A while ago, a dear patron shared with me that he has returned to the lessons in my hip joint series on YouTube well over a hundred times.

In that same spirit, though on a much smaller scale, two days ago, @georgsgotwood4301 wrote:

been doing this four days in a row, doesn’t get boring, actually the opposite is true. I get a better feeling for the directions of movement through my body. Thanks, great stuff. Now i will go back to lifting heavy planks of wood from one place to the other.

I was thinking: Excellent! Most excellent strategy!  To stick with a lesson, to do it over and over again. Go deeper and deeper. Most excellent!

Students of classic Feldenkrais are usually presented with a new lesson every time they practice. This might seem like… listening to a new song every time we listen to a song, or picking up a new book every time we sit down to read a book. Small wonder many beginner students will complain: What’s the purpose of this? It’s confusing! What are the principles? There are too many lessons!

In the same spirit, but this time as a promise rather than a report, @raycaspio commented just yesterday:

Alfons – What sorcery is this?! Hips are more open. Throughout, I felt increased awareness and beautiful releases in my neck, upper back, mid-back, shoulders, lower jaw, and groin. My back began to feel wider and more rested on the floor. Excellent lesson I will return to often.

I love large, beautiful libraries, especially those housed in most magnificent architectural masterpieces. To marvel, browse, glance, taste, sample. To get a sense of what books are out there (and which topics are kept from ever appearing in the catalogue.) And eventually, to find a favourite book (or series) to return to again and again. Just as with a great painting, or piece of music, a good movement lesson holds enough detail and variation to entertain and reward us each time we move through it.

@anndyercervantes8352 commented just today:

Marvelous lesson! The variations are mind blowing. So much more integrated, so much more ease in my body. Thank you!

And to top off this blog post, like chocolate nibs on ice cream, two more (very recent) comments:

“Dear Alfons, what an amazing lesson! It gave me so much joy, pure and simple joy 😄🥳 What a discovery 🤩 Thanks a lot! ❤️” – @aleksandrasteczkowska31

“Thank you, Alfons, it is always a new world of walking after one of your somatic movement experiences!” – @OriginalArtOnCommission

All comments were on these lessons:

And also, holy smokes, did this blog post eat away on time:

A. For many days I’ve wanted to write a blog post. And now the plumber has to clear out the buildup in the sink trap – a chunky, irksome, rode-like bundle of what once was beautiful thoughts.

B. In the Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education, we go: movement experiment → observation → non-judgmental interpretation → suggested variations. However, most people seem to expect: problem → action → result → reward. I might need to adjust. Do I need to adjust?

C. In comes a teacher into the classroom… and starts to lay out random topics, of which some might be on the test. How many people live out their entire lives in a burned-in afterimage of those 10,000+ hours of schooling?

D. Someone wrote, “There’s more poetry written than ever, yet, nobody reads poetry anymore.” 500k views, 30k likes, 1,250 comments. Me thinks: THIS IS our modern poetry. Swipe up.

E. “But keep in mind that in the United States almost nobody who reads, writes, or does arithmetic gets much respect. We are a land of talkers; we pay talkers the most and admire talkers the most, following the public models of television and schoolteachers.” – John Taylor Gatto, Essay: The Psychopathic School, Book: Dumbing Us Down

F. Yet, I keep writing. When I should be talking. When should I be talking?

G. “And I say this to you tonight, let us not forget. There is hope!” – The Crystal Method, Song: Keep Hope Alive, Album: Keep Hope Alive

H. On my homepage I don’t have any user tracking. The skies are clear and I feel merry. But on Substack I can see that last month 2 out of 108 subscribers unsubscribed. Who abandoned me? I want to know. Unease keeps creeping into my thoughts.

I. I feel very optimistic about the horse in this Year of the Horse.

J. Thank you for reading. There’s nothing quite like walking into a clean kitchen in the morning.

I want to think about this here (that much I have figured out already):

What is the difference between movement learning and regular movement?

And so I was thinking: first I need to find out how to think about things, in this day and age.

You know, when I was a kid, I always had to walk from school back to our house. I was used to walk alone, which took anywhere from half an hour to several hours, and led me over poorly paved streets, passing by meadows, eerie houses and farmland, and through a good stretch of then beautiful forest, with a creek trickling down the mountain. In the first year of my walks there was even a few fish in that creek (I kept looking for them, but sadly, they seem to have disappeared forever.) At that time there was no mobile phones or iPod or such things. I had a bulky, plastic-y SONY Walkman, but this thing was notoriously out of battery, the headphones didn’t fit that great, and I had nothing to listen to anyways.

So I was walking six days a week, alone, submerged in nature, and my own thinking. That was a pretty good setup.

