In Dialogue with Gravity

In Dialogue with Gravity: An encounter with the lightness of your movements

In our evolution, gravity has been a constant that shapes all our development. We cannot understand movement and human behavior without taking into account that we live in relationship with the forces of gravity.

From birth, we learn to roll, crawl, straighten our back or walk in interaction with gravity and the ground. As time passes, we adults come to feel that gravity is a force that crushes us, makes us heavy and hurts our back; the ground becomes hard and difficult to inhabit and we even feel the need to protect ourselves from it by hiding our feet inside all kinds of shoes.

As one of the basic concepts of his Method, Moshe Feldenkrais proposed to improve the efficiency of our actions by changing the way we organize ourselves within the gravitational field. Tension, pain, stiffness or fatigue are related to inefficient organization.

In the workshop “IN DIALOGUE WITH GRAVITY” we will work with different ATM lessons and some theoretical concepts that will allow you to:

• Replace effort with lightness and free yourself from the sensation of being heavy.
• Distribute your effort throughout your whole structure from head to toe.
• Organize your skeleton so that you can stand up with a long back.
• Activate the innate mechanisms that allow you to regain freedom and ease of movement.
• Improve the quality of your life by improving the quality of your movements.

“One day I felt that if I didn’t fight against gravity, I would feel free… and it’s time to share this experience with all of you.” Jaime Polanco

This course was a 2-day online seminar that we recorded in 2020, and it contains more than 6.5 hours of Feldenkrais group lessons (“ATMs”), talks, and LABs. When practicing this course at home with the videos, we recommend distributing the lessons over 2 or 3 days.

Content

1. Talk (Introduction) – 12 min.
2. ATM (Sit down and stand up without effort) – 65 min.
3. Talk (About previous ATM + Q/a) – 22 min.
4. Lecture (Revisiting the concept of ‘anti-gravity work’) – 25 min.
5. ATM (Push with the feet towards the head) – 78 min.
6. Talk (Questions, answers and experiences with last week’s lessons) – 18 min.
7. ATM (Push with the abdomen towards the head) – 81 min.
8. Talk (Questions and answers about the previous ATM) + LAB– 35 min.
9. ATM (Turning and rolling to reduce unnecessary effort) – 61 min.
10. Talk (Last question and Goodbyes) – 7 min.

Duration: 400 minutes