Learning to Ski with Awareness: Five Feldenkrais Method® Principles for Better Skiing

By Al Wadleigh, GCFP

Commentary and synthesis by Al Wadleigh, drawing from five articles by Jack Heggie

Article Summary

Jack Heggie approached skiing as a process of learning: when equipment or terrain changes, a skier must become able to feel what the familiar technique no longer solves. Drawing on five of his articles, this commentary follows his experiments with ski boots, posture, balance, bumps, and powder. Together, they show how moving slowly, comparing alternatives, and attending to the whole self can create the conditions for more adaptable skiing.

Editor’s Note

Jack Heggie originally developed these ideas in five separate articles: “Learning to Walk in Ski Boots,” “Good Posture and Good Skiing,” “Better Balance in Skiing,” “Skiing the Bumps,” and “Skiing the Powder.” This article brings them into one progression and adds my commentary about the learning process that connects them.

Jack’s words appear in clearly attributed excerpts. I have corrected obvious typographical and transcription errors while preserving his vocabulary, humor, examples, and substantive meaning. The introductions, transitions, interpretations, and conclusion are mine.

Some of Jack’s terminology and skiing descriptions reflect the period in which he wrote. His instructions are best understood as awareness experiments rather than universal prescriptions for ski technique. Choose terrain well within your ability, follow the rules of the ski area, and seek qualified instruction when appropriate.

Skiing Gives Us Immediate Feedback

A ski slope does not allow us to pretend for very long. If our weight is poorly organized, if our breathing stops, or if we stiffen at the sight of a bump, the mountain lets us know. The feedback is immediate, although the reason for the difficulty may remain hidden.

That is what makes Jack Heggie’s writing so interesting. He does not begin by listing the positions of an ideal skier. He watches what happens when a familiar solution fails, then makes the situation simple enough to study. He slows down. He reduces the challenge. He exaggerates one possibility and compares it with another. Only then does he return to skiing.

These are the learning principles we use in the Feldenkrais Method®. A Feldenkrais lesson creates conditions in which differences can be sensed. When the difference becomes clear, change does not have to depend entirely on correction or willpower. The person has more information from which to act.

Jack’s instruction keeps returning to the same move: make the situation simple enough that you can feel the difference.

Across these five articles, the conditions keep changing. First the boots alter ordinary walking. Then posture affects turning. The eyes and head participate in balance. Bumps provoke fear and stiffness. Powder makes hardpack habits unreliable. Each situation asks a different skiing question, while Jack’s approach to learning remains remarkably consistent.

1. Ski Boots: Let the Equipment Change the Organization

Most people think a ski lesson begins after the skis are on. Jack begins earlier, with the awkward walk from the lodge.

A ski boot changes the weight and mobility of the foot and ankle. A beginner often responds by trying to walk normally with this unfamiliar object attached to each leg. The result can feel clumsy because the rest of the body has not yet adapted to the change.

Jack asks the skier to study ordinary walking before putting on the boots. His attention goes to the relationship between the hip and shoulder, then to what happens when that relationship is exaggerated, prevented, and allowed to return.

Find a place where you can walk for several hundred feet in a straight line. As you walk along, focus your attention on your right foot and hip. Pay careful attention to the motion of the hip and try to decide exactly how the hip moves with respect to the rest of the body as the right foot steps forward.

After a little while walking, you should be able to notice that as the right foot steps forward, the right hip moves forward a little. The pelvis twists about a vertical axis in such a way that the right hip moves forward while the left hip moves back. Continue to walk along until you can clearly feel this hip motion.

When this movement becomes clear, focus your attention on your right shoulder and hip at the same time. Now try to determine exactly how the right shoulder moves with respect to the right hip as the right foot moves forward to take a step. After some more walking, you should be able to feel that as the right foot and hip move forward, the right shoulder moves backward.

When you feel this walking motion, try to exaggerate it. That is, as your right foot steps forward, consciously twist at the waist so that the right shoulder moves back and the right hip moves forward much more than they usually do. Continue to walk along like this, moving the right shoulder back and the right hip forward as the right foot steps forward. Then reverse the motion as the left foot steps forward and so on. The relative motion of the hips and shoulders will be larger and easier to feel.

Now try something different. Lock your shoulders in place so that they do not move relative to the hips as you walk. Now as the right foot steps forward, the entire right side of the body, the right hip and shoulder, will also swing forward. As the left foot steps forward, the left hip and shoulder will swing forward.

