Tag Archives: Functional Movement

2026 innovative & heathy lifestyles Newsletter

Innovation

Here are some considerations for innovative and healthy choices if you long for ease in the natural flow through all nine lifestyle areas as we collectively shift into 2026. The interplay of life areas that Inside Awareness topics focus on are education, career, community, past, health, future, wealth, fame and relationships. Each of these life areas can be explored separately or combined with other life areas for advanced learning that increases clarity and wellness. An example is the Relationships life area and the Health life area. The topics in the Health Life area include communication, food awareness and functional movement. These topics would enhance relationships. Especially learning a language that enhances empathy and compassion. The nature of the topics that focus on learning through the somatic experience creates ease through their integration. This integration leads to clarity and attainment that is balanced throughout the nine life areas.

The topics have a focus on cultivating awareness through the somatic felt senses. It is an interesting shift of inner behaviour for many who have had universally dominant socially conditioned behavioural training where one size fits all, and that has eliminated the inner connections to unique individual sensory responses. Instead of cultivating conscious awareness and guidance on how to process somatically, the scientific approach emerged with a pattern of consciously dumbing down the somatic experience through evaluative expression and definition. The mainstream has not caught up to the shift in science, where society is not being trained in how to process the somatic felt senses and lead with them This leaves a large segment of society in the dark and vulnerable.

An example of a life area with topics that can be an individual focus of attention, or combined with others, is the health life area. These include:

  • somatic functional movement integration of the inner physical, emotional, mental and conscious awareness processes
  • foods for eating plans to increase brain and gut function
  • somatic communication patterns for developing healthy inner and outer vocabulary skills

Rather than gatekeeping, the founder of Inside Awareness Center for Integrative Somatic Learning shares patterns of learning that are organic and natural at birth. Patterns that everyone is entitled to relearn without jumping through hoops, or the labels model holders give them as gatekeepers to retain ownership over them. Luckily, one living non-gatekeeper was a model who didn’t hold the pattern of learning hostage as gatekeepers do. This was Dr. Marshall Rosenberg, the author and founder of Nonviolent Communication. He didn’t present as a gatekeeper. Another non-gatekeeper from history is Siddhartha Gautama. We all know him as the Buddha. He is a man who attained enlightenment through a pattern of self-introspection and learning through his experience. Did he give himself this title? He did become a teacher as others recognized a quality that they wanted to mimic in their experiences. Did he gatekeep? The same with Jesus. Did he give himself a title? He also demonstrated qualities others wanted to mimic. Did he gatekeep his experiences? Humanity learns through mimicking. Who introduced gatekeeping to higher knowledge?

The founder of the Inside Awareness Center for Integrative Somatic Learning is a somatic empath. A growing awareness emerged through self-focused learning to better understand the qualities of a somatic empath. This growing awareness was a realization that this natural learning state was being held hostage through the isolation and categorization upheld by gatekeepers. A separation of a natural experience was being presented in a way that was creating division and separation.  

The focus of Inside Awareness Center for Integrative Somatic Learning is on practical applications for living a creative lifestyle that incorporates early learning patterns into the dominant analytical focus to balance it out and create understanding in current behaviours that is dragging society down. Society is being dragged down by a gap in conscious awareness that is limiting mental, emotional and physical intelligence.


Knew News

Inside Awareness Center has joined with four new affiliate partnerships. Read more on these affiliates that have joined Richters Herbs as an affiliate partner. These are:

  • Richters Herbs
  • Energy Muse
  • Crystal Herbs
  • Wishgarden Herbs
  • Grooni Earthing

Look to the right upper side columns to view their specialty products from essences, tinctures, seeds, plants, dried herbs, crystals and frequency generators. Each picture is a link to the individual retailer. Be sure to check them out.


Learn more about 2026 for setting intentional goals

2026

Check out Inside Awareness fundraising Fire and Water goal-setting program to support

Somatic Educational Legacy Program


Intro to Evolution of the Nine Life Area Integrative Lifestyle Programming Menu at Inside Awareness

Check out some of the articles in the nine life areas that is the focus of learning here at the Inside Awareness center below. For ease in understanding the different life areas, these web pages are articles and information on this featured program. Each one can be an individual focus or, as mentioned previously, combined with others for increased connection to the interactive nature of these nine life areas.

