Guided Patterns of Learning for Lived Function
Renee Lindstrom | @insideawareness
This short video shares some of my ongoing explorations of transitional movement, counterbalance, and the relationship between skeletal support, gravity, and muscular effort.
The focus is on the ankle and foot joints and how movement changes when unnecessary muscular effort is reduced.
Rather than lifting and holding the body upright through muscular effort, the exploration begins with the relationship between the bones, joints, and the supporting floor.
As the knees bend and straighten, weight shifts through the feet. The ankles, heels, balls of the feet, and toe joints have opportunities to participate in subtle changes of balance. These small movements influence the organization of the knees, pelvis, spine, and head.
The inquiry is not about eliminating muscular activity. It is about discovering how muscles can participate without unnecessary holding or bracing.
As weight transfers through the skeletal structure, counterbalance becomes a changing relationship between the moving parts of the body and the supporting surface.
The head does not need to remain fixed in position while the body moves beneath it. Instead, it can follow the changing movement relationships through the spine.
In these explorations, the feet are leading and the rest of the body is responding.
Movement as a process of discovery
Over many years of guiding balance classes, I have observed that participants often arrive with limited awareness of the movement possibilities within their feet and ankles. Some experience numbness, restricted joint movement, or fear about their ability to support themselves.
Rather than beginning with an expectation that participants can already sense these relationships, the guided patterns introduce small opportunities for joint movement and changing skeletal support.
Through their own explorations, participants frequently discover sensations and movement possibilities they had not previously recognized.
They may say, “I didn’t know that,” or “I’ve never felt that before.”
The movement itself becomes an opportunity for developing felt sense, recognition, and trust in their own functional possibilities.
The intention behind these transitions
These are not fitness exercises or demonstrations of positions to achieve.
The interest is in the transitions themselves: the subtle movements through which weight shifts, joints articulate, muscles respond, and the skeleton reorganizes in relationship with gravity and the ground.
The larger muscles are still participating, but they need not always be leading through effort.
They can become quieter participants in an ongoing relationship of movement and support.
My inquiry continues to be how guided patterns of movement can make these relationships available for conscious discovery, particularly for people who have never considered their bodies from this perspective.
The intention is not to prescribe a correct movement, but to create opportunities for learning through one’s own lived experience.
An ongoing exploration influenced by the Feldenkrais Method® and developed through years of teaching, observation, and lived inquiry.
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Renee Lindstrom | @insideawareness