Now walk some more in your usual way and see if the motion of the right side of the body is clearer. Then continue walking, but now pay attention to the left side of your body. Try the above exercises again, this time focusing on the motion of the left hip and shoulder as the left foot steps forward. Finally, try to walk along and shift your attention from the left to the right side of your body and back again without interfering with the rhythm of your walk.

When you have played around with these exercises for a while and think that you have a good feeling for the hip/shoulder connection, put on your ski boots and try them again. As you do the exercises, try to feel how the added weight of the boots affects the shoulder motion. After you have spent some time with the exercises, try walking along without any special effort and see how much your walk has improved. Do not try to impose a particular motion on the shoulders, but rather let go of them. Let them move as they will. When this feels comfortable, put your hands in your pockets and continue walking. What does this do to the shoulder motion?

—Jack Heggie, “Learning to Walk in Ski Boots”

The sequence matters. Jack does not tell the skier what the shoulders must do and then ask for obedience. He makes the ordinary relationship easier to perceive, temporarily exaggerates it, removes it, and finally adds the boots. The skier has several experiences to compare.

Walking in ski boots is not merely preparation for reaching the lift. It offers a small and manageable example of the learning that skiing will require. New equipment changes one part of the situation, and the whole person must find a way to participate.

Jack eventually brings the lesson back to the parallel turn. A skier who thinks only about skis, feet, and knees may miss how the upper body participates. His concluding encouragement has the lightness that runs through much of his writing: when the relationship becomes comfortable, “the turn will come without effort, almost by itself. It’s quite a feeling.”

2. Posture: Learn to Feel the Difference

In “Good Posture and Good Skiing,” Jack begins by watching ski racers. Their organization is visible even when they are barely moving. On a catwalk where novice and expert travel at nearly the same speed, the difference can still be seen.

Jack describes the expert as sitting back with the torso straight and vertical. Contemporary instructors may use different language depending on equipment, terrain, speed, and the phase of a turn. I would not turn Jack’s description into a fixed rule. The more useful part of his article is the experiment that follows: can you feel how different configurations affect turning and breathing?

Here is one way to do this. The next time you go skiing, find a flat level spot and stand still, skis slightly apart. Remove your poles and place them on the ground. Now begin to slowly twist your body from left to right. Continue, letting your arms be carried from left to right and back by the shoulders. Repeat this many times, and as you move, fix your attention on the bottoms of your feet, and note how they move against the boot. Then move up to your ankles. Can you feel the ankles twisting a little inside the boots? Let your attention wander slowly up your body, through your calves, knees, thighs, hips, chest, neck and head. Try to feel if all the parts are moving easily with respect to each other, or if there are stiff areas.

By moving slowly and easily like this we can feel what’s happening in our bodies. When actually skiing, we are usually too concerned with the mechanics of staying upright to be able to continuously scan our bodies in this way.

Continue to twist easily left and right. Try to feel your hips turning with respect to your skis, your shoulders turning a little farther than your hips, and your head turning a little farther than your shoulders. What are your eyes doing? Let your eyes look easily to the left as you twist left, to the right when you twist right. Can you feel any change in your body when you involve your eyes in the motion?

When you have a good feeling for the turning motion, stop and bend forward a little, rounding your back. Bring your head down towards your knees a little. Try the turning movement now. There should be a clearly discernible increase in the effort required to turn. By exaggerating the faulty posture in this way it becomes easy to sense the difference in effort required to turn the body. How does it feel to breathe in this position?

Go back to your habitual stance and twist left and right a few times, then bend forward and twist some more. When you can clearly sense the difference in effort required to turn in the two positions, stand up straight. Continue to twist, and see if you can find a configuration of your body where the effort required to turn is even less than in your normal posture. To do this, try bending your knees a little more, then a little less. Lean forward as far as you can, then back as far as you can; try to arch your back a little, or change the position of your head, and so on. All the while, swing slowly left and right and scan your body as before. Make sure that you don’t hold your breath as you move.

When you have a good feeling for this motion, pick up your poles, and try to do it while moving slowly across the hill. By beginning slowly you can start to integrate your newly found awareness into your skiing. If you immediately head down the hill at full speed, your old habits will take over, and the exercise won’t work for you.

—Jack Heggie, “Good Posture and Good Skiing”

This is posture treated as a living relationship rather than a photograph. Jack bends forward on purpose. He changes the knees, the back, and the head. He notices the eyes and breathing. The aim is to discover which organization leaves turning more available.