New articles in each of the 9 life areas:

1. Knowledge

Divine Feminine

Western Integrated Feng Shui


2. Career


3. Community


4. Past


5. Health

Integrated Lifestyle Health Topics

Communication – Somatic Dialogue & Effective Listening


Eating & Food Integration for Function

Movement – Feldenkrais


6. Future

Children

Goals

Travel


7. Wealth


8. Fame


9. Relationships


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

Expansive body awareness of jaw, skull, vertebrae, clavicles, shoulder blades, ribs and shoulder joints through verbal guidance

by Renee Lindstrom, Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner,’07

Cultivting awareness through felt sense movement guidance

Before an Awareness through Movement workshop yesterday that had a focus on the jaw joints, I wrote a short blog post to put myself into the mindset of the intention for the upcoming lesson being introduced. I write spontaneously as though through some elusive inner direction. This simply means I do not have an outcome in mind when in free writing mode.

Arriving at the workshop space and while setting up the room, I was approached by someone ahead of time who inquired if this workshop would benefit them. They mentioned their jaw experiences that I was able to confirm it would be, all the while thanking whatever inspiration it was to have me free write on it before coming. It seems the statement from that post about creating a safe environment was going to be the dominant theme of the workshop! It was the intention, only I didn’t know it at the time of writing that statement. I did my best to create a deeper opportunity for the experience of safety so that the participants could release their habitual holding behaviour in their jaws they have patterned to protect themselves and their jaws. By this point, it is their protection!

I slowed my roll down (flow of words) and began to guide participants with more words than usual to give functional reassurance. Needless to say, it was a powerful workshop for many. I wondered partway through if everyone was benefitting, or not, due to the wordiness in the verbal guidance. Remember that the guidance is not focused on cognitive strategy thinking patterns. Rather, it is all practical micro movements, yet the focus is on the somatic senses. Basically, it is helping people to tap into their felt sense awareness using some of the five somatic senses we all have, yet ignore.

While I was focusing on creating a safe environment and the patterns, the participants did experience something as beneficial takeaways. I heard about this after that reassured me that everyone benefited from my decision to use words to support a deeper inner reassurance for them to test out the patterns I was talking them through. It was a reminder that Awareness through Movement is just that, ‘awareness.’ It is not rule-oriented, which shuts the door on one’s expanding conscious awareness, no matter what way you look at it. It is open exploration with a curious mind. That is what I heard as feedback. Many responses of how much people took in that they had no connection with before the workshop. That is what brings me joy. To hear the feedback that the participants discovered something new within, increasing their potential. It’s called self-discovery. In a nutshell, that’s what I facilitate, a practice of self-discovery.

For information on the next class series or workshop, hit link below.

Awareness through Movement link to Playlist on our learning center’s YouTube Channel:

Visit web pages dedicated to Awareness through Movement news posts, tips and articles link below

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Renee’s Podcast

Feldenkrais® Practitioner ’07, Communication & Empathy Coach , Art of Placement

The Somatic Archetypes in Functional Movement

by Renee Lindstrom, Author of The Somatic Archetypes – the Fantastic Five

Listen while reading, or listen to this companion audio

Somatic functional movement patterns, using the Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education, guide participants through patterns designed to refocus their attention away from pre-conditioned beliefs and pre-existing understanding of movement. In other words, what they already know. The patterns encourage exploration of movement by bringing their focus to their sensory awareness from the inside with these fantastic five core senses.

This picture demonstrates interpretive dance patterns of movement. The interpretation hints at sensing movement, yet the focus of the patterns these models are making could suggest they are focused outside themselves, versus from inside connections, as in contact dance. Functional Integration, and Awareness through Movement, the Feldenkrais Way focuses on the skeletal movements in connection to the contact with gravity and its responses through the joints that are unlocked and in a posture to invite gravity to travel through the whole skeleton. In the picture above, the models are not making solid contact with the floor to connect to the force of gravity moving up through their bones. It appears to me, as a Feldenkrais Practitioner specializing in this movement pattern, that they are using their soft tissue to support their weight.

