Why I do this

High winds battered Colorado the first weekend of this month, with gusts ranging from 65 to 100 miles per hour. Because of the lessons learned from wildfires in California and Hawai’i, the local utility company shut off electricity to many communities in the northern part of the state, including Boulder, where I was teaching Unlocking the Spinal Engine, a postgraduate course for Feldenkrais teachers. 

When the power went out, the emergency lights flickered on, casting an uneven glow across the room. In that moment, the participants showed their true resilience. They took a few minutes to assess the situation and, without hesitation, unanimously agreed to continue. A little later, as the wind continued to intensify, we decided to end the session early to ensure everyone’s safety.

When we reconvened the next day, the lights and heat were still out at the venue. Thankfully, we were assigned another room with windows that provided enough natural daylight to proceed. Even better, all the participants returned dressed in layers, fortified by their genuine interest and good spirits, ready to learn.

The way my colleagues rose to the occasion demonstrates their dedication to improving their abilities and those of their students. That they did so in such a collegial, convivial manner inspires me. It is inspiring to realize how we are—to borrow a phrase from Staying with the Trouble, a recent book by one of my long-ago UC Santa Cruz professors, Donna Haraway—“committed to nurturing ways to respond, cultivating ways to render each other more capable.”

Here’s what Rose Silberman, one of the participants in the Boulder course, wrote me after the course:

I have had so much fun applying what I learned at the workshop in my practice the last two weeks. I gave the Awareness Through Movement lessons you presented and the Functional Integration session you taught us to a wide variety of students: a competitive cyclist, a tennis player, a woman with scoliosis, another woman with a botched hip replacement, a group of teen modern dancers, and my senior ATM class.

With my students, I practiced co-discovering which was their standing leg and which side they could not stop working. The outlier was a new client, a woman with a bungled surgery who stood on her shorter right side, which was the side with the hip replacement. They set her right leg in internal rotation during the operation. Her left leg turns out, and she rolls her left ankle outward. She was not able to evert her left foot. After the FI, she stood more erect with more weight on her left foot. She was quite amazed by the changes she felt.

I taught my teenage modern dancers the ATM standing at the wall and then in a circle with arms around each other. They loved it! They laughed when we did the interactive part and said they wanted their dance teacher to incorporate the sequence into their upcoming show. I noticed they were walking so differently afterward. They did, too. 

I look forward to trying this out with my adult tap dance class. I will report back to you how it goes.

Applying what I learned about the spinal engine to my freestyle and backstroke increased the power and efficiency of my swimming. I improved my speed without raising my heart rate! I could access my latissimus dorsi muscles more efficiently and reduce the strain on my shoulder joints. I am always looking for ways to improve my strokes, so that was super cool.

If you’re a Feldenkrais colleague looking to expand your skills, understanding, or repertoire, here are my upcoming advanced courses:

• The House of Breath in Munich, Germany, from 11 to 15 May 2024.
  
  
• Unlocking the Spinal Engine in Vienna, Austria, from 6 to 9 June 2024.
  
  
• Connecting the Arms to the Center in Florence, Italy, from 12 to 15 June 2024.
  (Please contact me if you’d like more information about this course.)

I took the photo at the top of today’s post during the recent Boulder, CO, course.