After a Feldenkrais lesson, you might feel different. Some of you report having more sense of groundedness, breathing more freely, of moving with greater ease, or relaxation. Other people feel their balance or co-ordination has changed. Or something about the way they move or feel about themselves has shifted.
Students often ask how can I make the sensation last?
It’s tricky, as there’s not a one fits all answer. But some things can help in keeping your sense of change.
- Give yourself some time and space after a lesson to sense what’s happened, or changed, or just to enjoy the new sensations.
- If you have time to go for a little walk. Walking can help integrate the work you’ve been doing in the lesson. It gives time for your nervous system to take on board the new patterns of movement, with new awareness.
- If you were doing something in the lesson that made a daily function feel easier then practice the movement. If turning to look behind you as you drive improved, then see if you can remember the feeling when you’re in the car. Then your sensory-motor system can bring it back from a memory into the present moment.
- Repeating some movements of the lesson helps you recall the sensation. In the same way you can hear just a few bars of a piece to remember an attached event or emotion. So play with something you remember from the lesson through the week. Some people like to do this in bed before they get up or go to sleep. Or when doing the washing up (depending on the lesson of course!)
- Other people like to revisit a lesson they found powerful. If you’re signed up to membership you have access to each weekly lesson.
Learning is culumative.
There might be moments where you question what you’ve learnt. But the next week, you can feel you’re in a different place. One stage is feeling your habitual holding patterns. The next is to be able to let them go when you sense yourself in the habit. You might notice that you no longer unconsciously raise a shoulder, or push part of your back forward.
It’s a bit like playing an instrument. Sometimes you have to go back to an old piece you learnt before to realise how far you’ve come. You might notice when you’re practicing Feldenkrais regularly you don’t feel pain. That’s the reason I kept coming back, before I decided to become a teacher myself. Or that if you stop for a length of time you feel rusty again. That you don’t connect together so well, or that you feel stiff when before you felt supple. I realised I didn’t get pain whilst playing the viola when I was regular in my class attendance, and I did when I stopped.
Often it’s only when we look back we can see where we started.
For many students, as you get to know yourself in this kinaesthetic way, it becomes part of your thinking. How you move through life.
Transform how you move, feel and live 