Back to basics, the skeleton

A focus I have, as a somatic empathic practitioner, is the power and control through function. The lens or viewpoint is through functional movement, functional processing of information internally of the environment that stimulates action, reactions and expression.

This lens includes the past, present and future potential. It is also not exclusive to one function or another as my view is on the effects and potential for whole functional integration learned through social conditioning. The conditioning of the functioning movement, language process and relationships to emotions that are responses to thinking patterns and the felt senses that are spontaneous to actual experiences happening in the moment. The patterns I use are to retrain the brain through functional guidance that easily expands the conditions holding someone in a belief system constraining their potential for increasing mobility and flexibility. This includes the thinking constraints in functional movement or relationship interactions, internal or external.

A core function that is the power and control system of human function is breathing. This morning I have a workshop introducing movement patterns through the skeleton to expand the individual consciousness of each participant. They will all be starting from their own unique social conditioned experience. This suggests there isn’t a set pattern that will integrate a full range of functional movement that will be the exact same. Often, I will run into comments like, ‘that’s not the way I was taught in …………. ‘ You can fill in the blanks from your own experience. It seems other modalities focus on telling students that there is only one way you can breathe, meaning I hear it from those who have gone into agreement with that limited clarity of facilitators who believe what they are sharing with their students, until they themselves advance their functional body awareness of full mobility. Our social conditioning is such a right and wrong culture. I had a Pilates instructor participate as a student in a class, sit up from the lesson and began to have a disagreement. Four years later, they advertised the same workshop from my perspective and patterns. They were not ready to take in the patterns to explore and expand their consciousness at the time of my workshop, yet 100 percent believed they were right and I was wrong. This is a pattern that I now recognize as social conditioning. Each modality is locked into a belief system of right or wrong ways of functioning until challenged. Unfortunately, it’s also the instructor’s ability to integrate what they are hearing and how they interpret it that shifts the original clarity of the method and conforms it into a lesser consciousness.

This is on my mind as I enter the workshop today. I recently did a series on rolling with the ribs, and I ran into someone whose fear skyrocketed with the shift in how they were breathing. It interfered with an activity they had been doing that was locked in. The fear was so great and behaviour so locked in, they couldn’t be spontaneous. Instead of self-reflection to question their limiting belief to free up their fear, they believed any other movement patterns had to be wrong. They wanted to tell me that twenty years of practical application of Feldenkrais was wrong, as they had a Yoga instructor teach them that this was the way to breathe, and from what I heard is they believed it to be the only way in every activity. Breathing is life. Literally. There is no one way. It depends upon the activity. It also depends upon available skeletal movement function. This person was hyper-focused on the diaphragm and lacked internal felt sense, or image of the skeleton, nor the relationship to the other bones in the body that counterbalance the rib movements. Afterall, the diaphragm could not possibly counterbalance the weight of the skull nor support the mild fluctuations through the vertebra. Let’s get real here for a moment. So here’s my answer. Back to the basics and begin with the skeleton. That’s a joke, as that’s the only thing I do.

I will focus on the connection between the skull and pelvis, which is: the spine, rib cage, shoulder blades, breast bone and clavicles. I asked Ai for an image, and they can’t provide an accurate one. Even the earlier anatomy images are disappearing online and being replaced with terrible ones that aren’t necessarily correct. This is not a good sign for future learning.

Renee is a Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner – since 2007

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Copyright 2014 – 2025  Renee Lindstrom, GCFP,

Feldenkrais® Practitioner since 2007, Communication & Empathy Coach since 2004, Art of Placement since 2001