That discovery cannot be replaced by the instruction to stand correctly. A person can imitate the appearance of a position while remaining unable to sense the effort required to maintain it. Jack wants the skier to know the difference from within.

3. Balance: The Eyes and Head Participate

Jack’s article “Better Balance in Skiing” uses the physiological language of tonic and self-righting mechanisms. Some of that terminology reflects the period in which he wrote, but the observation behind the article remains practical: balance involves relationships among the eyes, head, neck, spine, pelvis, legs, and the support beneath the skis.

He begins with an experiment away from the slope. Move your head gently from side to side while reading, and the words may remain available. Move the page instead, and reading becomes much harder. Jack uses that contrast to draw attention to the relationship between the movement of the head and the movement of the eyes.

On skis, he expands the comparison.

Before you begin skiing, put your skis on—but leave your poles aside—and find a flat spot on the slope. Slowly, begin twisting your whole body left and right. Make it an easy swinging motion. As you turn, let your attention go down to your feet, then move it up to your knees, hips, shoulders, head, and finally your eyes. As you move your attention up, try to feel that each part of your body is moving with respect to the other parts, that the hips are turning over the feet, the shoulders over the hips, the head over the shoulders, the eyes in the head (far enough so that you look behind you to the left and right as you swing your body). Continue turning left and right, but don’t strain; pay attention to the quality of the motion rather than the quantity. Let it be an easy twisting motion that goes on almost by itself.

Keep swinging left and right, but now shift all your weight to your left leg. Scan your body with your attention as before. Do you turn more or less easily like this? After a minute of this, shift your weight to your right leg as you swing. How is this different from your left leg? Finally, shift your weight to your left leg as you swing left and to your right leg as you swing right. Do this for a minute or so, then go back to the basic easy swinging motion you started with. Does this motion feel easier now?

Rest for a moment, and then begin to turn left and right again—but with this change: Fix your eyes on something at head level, right in front of you. Notice how this limits the motion of your head. The head can still turn left and right, but not nearly as far. Continue to do this and scan your body as before from foot to head. Does the fixing of the eyes change the body motion? Do you hold your breath?

As you swing, note what else you can see in your visual field without removing your eyes from the target. Try to pick out some objects on the extreme left and right, top and bottom, of your vision. The eyes should not turn, just the head, but you can still see other things—though without trying to make out the details. If you move slowly and easily, without strain, and pay very careful attention to yourself, you may be able to find a connection between your awareness of your peripheral visual field and the amount of effort required to turn your body. The effect is subtle, and not easy to feel, but it is there.

Now let your eyes be free and turn the body easily left and right as before. Notice how the turning radius of the body has increased. Can you feel what has changed in your body to cause this to happen?

Continue swinging left and right, and now make another change: Hold both the eyes and the head still in space and let the rest of your body continue to turn left and right. Holding the head and eyes fixed will limit the turning motion of the body considerably. Again, scan your body, noting all details. Notice your breathing and pay attention to your entire visual field. Think of your head and feet, which are still, while the rest of your body turns between them.

Continue this for a few minutes, until the motion feels easy, then release the head and eyes and let them swing left and right again. Notice how the turning radius has increased even more.

—Jack Heggie, “Better Balance in Skiing”

Jack does not ask the reader to accept an explanation and then perform the correct eye movement. He creates contrasts: weight on one leg and then the other, eyes fixed and then free, head fixed and then released. The skier can observe what changes elsewhere.

Balance is often discussed as though its purpose were to eliminate movement. On skis, balance depends upon continuous adjustment. Jack’s experiment makes some of those adjustments easier to notice before the skier moves onto a wide, easy slope and tries the same relationships while gliding slowly across it.

4. Bumps: Attention Changes What Becomes Possible

“Skiing the Bumps” is the most complete teaching story in the five articles. Jack’s friend Diana had received conventional instruction from an accomplished bump skier. She knew about facing down the fall line and bending the knees and hips. The information had not changed what happened when she pointed her skis downhill: she stiffened and lost control.

Jack did not give her a better description of technique. He changed the circumstances in which she was trying to learn.

Standing at the edge of the bumps, Diana told me that she had spent many an hour trying to imitate her husband’s style; when she pointed her skis down the fall line, the bumps started coming so fast that she lost control. The first trick, I told her, is to start off slowly. Then I asked Diana to begin by skiing across the bumps instead of straight down, so that she was moving only four or five miles per hour. At this speed, the bumps are not so hard to manage.

