Newsletter #124 – Weekly lessons & Student corner

Highlights

1. Announcements
• What to explore next on the Monday classes?
• Advanced workshop: Feldenkrais for Sports

2. The student corner
• A section to respond to students’ questions

Announcements

1. What to explore next? - Online Classes with Nikos

Last week, Nikos started teaching a new series of lessons: “Wholebody Moves.”

These lessons explore how to integrate the trunk and core into movements with the arms and legs, discovering how coordination, balance, and ease can improve when the whole self participates.

These explorations help you sense how power and refinement arise from connected movement, rather than from effort in isolated parts. As a result, you might notice how everyday actions (such as walking, reaching, or even breathing) can become lighter and more coherent.

The recording of these classes is available through our Neurosomatic Platform (more info further down), the live online class takes place on Mondays:

from 17:30 CET in English
from 18:30 CET in French

As we continue, we’re curious to hear from you: what themes would you like us to explore next?

Reply to this newsletter with your ideas so we can shape the upcoming series together.

2. Starting soon: ‘Feldenkrais for Sports’
- Advanced Workshop with Choune Ostorero -

The advanced workshop, ‘Feldenkrais for Sports’ is coming soon, from 8th to 10th November in Brussels, in Forest Lighthouse. (in French only)

Choune has a professional background in various sports disciplines. After several injuries, she had to rethink her way of doing and moving. This led her to discover the Feldenkrais Method, which radically transformed her sporting practice.
She has been working as Feldenkrais practitioner since 2009, offering high level athletes her experience and skills in body awareness, helping them optimize their performance and enhance their sports practice.

Workshop details:
When: 8th-10th November, 10:00 - 17:00 CET
Where: Forest Lighthouse - Brussels
Language: French

For more information about the workshop, you can visit this page: https://forest-lighthouse.be/en/event/feldenkrais-for-sports/

The student corner

This new section of our newsletter is dedicated to responding thoughtful questions we receive from students by email, during class or in our practice.

Questions like: what to expect in or after lessons, how to understand different experiences, how to respond as practitioners?
In ‘The student corner’, we will answer one student question.

Last week Yvo Mentens wrote about the possibility of instability after a Functional Integration lesson, and it raised the question: “Does this mean the practitioner didn’t know what they were doing?”.

Not at all. It’s true, in FI, we can’t predict exactly what someone will sense or feel afterwards, or how their abilities will show up. That’s because the nervous system — your system — is the one making sense of the input. But that doesn’t mean practitioners are working randomly. Far from it.
Here it’s important to differentiate: we guide and create conditions, but the outcome depends on how each person’s system integrates.

Think of other fields. Over the past 10 years, I’ve worked with creating edible forest gardens. Planting, tending, and multiplying trees is fascinating, yet even with experience, I never know precisely what will emerge — every season brings surprises. Consider tennis players like Nadal or Federer, even after thousands of hours of training, at the height of their career, they never knew for certain how or whether the ball would come back once they hit it.
Or consider medicine: when I was a donor for a transplant once, the doctors clearly knew what they were doing, but the outcome still depended on how the patient’s system would accept the process.

We are all living, complex creatures. In FI, sometimes integration is immediate, other times it takes a few minutes or a rest before a new coherence appears.
That variation isn’t a sign of randomness, but of learning.
An FI lesson doesn’t impose change; it offers your system the chance to discover it. The nervous system integrates the experience in its own time, often leading to more refined actions than anything we could design.
However the practitioner has the responsibility to stay « close to home », but I will write about that next week.

- Yvo Mentens, Feldenkrais Trainer