Looking back, I have designed three Feldenkrais-inspired rolling lessons in the past month:

All start in side-lying, and end in rolling, the third has yet to be filmed:

• Rolling by pushing-off/pressing against the floor.
• Rolling by curling-flexing/extending — curly rolls.
• Rolling by twisting upper/lower body — twisty rolls.

The challenge is naming the first variant. “Pushy rolls” would match, the image of thrusting, pushing-off, which is biomechanically accurate… but it feels off due to the negative social connotation of “being pushy.” I explore further:

• “Pressy rolls” is softer, but the metaphor of press (printing press, olive oil press, T-Shirt press) doesn’t match the thrust-off dynamic.
• “Rooty” from “rooting” is a recognisable word and often used in Yoga, but implies sinking/planting rather than pushing off.

Then I shifted toward everyday metaphors, like using a handrail of a chair to push oneself out of a chair. When this didn’t yield any results, I asked ChatGPT for material I could use for brainstorming: Scooty, Boosty, Nudgy, Hoisty, Prop-y.

• Scoot – feels rushed.
• Boost – appears in the word booster which is politically loaded.
• Prop-y – from propel. My thesaurus said: push/move forwards, move, set in motion, get moving; the action of driving or pushing forward.

Propel seems to fit the biomechanical reality, and it avoids the connotation of being “pushy.” And, when abbreviated, it even sounds a little bit like “proper.”

In conclusion, and to conclude the brainstorming coffee shop session from this morning, the emerging trio is:

• Prop-ly rolls (propel, push-off)
• Curly rolls (flex/extend)
• Twisty rolls (rotation/spiral)

In reality, I guess, “pushy rolls” might be the one that sticks… because it’s the most easy on the tongue — duh!

Yoga
mastering poses, breathwork, meditation, and philosophical systems

Pilates
cultivating control, strength, mat work, and equipment-based levels

Somatics
discovering spatial and sensory landmarks and their relationships

— or —

Yoga
practice of poses, breathwork, meditation, and philosophy

Pilates
practice of control, strength, mat and equipment progressions

Somatics
practice of sensing and mapping internal landmarks and relationships

with a 😊 by Alfons, YT@ImprovingAbility

p.s.: Somatics encompasses Feldenkrais, Hanna Somatics, Alexander Technique, Body-Mind Centering, and related practices that explore movement and sensory awareness.

I’ve just spent two hours on working a paragraph of Moshé Feldenkrais’s into something I could use for a Youtube Short. The text mingling felt rather effortless, annoying at times, but smooth sailing with a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a computer, but was quite some work nonetheless.

And thanks for nothing to GPT-5, which proofed to be useful only for grammar checking.

Title: The sensation of effort

1st slide:

• That light feeling when your hands glide like rays of light over piano keys.
• When your running stride flows.
• That crisp, perfect ping when you hit a golf ball just right.
• That feeling when your gear shift clicks perfectly into place.
• When your basketball shot rolls out perfectly, with no hesitation.
• When your singing voice hits the perfect resonance.

2nd slide:

• In truly skillful movement, work is being done, but the sensation of effort is absent.

3rd slide:

• In contrast, a sensation of effort signals that a movement is working against your body’s design;
• that a movement is inefficient enough to trigger a warning;
• is poorly distributed, badly timed, and wasting energy.

4th slide:

• Effort is a helpful signal if you act on it — and a troublesome one if you ignore it.

Source

Here’s the original text, Moshé Feldenkrais, The Potent Self, Chapter 12, Correct Posture, Section “Absence of effort”:

In good action, the sensation of effort is absent no matter what the actual expenditure of energy is. Much of our action is so poor that this assertion sounds utterly preposterous. It suffices, however, to observe a good judo man, an expert weight lifter, a figure-skating champion, a first-class acrobat, a great diva, an Arabian horseman, a skillful porter—in fact, anybody who has learned to perform correctly mental or bodily actions—in order to convince oneself that the sensation of effort is the subjective feeling of wasted movement. All inefficient action is accompanied by this sensation; it is a sign of incompetence. 

turn
bend
tilt

• Where?
• In the neck?
• At the base of the neck?
• In the chest?
• How much of the spine is involved?
• What is the spine?
• The shoulder-blades, what do they do?
• The clavicles?
• The ribs? Closer to each other on one side, wider on the other side.

twist
shift

A shift of weight – more onto one foot?
Less so on the other?

1. What do we look at?
2. What can we look at?

discover
explore
feel
sense
label
give names to movements, feelings, areas
compare

compare left to right,
one spinal vertebra to the next,
breathing,
tension,
ease,
availability.

verb-alise
adverb-alise
noun-alise
adjective-alise.

learn
invent
improve

Differentiate, divide it apart, let go, allow it to come together again…

It might be much better than before, it might feel great! :)