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.
Discovering a More Conscious Relationship with Nourishment and Daily Living
By Renee Lindstrom | Inside Awareness Guided Patterns of Learning for Lived Function
How am I participating in creating balance in my daily life?
The Infinity Flower reflects four interconnected aspects of lived experience—physical, mental, emotional and spirit/faith—with the “I” at the centre. It offers a simple invitation to explore nourishment, inner awareness and the relationships that shape daily life.
This question has become an invitation within my educational work, particularly when exploring our relationships with food, movement, rest and the living environment.
Food is essential to our lives, yet the experience of nourishment can become overshadowed by routines, responsibilities, dietary expectations and the many opinions about what we should or should not eat.
For some, eating becomes another task to complete in a busy day. For others, food becomes a subject of considerable planning, measurement and self-evaluation.
There are many valuable approaches to nutritional education. My interest through Food Inspires is to introduce another dimension of learning: becoming more consciously connected to our own lived experience of nourishment.
From Food Rules to Food Curiosity
What happens when our attention shifts from what we believe we should eat toward becoming curious about our relationship with food?
We might begin noticing what attracts our senses, what we enjoy preparing, how we experience meals, or the relationships between nourishment and our daily activities.
Perhaps inspiration arises through an unfamiliar ingredient, the scent of fresh herbs, a seasonal harvest or the discovery of a new way to prepare a familiar food.
A simple experience can invite curiosity.
Curiosity can lead to exploration.
Exploration may bring recognition of something we had not previously considered.
This is one of the foundations of Food Inspires.
The intention is not to replace nutritional understanding or individual health considerations. It is to expand our relationship with nourishment beyond instructions and expectations alone.
Nourishment and the Whole Person
My educational work has long explored the relationships between physical, mental, emotional and spirit/faith aspects of lived experience.
These are not isolated parts of ourselves.
Our physical experiences may influence how we feel and think. Our emotions and daily responsibilities may influence the attention we give to rest and nourishment. Our relationships with nature, community and personal values may shape what gives meaning to our experiences.
Food participates in all these relationships.
It supports physical function, but it can also offer opportunities for learning, pleasure, creativity, connection and appreciation.
A meal might nourish the body while inviting conversation, recalling a meaningful experience or connecting us with the season in which its ingredients were grown.
Through this wider perspective, nourishment becomes more than an individual food choice.
It becomes part of our participation in everyday life.
Listening to Our Lived Experience
Much of my work has been influenced by Feldenkrais movement education, where guided attention offers opportunities to recognize familiar habits and explore possibilities through direct experience.
Over the years, I have brought this orientation into communication, environmental awareness, personal values and daily living.
Rather than beginning with a prescribed answer, I invite curiosity about what is already happening.
This includes recognizing how expectations, learned beliefs, inner dialogue and familiar routines may influence our experiences.
The intention is not to judge these patterns or determine that they are right or wrong.
It is to become more conscious of them.
When something becomes recognizable, there may be an opportunity for another choice.
In Food Inspires, this same educational orientation is brought into our relationships with nourishment, daily activity and self-care.
Nature, Seasons and the Living Environment
My relationship with food has also been influenced by an interest in the natural environment and the changing seasons.
Living in the Pacific Northwest offers many opportunities to explore the relationships between locally available foods, plants, seasonal rhythms and the experience of preparing meals.
I enjoy experimenting with cultured foods, including kefir, as well as exploring ingredients and seasonal possibilities through curiosity rather than a need to become an accomplished cook.
Some experiments turn out beautifully. Others simply become part of the learning.
What matters to me is the experience of exploration and discovery.
Food offers an opportunity to recognize our participation in a much larger living environment.
The land, water, plants, growing seasons, people who produce food and communities in which we live all contribute to the nourishment available to us.
Becoming more conscious of these relationships can invite appreciation, curiosity and a different quality of engagement with everyday eating.
Making Room for Nourishment
Our relationship with food is also influenced by how we organize our days.
Do we make time for meals?
What space is available for rest, movement, preparation and enjoyment?
How do familiar responsibilities influence the attention we give to ourselves?
These inquiries bring nourishment into the wider experience of daily living.
Food Inspires is being developed through guided patterns of learning that explore these relationships in accessible stages.
The early experiences focus on daily awareness, comfortable movement, rest, sensory curiosity and our relationship with the whole self.
Further explorations introduce seasonal nourishment, symbolic qualities of lived experience, personal values and the relationship between inner awareness, intention and everyday action.
The purpose is not to prescribe what each participant must discover.
It is to create an educational environment in which recognition, curiosity and possibilities for conscious choice can develop through personal experience.
An Invitation to Discover
I have come to appreciate that meaningful changes in daily living do not always begin with greater effort.
Sometimes they begin with curiosity.
An experience becomes interesting. Something previously overlooked becomes recognizable. A familiar activity begins to offer a different possibility.
Food can become an invitation into that experience.
What might I discover when I begin exploring nourishment through curiosity rather than judgment?
And perhaps, through that exploration, another question becomes meaningful:
How am I participating in my own nourishment and balance?
These are the inquiries at the heart of Food Inspires.
Not a destination to achieve, but an invitation to explore a more conscious, enjoyable and personally meaningful relationship with nourishment and daily living.
Explore Food Inspires
Food Inspires is part of Guided Patterns of Learning for Lived Function through Inside Awareness.
The approach is being developed for individual coaching and experiential educational programs, with opportunities to explore nourishment, inner awareness, movement, seasonal relationships and self-care.
If this perspective interests you—whether for your own learning, professional curiosity or an educational group—I welcome your inquiry.
Food Inspires is part of a developing body of work through Inside Awareness that brings together nourishment, movement, rest, curiosity and self-reflection through lived experience. If you are interested in learning more about this approach, individual coaching, or future educational offerings, I welcome your inquiry.
