Beyond Movement: What Feldenkrais® Really Offers #168

Most people discover the Feldenkrais Method® because they want something physical to improve. Less pain. Easier movement. Better balance. More comfortable riding.

But the changes don't necessarily stop there.

In this episode, Mary shares a personal story about chronic hip pain, an uncomfortable phone call, and the surprising lesson that helped her understand how deeply our physical, emotional, and habitual patterns are intertwined.

You'll hear how  Feldenkrais® Awareness Through Movement® can help us experience ourselves differently, expand our sense of what's possible, and develop greater choice instead of automatically falling into familiar patterns.

Mary also explores why this matters so much when you're with your horse or dog. How you move, breathe, focus your attention, and organize yourself all become part of the interaction with your animal.

When your own possibilities expand, you may be able to offer your animal something different too: greater ease, clearer communication, deeper connection, and an invitation to discover new possibilities of their own.

Key Takeaways

• Feldenkrais isn't simply about improving physical movement. Changes in movement can influence how you experience yourself and what you believe is possible.
• Emotional and physical patterns aren't separate. Mary's unexpected return of an old hip pain during a stressful phone conversation made that vividly clear.
• Awareness Through Movement® uses novel movement and attention to create opportunities for learning and new neural connections.
• The quality of attention matters more than making large or complicated movements.
• As your self-image changes, you may discover choices and possibilities you hadn't previously considered.
• Those changes can spill into creativity, relationships, work, confidence, and other areas of life.
• Your own organization matters when you're interacting with your horse or dog. Your movement, breathing, tension, and attention all shape that interaction.
• By experiencing greater ease and possibility yourself, you become better able to invite your animal into greater ease and possibility.

TRANSCRIPT:

Most of you know that I'm a Feldenkrais Method teacher and that I am really passionate about the work because it's helped me so much and it's helped so many of my students from all over the world. So I'm truly grateful that I get to teach so many different people. And most of most people come to the Feldenkrais Method because they want to feel some physical relief or I just have a better sense of, you know, more elegant posture or be able to ride their horse more effectively or play tennis better or dance more, you know, elegantly, things like that.

So really, those kind of reasons are very valid because it helps with all that. But I want to talk today about another aspect of the Feldenkrais Method and that how it can help on so much more than the physical level. As important as the physical level is, it can help with so much, so much more, and also how this relates to our work with horses and dogs. So I'll give you a story about myself when I first started the Feldenkrais Method.

When I first started going to a practitioner and doing awareness through movement and having private functional integration sessions, I had had a really, really bad issue with my right hip. It started when I was 18. I remember it distinctly because it. It woke me up with like, I felt like someone was stabbing me in the right hip with a knife. It was like. It was sudden, it was very painful.

And I went from doctor to doctor over a course of many years actually, and there was no explanation for it. I was told to take NSAIDs, you know, over the counter medication, and basically just to live with it. And, you know, the pain would ebb and flow, it would be worse. Some days, you know, catch me suddenly, and other times it was just like this general ache I would have.

And, you know, all the things I loved exacerbated it. Riding my horse, hiking, running, things like that just seemed to make it worse. I'd kind of pay the price for it later. So luckily I came across the Feldenkrais Method after dealing. I just want to emphasize I was dealing with this hip pain for years. But luckily I found the Feldenkrais Method and my practitioner, Lawrence Phillips, really helped me.

I realized that the way I was organizing myself, the way I was standing, the way I was sitting, the way I was walking, and all the things contributed to the difficulty with my right hip and the pain went away. It didn't happen all at once. You know, it took many sessions over a period of time, little by little, it was getting better. And it went away. I was thrilled.

And then one day I got a phone call. And now, boys and girls, this was in the old days. This was many years ago. So we didn't have a cell phone. So it meant that I was sitting at my kitchen table taking a phone call. And as I was talking to this woman who happened to be someone I found difficult to deal with, suddenly that pain in my right hip, that familiar old pain in my right hip came roar

And wow. I was surprised because it had been gone for months by this point and it was such a valuable lesson. So after I finished my conversation with her, I thought, wow, isn't that amazing? Isn't it amazing how something that was gone for so long came roaring back when I was in a situation that I perceived to be difficult? In other words, I had a lot of tension, emotional tension, which of course is physical tension as well.

