In the previous post in this series, I wrote about my first Feldenkrais class in Brooklyn in 1996, long before I started my practitioner’s training.
The instructor’s simple instructions quieted the noise in my head, and I was absorbed in the ebb and flow of rest and movement. The movements were so small and slow. I remember coming out of that darkened storefront feeling pleasantly puzzled, edged with mystery.
But I had no concept, then, what any of this might have to do with writing and language and story. I’d only discover an answer to this question years later — by accident.
At the time, I was a young playwright into yoga and writing jags; I wasn’t yet aware of some of the ingrained anxiety and competition that I would later come to see as ubiquitous in my community and my classrooms.
I’ve written before about how, eventually, I came to recognize and wrestle with the dysfunction that plagued the artistic circles I was part of. I was craving a way to access and even resolve the underlying blocks and anxieties that I saw all around me.
I knew I had to go back to the body in a rigorous way.
For years, I had been integrating somatic practices into my writing and teaching practice, and as a playwright and theater artist, I’d explored so many questions around the creative process. I’d already started investigating the overlap between language and the body.
So when I came back to Feldenkrais a decade after that first class, the parasympathetic-dominant learning that the practice invoked in my body felt like the missing link to a lot of long-standing questions.
It reminded me of the “beginner’s mind” concept from my meditation practice, but it felt infinitely more yielding — like a drop of ink on the veins of a leaf, it lit up old and new pathways of inquiry that I’d been immersed, and sometimes tangled, in for years in my creative work.
One of the most quoted of Feldenkrais’s statements is “I’m not interested in flexible bodies, I’m interested in flexible minds.” He imagined that the parasympathetic learning state could be applied far more broadly than the body — he imagined the limitless potential uses for embodied neuroplastic learning. Complexity, capacity, and maturity.
Feldenkrais worked with people in all kinds of professions — including performing artists, athletes, and scientists. But because he was so good at helping people with serious movement conditions, his legacy became focused on the physical applications of his work, which were often dramatic. It’s safe to say that it didn’t transfer as much as he would have wanted.
After my training, when I came back to New York and was teaching writing again, I started to make practical connections between the exercises I’d been teaching for decades and some of the Feldenkrais lessons I was bringing back with me. I would spontaneously ask students to do a movement lesson (when they were really not expecting one). Almost accidentally, this gave them time — gave their nervous systems time — to make the connections between their bodies and the ways they were expressing themselves in language that I’d always seen as elusive.
Through these early Brooklyn classes, I was discovering a forum to spontaneously bridge the deeper principles of the Feldenkrais lessons with writing exercises and storytelling in general.
And that’s what I’m sharing with you now, in the last sequence of this series.
We’ll be exploring this bridge — between the skilled, pre-verbal beginner’s learning state we once inhabited with ease to the complex, mature, authentic access to choice and artistry as writers.
