I’m getting to know my pelvis and lumbar spine in a delicious, new way.

My personal Feldenkrais Method practice is movement meditation; serving to calm my nervous system as I explore.

My pelvis is my movement engine; the powerhouse behind everything I do.

I have known that in theory and somewhat in practice for a long time.

My practice has changed.

The first step was clarifying my movement and my intention.

What do I want/intend to do?

What am I doing?

What’s the difference?

How does it feel?

Am I struggling?

Why?

Is it that I don’t fully understand the movement?

Or am I putting effort in the wrong place?

Do I need to use this amount of effort? Really?

For me, learning when the degree to which my pelvis needs to act as engine as I move was a beginning.

Next, am I using my pelvis in such a way that allows it to be different as I move?

There are movements that ask my pelvis to be mobile and there is a myriad of ways in which my pelvis can be mobile.

Fast.Slow.Sharp.Smooth.Soft.Hard.Giggly.Wiggly.Clear.Fuzzy.Lopsided.Vibratory…

When movements ask stability of my pelvis, what sort of stability?

Must it be “held” – locked in place so that everything else around it can move?

Fluid stability? Standing on one foot and always being ready to change direction.

Flexible stability? Allowing me to fold to the floor and unfold back onto my feet.

While there is an extended menu of ways in which my pelvis can be in my movement, one constant is that it is attached to my spine – always.

It also attaches to my legs through my hip joints.

It is this relationship that has most noticeably changed.

It is not necessarily where most of the change has taken place.

As a result of this daily practice, I am virtually pain free and more easily mobile than I have been in 6 or 7 years.

My biggest lessons so far (not that I’ve mastered them at all; the path is just unfolding):

-I put more effort than I need into most movement.

-In order to truly be able to be aware, movement has to slow down

-Most of what I’ve come to see as “just the way I am” is not and it’s changeable.

-There is a significant relationship between my hips joints and my thoracic spine. This piece of information is still a bit fuzzy. I can only catch glimpses – of understanding and of sensation. What is clear is that when the conditions were present for my thoracic spine to change, the most noticeable “response” was in my hip joints. There is possibly more than I’m not yet aware of.

The last of these lessons:

-Language and Sensation

There is so much to be felt for which there is no language.

It is not always that what we feel is not known or understood; it is that we don’t have the language to speak what we feel. We are so much more than our minds (for clarity, “mind” and “brain” are not interchangeable terms here). Much of our learning takes place below conscious awareness suggesting that we have a veritable ocean of information simmering and waiting to arrive to us when it’s time.