While I love how the Feldenkrais Method helps improve the way we move; improving balance, flexibility, and resilience, I’ve always been much more impressed with how it has improved my inner balance, my mental flexibility and my emotional resilience. The simple and profound truth that the body and mind are a unified system, as Feldenkrais said so many times, “…improve the process and you improve life itself,” can often get forgotten in focusing on reducing back pain, healing shoulder injuries or improving pelvic floor function.
To be intellectually nimble, physically poised and emotionally fluent requires that I give myself time to reconnect with all of myself: breath, structure, acture, while being willing to be in the unknown. Can I be curious about the tightness in my scapula? Can I be willing to let go of the need to lift my leg as high as possible? Can I forgo judgment of my perceived limitations?
I developed the Kinēsa process in order to make explicit the power of Awareness Through Movement® as a transformational process not just for physical well being, but for the whole package, what I call the seven bodies of the self: Mental, physical, emotional, creative, energetic, archetypal and alchemic.
Today as I hiked in the mountains, the ground was muddy and slippery with boulders to climb over and streams to hop. My physical body leapt, slid, climbed and scanned. Wildflowers competed for recognition by my mental body: narrow leafed evening primrose, Eastern graybeard tongue, black cohosh. My emotional body swelled with joy, interrupted by a moment of righteous indignation by sounds from the highway, moving toward nostalgia as I reminisced my childhood relationship with trees. Integrating our bodies is an alchemical process, turning our personal lead into the gold of a life worth living.
I know I’m preaching to the choir, but every once in a while I just feel the need to shout it from the mountaintops: if you know what you’re doing, you can do what you want! Really!