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.
What is available outside my door that could support sustaining life that is not being recognized?
This question became an important part of my personal exploration of nature, nourishment and the living environment.
A second question accompanied it:
How can I inspire an interest in others to explore their own food journey and connection to nature, both inside and out?
These inquiries did not begin as an organized food program. They emerged through a longstanding curiosity about our relationships with the world around us and the ways those relationships influence our daily experiences.
Over time, my home and office surroundings became a living environment for exploration.
I began paying closer attention to what was growing nearby, including native plants, introduced species, familiar garden plants and plants often dismissed as weeds.
Some offered possibilities for food. Others inspired explorations of natural dyes, flower essences, herbal preparations or simply a deeper understanding of the environment.
Not everything growing around us is edible or appropriate for medicinal use. Part of the exploration involves learning to recognize plants accurately, respect their ecological relationships and understand appropriate uses and safety considerations.
What interested me was not simply collecting information about plants.
It was recognizing what had previously escaped my attention.
Curiosity Through Lived Experience
My personal food explorations often begin without a particular outcome in mind.
An ingredient attracts my attention.
Something familiar suggests another possibility.
An experience with kefir inspires a new experiment, perhaps making kefir cheese or exploring whether it could become part of a cheesecake.
A seasonal plant, herb or flavour invites another discovery.
Sometimes I photograph these experiences and share them. I may reflect on the sensory qualities, the season, the nature connection or the chakra qualities I associate with an experience.
Some explorations turn out as I imagined. Others surprise me.
The enjoyment is in the exploration itself.
These personal discoveries are not intended as instructions that others must follow. They are examples of curiosity in action.
Sharing the Experience
I have found it useful to distinguish my spontaneous creative experience from the process of communicating it afterward.
A gentle pattern helps me organize a photograph or reflection into something others can follow:
Inspiration — What attracted my attention?
Exploration — What did I become curious enough to try?
Experience — What did I notice through my senses?
Connection — What relationship did I recognize with nourishment, nature, season, daily living or the chakra qualities?
Invitation — What might inspire someone else’s curiosity?
These are possible points for reflection, not five steps that must be followed whenever I prepare food.
The creative experience remains spontaneous. The structure simply helps me communicate what I discovered afterward.
This distinction is important to the educational intention of Food Inspires.
From Personal Exploration to Guided Learning
Food Inspires provides a different kind of structure.
My personal explorations demonstrate how curiosity participates in my daily life.
The educational program offers guided patterns through which others can begin recognizing their own relationships with nourishment, movement, rest, nature and everyday living.
The intention is not for participants to reproduce my food choices, interests or discoveries.
It is to create opportunities for their own curiosity and recognition.
The program begins with familiar experiences of daily rhythm, inner awareness, movement and nourishment. Later explorations introduce seasonal relationships, the qualities associated with the chakras, and deeper inquiries into embodied intention and lived function.
These experiences are connected through a central question:
How am I participating in creating balance in my daily life?
As this inquiry develops, nourishment becomes more than a choice about what to eat.
It becomes an opportunity to recognize relationships with ourselves, our community, the natural environment and the living systems that sustain us.
An Invitation
Food Inspires is not an invitation to adopt someone else’s relationship with food or nature.
It is an invitation to become curious about your own.
Perhaps that curiosity begins with a familiar ingredient, a favourite meal, something growing outside your door or the simple pleasure of preparing food.
Sometimes the smallest discovery opens an entirely new relationship with an ordinary experience.
What might you discover when you begin noticing what is already available?
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.
Creating Space for Conscious Recognition Through Lived Experience
By Renee Lindstrom founder of Inside Awareness Center of Integrative Somatic Learning
What becomes possible when we listen to another person’s experience without immediately interpreting it through our own?
This question has been part of my educational exploration, coaching and teaching for many years.
Through my work with somatic awareness, communication, relationships and the influences of our environment, I have been exploring how guided patterns of learning can support conscious recognition and expand our possibilities for participation in everyday life.
One particularly meaningful part of this exploration began through a sacred circle I hosted for four years.
The Experience of Empathy
The circle initially focused on Nonviolent Communication (NVC). I prepared the physical environment with intention, including an altar and arrangements traditionally associated with sacred gatherings.
Although our intention was to develop communication and connection, I began recognizing how readily interpretation entered our listening experiences.
During this period, I attended a residential learning gathering with Marshall Rosenberg, the founder of Nonviolent Communication.
Each day began and ended in a listening circle. Participants could express what was alive in them in the moment, while others listened. Throughout the day, Marshall offered opportunities for learning through direct interaction and stories drawn from lived experience.
As the days passed, I began sensing a deepening quality of empathy within the group.
It was not simply something being described or demonstrated. It was becoming recognizable through participation.
During personal interactions, I experienced Marshall’s capacity to listen with an attentiveness that allowed deeply painful experiences to be expressed without needing to be corrected, interpreted or immediately resolved.
That experience offered an important recognition.
Empathy could be experienced through the quality of listening itself.
When I returned to the circle I was hosting, the participants began recognizing a difference in how we were engaging. Over the following three years, our exploration moved increasingly toward the lived experience of empathy.
We were not simply learning what empathy meant. We were exploring what happened when we participated in it.
Recognizing the Environment of Listening
At the same time, I had been exploring the influences of environment through Feng Shui.
My understanding of environment was expanding beyond the arrangement of physical spaces.
I was recognizing that our surroundings include people, their words, the ways they engage with us, and the internal conversations we have with ourselves.
Our experiences are influenced by what surrounds us, what takes place within us, and the relationships between them.
Through my environmental studies, I had been exploring entrainment: how patterns and conditions within an environment may influence the experiences of those participating in it.
As my listening work developed, I began recognizing something related.
