Make 2020 the Year of Reaching for An Excellent Life!

3 Steps to Unlimited Learning

A Simple, Do It Yourself Process to improve the Quality of your life!

What’s the most rewarding work you can do? Attain mastery and skill:  when you learn to master the process of learning easily, so that you can apply it to whatever you want. Reach for the stars!

Time to reset your thermostat! You’ve already become aware Step One, which is to notice that limitations seem to be creeping in as the years go by. But what can you do about it?

The range of what you do every day over years sets your unconscious thermostat, meaning it creates a set-point for what is “normal” for you. But when you consider the difference between the range of moves that children make, and the range of moves that adults make, it becomes clear that the sheer diversity of things we do in a day diminishes as we move into adulthood. From childhood to young adulthood, you are expected to expose yourself to new situations which always promote new learning. As an adult, however, most people contract in terms of what they expose themselves to, if only because most work environments are repetitive.

What happens when we stick to a routine? Some things get easier, it’s true. Those are the kinds of things that we need to be able to do without thinking. But just like it’s good to do the dishes and clear out the cupboard once in a while to inventory what’s useful and what’s not, you need to do the same thing with yourself at least once a year. This allows you to make sure you are doing what you intend, what is most fun, and what feeds your soul as well as your wallet.

For example, in the hurry and scurry of life, it’s easy to forget that we work to live well, not the other way around…How can a movement class such as Awareness Through Movement (ATM) improve Quality of Life (QOL)? It’s an opportunity to check inside, to assess if you are living with as much freedom as you would like. Movement is just the canvass for learning. It’s just a very concrete way to learn the process of ATM which allows you to assess, improve and refine anything you wish to learn.

Some might say that it’s better to focus on helping others than on yourself, but if you allow yourself to get depleted, it becomes a catch 22 situation. When your life has become a series of choices that diminish your options out of habit, rather than expanding your range of options, you become more and more stiff, sore and irritable over time. This is a sure-fire way to land in a state of burnout. In that state, no one has anything much to offer when it comes to being of service to others…

When you don’t take time out periodically to renew, to refresh, to assess, it leads to a life lived on autopilot. This is like making NO decision to take care of your own wellbeing. The consequences of making no decision to alter things or to look at what and how you do things is that your self-image of what is possible for you either remains static or diminishes over the years. Because whether you are conscious of doing so or not, you HAVE made a decision about what you can and cannot do, about what’s possible for you. Think about some of the things you used to do that you miss, but somehow don't even consider doing now! When you take the time to reassess, you don't loose so much of yourself along the way.

To enter into this process of resetting your internal Thermostat of what you assume is possible for you, take a brief trip back to beginner’s mind.To enter into the process, have the humility to get comfortable with being uncomfortable for a short period of time while you are exposing yourself to new understandings. This is a pre-requisite for any kind of learning.

If you want to expand your limitations, it’s as simple as being willing to do what you ask any high school student, or any student to do, for that matter: be willing to sit in the momentary discomfort of not-knowing, trusting that the discomfort will go away quickly as the learning is initiated, as understanding dawns.

Understanding is actually a very rewarding feeling and satisfying in its own right. But what’s really rewarding is mastery and skill: learning to master the process of learning easily, so that you can apply it to whatever you want.

The Steps of Unlimited Learning:

1. Awareness - of a limit to understanding (be it how to move more freely after injury - or in any other realm – as mentioned earlier, movement is used in ATM because it is more concrete than ideas. Movement offers a topic to practice with that yields concrete results: you feel the improvement in your body. You feel lighter, more grounded, more secure. Your mind also participates. It calms itself through focus on movement, which is much easier than focusing on not thinking the way mindfulness meditation stipulates! You slip easily into a state of receptivity: which makes fun, love, inspiration and spontaneity much more openly accessible.
2. Differentiation - is the act of noticing a difference between what works, and what does not work, instead of mindlessly doing things one way because that's what you always do...This is done by exploring different ways of completing the task, whatever it might be. The best learning happens in an environment that is safe, comfortable and without pressure. Then, when you do the task under pressure, it’s easy, because you have allowed some time for it to become habitual on some level, requiring much less thought to accomplish than ever before.
3. Processing Time: is the key element that allows the brain to make sense of the data, or the experience you present it with, so that it can assimilate the new into the already known. This is where the neuro-plasticity of the brain takes over, but it must be given that time and quiet to work quickly and easily. The biggest mistake people make when teaching or learning is to just cram in as much information as possible as if the goal was to just get it over with. This actually impedes learning because it kills the requisite time-out for assimilation. 

Thus, the process of Unlimited Learning is superior to random learning that is done without understanding how the brain works. Unlimited learning evolves from an awareness of a need, to a curiosity about how something could be done differently, to a willingness to sit temporarily with not-knowing, while trusting the process. From this place of opening, the mind will run over options automatically, because the mind runs through open questions until it finds some explanation or solution. When you add awareness to the mix as you try new options and new possible ways to do something, an easier way is found more quickly. It is assimilated more easily and with fewer repetitions. It quickly becomes part of the unconscious repertoire of known skills or understandings.

