Josef Albers' Interaction of Color, written to help artists develop more sensitivity to color, could double as an Awareness Through Movement manual. Swap movement for color, brightness for effort, and seeing with feeling and you're feeding two birds with one grain.

“What does she mean, what do I like? It really breaks a mold in my head that I'm allowed to like, or that I have a preference.”

Does this resonate?

This excerpt from Rachel Cusk’s newest novel Second Place, reminds me of why awareness is a skill worth building:

I had no idea at all why things turned out the way they did, why I felt gorged with sensation at one minute and starved of it the next, where my loneliness or joy came from, which choices were beneficial and which deleterious to my health and happiness, why I did things I didn't want to do and couldn't do what I wanted. Least of all did I understand what freedom was and how I could attain it.

In Nancy Kline’s Time To Think, she outlines the components that create a Thinking Environment, the conditions that help one to think clearly and for oneself. The process has remarkable parallels to Feldenkrais’s Awareness Through Movement.

Apropos of spring and all the transitions therein, here's an excerpt from Natalie Goldberg’s chapter “Composting,” from Writing Down the Bones. "Our bodies are garbage heaps" is a bit strong, but, overall, I find composting a useful metaphor to draw on in your approach to Awareness Through Movement.

This passage from Clarice Lispector’s A Breath of Life seems so fitting for the discoveries you’re making in class. Some of you have found that it takes much more effort to move when you freeze different parts of yourself, or when you clench your jaw to move your leg, for example. This is what Feldenkrais calls parasitic effort.

Regarding a recent post-class comment about one’s “messy” internal experience during the lesson, here's a bit from Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, which I had read just the day before.

From the chapter fittingly titled, Perfectionism:

Besides, perfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness and life force...Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.

I found this note tucked inside Writing to Learn by William Zinsser, a book that I recently checked out from the library. The reader so beautifully synthesized the chapter in a way that has remarkable parallels to our work with the Feldenkrais Method:

When you begin to make connections
the subject—anything you’re learning becomes part of your world—
About you-connected to you