My approach to Feng Shui is not primarily concerned with identifying what is right or wrong within an environment or prescribing corrections to its arrangement.
I am interested in exploring the influences of place on lived experience.
Every environment offers a particular arrangement of space, movement, relationships, sensory experiences, and possibilities for participation.
Through Embodied Feng Shui, I invite people to become curious about how they experience their surroundings, what they notice, what may have become familiar or overlooked, and how the environment relates to their intentions and everyday choices.
The nine life areas provide a framework for differentiating these relationships. They offer opportunities to explore where attention is directed, which aspects of life may be receiving greater emphasis, and which possibilities may not yet have been consciously recognized.
Rather than interpreting a home or property for someone, my intention is to support the person in recognizing their own relationship with place.
This approach shares a foundation with my work in functional movement and communication.
The intention is not to fix the person, correct the environment, or prescribe the right response. It is to make the relationship between them more available for conscious recognition and choice.
When we begin to recognize how we participate in our environments, we may discover new possibilities for organizing our spaces in ways that support our values, intentions, and lived experiences.
Over the past several days, I have been bringing together patterns of learning that have developed through many years of observation, teaching, personal exploration, and lived experience.
The accompanying diagram reflects an emerging integration of three areas of study that have been central to my educational work:
Nature and human nature through Feng Shui: exploring the relationships between people, their environments, and the nine life areas through which lived experience unfolds.
Inner and outer patterns of transitional movement: exploring how the body organizes itself in relationship with gravity, support, balance, movement, and changing circumstances.
Inner and outer patterns of listening and interpretation: exploring how information is received, sensed, interpreted, and expressed through inner language, communication, behaviour, and choice.
Although these areas have often been presented as separate educational subjects, I have increasingly recognized a common process connecting them.
How do we organize ourselves in response to our experiences, and how much of that organization is habitual rather than consciously recognized?
In functional movement education, a person may have developed familiar ways of shifting weight, finding support, or transitioning from one position to another. These patterns can become so automatic that other possibilities are no longer readily available.
The same question can be explored through inner language, listening, and communication.
A person may respond to a situation through a familiar interpretation without recognizing the process through which that interpretation arose. Their response may feel immediate, natural, or inevitable, even when another possibility exists.
The diagram introduces three interconnected dimensions of lived experience.
The inner process represents how an individual receives information, senses, interprets, and responds to experiences arising within themselves and from their environment.
The orientation of attention explores how particular values, intentions, and life areas may influence that processing, sometimes without conscious recognition.
The nine life areas offer a way to differentiate the contexts in which life unfolds, including Health, Relationships, Community, Career, Knowledge, Past, Future, Wealth, and Fame.
At the centre is a person in nature.
This placement is intentional. A person participates in the natural world and in relationships regardless of whether they consciously recognize the processes influencing their choices.
The nine life areas are not separate compartments of living. They are distinguishable orientations within an interconnected lived experience.
One or two areas may become so dominant that they influence how a person interprets and responds within many others. This may restrict available choices without the individual recognizing the underlying pattern.
The intention is not to establish equal attention to all nine areas or prescribe a correct way of living.
It is to make the organization of experience more available for conscious recognition.
This is also the foundation of Awareness Through Movement learning.
The learner does not have to reproduce the experience the teacher helped create. The learner can begin to recognize how learning happens within their own lived experience.
Through guided patterns, the learner is invited to notice familiar responses, differentiate the processes involved, explore variations, and discover possibilities that may not have been previously recognized.
This emerging educational focus brings movement, communication, inner listening, and life orientation into relationship without requiring them to become the same subject.
It is an exploration of the difference between habitual participation and conscious choice.
How am I participating in the process of my own experience, and can I discover another way?
Guided Patterns of Learning for Lived Function — A New Area of Exploration
How am I participating in the process of my own experience, and can I discover another way?
For many years, my attention has been drawn to the processes through which people organize their lived experiences.
Not simply what we think, say, feel, or do, but how we arrive at those thoughts, interpretations, responses, and actions.
This focus has been familiar to me throughout my life, although I have often found that the language available to describe it has not reflected what I was recognizing.
Through years of teaching functional movement, exploring communication, and listening to the experiences of others, I have continued to observe how early-learned patterns can become automatic ways of participating in life.