Find a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement Class near Medford, Oregon:

ATM classes meet on Tuesdays in Jacksonville. Classes resume on January 7th, 2020.

In only a few lessons, you can discover a whole new world of enjoyment: a process that allows you to learn from your own experience. You can learn to tune in, to refine, to hone the perfection of your own pitch-perfect ability to discover new ways to access ease, comfort, freedom and joy!

What Is Integration?

Learning Without Trauma





The foundation of an integrated structure provides stability, and is an even, regular pattern that is solid and pleasing to the eye...


I have just come back from a long ride in the desert. As the miles fly by, the pieces of my life seem to fall into place of their own volition. But it has been a long time coming. That's one of the characteristics of integration. It happens in due course, when the time is right and not before. It happens as a result of work that has been done in advance, like the percolation of yeast that sometimes must be kneaded heavily and then left to rest before it can later rise in the oven of a willing consciousness.

The brain is like a topographical map with areas designated to provide sensory and motor function for specific skills, yet it's living, ever changing according to what we spend our time doing. If we do the same things over and over again, we tend to have less change in the way our brains function and some activities tend to fall away over time if not pursued. We all know that stimulus is what generates intelligence in babies. We have yet to realize the implications of the new research that proves the same is true for adults...FELDENKRAIS works with this principle of the extreme adaptability of the brain to experience.*

Any FELDENKRAIS lesson also works with the fact that it's often in silence, or in rest that the pieces fall into place. It's a concrete way of feeling the difference between not integrated and integrated. Not integrated feels vague, unsure, chaotic, sometimes frustrating. In movement, it looks disjointed to the outside viewer, like the uncoordinated walk of the toddler. Once integrated, it looks like a smooth, even pattern. It feels delicious, comforting, pleasurable.

There are many aspects of human experience, some seem at times to conflict. This is a lack of integration. Integration happens at a different pace for different kinds of intelligence (emotional, numerical, spatial, linguistic or survival skills just to name a few). Ideally, as we grow from child to adult, our ability to manage our emotions becomes more coordinated even as our ability to move in space or to survive in the world becomes more effective. Often, however, these different intelligences grow at different rates. Hence the experience we have all had of meeting people who seem old beyond their years, or others who seem incredibly immature, considering their age.

For myself, I have my own difficulties with being congruent: in Europe I feel very American, it oozes out of my pores. In America, sometimes people wonder if I am European, there's just something slightly different about me. It's not necessarily a problem, just a place where I am rough around the edges. A slight conflict that is more at odds with my well-being is that sometimes the workaholic in me takes over, sometimes the sloth, although I have not seen much of the sloth in recent years...

Yet, thankfully, being alive is more complex than how we behave, there's the little detail of what motivates us to behave that way. Having spent most of the beginning of my life as the sloth, there may be a part of me that is overcompensating. This is a problem for me, knowing what I do about how the brain works, and how all systems of the body require rhythms of rest and action in equal proportions. Yet, the drive to keep going is strong, it's motives unconscious.

These are the pieces that must fall into place. When I am not clear about what I am doing, the result is bound to be failure. When I am not clear about why I am doing it, I loose momentum like a car running out of gas. Often the deeper layers of why are hidden in subconscious decisions made long ago in moments of emotional upheaval. The stories I tell myself about what my life has been about are clues to these hidden motives. Often these stories, when laid out in the light of day are tinged with judgment.

In rolling on the floor, doing FELDENKRAIS lessons in AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT, I learn to practice the art of non-judgment. I learn to give myself a helping hand, to be the silent witness. This skill is transferable from observing movement of the physical, to observing behavior, thought processes and motivations. It's one of the most gentle, non-intrusive ways to allow integration to happen of it's own volition. It allows self-correction motivated by awareness of incongruity. It allows me to streamline my convoluted consciousness without force or trauma.

These lessons are a place to practice the skills that feed me inside and out. They are a place to practice integration in a very real setting: I can feel the changes almost immediately when things fall into place. I have time to notice it and I have created the opportunity to grow from it. This is worth taking the time for. In the rest of my life, it allows me to move along what I consider to be the culmination of a life well-lived: to move in the direction of integrating all the various intelligences I possess in varying degrees. As a practitioner, I am good at the movement part of the equation, but I still have plenty of areas to transfer these skills to. I am happy to make it a lifelong journey; it makes life entertaining, juicy, plenty interesting without tragedy, thank you.

I change as a result of being present rather than being pummeled by experiences that prove my lack of coordination. I gracefully lay down the baseball bat. I have learned from the drama. I have learned the greatest of all lessons: that the drama is not necessary. I can learn without it.


* See The Brain That Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge, M.D. (Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science)