Food Inspires is an experiential educational approach and does not replace individualized medical or nutritional care.
Contact Inside Awareness to ask about individual coaching, educational sessions or future Food Inspires programs.
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
Embodied Mindfulness approach to personal change
Here is a life style map diagram of the the focus of attention in the learning topics at Inside Awareness. The intention of lifestyle learning patterns are for Human Flourishing.
Human Flourishing
Flourishing is a state of living optimally, in deep fulfillment and ongoing personal growth, beyond basic survival or simple happiness. Flourishing encompasses a sense of purpose, rich relationships, physical health, and resilience to adapt to challenges
The body reveals.
The mind interprets.
Awareness connects the two.
Recent Lifestyle Articles:
Goals: 2027 Manifesting through intention first before solutions
3. Article on Relationships: The fractals creating the words expressed from the speaker you are listening to suggests need to take caution before going into agreement with their perspective …
Minimalist line art emphasizing embodiment before strategy
Embodied somatic action harmonizes with cognitive focused strategies and increases conscious connection to motivation. It leads to clarity of motivation before action. This pattern increases the potential for successful outcomes in all life areas, and reduces inner and outer conflicted states. Leading with strategies indoctrinates self and others and reduces innovation, motivation and spontaneous outcomes. Embodiment cultivates awareness and increases possibilities for higher outcomes and experiences.
Cognitive StrategiesVs Somatic Awareness
Strategies are cognitive based upon beliefs, while somatic processing is a learning path of awareness. A cognitive based belief system can stunt a person’s perspective by its nature as it has a focus of attention in one or two life areas only. For example, if a person is only focused on wealth and its attainment, every action will be strategic to meet that need. Generally, there will be a lack of mindfulness through the experience. The experience will lack the balance and harmony that is born from lived mindful awareness. Without this mindfulness there can be perpetual states of conflict, inside and out. Conflicted states fanned by the flames of seeking ways to increase wealth. This can influence every aspect of living as this conflict is expressed through emotional behaviour, expression and physical action. It can extend to every relationship that begins with critiquing through the lens of how to use others to their advantage in growing greediness. Strategy focused actions usually led to winners and losers. Strategies born from beliefs lack conscious awareness of the intent in the present moment. Beliefs are the past, yet they control the present, the future. This pattern can lead to extreme actions and statements for justification, with the last attempt feeding the next.
The process of mindfully connecting to one’s inner motivation before strategies increases conscious awareness. This process is more likely to grow beyond a single minded focus such as in this example, to become wealthy. The isolation that comes with self perceived status can expand into a state of thriving, instead of striving, through the increased range of information that comes with inclusion. Achievement will not be at the cost of people, places and things and instead include consideration for them. Those who are strategy first decision makers are not eliminating somatic experiences, they simply have no control over it. Their focus on power and control is strategic and is without the abilities of self regulation. How can one self regulate an experience they are cognitively ignoring? Being led by uncontrollable somatic experiences can lead to conflict and harm, of self and to others. They may lack the discernment for recognizing they are living in a cycle of going from one catastrophic experience to the next. Often overlapping.
Embodiment before strategy is a learning pattern integrated into the program topics at Inside Awareness. Learn more about the lifestyle program topics.
by Renee Lindstrom, founder Inside Awareness Center for Integrative Somatic Learning
This blog article below was written on this author’s personal website http://www.reneelindstrom.com recently. It is from a perspective of a somatic empath that carries the ability to identify the authentic somatic experience and the cognitive conceptualization that those not in their somatic experience believe it is. No judgement, simply a gap this author is bringing focus to. You can read this article by clicking the article link below or listen on You tube at link below it. I hope this content will be of interest in those sincerely interested in actively going beyond what they think they know from societies conditioning in accepting the stories attached to their mental, emotional and physical states of being. The first step to breaking free of acceptance to labels, assessments, and moral judgements, etc., is having clarity on the separation that supports it.
Below are two earlier articles from this authors personal web site on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs from an interesting perspective that may be interesting to read after digesting and integrating this perspective from a somatic empath. Understanding this first stage will support how society is perhaps being misguided by this lack of clarity by those who are seeking to meet their needs without compassion and empathy for others.
If you would like to connectto learn moreabout educational opportunities, coaching, mentoring , consulting or functional integrations
Feldenkrais®, Feldenkrais Method®, Awareness Through Movement®, and Functional Integration®, are registered service marks of the Feldenkrais Guild® of North America. Feldenkrais Method®
Copyrighted Property posted on Renee’s authentic accounts only:
by Renee Lindstrom, founder, Inside Awareness Center for Integrative Somatic Learning
Bus Stop Feng Shui
Announcing Feng Shui for function
….in first person…..I have just announced this focus on the topic page titled Awareness through Feng Shui.
Announcing a new integrative focus on Awareness through Feng Shui. Not a new focus my work as a practitioner, consultant and mentor, a new focus in Feng Shui and a newly differentiated topic on the Urban Feng Shui web site. Feng Shui is a program of one of the nine pillars at my learning center, Inside Awareness Center for Integrative Somatic Learning. It is a program in the Knowledge/Educational Life area for creative lifestyles. Feldenkrais is in a the pillar area of Health with a focus of attention on functional integration that originates with the skeleton in postural transitions… I have differentiated the life areas life activities fall under for increased integrations, understanding and increased mindfulness. This differentiation increases intellectual clarity through enhanced mindfulness. Watch these web pages if this topic interests you as there will be a new and interesting perspective on design and health. The relief is it will not be from the marketing perspective of advertising furniture will a lack of understanding the skeletal needs for optimized functional movement.