These patterns are not limited to physical movement. They are also expressed through inner language, listening, relationships, values, and the choices we recognize as available.
In movement education, I invite learners to notice how they shift their weight, how they organize themselves, and whether another movement possibility can be discovered.
I am now bringing that same educational attention more consciously into communication and inner language.
It is not only what we do. It is how we do it, what we notice while doing it, and whether another possibility becomes available.
One simple inquiry I would like to introduce in early childhood learning is:
“When I say this … this is what I mean …”
Imagine children having regular opportunities to recognize and express their own meaning, while adults learn to listen without immediately interpreting their experience for them.
Imagine learning environments where curiosity about a child’s process accompanies attention to their behaviour.
My hope is to develop guided patterns that nurture recognition, autonomy, inclusion, fairness, kindness, and reciprocal participation.
The early childhood material will become part of my Legacy Movement Educational Project, while related adult learning patterns will develop alongside it through Inside Awareness.
These are not intended as prescribed ways to think, feel, or communicate. They are invitations to explore how we participate in our own experience and discover a greater range of possibilities.
As autumn arrives, I am recognizing how several areas of my life’s work are beginning to come together within a familiar foundation.
Sensing myself. Sensing another. Discovering how to participate together.
For nearly twenty years, my exploration of balance has developed through teaching, observing, and listening to the unique ways individuals organize themselves in movement.
Throughout these years, I have become increasingly interested in the transitions between movements rather than the completion of individual exercises or postures.
How does the skeleton organize itself to transfer weight? What happens as we change direction, rotate, reach, or shift from one supporting leg to another? How can an awareness of gravity, skeletal support, and counterbalance offer new possibilities for movement with less unnecessary muscular effort?
These questions have gradually influenced the development of Guided Patterns of Learning for Lived Function.
More recently, I have begun recognizing something unexpected within my own spontaneous movement. As the relationships between skeletal support, rotation, and counterbalance become increasingly familiar, movement can begin to flow creatively, almost like a dance.
This expression is not intended to reproduce an established dance form, yoga posture, or tai chi sequence. Rather, recognizable shapes may emerge naturally through the exploration of functional movement relationships.
The accompanying diagram, Transitional Movement Patterns, introduces some of these possibilities through incremental illustrations of movement, including side-view skeletal relationships.
For participants in my Balance classes, these images may offer an alternative to remembering a list of exercises. They can become visual invitations to recognize how the body organizes itself through movement, allowing each person to explore within their own abilities and circumstances.
An additional direction is emerging through this work: the relationship between internal sensory awareness, the surrounding environment, and participation with others.
What happens to our spontaneous movement when another person enters our experience? How do our internal interpretations influence the way we move, respond, or choose to act?
These questions are beginning to connect the movement patterns with my developing explorations of inner language, listening, and conscious recognition.
I am also considering how these foundational movement relationships might be introduced in early childhood education, supporting opportunities to develop sensory awareness, movement choice, and participation in relationships from an early age.
This is an evolving exploration rather than a completed system.
My intention is to create accessible learning experiences that invite curiosity, encourage individual discovery, and support the integration of awareness into ordinary lived function.
The focus is not on achieving a particular movement. It is on discovering the relationships that make movement possible.
Feldenkrais®, Feldenkrais Method®, Awareness Through Movement®, and Functional Integration®, are registered service marks of North America. Feldenkrais Method®
by Renee Lindstrom, Founder – Inside Awareness Center for Integrative Somatic Learning
Autumn New Moon Inquiries
Septembers New Moon Was the Inquiry: What is calling me? Now In October the inquiry is:
Current position of the moon phases – September 25th, ’26
An Invitation to Walk with Awareness
No two life paths unfold in exactly the same way.
People may arrive at the same age having developed remarkably different ways of moving, relating, responding, choosing, caring for themselves, and participating in life. These differences do not appear all at once. A life path develops through an accumulation of experiences—circumstances encountered, responses learned, choices made, opportunities available, and patterns repeated over time.
Many of these influences become part of everyday living without being consciously noticed. What is repeated becomes familiar. What is familiar can become a lifestyle. And the lifestyle itself begins to influence how the continuing path is experienced.
This raises a different possibility:
What might change when awareness becomes part of how the path is walked?