Even so, at first Diana didn’t do so well. She had been trying without success for so long that she didn’t believe that she could learn. When Diana reached the edge of the trail, I asked her to stop and do a kick turn while standing still. I didn’t want her to crash into a mogul trying to do a regular turn.

When Diana had turned around, I asked her to ski across the hill again, moving as slowly as she could. I had her repeat this routine of stopping, turning, and skiing slowly across the trail, over and over again, for about 20 minutes. At the end of that time, Diana suddenly realized that she wasn’t going to fall, and she loosened up a little.

Then I asked her to keep skiing across the hill, but to bend her knees and hips each time she went over a bump. Moving at such a slow speed, she was able to do this without much trouble. I watched as she bent her knees and hips at the top of each bump, and straightened them out in the troughs between the bumps. It didn’t take Diana too long to figure out that this was what accomplished bump skiers do—but much faster. Moving slowly like this, she was able to feel the rhythm of the bumps for the first time.

Next I asked Diana to reverse the motion of her knees and hips so that she bent them in the troughs and straightened them on top of the bumps. Although this is the wrong way to ski the bumps, Diana soon found that by practicing this way for a little while, and comparing the feeling of the two ways, the right way suddenly became easier.

Then I asked her to stand still on top of a bump, with her skis facing straight across the hill. In this position, only the center of the skis are on the snow, and the tips and tails are in the air. I asked her to close her eyes and slowly move forward until the tips of the skis touched the next mogul, and to open her eyes and stop as soon as she felt the tip touch.

I had her repeat this until she became so absorbed in the sensation of the ski tip touching the mogul that she forgot to be afraid. I could see her body begin to loosen up and start to move easily from one bump to the next. The less she thought about skiing, and the more she just felt what she was doing, the faster she improved.

I spent about an hour with Diana in the bumps that day, and I hardly ever spoke about technique, or the right way to ski. Instead, I just had her move slowly and easily, and feel how her knees and hips bent, and how the pressure changed on the bottoms of her feet as she went from the top of one mogul through the trough to the next one.

—Jack Heggie, “Skiing the Bumps”

This passage contains several features of Jack’s approach. He lowers the speed. He changes the direction across the slope. He asks Diana to compare an effective movement with its opposite. He gives her a sensation to attend to—the ski tip meeting the next mogul—rather than another instruction to perform correctly.

Most importantly, he recognizes that knowing what to do is different from being able to feel what one is doing. Diana had been trying to bend her knees. Jack later observed that many skiers moved the knee through space while keeping the joint itself fixed. Their intention and their action were not the same.

Jack had made the same discovery in himself:

One day, however, I decided to slow down, quit trying, and just feel what I was doing. It took me quite a while to discover that whenever I saw a bump coming toward me, I would hold my breath, clench my jaw, and stiffen my neck and spine. With my upper body still like this, my knees and hips couldn’t move either, so I didn’t stand a chance.

Looking back, I was amazed that I had been tightening up all of the muscles in my body and yet hadn’t felt what I was doing. I wondered how I could miss something that obvious for so long.

—Jack Heggie, “Skiing the Bumps”

The lesson concludes with Diana telling Jack that she had not been feeling what happened in her knees, hips, or the bottoms of her feet. Jack gives her the line that opens and closes his article: “Once you get your mind off what you are trying to do, the learning comes naturally.” Then she heads back toward the bumps with a smile.

5. Powder: When Familiar Habits Stop Working

Powder creates a different problem. The skier may already be competent. The familiar technique works on hardpack, so there is no reason to question it until the snow changes.

Jack’s first powder experience is funny because it is so recognizable. He does what has always worked. He falls. He tries it again and gets the same result. Only then does he begin to investigate.

The first time I tried to ski in powder was disastrous. I was a good intermediate-level skier who had learned to ski on hardpack. One fine day, after a fresh snowfall, I found an area at the side of the trail that the snowcats had missed; the untracked powder was about six inches deep.

I went into it, not moving very fast, and then tried to turn, using the same technique that I had always used on the hardpack. To my surprise, one ski shot out to the side, I lost my balance, and fell.

I got up, tried again, and fell again. A third time; same thing.

I got out of the powder, skied the rest of the way down on the hardpack, and did some thinking on the way back up the lift. It was obvious that my hardpack reflexes were not working in the powder. Each time I fell, the uphill ski had shot out to the side, as if some force had pulled it out. With my skis separated, I had no control and couldn’t remain upright. I’d never had that kind of fall when I was skiing on hardpack.

