Ski: The center powers the legs

(Mobile users press “+” at upper right to see the menu.)

I should call this section, “How to get out of your own way to access your power.” All these lessons help you locate, feel, and clarify the connection of the legs to the center. I say they are for skiing, but anyone can benefit from a mobile trunk, swiveling pelvis, and swinging legs.

This lesson swivels the ball and socket joint of your hips, helping you to evenly distribute movement along the joints in the leg. As you continue to slide the foot and feel the position of the knee over the foot, the invitation is to move the pelvis, ribs, and spine to give support to the motion of the leg, allowing the movement of the whole leg to become one of your whole self.

Even though this lesson is in the skiing section, it is helpful to relieve hip tension, back pain, and even encourages upright sitting as the pelvis resets on top of the hips.

AY111

This lesson is similar-but-different to the first one. It continues the education of the ribs and spine to help power the legs, but you start in sitting to circle the foot on the floor, instead of on the back as in the previous lesson. Then you move to the belly to tilt and swivel the legs some more.

Both these lessons are an exercise in getting out of your own way and allowing movement in the ribs—yes, those elusive round things that protect your chest can MOVE. It’s amazing how wiggly they are. Can you imagine little babies? We can all be that wiggly, and it is that ease and fluidity that will transfer power through the trunk.

The more you activate the middle and take over the work of the legs, the more available the muscles of the legs become. This lesson might take some playing with until it clicks in and you think, “Ah-ha! I can move everywhere, I am wholly integrated and it is allowed to shift, bend, swivel, and turn!”

AY244

In this lesson, you are lying half on your side and half on your back. It asks you to initiate moving your limbs from a more proximal area—from your center. First, you feel how the upper trunk and lower trunk are over-working. Then, slowly, the middle starts to wake up.

I love how Feldenkrais lessons guide me to notice more and more until the logic of how to organize the muscles becomes obvious.

As Moshe says, this never happens by an external manipulation of the muscles, but rather from clarifying the image of action from the inside. Once you are clear on how to use the big muscles wrapped around your pelvis, you’ll never go back!

This lesson helps you differentiate the hip joints as well as connect from the feet through the spine to the head. As you invite more and more breath into the ribs in different positions, old tensions let go and your ribs and hips feel connected and powerful. The lesson also lets go of strain across the upper back.

It’s a yummy one that flattens out your back as you differentiate the ability of the pelvis to turn around the hips.

For more like this, see 43 Tilt knees, lengthen arms, and all the alternates listed there.

This is the Esalen version of flexors and extensors.

This lesson is a puzzle. To solve it, something in the chest and spine has to yield, soften, shift, or bend. You will start in sitting with the hands on either side of one leg, then swivel that foot to the other side of your hand. How does that happen? If you don’t access your ribs, the leg will feel tight or stuck.

The solution is not to stretch, but to find out how you can support the movement of the leg with your whole self. It’s a question of organization and intelligence, not of mechanics.

Eventually, you’ll be invited to organize the chest so that the legs can be free to shoot out in front of you, out to the side, and behind you. Play with the lesson, you’ll see what I mean. It’s very satisfying to feel all the ways your chest can move to support the legs.

If this lesson feels elusive, and it might, depending on how flexible your spine is at this moment, do one of the basic flexion lessons to reset the muscles along your spine, then come back to it.

AY377

This lessons clarifies the extensors of the back in relation to the hip flexors. Honestly, it helps with everything, including sitting upright in a chair, sitting easily on the floor with the legs long (this will be your reference movement) and swiveling the pelvis around the hips.

The movements are so non-habitual, they must be very small, like an inch or a millimeter. If you go too far or too fast, you miss the opportunity to find the “opposite movement with no opposing force.”

It’s marvelous when the movements come together. Don’t do it perfectly, just “muck about,” as Moshe would say. Make mistake after mistake after mistake, that’s how we learn.

AY241

This lesson is in sitting with the legs long. You reach forward and across yourself and feel how the knees, spine, chest, and pelvis do—or do not—respond. Just observe what you do at the beginning, then see how it changes by the end.

Much of our ability to swivel the pelvis comes from the ability to swivel the spine and ribs. You’ll feel this as you go through the movements. Feel how the whole self participates until the spine is more and more twisty. This lesson grows into a bigger movement, give it time to blossom!

AY358