Awareness does not tell us what our life path should be, nor does it guarantee where the path will lead. It can, however, help us recognize what is happening while we are living it.
A habitual response can become something we notice.
A reaction can become something we feel before acting upon it.
A familiar strategy can become something we question.
A choice can become more conscious.
The guided patterns offered through Inside Awareness are invitations to explore this possibility through lived experience. They bring attention to ordinary areas of living—movement, sensing, feeling, thinking, eating, communicating, relationships, home and environment—not as separate subjects, but as experiences through which awareness can be learned and integrated.
The intention is not to interpret your life path for you or prescribe how it should be walked.
It is to offer guided experiences that may help you become increasingly aware of how you are walking it.
Your life path continues to unfold.
The invitation is to be present for more of it.
A pattern of inner listening to the experience has emerged through my own life path that has shaped the awareness integration sessions and classes for a number of years. The organic connections that emerged have been put into guided patterns that will be available through boutique group learning in early 2027.
Inner Listening Pathway
This image below reflects an experiential pattern that spontaneously emerged through a shift in the orientation of interpretation. The pattern is one of inner listening that can actively transition from sitting into standing and walking. The pattern of inner listening creates balance and clarity without reacting or attaching to the stories, emotions and thoughts of others in ones relationships. The space becomes the gentle boundary between what others experience and how they responded for remaining centered and grounded creating choice. A choice to engage and how to respond sensibly.
Read more on Life Path Origins or if you are interested in exploring boutique group learning opportunities sign up for updates or like and subscribe for future news as it is posted
Lifestyle Opportunities for Lifepath Integration of Experiences
Embodying Relationship with Lived Experience in the Home
Foundation – Where living takes root
Home • Environment • Life Path
The home becomes a life path for the time one lives in it. This clarity has value as it brings awareness to how it stimulates your thoughts, emotions and actions. Most are considering colour design trends and locking into a long term experience, bypassing the listening stages for maximizing the potential influences in becoming a supporting and flourishing home. One that reflects the homeowners intentions and expectations.
The patterns of listening at Inside Awareness use natural patterns for balancing the interrelationships between the home and householders living within it. The intention is for a fuller life that is supported by a foundation that compliments ones hopes, dreams and intentions on their lifepath.
Listening to Universal Interconnected Qualities
These qualities of Yin and Yang are a focus in Traditional Feng Shui. Together in balance they reflect balance.
These same qualities are consideration that are reflected in in the Life Path & Living Expressions through relationships learning and coaching opportunities.
Recognize the seed pattern? Ancient gravitational rotational pattern. Explore Feldenkrais @ Monterey Center in #yyj’s Oak Bay or create your own boutique workshop or group lessons at home, work or organization. Living Functional topics could include, TMJ and Jaw Bone Function, Breathing through the Flexible Bone function, Walking through Flexible Bone Function, Sleeping with Bone Functional Awareness, Rolling into and out of Bed through Bone Functional Awareness, and more…..
New Fall Movement Classes
Signing up for #yyj Balance and A Fear of Falling still active – Monterey Center – 250-361-7508
October 31st, ’26 – #yyj Workshop – Breathe Easier with Feldenkrais – 250-361-7508
December 5th, ’26 – #yyj Workshop – TMJ – 250-361-7508
A focus of Harmonizing with food is to inspire lived relationships with eating plans that support inner and outer relationships with nature. These lived relationships are demonstrated in the diagram. Eating plans with a focus on the seven energy center colours was an plan to inspire the connection with food choices. The seven chakras life areas influenced by the chakras are shown in a gallery under it.
If you are interested in starting your Cultured Food Journey:
This slideshow demonstrates the body’s seven energy centers in alignment with their corresponding life area influences. Each picture shows a person transferring this into lived action by the figure coming into standing for a lived experience.
Embodiment before strategy is a learning pattern integrated into the program topics at Inside Awareness. Learn more about the lifestyle program topics.
With respect and gratitude, this work acknowledges the ground provided by the teachings and practices of Moshe Feldenkrais, Marshall Rosenberg, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and Dyan Grant Francis. Their contributions are honoured as part of the learning from which Inside Awareness continues to grow.