The listening pattern itself could hold the space.
The quality of the gathering did not depend entirely upon the arrangement of the room or the objects placed within it.
It could emerge through the shared intention, attention, listening and participation of the people present.
This opened another direction in my educational work.
Bringing Universal Values Into Lived Experience
I began recognizing that people could be familiar with the names of universal values without necessarily having an inner, experiential understanding of what those words meant to them.
A word such as respect, autonomy, kindness, consideration or belonging might be understood conceptually, yet not be consciously connected to a particular lived experience.
Without that personal connection, the value might not be readily available in someone’s inner dialogue or everyday responses.
I began introducing a guided pattern in which participants explored one universal value each week.
We gathered in a talking circle, with opportunities for each person to express their own understanding of the value through their lived experience.
The intention was not to establish one correct definition.
It was to invite participants to recognize where and how that value had been experienced in their lives.
As people listened to one another, they could encounter different expressions of the same value without needing to replace their own understanding.
The word could gradually become more meaningful through conscious recognition.
This was another way of integrating values into lived function.
Rather than expecting someone to demonstrate respect because they had been told what respect meant, the learning experience encouraged recognition of what respect actually felt like, how it was received, and how it might be expressed through one’s own actions.
When the Pattern Becomes the Environment
One experience during these gatherings brought another recognition.
A new participant suggested introducing candles and other ritual elements to give the gathering a more recognizable sacred quality.
I listened to the suggestion and began considering what was already happening within our circle.
Unlike my earlier sacred-circle gatherings, I had not arranged the room with ceremonial adornments. This was not intended to exclude ritual or diminish its value.
It simply wasn’t our focus of attention.
Our attention was directed toward listening, recognizing and expressing the meaning of universal values through lived experience.
As I listened to the suggestion, I recognized that something I had previously associated with the preparation of sacred space was already being experienced through our participation.
The quality of space we were seeking was becoming available within us and between us.
The talking circle itself offered a pattern through which presence, respect, consideration and connection could be experienced.
The experience did not require participants to adopt a spiritual or ceremonial interpretation.
I believe Marshall’s modelling of empathy influenced an important development in my understanding of the environment of listening. Through his presence and participation, I witnessed empathy becoming a lived experience rather than remaining a concept or technique. I had previously encountered profound qualities of presence through Tibetan Buddhist teachers, where devotion and spiritual practice provided an important context. With Marshall, I encountered something related through the ordinary human experience of being heard. I began recognizing that the qualities I had associated with sacred space could also emerge through the way people listened and participated together. This recognition later became increasingly visible in my own talking circles, where the pattern of listening itself began to provide the shared environment.
It emerged through how we listened, how we expressed ourselves and how we participated together.
This became another important relationship in my understanding of environment.
An environment can be influenced by physical arrangements, yet it can also be shaped by the patterns of attention and interaction taking place within it.
And through repeated lived experience, some of the qualities initially supported by an external environment may become more available within ourselves.
Returning to Listening
Recently, I hosted a gathering between two people experiencing different stages of regret and pain within their relationship.
The listening pattern I introduced was not new to my teaching or coaching practice. However, this particular experience helped me recognize its potential for more clearly organized educational programs.
The intention was not to negotiate an outcome, determine who was right or wrong, offer therapy or prescribe reconciliation.
It was to provide a shared environment in which both individuals could express their own experiences and have an opportunity to be heard.
The gathering revealed moments of recognition, emotional expression and greater understanding. It also revealed how easily established patterns of interpretation can return.
This contrast brought greater clarity to the distinction between listening to recognize another person’s experience and listening while preparing our own interpretation of it.
Interpretation is a natural part of human understanding. The invitation is not to eliminate it.
Rather, it is to recognize when our interpretation begins replacing our attention to what another person is actually communicating.
That recognition may create an opportunity to pause, become curious, clarify what we have heard and respond with greater awareness.
An Invitation to Listening
The accompanying diagram illustrates relationships that are present whenever two people communicate.
Listening to myself: Recognizing the sensations, emotions, memories, thoughts, interpretations and values arising within my own experience.
Listening to another: Allowing another person’s experience to be expressed without immediately correcting, analyzing or replacing it with my own.
Listening within relationship: Participating in a shared environment in which clarification, curiosity and reciprocal recognition become possible.
At the centre is Inside Awareness—recognizing what is happening within ourselves as we participate in an experience beyond ourselves.
The intention is not to teach someone the correct way to feel, think or respond.
It is to create conditions in which conscious recognition may become possible.
From Guided Patterns to Lived Function
These explorations have been part of my educational work across several subjects, including movement, communication, personal values and environmental awareness.
The learning environments may differ, but an underlying principle remains:
A guided pattern can direct attention without prescribing what the learner must discover.
In movement, we may explore unfamiliar possibilities through relationships with gravity, skeletal support and the surrounding environment.
In communication, we may explore unfamiliar possibilities by recognizing our inner experience while listening and responding to another person.
In both, the learning begins through participation.
I now see opportunities to organize these longstanding practices into listening programs suited to different environments, including personal reflection, families, educational settings, workplaces and community groups.
Each setting may require different considerations for safety, participation, clarity and consent.
The intention remains consistent.
The program does not prescribe reconciliation, agreement, therapy or resolution. Its purpose is to support a shared environment in which spontaneous recognition becomes possible.
At the heart of this exploration is an inquiry that continues to guide my work:
How do I remain myself while participating in relationship with someone whose experience may be different from mine?
Perhaps the possibility begins with recognizing that listening is more than receiving someone’s words.
It is also a lived experience of relationship—within ourselves, with one another, and with the environment we create through our participation.
An Invitation to Listening Guided Patterns of Learning for Lived Function
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.
