unpolished thoughts 2/1/2019
The way that it feels to be me this morning is so different than what I’ve ever known. It’s impossible not to imagine pure possibility.
With the last day of two weeks of study at the Feldenkrais Training Academy just a couple of hours away, I can feel myself sitting on the cusp of great new adventures.
To be more precise, I’m sitting on the floor – but my spine is effortlessly bolt upright. It feels like a zipper that was just zipped up and continues to lift.
I just finished meditating for twenty minutes. When your spine holds you up effortlessly, it’s a lot easier to find the space between your thoughts, to be able to simultaneously take in the sounds of your own breath and heartbeat along with the sounds of light rain on the trees outside.
When gravity is no longer a thorn in your side, you live in a different world. One of the most beautiful things about this is how available you become to be present for others.
Being present for others means giving the people around you more opportunity to be present with themselves. It creates more opportunity for community.
This morning I’m reminded of how I felt the day I did my very first Awareness Through Movement lesson.
I got up off the floor feeling like an entirely new person. The old story – about all the things I would never be capable of and should never even bother attempting – wasn’t there.
I didn’t permanently shed my old stories that day, nor am I some kind of enlightened being with my strong spine this morning. But what has become abundantly clear is that I truly can bury the pieces of my past that have historically weighed me down a little more each day.
I have enough direct experience with the Feldenkrais Method to understand that each one of us is absolutely capable of our own transformation.
I still expect plenty of struggles to come, plenty of heartaches that I can’t prepare for. But I also know without a doubt that each one us, given the right conditions, can blossom into an entirely new story.
Each one of us is capable of experiencing more joy than we can even dream of.
This where the art of asking questions come in, the central art of the Feldenkrais Method.
For the most part, our limitations are imaginary. Even the most concrete constraints that may come as a result of physical injury, illness, economic circumstances or environmental conditions inherently carry hidden opportunities and blessings.
Every wounding circumstance that we have survived was a training ground for a life skill, whether we have recognized it yet or not. When we discover the true nature of the powers we’ve developed and how to wield them intentionally, the landscape completely changes.
The challenge is to discover the questions we have never asked ourselves in order to reveal those things which we never knew. The answers to those questions will likely seed new questions that take us even further away from the standard story we have always used to explain to ourselves who we are and why.
I could not have dreamed I could feel this way on the day of that first Feldenkrais experience, and I certainly never would have come so far without the support of so many teachers, students, colleagues, friends and family.
But we never do anything completely alone. That idea – and the idea that needing help is a bad thing – are central to what holds so many of us back.
What I know from direct experience is that when you are willing to reimagine yourself, you will quickly discover that the world greets you in new ways. If you then connect with others in the process of reimagining themselves, the possibilities accelerate exponentially.
There is nothing more I would love to do with my remaining time on this planet than to build a community of reimagination.
I want to create a place where people come together, ask themselves the important questions, discover the truth about their true potential, and embrace the possibility of truly being the authors of their own story.
I would like to invite you to join this community – because everything we do will be better when we do it together.
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¡Reimagine Yourself! 2019 online classes start March 25
A movement practice to rewrite the story of how you move through the world
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Do you live in Washington DC?
Send me a message at sethbdellinger@gmail.com if you want to get information about ¡Reimagine DC!
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