Feldenkrais®, Feldenkrais Method®, Awareness Through Movement®, and Functional Integration®, are registered service marks of the Feldenkrais Guild® of North
A pattern of inner listening to the experience has emerged through my own life path that has shaped the awareness integration sessions and classes for a number of years. The organic connections that emerged have been put into guided patterns that will be available through boutique group learning in early 2027.
Each human has a path forward that could be called their life path.
This path is influenced by experiences and choices. In turn, what has already been experienced and chosen influences how the present is encountered and how future possibilities are approached.
Much of a life path is walked without full awareness of where it is leading. Circumstances arise, we respond to them, and choices are made within them. Those choices become part of what shapes the next steps along the pathway.
Yet many of the influences shaping the path remain elusive. The walker’s attention is naturally drawn toward navigating what is immediately happening. Attention may become occupied with deciding what is right or wrong, solving problems, assigning blame, avoiding shame, or relying upon familiar strategies that have worked—or seemed to work—in the past.
Over time, these learned responses can become habitual ways of walking the path. New experiences may then be approached through patterns established by earlier ones. Attention can become absorbed in resolving the difficulties that arise, while the patterns influencing those difficulties remain largely unnoticed.
In this way, the patterns of one’s lifestyle become a core influence on the lived experience of the life path. They can be quiet, elusive, and outside conscious attention. What has become familiar may simply feel like the way life is.
What if the life path itself could become a place for cultivating awareness?
What if simple guided patterns could be integrated into ordinary life experiences—not to prescribe the path or determine where it should lead, but to make visible what has previously been elusive?
As patterns become recognizable, there is an opportunity to pause, sense what is present, and notice how an experience is being interpreted. What was once habitual can become available for inquiry.
Awareness creates the possibility for greater clarity.
And with greater clarity, choices along the life path can become more conscious.
The intention is not to interpret another person’s life path for them.
It is to cultivate the awareness through which they can begin to interpret their own.
Read initiation to Life Path in Octobers Newsletter
With respect and gratitude, this work acknowledges the ground provided by the teachings and practices of Moshe Feldenkrais, Marshall Rosenberg, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and Dyan Grant Francis. Their contributions are honoured as part of the learning from which Inside Awareness continues to grow.
by Renee Lindstrom, Founder – Inside Awareness Center for Integrative Somatic Learning
Energy of Abundance
The flow into fall begins and summers ease begins to fade.
Sensing
Money Path
When money is approached primarily through fear, analysis, and pursuit, it can become an external measure of security rather than something we feel capable of creating and receiving.
Developing trust in yourself can open a different relationship with money—one that is less influenced by old social conditioning and more connected to your own sense of possibility, resourcefulness, and abundance.
This does not mean being financially reckless. It means noticing the beliefs and habits that restrict your relationship with money and exploring what supports a more independent, grounded, and abundant way of creating financial well-being.
Nature demonstrates. The moon reminds. Awareness notices. Intention chooses. Life reveals what grows.
Long-distance bracelet that sends human-like touches, replicating the comfort of a loved one’s presence and bridging the distance between couples, friends, and family. The emotional gift to stay in touch with the ones you love. Link below to learn more:
Renee’s Educational Journey of the Labyrinth mirroring this historical evolution
beginning with introduction through dousing and walking meditation followed by the uncovering of the mathematical patterns in churches and community group sharing labyrinth values
Renee’s Educational Urban Gardening exploration and decisions
A choice to become a master gardener was blocked by a life event. The choice shifted to exploring urban foraging and healing gardens alongside one another with one foot in each category – it changed everything and reconnected a separation to the land I felt somatically yet couldn’t identify cognitively
Fall Detox to build Immune System
I do a detox a couple times of year with wormwood and black walnut. I have never digested it through a liquid and decided to try it for this summer transition into fall. The ingredients in the pic also are inclusions I had not experienced in combination. The berberine excites me as it is a plant tincture I use for infections. It comes from Oregon Grape roots, which is a common bush/shrub in our #yyjneighbourhoods. It is a good time to start this due to the immune system support it offers. Read more @ link below:
Embodiment before strategy is a learning pattern integrated into the program topics at Inside Awareness. Learn more about the lifestyle program topics.
Feldenkrais®, Feldenkrais Method®, Awareness Through Movement®, and Functional Integration®, are registered service marks of the Feldenkrais Guild® of North
