Focusing your Touch

Your eyes take in a tremendous amount of information. You use only a small fraction of that information, selectively filtering and attending to what seems important to your current functioning. Your tactile and proprioceptive systems also provide much more information than you actually use. You selectively filter that information as well, though perhaps less well than you filter visual information because you are less conscious of using it.

As a Feldenkrais Practitioner, the quality of your Functional Integration^® depends heavily on how you use tactile and proprioceptive information. This audio workshop will help you learn to focus your tactile/proprioceptive awareness and attention more consciously, to enhance your Functional Integration. You will feel the positive difference that this can make in the quality of the Functional Integration experience, and so will your clients.

Topics Include:

• Consciously focusing your attention where it serves you best, irrespective of where you are touching your client. Exploring different questions with the same movement by changing your focus of attention.
• The nature of the cultural agreement which creates the collective illusion we call reality and ways we create unnecessary limitation within that agreement. The distinction between pushing on and moving with your client, and the difference it makes in the resulting experience.
• The perception of a pattern as more than the relationship between isolated parts. Using the perception of pattern in Functional Integration. Enlarging the pattern you work with to encompass yourself as well as your client, and working with the conjoined system that results.
• Discussion of treatment and exploration as tools for facilitating change. The role of exploration in Functional Integration and the practice of the Feldenkrais Method^® as an exercise in not-knowing.

Program Contents

Part 1

1. Introduction – 1:41
2. Controlling your focus – 14:11
   
3. Controlling focus (cont.) – 11:30
4. Pushing and moving – 7:03
5. Functional Integration practice – 9:41
6. Creating limitation – 7:16
7. Moving with vs pushing against – 9:06
8. The perceptual shift – 5:38
9. A different reality – 0:38

Part 2

1. Perceiving pattern – 10:44
2. Pattern in Functional Integration – 13:58
3. Treatment vs exploration – 8:55
4. Enlarging the pattern – 6:19
5. The conjoined system – 9:47
6. Asking different questions – 7:52
7. The nature of Feldenkrais practice – 5:28
8. Training soft focus – 3:00
9. Working with impulses – 11:11