Counterbalance 1 (with baby rolling)

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This is an iconic lesson in shifting your weight. Once you feel the logic of pivoting your chest against the weight of your leg, you won’t forget it. Your system will remember the effortless, easy spiral.

Coordinating movement from your middle is one of the glorious pleasures of human skeletal organization.

Tip: If you find yourself stuck on your side and pushing yourself up, turn your chest toward the floor. Most of us get stuck here. Likely, you’ve created a rigid board in your spine instead of a round ball and you're trying to push it away from the floor. The spine must roll and bend. Don’t orient your chest to the wall and uumph, turn toward the floor and roll. Ask yourself, am I a board or a ball?

This lesson inspires movement from the middle as well, but from a different position. The power from the spine begins to translate to the limbs, bit by bit.

You’d be surprised how much you learn about rolling onto the side without using effort! Once you feel this movement, it will serve you in everything you do: walking, sitting, coming to stand, rolling out of bed, and more.

Note: if you are not comfortable lying on your right side, do the lesson on the left.

Tip: To complement this lesson, do 438 Roll across the midline. It invites a more nuanced appreciation for the weight shift across the back.

(Amherst, week 4, June 30, 1980)

Bring the elbow and leg into the picture of curling and uncurling. Practice complex tracking as you move through space. Once you're good at this, you can make a big, fast movement, but first you learn to pinpoint where you are in space piece by piece.

This is a brilliant lesson. You lengthen your arm and leg at the same time to roll onto the back in many ways, focusing on timing, foreground and background, and new pinpoints of attention.

At the end there is a profound wholeness to your sense of self, as well as freedom and power from the center to change direction at any time.

For another lesson on a flexible spine, see 90 Soft spine, curling and uncurling

Here we begin the process of baby rolling. A large part of counterbalancing is re-learning how to roll like a baby—that is, from the middle. When the middle is well-organized neurologically, we have more power available to us.

Use this lesson to find balance, timing, weight shift, and what to do with those limbs when they're all over the place, just like a baby.

A variation on baby rolling, with different cues. Begin to sense the weight as it moves off your center. As you become skillful at knowing where your mass is in space, you can relate to the weight of the limbs more and more clearly.

This is excellent for sensing timing, coordination, and balance. Wonderful for walking and unwinding the back.

Babies learn to roll by accident, through many tests and experiments. They clarify the use of the large muscles in the trunk to direct them through space to do what they want: mostly to get a toy, see something, or engage with the environment in some way.

If, when we first learned how to roll, we created some dysfunction in our relationship to gravity, we will feel this “over-correction” our whole lives until we cycle through our learning again so we can eliminate this feeling of effort.

You've seen people who are very controlled and rigid. They expend tremendous effort and conscious control to guide themselves through space. It's exhausting because nothing is happening naturally. It's all active, controlled muscular contraction.

Use this series to eliminate effort and feel balanced, safe, and efficient without a sense of having to over-control everything. Once you rely on sensory feedback for balance, the over-contracting and over-thinking subsides. Life gets easier. I know this for a fact.

More rolling and counterbalance lessons:

435 Spiral to stand tilting knees and spiraling arm, 40 min
436 Spiral to stand with rotating hoop arms, 34 min
437 Spiral to stand with reaching and leaning on elbow, 36 min
319 Initiation in rolling, 30 min
320 Roll to sit holding foot, 42 min
321 Advanced rolling to sit, 39 min
509 Integrate the leg into the spine, rolling by holding the knees (part 1 & 2), 31 & 28 min

A short video by a Feldenkrais practitioner demonstrating these principles.