d see yourself not only in relation to yourself, but in you would get to know yourself relative to your environment.  That’s one of the secrets of improvement: check in throughout your session from beginning to end.  This is how we know what we do…so we can do what we want.

This scan, can be done anytime.  Try it right now and feel the change in your sense of yourself………

Take a moment to sense yourself in sitting right now. 

Move your chair back from your computer.   

How do your feet touch the floor?  

Are your feet more toward your heels, your toes, the outside of your foot, the inside of your foot? How much of your foot is on the ground? 

How comfortable, or uncomfortable are you?  Where is the pressure on each buttock?  

Do you sit toward your pubic bone or backward toward your tail bone?  

Are you breathing? Where is your breath?  

Do you breathe in and out in your belly or in your chest? 

Does the surface on which you sit change with your breath? 

Let go of any judgement you have about how you are sitting right now. There is no right or wrong. 

It is simply a question of what you are doing.

How do you hold your head?  Is your right ear closer to your right shoulder than your left ear is to your left shoulder? 

Feel your breath come into your nose. Follow it throughout your chest. Where does it go?  

Are your teeth touching.

Are your lips touching? 

Allow your eyes to be soft. 

Sense how your head sits on your chest and follow your spine down from the base of your skull to your pelvis and feel your sitting bones on your seat now.  

How do you feel now?

  

You will sense a change by just this small bit of noticing.  There is no need to adjust anything.  Just your awareness will affect how you move, feel, and think. Your stress and anxiety will decrease if you can nourish yourself with this kind of sensing throughout the day  your ability to do what you want and to live the life you want will increase! How would that feel for you?  

Don't forget to ask yourself the question. "Where are you."

Go, take on your day!