Embodying Full Circle Moments in Life

My aim at Wise Move Studio is to provide encouragement, skilled attention, and wise presence for students as they move through their learning process in classes and private lessons. Students come to the studio for a range of reasons, and there is often an acknowledgement on their part that their needs, interests, concerns and hopes for learning something new include more than just the physical dimension.

Some of the most popular lessons involve learning to notice the many ways that everyday movement includes spiraling and simple circular motions. From your cycling regimen, pickleball or golf swing to how you start your day getting out of bed, making breakfast, or backing up your car, there is hardly a function in life that does not require you to organize yourself by rounding and rotating your spine and entire self.

It is easy to live a full life and never consider the wondrous, proprioceptive intelligence that we use to navigate our space each moment of the day. Even when taking a class, one might miss the significance of circling movements to quality of life unless you are guided to notice the many functions that depend on those capacities to turn, roll over, or even to safely move our arms and legs through a full range of motion.

Something that I love about teaching is being there when students experience a significant change, a shift of perception when it dawns on them that their balance has suddenly become more available, or that their head can turn easily in either direction without strain, a distinction from how they felt when they walked in.

Daily, most of us put up with muscular strain caused by repetitive actions that keep us stuck in certain motions, and we are unaware of the full impact that ignoring these limitations can have on our quality of life, including emotions and thoughts.

Many times, in the studio, a student will walk around after a lesson, feeling freer and more comfortable, and say something like, “I know this might sound funny but what I’m really learning is to be more aware of what is happening in my life in the moment, especially the easy, good times. The moments that I should just enjoy without my mind finding a reason to be stressed or anxious.”

Moments like these are very important because many of us have not been encouraged to savor, celebrate, or simply honor the significance of the lives we lead and the rich moments that can be easily overlooked.

In addition to the instruction on what to do, I also guide your attention to notice what feels lighter, more pleasurable, more efficient or easy as you move through the lesson. Many of us are conditioned to notice what feels wrong rather than what feels “right” by a comfort and stability standard. My students learn to embrace the freedom to do the lesson with curiosity about how to move easier and with less strain or pain, and that opens possibilities that they barely knew they could access.  New neuropathways are strengthened by what you prioritize in action, thought, and noticing.

The best part of this science is that the mere participation in these lessons helps your brain organize your entire self for more efficiency and clarity. We have disrupted the norm and your brain has responded!

There is a parallel effect between what students experience physically and the mental, emotional aspects of their life experience.

Consider the example of a new retiree from a high-profile career who notices that she wakes up each morning and by habit prepares herself for stress, worry, or crisis because that was the habit she formed through her job conditions. Even though those stress points are no longer in her life, the habit and the physical strain that is wired with those thoughts still shape her until she slowly unwinds from them, learning to sense, move, and place her attention on other aspects of life. It might take several weeks or months for her to replace this habit with one that is more appropriate for her current life.

In a nutshell, this is the work of the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education.

One could think of waking up each day as an ongoing spiral movement, and the mental actions that move with us through that ritual have a large impact on how we shape our day. In the studio, we explore ways to literally get out of bed with ease to help support that healthy mental habit as well.

Full Circle Moments and Movements: Bringing Parts into Harmony and Wholeness

I LOVE this lesson”, said the person who has chronic shoulder pain. She was in an Awareness Through Movement® group class.

Lying on her back, she was about twenty-five minutes into the movements we were exploring, coordinating her entire self---arms, shoulders, spine, ribs, hips, legs, feet, head and eyes---for a full circular motion. Slowly, she and others found the way to roll arms and use the rest of their body and friction with the floor, coordinating their vision with their intentions, and finding themselves rolling easily from one side to the other. This is one of many lessons I think of as “full circle” lessons.

In my classes, the repetition of lessons allows students to refine how they pay attention to certain details. There is ample room for students to make their own choices about what they do because we explore different options until they are confident to go in the direction they wish. Additionally, students learn never to push themselves through strain while doing a Feldenkrais lesson, a way to signal to their nervous system that it is safe to explore and hold less tension.

We all experience times when we come full circle to a moment that mirrors a previous one. We have the special opportunity to experience those moments however we wish, and often they are full of nuance.

Have you ever noticed the role of repetition in your life as a tool for growth, reflection and sometimes, pure joy and awe about how it is all unfolding for you?

Recently, I found myself on a beautiful stretch of highway that I have not traveled for several years. But here I was, driving on this road, transformed by the knowledge that someone I love was, that very moment, in labor to have a child. As I drove past the farms and fences, it dawned on me that I had a distant memory of driving that same road nearly 35 years ago.

A memory tucked deeply into the “no longer needed” file of my mind, it nonetheless appeared because of an interesting parallel. All those years ago, I had just visited a friend and her newborn baby, the first of our group of friends to become a mother.

 I was so transformed by awe of the miracle of childbirth on that day that I got pulled over by a state trooper because I was speeding!

I admit that I am predisposed to notice synchronicities, but this full circle moment was so powerful because I was on the same road that I hardly ever travel, experiencing the same kind of awe and wonder as I had the day that I got a speeding ticket!

Full circle moments happen in large and small ways, and I think that they offer us an opportunity to reflect and refine our actions. Some of the large ones I observe are things such as finding ourselves in need of making new friends, realizing that it is time to take a new step in a career, anniversaries, holidays, and other rituals that bring us back to something familiar. Also, in situations such as younger family members reaching important thresholds in life, or our adult children having their own children, when the cycle of life causes us to slow down, to notice, and to pause, we have the chance to honor the wisdom that comes with living into these experiences.

I find that in addition to wanting to move and feel better, there are emotional, personal, human needs that students have, and mostly what is needed is simply someone to hear and acknowledge the significance in this moment in time.

As in a single Feldenkrais lesson, we started our life by taking small steps and actions, not knowing where they would lead. We have all asked ourselves questions such as:

 Is this the right way?

Who can tell me the answers?

 How can I know?

Lying on the floor, students do not know where a lesson will lead. This innocence is by design, because if they believe there is an outcome that is expected of them, they will surely strain to try to achieve it, remaining in their well-worn habits. That is not how we create new possibilities or gain the confidence to learn and find the way forward. Of course, we all need support along the way of making a challenge a little easier.

Feldenkrais lessons not only help you feel better, but they help you relearn the satisfaction and importance of finding yourself in action that feels a little more “right”, more fluid, and more coherent. Grounded, centered, and present with what is, we can make choices that suit the moment.