by Lavinia Plonka | Sep 5, 2022 | Kinesa Newsletter, The Feldenkrais Method® |
Last night we went to a friend’s art opening. The artist has spent many tortured years working through personal challenges in order to build his international reputation. His craft was never in question: he can paint and sculpt anything in any medium. But life kept...
by Lavinia Plonka | May 1, 2022 | The Creative Body, The Feldenkrais Method® |
Years ago, I had a dream where our universe had collided with some other universe or reality, causing this crazy implosion where nothing made sense. Sofas came flying through the air, my house kept changing its shape so that I could never find my way to the elevator,...
by Lavinia Plonka | Jun 2, 2021 | The Creative Body, The Feldenkrais Method®
Misery or Samadhi? When I was a child, I had to practice my accordion for an hour every day. While I loved the sound of the instrument, I found the endless repetition tedious. I wanted to wail with rock ‘n roll songs, or improvise crazy gypsy sounding melodies...
by Lavinia Plonka | Mar 10, 2020 | Humor/CosmiComedy, The Creative Body, The Feldenkrais Method®
I bought what I thought would be a cool, new circular hairbrush that I could use with a blowdryer to volumize my hair (just a few decades late to the party.) After a few curls, my hairbrush got stuck. I tugged. I tried to reverse my way out of the tangle, which merely...
by Lavinia Plonka | Jan 29, 2020 | The Creative Body, The Feldenkrais Method®
A brilliant Feldenkrais mentor once told me that we must learn to “follow the yes,” to sense where there is resistance and look for what is willing to yield. In his less than successful comedy, The Yes Man, Jim Carrey portrays a man who makes a covenant to...
by Lavinia Plonka | Dec 26, 2019 | Movement as Medicine, The Creative Body, The Feldenkrais Method®
I got in the car and reached for the key in the ignition. Except there was no key. This car, which I’ve had over three years, has a keyless remote. You simply push the bright blue button on the dash and voila! you are engaged. But my hand had decided to enact an...
by Lavinia Plonka | Nov 12, 2019 | Movement as Medicine, The Feldenkrais Method®
In the first dream, I find myself onstage in a jazz club. The other musicians are taking their places and I am frozen. I don’t belong here. I’m not a jazz musician. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be playing. I look at the only unoccupied instrument, which looks...
by Lavinia Plonka | Oct 8, 2019 | Humor/CosmiComedy, Movement and The Spirit, The Creative Body, The Feldenkrais Method®
Photo by Ron Morecraft of an installation by Tomas Saracéno from a work by an anonymous spider. For weeks my carport was Charlotte’s lair. The classic orb spider had spun a glorious, monumental web that sometimes verged on over-ambition, attaching silken threads...
by Lavinia Plonka | Aug 11, 2019 | Body Language, Movement as Medicine, The Feldenkrais Method®
During my tween days, when it seemed like I didn’t have a friend in the world, my mother would say to me, “It doesn’t matter whether people like you. What’s important is that they respect you.” Webster’s defines respect as “a...
by Lavinia Plonka | Jul 4, 2019 | Movement as Medicine, The Creative Body, The Feldenkrais Method®
I’m old enough to actually have had this kind of phone in my house. When it rang, the entire family would jump. We never knew if it was good news or bad news, but it was most certainly news. We didn’t know that that odd feeling we had when someone yelled...
by Lavinia Plonka | Apr 7, 2019 | Movement as Medicine, The Feldenkrais Method®
I should have been working on the book chapter that was coming due. Or finishing up that talk I have to give in a few days. Or at least doing some free writing to give voice to the thousands of ideas in my head. Instead, I was on my knees in the dirt, battling crown...
by Lavinia Plonka | Jan 2, 2019 | Movement and The Spirit, The Creative Body, The Feldenkrais Method®
At the beginning of a year, most of us want to look ahead, resolutions, wishes and a bit of trepidation. Will I move into the unknown, or repeat myself, stuck in a loop? I have often found a good way to move forward is to actually go backward. Several spiritual...
