In this wonderfully optimistic interview, Designer Bruce Mau talks about the failures of approaching problems and solutions as singular tasks. The movement equivalent of this way of thinking is to strengthen a weak shoulder or to stretch a tight one. This may lead to temporary change, but it doesn’t change how the shoulder functions.

The spiral is a fitting image for the process of Awareness Through Movement. You revisit some actions and questions many times. But each time, you’re in a different physical, mental, or emotional place so you find something different: a connection or a sensation you hadn’t noticed before. I hear evidence of the spiral when someone says, “Today for the first time, I….” what follows is usually a word like “felt,” “understood,” “found.”

When you tune into the sensations and qualities of what you’re doing instead of just following instructions, you catch things as soon as they feel off and you can adjust how you move. You’re able to sense what is safe for you and what isn’t. You know when you’re approaching your limits and you stop before you reach them, thus avoiding injury. And you’re able to reproduce the results you get in class on your own time, thereby building your sense of agency.

…if one looks long enough at almost anything, looks with absolute attention at a flower, a stone, the bark of a tree, grass, snow, a cloud, something like a revelation takes place. Something is “given”…

I find this comment by painter Agnes Martin so Feldenkraisy and so moving. This is from the documentary, With My Back to the World, on Kanopy, but there are also plenty of interviews on youtube if you’re interested in learning more about her.

“Art is…always on its way, too complicated to be a noun and ineffectively contained in form.”We, too, are always on our way. With no ‘ending’ to our learning. Our bodies (and feelings!) change from one day—sometimes one moment—to the next, preventing any tidy arrival at a perfect understanding or perfect and permanent comfort.

Jay Griffiths’ A Sideways Look at Time is full of poetic examples the world over in which time is animate and “characterized rather than counted.” There are places where early evening is considered “cattle-dust-time,” and where January and November are known as the months of “Snow Crust” and “Slender Wind” respectively.

Jay DeFeo began her most iconic painting, The Rose, in 1958. She worked on the painting everyday for EIGHT YEARS! She built up and scraped back the layers over and over and stayed with it through many different phases and titles. What started out as a large canvas slowly transformed into an 11 feet tall, 8 feet wide, 11 inches thick hybrid between painting and sculpture.

What does a 2,000 pound artwork have to do with Feldenkrais? Like a single day’s worth of brush strokes, it can be hard to value the small changes you experience after a session—more perception in your feet, or more length in your spine, for example. But as with DeFeo’s Rose, the small changes accumulate over time and lead to meaningful shifts in your experience. When you move with greater ease, your presence changes. You feel it and others around you do, too.

The challenge with developing good habits is maintenance. Toward that end, I will do my best to create classes you want to attend rather than have to. I will help you to value your small changes and understand what to do with them. When you show up again and again with DeFeo-like devotion, the small shifts become seismic.

“We actually have a very malleable relationship with time,” Danish poet Inger Christensen writes in her essay The Shadow of Night from the collection The Condition of Secrecy. “We can move in and out of it as we like, can shorten or lengthen it to suit us… We can do everything by the clock or we can follow our own rhythms and only occasionally check to see what time it is.”

Yassas! My classes are on pause this month while I’m in Greece co-teaching a Cleaning the House workshop for artist Marina Abramović.

In the workshop, participants hand over their technology and fast in silence for several days while doing exercises that Abramović developed over several decades: sorting grains of rice, walking in slow motion, looking at one object, all for hours at a stretch. The point? To confront one’s limits and to strip away distractions so that we bring our full presence to everything we do. In her work as an artist, she’s found: