Composing Experience

Living in Gravity DVD

Ralph Strauch — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 19:18:20 +0000

In the first post in this series on Being Grounded, I defined being grounded as a state of relaxed skeletal balance where the forces generated by the weight of your body pass cleanly through your skeleton into the ground, and supporting forces from the ground are transmitted back up through your skeleton. I’ve recently released [...]

More thoughts on Autonomy

Ralph Strauch — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 04:16:24 +0000

My previous post on Empowering Autonomy has generated interesting and worthwhile comments, pointing out areas where my meaning and sometimes my thinking were less clear than they could have been, or where I could usefully expand on something. These comments seem to bear out my earlier observation that we each understand the world through our [...]

Empowering Autonomy

Ralph Strauch — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 02:53:17 +0000

The Feldenkrais Method serves many purposes. It can help you learn to move more easily and fluidly, to lessen chronic pain and discomfort, to moderate limitations created by neurological damage, to perform better at many different tasks, to heal old emotional traumas, and to understand yourself and your ways of being in the world more [...]

Defining the Feldenkrais Method

Ralph Strauch — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 04:37:39 +0000

To explore issues around understanding the Feldenkrais Method we need some definition of what the Method consists of. I don’t believe a formal definition is feasible; instead I’m going to suggest somewhat loose and fluid boundaries to the territory that contains it. Not everyone will agree with my choices, and that is part of the problem [...]

Ways of knowing Feldenkrais

Ralph Strauch — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 20:19:55 +0000

For the past quarter-century I’ve been engaged in the practice of the Feldenkrais Method, a revolutionary approach to human development created by Moshe Feldenkrais, an Israeli physicist, engineer, and deep thinker about the nature of being human. Over that time the number of Feldenkrais practitioners has grown, from less than one hundred when I began to study [...]

The importance of pelvic flexibility

Ralph Strauch — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 04:37:21 +0000

The experience of being grounded comes from having a clear proprioceptive sense of the path of support from the ground beneath you through your feet. When your body weight is carried by a balanced, relaxed skeleton the supportive forces pass cleanly from one bone to next along the path, making that path of support relatively [...]

Which way is up?

Ralph Strauch — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 04:15:48 +0000

There are few questions in life more important than “Which way is up?” We joke about that, describing someone who doesn’t grasp what’s going on around him by saying “he doesn’t know which way is up.” The question, though, is one that you really do need to answer almost constantly, whenever you’re awake and upright. [...]

Pushing down is not being grounded

Ralph Strauch — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 05:57:51 +0000

Being grounded is a natural way of being — part of our human biological heritage honed by millions of years of evolution. And yet, in contemporary society, really being grounded is relatively rare. Being ungrounded is much more the norm. It’s part of a class of behaviors that I think of as pathologies of civilization [...]

Teaching “Composing Experience” in England

Ralph Strauch — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 18:17:43 +0000

In May 2008, I presented a five day Feldenkrais advanced training in Composing Experience in Devon, England. The Winter 2008 issue of Functional Information, the Feldenkrais Guild UK Newsletter, included an article on the training and participants’ reactions. A portion of that article is reproduced below. A description of the material presented in that workshop can [...]

The experience of being grounded

Ralph Strauch — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 04:02:36 +0000

Much is written about being grounded. A google search turns up more than 700,000 entries for the term. Some are about the kind of being grounded that happens to a child as a form of punishment, but most have to do with connection to the ground and its consequences. Some writers see it in terms [...]