Monday, March 27: Where am I now?

Where am I?

In a basement, in New Jersey, in the house of my sister Francesca and her husband Jack. I am sitting at the front edge of a chair and in the background a dehumidifier hums away. It’s a little after seven in the morning and I notice that I am not noticing my breathing.

I’m back in, in the East to study with Anat Baniel, who was one of the apprentices with Moshe Feldenkrais thirty years ago, and has been forging a deeper and deeper understanding of that work for herself and others. She’s figured out how to teach what we all glimpse when we take a training: this work can help anyone, immensely. She’s also figured out how to have it start helping people almost instantly, which makes it a lot of fun to practice.

Practice can mean doing it with myself, moving in slow and mindful ways that open up new pathways in my brain, i.e. learning, or doing it as a lesson for others, which opens up new learning pathways in their brain. Learning is always in the present and always leaves us bigger and more full of life than before we started. So this is a process of becoming present to ourselves and become even more alive.

Right now, if I were to vary the position of my pelvis on the chair, and notice my spine as well as my breathing, I come into the present. If I notice areas where it’s not quite comfortable to move, I can slow down even more in those areas and get some hints as to what else I might try to make an uncomfortable area comfortable, a tight movement more fluid, a closed off area more open. Touching another, I do the same: moving slowly and easily, feeling/listening for what works and trusting in small experiments to learn what more can be brought into easy and efficient and pleasurable movement.

∑ This is where I am, back on the East coast learning how to learn and teach in easy and efficient and pleasurable ways. It’s nice.