tl;dr

You enter into a professional perspective with terminology, customs, and expectations that, if you’re lucky, don’t quite match your own. I say that because if there’s no mismatch, you’ll get to confirm what you know and miss the chance to expand your horizons and options. Instead of adding a piece to your existing mosaic, the caleidoscope turns and other perspectives come into view. At first, you may find yourself feeling uneasy or a bit disoriented. Or you feel confused. Or curious. 

Even so, there is something familiar about this place, a sense of coziness and promise, like running into an old friend you haven’t seen in years and feeling like no time has passed since you were last together.

Participating from afar is different from being there in person

Listening to recordings of the daily Awareness Through Movement® lessons on the floor on your own isn’t the same as having other people lying next you. You can’t glance around the room to find out if you interpreted  the directions well. If you don’t have that often unconscious sense of the ease or difficulty of the instructions that comes from the music comes from the breath of the class.

You’ll do the lessons on your own. Something that most Feldenkrais teachers have done many times, like listening to recordings of their faculty to do an ATM® or reading and doing the lesson when preparing a class. We discovered the advantages over in person: the possibility of stopping the proceedings whenever, of taking a break, rewinding, reflecting, or revisiting later.

You’re invited to be an autodidact, to learn on your own, and to learn about your learning and how to guide it.

The same is true listening to a talk or watching a hands-on demo or any of the other videos. The advantages of on-demand learning — being responsible for your education, following your interest, going at your pace, being your own authority — don’t replace what happens in the room, in person . . . and vise versa.

Distance learning enhances learning

Online learning affords unique ways of learning. 

The Mind in Motion Online school offers a roadmap of the curriculum, a guide through each training day, one section at a time. It supports your learning by giving suggestions about what to notice at each step along the way,  orienting you specific aspects, suggesting ways you can learn on your own, and augmenting the experience of listening to ATMs and viewing the videos.

The online ATSO Forum provides a way for you to keep the conversation going with your classmates. For each day of the training, you’ll receive at least one question to answer or subject to address on the forum. The forum is a group chat, where you can share your thoughts, ask questions, explore obstacles and objects, develop insights, and more. The messages are stored and passes in the same location, making this a funny kind of meeting place, one that doesn’t require you to be there at the same time as the other people you’re conversing with.

Meeting twice a week on Zoom gives me a chance to address specific aspects of each training day, gives you the opportunity to work in small groups, and allows us to talk together about the curriculum and about your process. 

One new approach is known as the Flipped Curriculum. Instead of the traditional approach — attending class for lecture and demonstrations while doing homework outside of class — we flip things around. The students can watch or listen to presentations online, conduct experiments, role play, and do homework in class, alone and with their classmates, all with the teacher close by, available to provide support for their learning.