An article by Feldenkrais teacher & author Jürgen Bräscher
Is time passing much faster than usual at the moment? Week after week passes without any particular event remaining in our minds. Maybe it's because every day looks the same to us, because we have succumbed to our many habits. It doesn't matter whether we do something privately or professionally from home: Everyday life has become routine, our movements, our thinking, our daily routines are rehearsed like a play that is performed anew every day.
Yet we are told that everything should be different now, that we want to do everything anew, and at the same time we find ourselves in an everyday routine that couldn't be more entrenched.
Playing with habits
This is exactly where the Feldenkrais Method comes in. It focuses on our habits, our everyday routines. "If you only have one option, you limit yourself," says physicist and behavioral scientist Moshé Feldenkrais himself. If, on the other hand, you have many options at your disposal, a huge playground opens up. This is because the essence of Feldenkrais is not limited to physical exercises in the conventional sense; rather, the strategies can be applied daily in our lives to inspire our minds.
Exercise: reshuffling the cards
We can borrow some ideas from Feldenkrais and literally reshuffle our cards. It's best to join in right away: Grab some A4 sheets of paper, a pencil and a pair of scissors and get started.
Cut your sheets into about eight pieces and write down your to-do's in the usual order for one day only. Put one activity on each sheet, for example breakfast, morning exercises, drive to work, walk, cooking, home office, drink coffee, call a friend, go shopping, smartphone/computer-free versus digital time and so on.
When you're done, shuffle the cards and put them in a different order. Let yourself be inspired by the new sequence of cards that spreads out in front of you and vary the timing of things.
Impulses for an agile brain
Simply go shopping before work instead of afterwards or move your walk from the evening to your lunch break. Practice will show the answer: Did the experience simply bring a breath of fresh air into your day or is one of the new options even better for you? Maybe it even turns out that you can eliminate a card from the pile? Or you want to mix a completely new idea into the card set? You decide which process you want to use today.
Once you have gained some experience, you can apply this idea to the entire week and then reshuffle the cards. Try it out and discover the freedom it opens up for you. In the spirit of Moshé Feldenkrais: "What interests me is not moving bodies, but moving brains".