And luckily though, because of the Feldenkrais work I had done, I had tools now to mitigate the problem and did. Awareness through movement. Pain went away. And I'm happy to say decades later, it's still gone. But it taught me a super, super valuable lesson about how we organize ourselves around not only our physical. In other words, we, we don't just have habits of movement that relate to, again, you know, standing, sitting, walking, running, riding, etc.

But they relate to how we deal with emotional situations. And this is why the Feldenkrais method is something that I do on a regular basis. I practice my awareness through movement regularly because I feel so differently after I do it. So let me explain why. When you're doing awareness through movement, you're creating new neural connections, you're really tapping into neuroplasticity, our ability to adapt and learn at any stage of life, by the way.

And you feel differently, you sense yourself differently. When you're doing awareness through movement, there are novel movements. You're moving in these non habitual ways. You're paying attention to yourself. This is big. It's not the movements that are creating the improvement, it's your ability to attend to yourself. That's why people who are only able to do tiny movements and really slow movements, or maybe just kind of imaginary movements, they improve so much because their quality of attention is there.

So, and then what happens is when you do that, when you start to, to recognize and this is subconscious, you don't have to like intellectualize this, but you start to realize that your self image has changed. In other words, what, what you feel about yourself, how you relate to your environment, Changes, it shifts. And it could be something like, I've seen this over and over with, with people who come to me for sessions, whether online or in person.

It's, we'll do something with them where all of a sudden, like a particular vertebra, certain parts of the back are moving or their ribs are moving in ways that haven't in a while. And they'll have this look on their face like, wow. Now some people recognize it automatically and they say, I never thought I'd be able to do that. Maybe it's a movement of, you know, using their back in a particular way or reaching or using their hips in a particular way.

And it's just like there's this shift that comes over them that they realize, wow, so much more is possible than I thought was possible. And here's where this gets really interesting. The change doesn't mean that they ride their horse better. They can run with their dog more easily and comfortably. You know, yes, all those things happen. But it's so much more than that because suddenly now they decide, maybe I'll go back to school or maybe I need to re evaluate this relationship.

Or like in my case, I completely shifted my career. When I first started the Feldenkrais Method, I was an IT professional. I had a great job, made very good money, you know, all, all the things that, like society says are important, but it wasn't feeding my soul. Was not feeding my soul, but what was I going to do, right? But my passion was always animals. It was always the horses, the dogs, the cats, the other animals, and movement.

And so when I started feeling how, you know, my own movement changed so much and my aches and pains disappear because it wasn't only just about the right hip, by the way. I had plenty of stuff. And I was in my 20s, I might add, when I started my journey. What happened was I realized I can do this. And I quit that corporate job. I left that career and dedicated myself to both studying the Feldenkrais method and working full time on my own.

With horses, dogs and other animals. Yeah, I did. Oh, and I moved 3,000 miles away from where I was living and of course took my horse with me and, you know, didn't know people in the new place, so I had to start my business, you know, all those things that would seem crazy. I had the confidence in myself to be able to make a go of it. And I can credit that to having a different self image from my Feldenkrais practice.

In other words, by doing the awareness through movement lessons Right. I also had gone to a Feldenkrais practitioner in person for a while, as I mentioned, Lawrence Phillips. And then continuing with that, of course, I had other Feldenkrais practitioners and teachers when I came to California, and they, you know, and I just continued on the journey. So now it's been quite a number of years, and it still invigorates me.

It still lets me think about what's possible. I remember a particular amazing session I had with Dr. Mark Reese. Back again. This was maybe 20, 30 years ago, probably little, little less. And I could not wait after I had that session. And I just felt lighter, taller, just all the things. I had this brilliant idea, like this breakthrough on an article I was writing. And I don't think that was a coincidence.

And again, I've seen this over and over, not only with myself, but with my students I've had, for all the years that I've been teaching this, that there's suddenly like these. You become more creative. So maybe you're an artist, you paint. Or maybe you are more creative with how you train your horse or train your dog or something related to work or some other personal endeavor you have.

