Lessons IN walking

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Many lessons in Feldenkrais are helpful for walking, but they are done lying down. That’s because learning is easier when you remove the the postural work of standing. That said, there are many useful experiments available in standing or walking.

Use these lessons in walking to learn about your habits—and invite some new ones.

TIP: Walk on the floor or carpet of your house in socks or bare feet, not shoes. You need a flat surface for optimal feedback. These are not meant to do on a hike or outside.

This lesson looks at the swing of the hips and shoulders relative to the position of the foot in space. Make small, detailed observations about your own patterns and discover how you actually walk, not how you think you walk. It could be eye-opening.

In this lesson you feel how your head organizes over the legs and what happens with your ribs in walking. Do you bend or turn? Is it different when you’re on one foot or the other? What do you do when the foot is standing versus swinging?

While walking, you test side bending and twisting in the trunk,. once with the left hand on the head, and once with the right. With so many variations, you might discover a new strategy for how you swivel the ribs. Or, you might find clarity about what you already do. As Moshe says, “If you know what you’re doing, you can do what you want.”

Note: While this lesson has symmetrical movements on each side, your awareness is one-sided, always on the right foot. If you wish to use the left foot as the focal point, change over the instructions.

This lesson is a little longer but it’s well worth doing in one go if you can. If not, do as much as you can and come back to it.

Connecting the arm overhead to the bones of the feet can bring about phenomenal reorganizations of the trunk as you walk. Plus, the breathing experiments let go of tension throughout the belly, back, and the chest.

For this lesson, you reach one arm toward the ceiling while walking on one foot, then the other, to assess the same-side and opposite-side connections. Then, in a stroke of genius (I think), you walk on the ball of the foot with the arm overhead to feel the same-side and opposite-side connections. This pinpoints the support of the foot bones. Notice the difference between the ball of the foot and the sole.

Finally, the default muscular tone of the abdomen and chest is challenged in many positions, all while walking. Can you walk easily with tension in the belly? Or the chest? How much of your holding is below the level of consciousness? How does a rounded or arched back impact the swing of the legs? Lots of awareness can emerge in this lesson.

It is wonderful for finding the glorious midpoint of our uprightness: Front to back, side to side, across the diagonal. It’s a gem.

This lesson starts with a long scan of your skeleton, which is different from scanning your sensations on the floor. Make sure you’re comfortable on the floor for this. The lesson itself starts at 12:05, however, it’s worth doing the long scan a few times to practice mapping your bones. You will also return to this at the end.

Here, you stand and swivel the heel out to the side. First, you move just your leg in the hip, then move your leg in the pelvis, then move your leg in the ribs and shoulders. You’ll see how you create different constraints at each point. Consider how each one is someone’s normal.

Finally, you use your eyes and head to track the horizon as you pivot the heel and turn around yourself 180 degrees. It’s a cool move. Notice your habits around using the eyes as you turn, all without losing your balance.

Then, you do a lot of walking with the neck in different planes, such as rotating, tilting, and nodding. Each variation changes how you walk. You will appreciate the variety in human movement after this, and it will allow your head to float freely on top of the spine as you unravel pernicious habits of holding in the neck.