As I prepare for my upcoming workshop, How We Get In Our Way: Our Hidden Habits of Resistance, I am immersed in reflections on resistance and how it functions in my life.  When I approach something new and uncertain, I fill that uncertainty gap with something – a form of resistance to what is (or might be) coming.

I spend my days working with muscular habits – my own and with my clients.  This week in my Vitamin MM Mindful Movement class online, we focused on the habits in how we use our eyes.  As I dig more and more into the neuroscience of movement, I find that our movement has more embedded in it than we typically think.

What is Driving your Movement?

“All the physical movement is to give her a change so she can own the responsibility for what she wants.” 

How does changing how you move affect the rest of your life?  Movement is movement and the rest of your life is the rest of your life.  Nothing more to see here, right?

Every body can be successful

What do coaches do?  Help you to perform better, to move better – in soccer, baseball, in leadership, as entrepreneurs – to help you improve how you perform whatever field you play on.

I want to share with you something that really inspired me last week.

With the recent cold weather, my Netflix watching may have increased a little bit.  I watched a wonderfully understated movie, The Dig.  It is the story of the excavation of historical mounds in Surrey just before the outbreak of WWII.  

I connected with a colleague over a pretty mundane issue – did I send her the report?  Did she receive it?  I went to the place of assuming I had thought about sending it but didn’t actually do it.  This happens.  It happens more right now as I live with my shifting hormonal, menopausal self.

I realize that I have almost always picked work that requires me to learn on the job.  Coming from a family with a high number of teachers, grandmother, cousins, aunt, I grew up in an environment where the value of learning was infused in the air.  Growing up in my farming family, my earliest school room was the freedom to play outside as long as I was home for dinner.

Is Feldenkrais good for people to recover from trauma?  Like all such questions, the true answer is, it depends.  Based on my own background and training in Being in Movement ™, what I focus on to respond to this question is one aspect of what happens for people who struggle to recover from trauma.

Social Distancing is the term used to describe staying away from people and microbial residue (or as our Prime Minister called it, “moist breath”) that people leave behind when touching objects.  Pre-pandemic, MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research conducted an experiment with forty people who sat in a windowless room alone for ten hours.

After feeling numb, feeling more whole can be confusing.

When I write these postings, I share less about my own Feldenkrais practice, not because I don’t find it interesting, but because there can be a kind of daily grind of working with my own self image/body patterns that I am motivated to work with but don’t really want to talk about all the time. 

Before the isolating constraints of the COVID-19 virus, I lived and worked alone. Mostly, I do solitude well, feeling any sense of loneliness in the evening, feeling into the emptiness when purpose and pleasure are set aside for the day.

I started writing this as a description of a multi-day learning activity I participated in during my last Feldenkrais training segment.  Today, with the physical isolation and daily evolution of our global pandemic, this learning activity is taking on a new meaning for me.

As I mark my half-way point in my Feldenkrais formal training, I am interested in the assumptions we can hold about learning.  I have worked most of my adult life in education and remember playing school as a girl in small wooden desk on our family farm. 

Why did I start training to become a Feldenkrais practitioner? 

Working with people in their bodies, I intuit people want an answer something like this:  I have been interested in body-based practices for years – Martial arts like karate, Tai Chi and aikido, Pilates, gym workouts and physical hobbies like kayaking, hiking, swimming, walking.  So I wanted to become an embodiment professional. That is partially right. 

In considering content for my blog, I often write to provide what I hope are stimulating and helpful compilations of wisdom from my many life teachers, a little personal experience and coachy questions that you can choose (or not) to consider for yourself.

What is something you don’t miss, until it is gone?   One of my favorite lines from an old movie, The Paper, has Marissa Tomei sneezing as the very pregnant wife of the newspaper editor in the movie and say, “You don’t appreciate bladder control until it is gone”. 

What was the last time you had something happen to you that you really didn’t want to happen?   That thing that created in you a kind of digging your heels in, push back on reality kind of bracing. 

I live where it feels like, at this time of year, pretty far north.  This week I have watched leaves start to turn colors, weather forecasts start to hint at near frost temperatures, I daily contemplate the likelihood that my squashes will grow big enough to be harvested before a hard frost.

Let’s talk about power.  And powerlessness.    I found myself a wee bit triggered the other day, seeing another Woman Warrior offering land in my digitally enhanced attention stream. 

What is difficult for you?  What happens when you face something difficult?  A conversation? A strong,  emotion emerging out of nowhere.   A task you don’t know how to do.  Or a job you’ve been working on for a while without getting anywhere.   Or does the thought of how difficult something might be stop you cold?