Saturday, March 11: The Joy of Rolling

ROLLING
One of the great things about the Feldenkrais work is that you get to do things that you haven’t done since you were a child. Rolling is one of them. From Doctor Feldenkrais love of and immersion in judo, many of the lessons allow us to explore, improve and enjoy rolling up to sitting from lying down, or the reverse: rolling on down to the ground from sitting.

Then there is spiraling up from sitting to standing, and coming down in graceful and elegant ways from standing to sitting.

These transitions are part of what we learned to do when we were young geniuses, when we were six months to two years old, when we turned ourselves from a blob that knew how to learn into a being that could stand upright on a very small pair of feet, leaving our hands free for dancing or typing on computers or playing golf, or building houses or picking apples. We needed to learn and we did and then we get older and many of us stop learning. We get in a rut. We think the same thing and feel the same thing and do the same thing, only jolted out of our ruts by unexpected weather, the annoying habit of some people to die occasionally, and the equally annoying habit of dissatisfied partners to leave us, or vice-versa.

What to be done about our ruts? Come back to learning, and to learning how to move in ways that are easy and elegant. So much of our self-image is trapped in how we move and how we are limited in our movements (when was the last time you skipped, or ran?), that to begin to move in new and more youthful ways can stimulate us in many wonderful and unexpected ways.

So: come try some Feldenkrais lessons. Learn to roll around and become a young genius again.