Awareness Through Movement #139

Touching the floor with the hands – LENGTHENING

hhmm… I’m thinking the reason this AI mostly shows men in the images is because I search “Feldenkrais” - and it knows Feldenkrais was a man.

With many methods, “stretching” muscles takes time and patience… the way Moshe works with people to *lengthen* has the muscles unwind and surrender to softening… with the breath. With Feldenkrais, it’s not so much about one group of muscles stretching between A and B… ie.. the hamstrings… it’s more about the whole system working as one for all of the muscles to connect and unwind…. as a spiral:

As Tom Meyers explains here, the whole network of muscles and fascia spirals through the human body from the head to the toes. After dissecting hundreds of bodies and following the connectivity of muscles wrapped in fascia… where they start and where they end… he calls these lines “anatomy trains”. He says there are 12 such trains, and they wrap around the bones front to back head to toe in different directions. One such train travels from the fingers of the right hand across to the fingers of the left hand, another you will see in the link to his article.

Even without this knowledge available at the time, Moshe has had people move (even now), using these trains through the whole body so that then this feeling of being “stretched” is felt… after 45 minutes…. rather than after weeks and months of going over the same movements to lengthen one group of muscles.

Today’s lesson…