Qi-Essensuality* – Feldenkrais for Fine-Tuning Your Senses

Feldenkrais Training for Enhancing & Fine-Tuning All Your Senses

Upcoming Summer School

Coming To Our Full Senses

July 17th – 21st 

&  24th – 28th

2 – 3.30pm BST  ~  9 – 10.30 EDT
NB: the class will be an hour earlier on Tuesdays

£180 (full fee) – £120 is the early bird fee AND the low income discount fee.

People still refer casually to humans having five senses – seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling…

…but current science suggests we have a minimum of 9 and as many as 21, with some of the more extreme suggestions going as high as 33 or even 54. As with much of the science of complex systems, it is mainly a matter of where we insert a division in order to make a distinction.

I thought it would make sense to distinguish five sensory processes that can be influenced directly by Feldenkrais Awareness sensory-motor training strategies – the original five exteroceptive senses, plus the kinaesthetic, proprioceptive, interoceptive, and “neuroceptive” sensory systems.

Photo by Alex Alvarez on Unsplash

Feldenkrais is a form of self-development practice, as is mindfulness meditation, and many elements of these two practices overlap and enhance each other.

For those of us with chronic pains, muscular tensions, stresses, anxieties, sleep problems, chronic respiratory issues, or who are simply feel blocked by our own habits of thought and behaviour, the more bodymindful aspects of The Feldenkrais Method can be the most effective way to create the long lasting changes that generate ongoing cumulative improvements to our sense of physical and mental well-being. Anyone who, like myself, has found themselves reliant on medications for chronic health conditions knows that being forced to rely on drugs that work by interfering with our normal immune system functioning may be very helpful in the short term, but are rarely the best answer in the long term. Gabor Maté is one of the many modern ‘heretics’ who has pointed out that most of the medications that we are using to manage chronic health conditions work by inhibiting our stress responses, and much of the challenge to the dominant pharmacological paradigm is coming from medical professionals who are similarly frustrated as they can clearly see how ineffective this approach is for the long-term well-being of their patients.

Becoming your own neuro-feedback device…

Naturally as scientific investigations of meditative techniques are proving their value, there are people looking to offer us faster routes to ‘inner peace’. Obviously this is to some extent a good thing, however the current emphasis on expensive gadgets for enhancing our nervous system’s ability to self-monitor and self-regulate is outsourcing abilities we all have the potential to access and develop naturally and directly through our own senses, and one of the advantages of learning to enhance your own natural sense-abilities in this way is that you may begin to feel better straight away, long before you have actually mastered the skills you are practising, which is a boon for those of us who cannot easily afford to invest in high quality equipment that may take a while for us to master.

This course is designed to develop this process into an effective practice, with the advantage of being performable anywhere, in any position, for any available length of time.

You will be learning to enhance:
…your sensory awareness
…your muscular awareness
…your skeletal awareness
…your interoceptive/’neuroceptive’* awareness, and…
…your ability to focus your attention simultaneously on both your internal and external sensory awareness.

*Neuroception overlaps with interoception and could easily be defined as one aspect of it. Dr Stephen Porges invented this term to highlight the aspect of our internal self-sensing abilities that is focussed on sensing danger, an aspect of our sensory experience that can become permanently switched on after some kinds of traumatic experience. He intended it to clarify our understanding of the role of human interaction and social engagement in the healthy functioning of the mammalian nervous system.

You will learn to develop the elements of Feldenkrais Awareness training that overlap with self-hypnosis (AKA auto-suggestion), with meditative practises, and with the internal self-organisation and skeletal alignment necessary for improving Qi and Chakra (energy centre) work – and on top of all that it will also be good fun!

I have a lot of material to share, and, unlike classic Awareness Through Movement training, we will be exploring sequences with the intention of developing an individually-tailored daily practice, however one with all the flexibilities of the Feldenkrais process built in – ideal if you find meditating difficult; nourishing and stimulating if you find meditating easy.

You will need to book with me directly to get the Zoom link, and a recorded version of the lesson is included in the fee. Bookings are by email, or via my contact page.

This will be a very practical course and you will receive notes and supporting materials to help you maintain the improvements you experience from this immersive Awareness Through Movement experience.

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