Listening with Your Hands

Dear Reader,

It’s an odd phrase, isn’t it—“listening with your hands.”

As I was demonstrating something about touch with a client today, I talked about listening with the hands. So many questions: How? Why? Listening for what?

My answers turned out to be more about the how. Listening with curiosity. Listening with respect. Listening without pushing.

But sometimes it is listening for something specific. What moves easily? What resists movement?

And sometimes it’s about listening so that the other person feels seen. Have you noticed that I mix my metaphors quite freely? Touch is about a particular sensation, but somehow it’s a bit richer when I think about listening with my hands.

A Feldenkrais session is very much like a conversation. What do you think about this? How does your body respond to that? What might be different if we moved this part in this direction?

Much of the value in these sessions comes from the questions. From hands that listen, listen respectfully. With curiosity rather than judgement.

Feldenkrais often said, “Pay attention!” in his Awareness Through Movement lessons. The original Hebrew statement could be translated as, “Listen with your whole heart.” What a lovely idea. I like to think that when we’re at our best in the presence of others, we listen with our whole hearts. Listening with respect and curiosity, acknowledging a fellow human. Life gets so much better when we do that for one another—and for ourselves.

If you’d like an opportunity to pay attention to yourself and your movements, please consider joining me for our Tuesday online Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lesson. It’s free/pay as you wish.

If you’re more interested in private sessions, you can Book an Appointment or reply to this email.

Please mark your calendars for Saturday afternoon, October 28. I’ll be doing a mini Feldenkrais retreat at the Jung Center of Houston. More details to follow soon.

Have all the fun you can—listening, noticing, paying attention with your whole heart.