Searching for a solution to an old injury…
A few weeks ago, on a beach in Maine, I watched a woman walking slowly, looking down at the sand and the shells, searching for some ocean treasure.
I remember a year ago walking on the same beach, feeling my feet pressing against the sand and the old familiar pain in my right achilles. The sensation had been with me for years, sometimes subtle and sometimes not, but always present. Back then I had been searching too, for an answer to that unpleasant puzzle.
Curious and hopeful
A four-day JKA workshop of movements done in standing sounded impossible, but I was curious and hopeful, and decided to try. In the workshop I immediately felt I was in the right place. Standing, moving, and meeting the ground moment to moment, I felt my competence in gravity growing. Exploring asymmetries, I found new support. I sensed connections and noticed differences, gradually building strength, endurance, and resilience.
Something else is here now
This year as I walked on the sand, the injury that had seemed so permanent now feels fundamentally changed. In the Feldenkrais world we often say, “life is a process, we are not fixing.” This is true. And at the same time, now I feel something has been ‘fixed’, not gone exactly, but that old familiar sensation and “problem” are not present. Something else is here now, and I like the (new) feeling: integrity, strength and ability.
For me JKA Solvents and Glue® has been a wonderful and rich meeting place on the edge between mindfulness and exercise. It is where learning can be both non-linear and sequential. Where I learn to press and yield, cultivate connections, and disentangling bound places within. It is a study of ease and strength in motion, a layered dance between mobility and stability. The practice is simple and complex, structured but non-corrective, gentle and transformative.
Video collaboration: Matty Wilkinson, Tiffany Sankary & Erin HArper / Music credit: Danny Paul Grody