When the skeleton is making full contact with gravity through the feet in standing, the sit bones in sitting, the hands in a posture of pushing off, or crawling on hands and knees, or in a prone position on the full skeleton on the front, back or side body on a hard surface the pressure thorugh the bones creates a weightlessness in the soft tissues in the body. The more one makes contact with gravity through skeletal movements, the more ease and freedom one has in their joints, vertebrae and ribs. This increases counter-balance and functional movement abilities.

The guidance patterns in the Feldenkrais Method use felt sensory words on the actual movement of the anatomy, with a focus on the potential for using the force of gravity. It is a powerful shift from analytical thinking that takes one out of a closed mindset function into the exploration of the experience itself, through the movements in connection with the force of gravity. The focus is on the felt sense of the bones and the discoveries through them to reconnect the body’s own elusive responsive connections to the intricacies of movement that are beyond the current comprehension of social conditioning. In essence, the movement is retraining the brain to expand and use more of the available functions in movement.

Why do I write reconnect?

When babies are born, they have the capabilities to use their full range of available learning potentials to guide them to come upright and participate in society. They do so without the educational encouragement of those surrounding them. Those surrounding do encourage them, yet they lack the understanding of how the function of the brain, body, felt senses, and mental is coming online to work in harmony that enables a baby to roll over, sit up, crawl, stand, walk and run while learning to speak and think. It is beyond the comprehension of the family members, as their own process was just that, a process. It wasn’t memorized, itemized or catalogued. It was learning through the experience.

With the focus of attention in society that seems to be focused on evaluative concepts and analytical statements, there has been a separation from the somatic patterns of functional learning that each of us was born with. When an adult speaks, it is through the evaluative expression of analytical thought patterns and statements that are far removed from the actual experience of functioning through the somatic experience. When speaking from an analytical perspective, it is a small interpretation of functional learning. It is like the difference between ballet and contact dance. One dance disconnects the artist from the ground and lacks the connection to the force of gravity, and the other pushes off the ground using the force of gravity. If you observe the two styles of dance separately, one stretches their muscles and holds their joints in a way that is different than the other. The contact dance method uses organic functional movement patterns. One dance appears to have effort with an intention to be interpreted as effortless, while the other one is effortless. This would describe the difference between mentally organized movement from strategies of thinking and spontaneous movement that includes all functioning components through the somatic felt sense as the origin. Basically, one is from the outside trying to define what can happen organically from the inside out.

The early learning patterns for movement are inherent within us as we are born. They evolve around the somatic senses of the fantastic five: sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. Each of the senses stimulate the others, and they are the inspiration to get up off the floor and walk, talk and become members of society. Each child will have one or two senses that will have the strongest response and will become the filter to the environmental stimuli surrounding them. I have begun to call these senses Somatic Archetypes.

I offer movement through group classes and individuals that support these dominant Somatic Archetypes in response to the guided patterns. These are called Awareness through Movement lessons that are group classes, and the other is a personal session or consultation called a Functional Integration.

Please investigate the classes and a personal session or consult:

Read more about the Fantastic Five Stomatic Archetypes:

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

The Mask

 

The Mask
tragicmask

 

 

Always a mask

Held in the slim hand whitely

Always she had a mask before her face —

 

Truly the wrist

Holding it lightly

Fitted the task:

Sometimes however

Was there a shiver,

fingertip quiver,

Ever so slightly —

Holding the mask?

 

For years and years and years I wondered

But dared not ask

And then —

I blundered,

Looked behind the mask,

To find

Nothing —

She had no face.

 

She had become

Merely a hand

Holding a mask

With grace.

Author unknown


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Renee Lindstrom, GCFP,
Feldenkrais® Practitioner since 2007, Value-Based Communication & Empathy Coach since 2004, Art of Placement  since 2000, Founder of Greater Victoria Peace & Intercultural Celebrations since 2010 & Greater Victoria Labyrinths since 2012, #yyj Peace Week Calendar Founder – 2014 & 2015