This section addresses the following questions:

• I don’t really enjoy the Feldenkrais lessons. I find them hard to follow and so slow. I also often feel like I’m doing it wrong and don’t get it. Do you have any suggestions?
• This is boring! What’s the point?
• Is it possible that I find these lessons boring because I don’t have the capacity to be in my body? I get why I should be doing these lessons intellectually, but really struggle feeling the benefits when I do the lessons.
• I feel so sore after these lessons. Trying to make it easier seemed pretty impossible. Am I missing something?

Our culture is so fixated on performance, fixing problems, and getting things ‘right’ so that we can get good results, that this kind of Feldenkraisian learning can be very challenging for many people.  It’s important to remember with all Feldenkrais lessons that it’s not about doing the movement nearly as much as it is about how you pay attention to yourself while doing that movement. So what you may be resisting here is an attempt to slow down and pay attention to yourself in a way that feels quite foreign.

These lessons are about discovering HOW you do things; what are the thoughts that happen when you try and change something? What are the sensations? Emotions?

They are not about trying to get a result, though paradoxically what often happens is, if you can allow yourself to drop into this way of being, to slow down and really pay attention to your internal experience while doing external movements, you often will end up getting some pleasant results.

It’s also important to remember that Feldenkrais is very advanced rewiring work! It will be hard for anybody to do if there is still a lot of survival energy running through the body, so there are a couple options if you find yourself bored or checking out, or noticing nothing.

One, take some time to really internalize the purpose of these lessons. Read again everything I’ve written above, and see if you can re-approach the lessons with these understandings in mind. If you can do this, you may find you are already starting to notice things about your thoughts and feelings while engaging with these lessons. In this case those thoughts and feelings are ones of boredom or resistance, so okay! Notice that and keep practicing.

Two, leave the Feldenkrais lessons for a while and focus on repeating earlier lessons and integrating the basics, maybe seek some one-on-one support with a good practitioner, then try again in a few weeks.

If you feel sore afterwards when you didn’t before, then you are likely doing way too much movement. Remember, it’s not about the movement! It’s about how you pay attention to your internal experience. So you can make the movements VERY small — move just half an inch and come back, or you can simply imagine doing the movements, and notice your response to that. There is a lot of room for refinement with these lessons, and there should never be any feeling of straining or striving while doing them.