I decided to experiment a little. When I got off of the lift, I went back to the same place and began to ski slowly, along the edge of the powder. Gradually, I eased over into the powder, so that one ski, the left, was on the hardpack, and the right ski, which was uphill, was in the powder. Keeping most of my weight on the downhill ski, I raised the uphill ski a fraction of an inch and moved the tip a little to the right.

As soon as the tip of the right ski moved to the right, I felt that same force jerk the ski out to the side. But this time, I was moving slowly, and I still had some control from the left ski, still on the hardpack, so I managed to avoid a fall. I repeated this motion several times and gradually began to feel why the ski jerked to the side. When skiing on hardpack, the skis are on the snow, but when skiing in powder, the skis are in the snow.

Every time I lifted the ski that was in the powder and turned the tip out a little, the pressure of the snow against the inside of the ski pushed that ski away from the other, causing me to lose control and fall. This doesn’t happen on hardpack, of course, since there is no snow to push against the ski.

I continued to experiment, skiing with one ski in the powder, and one on the hardpack. Gradually, as I got a better feel for the way the powder was affecting my ski, I was able to control the motion of the ski with less effort. After two or three runs, I began to feel more confident and let both skis go into the powder. Then I skied along slowly, across the hill, without making any turns. As I skied through the powder, I slowly shifted my weight from one ski to the other and back again, over and over. As I did this, I could feel myself becoming more stable and confident. Then I tried leaning forward and back. This move is also different in powder, because the snow can grab your ski tips if your weight is too far forward. After an hour or so, I began to get some control.

Curiously enough, I couldn’t tell what I was doing differently to control the skis. It seemed that my body had learned something, though, and I wasn’t falling anymore. I had apparently learned a new set of reflexes.

—Jack Heggie, “Skiing the Powder”

Jack’s key decision is to work at the boundary between the known and the unknown: one ski remains on hardpack while the other enters powder. That arrangement gives him enough stability to study the force that had previously thrown him. He varies the position of one ski, shifts weight from side to side, and then explores forward and backward.

He cannot explain precisely what his body eventually does differently. The learning becomes apparent through the changed result. This does not make the process mysterious. Jack has supplied information through carefully graded experience until a new coordination can emerge.

The mountain gives immediate feedback, but awareness determines whether the skier can use it.

Better Skiing Begins With Better Questions

These five articles contain plenty of skiing advice, yet the advice is not their most enduring contribution. Equipment and technique change. Snow conditions differ. A description that helps one skier in one turn may confuse another skier somewhere else on the mountain.

Jack offers something more adaptable: a way to investigate.

When the boots make walking awkward, notice how the hips and shoulders participate. When posture feels uncertain, compare how different configurations affect turning and breathing. When balance becomes difficult, include the eyes and head in the exploration. When bumps provoke stiffness, reduce the speed until sensation becomes available again. When hardpack habits fail in powder, enter the unfamiliar conditions gradually enough to learn from them.

The common principle is awareness in the service of action. Awareness is not an abstract state and it is not a command to think about everything at once. Jack directs attention toward specific differences that matter in the situation: this leg and the other leg, eyes fixed and eyes free, knees bending one way and then the opposite way, one ski on hardpack and one in powder.

That is also one of the practical strengths of an Awareness Through Movement® lesson. The lesson does not teach a skier which angle to hold on a particular slope. It creates conditions for learning how different parts of the self participate, how effort spreads, and how another possibility might feel. A skier can then bring that improved ability to sense and compare back to the mountain.

Jack’s writing remains useful because he does not separate insight from experience. He lets us watch a skier fail, become curious, construct an experiment, and discover something that was unavailable while trying harder. His humor keeps the learning human. Sometimes the path to better skiing begins with eating a little fresh snow and becoming interested in why.

If you would like to explore this kind of learning away from the slope, begin with a free Feldenkrais® lesson. Move slowly, compare what you feel, and allow the experience to give you information that instructions alone cannot provide.

Originally written by Jack Heggie.
Edited, integrated, and expanded by Al Wadleigh, GCFP.

Source Essays

Heggie, Jack. Learning to Walk in Ski Boots.
Heggie, Jack. Good Posture and Good Skiing.
Heggie, Jack. Better Balance in Skiing.
Heggie, Jack. Skiing the Bumps.
Heggie, Jack. Skiing the Powder.