Reframing walking

Perhaps you can understand why, when Laura Sebastian and Mary McCutcheon asked me to lead this year’s Midwestern Regional conference of the Feldenkrais Guild® of North America, I suggested walking as the theme.

If I remember correctly, Laura was curious about the ATM® (Awareness Through Movement) lessons I’d recently come up with that you do while standing in a doorway. That was perfect because these particular ATM classes are made for learning about how walking works and for improving coordination, orientation, and balance.

Here’s the curriculum we came up with for what we’re calling REFRAMING WALKING: 

• On the first day of the advanced training* (Friday, February 5th, 2021), I’ll teach two of those “done in the frame of a door” ATMs. We’ll unpack the “how and why” of each lesson, explore how to get the most out of what these lessons have to offer, and then examine how, exactly, they relate to decoding and repatterning the way we walk.
  
  
• On Saturday morning, February 6th — smack dab in the middle of the advanced training — I’ll teach a half-day public workshop, Reframing Walking, featuring the same two ATMs that were front and center during the postgrad program the day before. Reframing Walking is open to anyone interested in understanding and improving how you walk. In addition to doing the lessons, the participants — students and teachers of the method — will have the opportunity to learn from and with each other.
  
  
• On Saturday afternoon, I’ll meet exclusively with the participants of the advanced program again. We’ll debrief the workshop, examine what worked and what didn’t, figure out what there is to be learned, and then participants are going to apply those lessons to their practices.
  
  
• On Sunday morning, 7 February, we’ll take a deep dive into implementing the ATM structures as designs for Functional Integration®. Since so many of us are not doing hands-on work, we’ll focus on how this works when you’re giving someone an individual lesson online.

The conference structure affords a unique opportunity for teachers to invite their students to participate — and vise versa — so that the public workshop becomes a starting place for your continued work together. The teachers and trainees participating in the advanced training will learn specific ways to build on the workshop. I will show you how the challenges that come up can serve as stepping stones to learning, and we’ll take a look at what lessons you could teach next.

The early registration deadline for the public workshop and the advanced training* is Monday, 25 January. (If you’re wondering, the recordings are included in the tuition.)

• To find out more and to register for the advanced training, please click here.
  
  
• To find out more and to register for the public workshop, please click here.