Dear Students and Friends,
As we plan for the coming new year, this is a good time to gently look inward and get more in touch with our personal landscape, inner and outer. This simple (though perhaps not easy) act will greatly strengthen our ability to move forward with our planning and our plans.
Oddly, the great reward of this process, increased self-awareness, is a personal attribute that most of us think we already have and don't really need. This response, however, actually shows how little we see ourselves, how we don't spend enough time or effort paying attention to our inner workings. When we do, we see clearly how much of our lives we spend in autopilot mode.
Imagine the possibilities! What would our lives be like if we had more frequent, deeper, clearer and genuine self-awareness? A thrilling idea...
Ironically, if I can't see or sense myself with accuracy (and without judgment), I won't see what I lack, how I really am, and how much time I am not present. Nor will I be motivated to undertake a real exploration of what greater awareness can mean for the fabric of my life, my relationships, my feeling of self, my ability to create, perform, produce, love, and to live fully.
Thus the first step to making progress is to sense/see that I am more disconnected from myself and the world around me than I think. That I use only a fraction of my 12 billion brain cells. And if I wish to embark on change, I need to begin to learn to pay more attention to how I am: what I do with myself, what my habits are, physically, mentally, emotionally. And how my autopilot mode directs about 95% of my life and LETS me think I am actually present, when in fact, I am not.
Below, my December article in Healthy Beginnings Magazine, lays out some preliminary groundwork to begin this process. I hope you find it helpful and inspiring for the New Year. It is something that can measurably improve the quality of your life and wellbeing -- it costs nothing, and requires no new equipment, except hooking up and accessing the stuff you already have, i.e., your brain and your body!
Relative to 'hooking up,' remember that Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement classes start again the week of January 7, 2019. The first class will be on Tuesday, Jan. 8, at noon, at 250 Bell St. My contact info is below if you have questions or would like to schedule time to talk.
Meanwhile, be happy, move well and make comfort a true priority. That's when we learn best!
With warm wishes, Carole
Embracing self-awareness – what does it take to make a difference?
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Tabor Griswold, program director for the UNR School of Medicine’s Nevada Health Workforce Research Center, participates in a Reno Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movements class. Photo: Carole Bucher
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Self-Awareness as a Personal Strength - Part 2
As a personal empowerment skill, experts agree there’s nothing more critical than self-awareness. Yet habit, ego, social pressures and even too few neural pathways prevent people from working on it consciously. They usually resort to it only when facing an inescapable need for change in themselves or their environment.
Below are certain qualities that self-awareness is known to improve. These characteristics accelerate personal growth, improve relationships with family and friends, and increase your ability to contribute effectively to community on every level, even politically. See what resonates:
- Being proactive instead of reactive — make better choices in what you say and do.
- Becoming more neutral in discussions — listen more carefully.
- Developing healthy boundaries — take things less personally.
- Understanding that mistakes (yours and others) are necessary to grow and learn.
- Transforming judgment into curiosity — be more interested in everything.
- Learning what makes you ‘tick’ so you can see yourself and others with more humanity, as thinking, feeling, conscious beings.
If these possibilities inspire you to explore, let’s deconstruct how lack of awareness can derail your possibilities; create negative, inauthentic behaviors; and generally disempower you. It goes like this:
- Thoughts arise out of the blue (based on what you see/hear, your associations, memories, insights, even intuition).
- Thoughts produce emotional responses that you are often not aware of.
- Emotional responses can be felt/sensed in your body as physical feelings.
- These feelings/sensations can evoke actions or reactions that you may carry out, consciously or unconsciously.
E.g., you see something that reminds you of a sad or violent movie; you get depressed or angry without noticing, argue with your colleagues or spouse, or worse, completely misunderstand someone’s behavior because you’re lost in an imaginary place having NOTHING to do with reality. You might even get into a physical fight based on “nothing,” although you think you’re right. Serious uh oh! Our thoughts aren’t trustworthy!
However, when you learn to feel more deeply in your body, you can pause and self-inquire, use the physical feelings as reminders to check in with yourself, and test the validity of your conclusions or judgments before you say or do anything.
You can track the physical and emotional feelings back to your thoughts and stop getting lost or dragged down an emotional rabbit-hole where distortion happens and bad choices loom. You can discover and assess the emotions underneath your reactions.
You’ll see that your perceptions are sometimes off base and/or disconnected from reality, especially about other people. Or, you may validate your perceptions. But you’ll avoid inaccurate conclusions and misunderstandings, large and small, because you are deciphering the feelings in your body intelligently.
The biggest, most mysterious benefit from self-awareness is your connection to the innate wisdom of your nervous system. Here, doors open to better physical, mental and emotional health. You get along better in the world, understand more, are less fearful and negative — an empowering payoff for your work.
Commit to learn about yourself — body and mind — and watch the transformation in your life — your gift to yourself and the world! Wishing you a wonderfully moving holiday!
Carole Bucher, BA, is a Guild-Certified Feldenkrais practitioner/teacher and owner of Reno Feldenkrais Integrative Movement. Visit renofeldenkrais.blogspot.com to learn more.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, USE THE CONTACT FORM AT THE TOP RIGHT OF THIS PAGE.
We worked deeply and quietly with the eyes, jaw and pelvis, and coordinated taking the knees right and left. In the middle of class we got up and walked a bit to sense what had changed on the side we had just worked on -- and the experience was phenomenal. The entire right side had stabilized and organized in a way that was exponentially beyond what it seemed we had done. BALANCE was profoundly affected, meaning the work went deep into the organization of body via the work with eyes and jaw, the nervous system.
There are more than 2000 Feldenkrais® Awareness Through Movement® lessons, each meticulously designed to address particular areas of the body and function, using self-awareness during non-habitual, mindful movement. Of these, about 750 were developed by Dr. Feldenkrais himself. The balance are extensions or variations developed by his small group of students, early students who worked and trained directly with Dr. Feldenkrais, and others who completed the 1000+ hr Feldenkrais professional training after Feldenkrais' death in 1984.
