This week, someone said something in a lesson that stayed with me.

“I felt movement where I’ve never felt it before… and it felt exciting.”

I realised afterwards that this sentence could have come from almost any lesson I taught this weekend.  The details were different, but the experience was remarkably similar: people discovering possibilities they didn’t know they had.

Without alternatives, there’s no real choice, only habit.

One of the things I’ve learnt through teaching Feldenkrais is that this moment of discovery is often where real change begins. Not because someone has been shown the “right” way to move, but because they’ve experienced another possibility for themselves. Once your nervous system knows there is another option, you have a choice. Without alternatives, there’s no real choice, only habit.

One client came because walking wasn’t as comfortable as she would like. We ended up recalibrating how much of her skeleton was involved in the movement. It wasn’t a once-and-done lesson, rather the beginning of a new conversation for her nervous system. She left delighted, not because everything had changed in one lesson, but because she’d experienced a different way of organising herself. She now knew something else was a possibility.

We all have blind spots

Later that day I worked with a dancer. One might think that a dancer knows their whole body, so why would they come to Feldenkrais? Dancers have excellent body awareness after all. No-one can sense everything about themselves; we all have blind spots, areas outside of our conscious awareness. For many of us they’re in places we can’t easily sense, or places where our thinking has become very habitual. 

Over the years I’ve worked with musicians, dancers, athletes and people who’ve not thought much about movement at all. But awareness isn’t about ability. It’s about noticing what has become so familiar you no longer pay attention to it. 

I offer a fresh perspective

That’s why another point of view can be so valuable. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I still love this work after all these years. It isn’t about fixing people, but helping them discover possibilities they couldn’t discover on their own.

• Sometimes it’s a rib that begins to move.
• Sometimes it’s a pelvis moving differently so the person can shift weight in walking more easily.
• Sometimes it’s simply the excitement of feeling movement where you’ve never felt it before.

And very often, with that shift into something new, that’s where the learning begins.