You start to realize that there's more options. Because when we expand our movement options, we expand much more than our movement. We expand how we move through life. We change it. We realize we have more agency, we have more choice. And now how this relates to your horses and your dogs, because maybe you're here for that. You're just here to hear about that. I will say this. In all my programs, whether horse or dog, working with yourself through Feldenkrais awareness through movement lessons is foundational.

It's not optional. Because connecting with yourself in this way, yes, it helps you sit on the floor more easily or stand more easily or ride, you know, in a more balanced, effective way. But it does much more than that. Because when you tap into yourself, when you tune into yourself to this level, you can also notice when you're kind of stressed or when you're focused on things that are not serving you.

And those things, that's unnecessary tension, yes, physical tension, but mental tension as well, that will get in the way of your interaction with your horse or your dog. So connecting with yourself and changing your self image through Feldenkrais awareness through movement lessons is paramount to helping your horse and your dog. Because you know, how you move, how you breathe, how you direct your attention, those are all felt by your animal, and they all shape the interaction you have.

So we start there. We start there. Because when you connect to yourself in this truly deep way when you really have a different self image and you realize that much more is possible than you've thought was. Now you can relate to your horse or your dog differently. You can connect to them more deeply and then you can transmit that sense of ease and new possibilities to your animals.

We do this through our hands, we do this through our heart. We, we do this through our thinking, right? So we do this. And that's my work. The hands on work for animals is called de Bono moves. And in those classes that I teach about it, that's what you're doing. You're helping your horse, for example, feel how the ribs and the sternum can move differently, how the pelvis can move differently, how the spine can be more supple, you know, many, many different things we do.

And, and by doing that now the horse is having a different sense of themselves, right? They, they can turn their head and neck more easily, which makes them feel more confident. They're not as vulnerable. Maybe they're not as spooky anymore. Maybe they're more comfortable when you're riding and training them. They have a different sense of themselves. Same thing with your dog. Maybe you have an older dog that's having mobility issues.

I've worked with many, many dogs over the years in such a condition, right? Things are slowing down. There's that downward spiral that starts. You can interrupt that. You can help the dog kind of regroup, if you will reset. You can start to relieve unnecessary tension in their body, which then allows them to move in a more balanced, confident way. So now they can do things that they hadn't been able to do previously.

You can help break that cycle. So there are so many ways that we can help ourselves and our animals, but it starts with you attending to yourself. And again, it's not, it's a never ending thing, which is exciting, right? It's a lifelong journey. You don't get to a point that you're like, oh, I did enough Feldenkrais awareness, zoo movement, you know, I'm done, right? You don't get there.

You don't want to get there because you realize that your options, your expansion is endless. It's so many ways that you can support yourself. And as we all get older, of course, things change in our bodies, etc. The Feldenkrais method can help us stay as mobile, as healthy, as active as possible. And again, this is body and mind that shift. Again, this idea of the self image, this was very, very big in Moshe Feldenkrais who created the Feldenkrais Method.

My hat is off to him every day. I literally thank him for creating such an incredible body of work. And what he said once was something along the lines of, what I'm not after is flexible bodies, but flexible brains. So he was using improved movement to help people have more behavioral flexibility, to see their possibilities, to not get stuck in compulsive habits of thinking and acting and just kind of reacting to the world.

So it's a. It's a beautiful way of expressing yourself more fully as a human being and helping your animals express themselves more fully as well, in their true nature. And again, I've done this work for decades. I love sharing it. As you can tell, I'm quite passionate about it. And I'm lucky to have students from all over the world, which is so fun to be able to share this with horse and dog lovers from all over the world.

Of course, the cat people are there too. So, anyway, just wanted to share that with you, so you might want to look into. And I certainly have resources about Feldenkrais awareness through movement or. Or speak to a local practitioner, if you have one in your area, and let me know how the Feldenkrais Method has impacted you. I love hearing from you and I so appreciate you listening, and I look forward to talking to you again soon.

Bye for now.