Shift Network's Somatic Movement Summit Featured Feldenkrais Stars
Shift Network Somatic Movement Summit Featured Feldies
Lavinia Plonk, Mia Segal and Leora Gaster, Anat Baniel, Linda and Russell Delman Representing!
Awareness Through Movement® and The Feldenkrais Method® are beginning to penetrate the ‘new age’ mainstream. The recent Shift Network “Somatic Movement Summit” was hosted by a Feldenkrais Method student and included half dozen practitioners presenting their spins on the work.
My friend Jamee Culbertson, with whom I trained in the International Healing Tao practices, is an Internationally Certified Alexander Technique Instructor. She presented on Chi Kung and the Alexander Technique.
Like all these summits, there are too many presentations to take in. Confession: I watched quite a few at 2x to get the gist and decide if I needed to pay close attention. Mia Segal and her daughter Leora Gaster’s session on Awareness Through Movement® as spiritual and transformational embodied practice was my summit highlight.
I took some notes. Enjoy:
Leora Gaster:
In exploring what makes us human, what empowers us to be our best? How can we grow as a society?
We cannot go into the brain and just think it. Then we are ignoring the whole rest of the system. The physiology is the access point and the expression of thought and feelings and spirituality. Everything that goes beyond living day to day without thinking doing things by habit. The movements are just a framework to explore our own self image and limitations as well.
You are asked to do a just small movement, but to really explore how you are think about doing it, which makes you find new connections through yourself including more of yourself in every intention and every thought. Which just makes more of yourself available. And then as a society we also become more sensitive and aware to each other, and the whole thing goes into a very spiritual place. It’s really nice for us to access it from something as practical as movement that anyone can do in relation to a floor or a chair.
When you change your posture you change your relationship with gravity. It also affects your breathing. If you breathe out, all the emotional things like laughing or crying, they involve expiration. Also looking down, when you ask someone to think of something sad, people look down. It’s also the posture of prayer. So there is a very emotional component to this. It is also a component when people get stressed out. Thinking of something happy, people are making pictures in their head, so you go from the emotional to the visual.
In this work we explore these movements so everyone has an entrance point into their internal state and master it. If you are stuck in a state you want to change, you have several hooks. You can think of gravity, you can look up, notice changes in the body. So we encompass the idea that thought and physiology are intertwined in a way that empowers people to feel better about themselves and behave in a way that suits their hopes.
This is how the movement and the spiritual and the emotion all tied together in this practice.
Leora Gaster
Mia:
Refinement goes forever. You can’t put it in a frame – this move or sequence – that’s it. As long as you can move, you keep refining. You can guide someone to what they think is their limit, as the teacher, you can guide them to go further. There is so much to see – more and more. And so much to explore.
When we make the work refinement of movement, Refinement of ability. That brings it to the spiritual. Refinement is another level. Shifting to another language. To yourself you say to yourself, who limits me? That is the spiritual.
The beauty is how this is a metaphor – the body is connected, we are a community. A nation is a community. Civilization is a community. I say “think you are a conductor and all your limbs are an orchestra. How does the violin integrate with the harp? How do our thoughts integrate? We are spirits put together.
Each of these teachers is expanding The Method’s reach. Summit attendees will sign up for classes, build demand. Thanks to both the Summit and our Feldy teachers for representing. Also, a continued shout out to Cynthia Allen for her tremendous work in promoting the practice.