Newsletter #128 – Health, Rhythm, and Learning

Highlights

1. Did you know? …
2. Book recommendation
• The sound of a wild snail eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey
3. The student corner
• A section to respond to students’ questions
4. Quote of the week

Did you know? …

You are an Orchestra of Clocks!

Every cell in your body keeps time. Each one contains a molecular clock that synchronizes with thousands of others, creating a chronobiological symphony that coordinates metabolism, sleep, and mood. At the center of it all is the master clock, a tiny cluster of neurons in the hypothalamus called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). It takes its cue from light entering your eyes and sets the tempo for the rest of the body’s rhythms.

Every tissue — liver, heart, muscles, even skin, follows this lead, yet maintains its own beat.
You don’t just live in rhythm — you are rhythm.

Book recommendation

Moving at the Speed of Awareness

‘The sound of a wild snail eating’
- Elisabeth Tova Bailey -

When illness confines Elisabeth Tova Bailey to bed, her world collapses to the size of a room. One day, a friend brings her a woodland snail beneath a pot of violets. What begins as a small, almost absurd gift becomes an intimate apprenticeship in slowness, sensory perception, and interconnection.

As Bailey watches the snail live its tiny, deliberate life, eating, exploring, resting, she enters a parallel rhythm. The snail’s world unfolds in exquisite detail: the sound of it eating a flower petal (“like someone very small munching celery”), its tentacles reaching and tasting the air, its effortless gliding over moss. Time stretches, deepens, and softens. Through stillness, she discovers motion.

The book is part natural history, part memoir, and part meditation on embodiment. Bailey, once active and capable, finds herself observing the minute gestures of another creature as if learning a new language of being. Her attention sharpens; she senses without moving, feels without touching, perceives through the smallest variations in sound and light. The snail becomes her teacher — a quiet master of adaptation and resilience.

For Feldenkrais students, Bailey’s story speaks directly to our practice. The snail’s slow, efficient movement mirrors the pace of awareness we might cultivate during lessons, where change arises not from effort, but from attention. In its rhythm we glimpse the nervous system’s natural intelligence: movement organized through sensitivity rather than will.

Illness stripped Bailey of her usual identity and agency, yet through the snail she rediscovers belonging in life itself. She writes: “When the body is rendered useless, the mind still runs like a bloodhound along well-worn trails of neurons” This could describe any moment of learning through sensing — when, even in stillness, the nervous system reorganizes.

The snail reminds us that perception does not depend on speed, and that awareness can travel farther than the body. In the slow pace of recovery, in the sound of a wild snail eating, Bailey finds companionship, wonder, and meaning — proof that even in immobility, life continues to move.

Like the Feldenkrais Method, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating invites us to rediscover aliveness through curiosity, and that healing begins with listening to the smallest sounds within and around us.

The student corner

Mika, a student from Espoo in Finland asked me… :

“I used to crack my knuckles before doing Feldenkrais lessons. Does this cause arthritis?”

Short answer: No.

When you crack a knuckle, the joint space widens, pressure drops, a gas bubble forms, and then collapses: pop. It’s physics, not damage.

Research, including X-rays, and a doctor who cracked the knuckles of one hand over 60 years, shows no link to arthritis.

Why the worry?
Noisy joints can feel alarming. In Feldenkrais, we see sound as a sensation.
Unfamiliar sensations can trigger fear, but joint sounds are often just fluid shifting or pressure changes.

Instead of fearing the noise, ask: How am I moving? Am I straining? Sometimes better organization quiets the joints; sometimes it doesn’t. Healthy movement isn’t about silence, it’s about gentle, varied motion and curiosity.

Cracking doesn’t cause arthritis. It’s just another sensation to explore without fear.

- Yvo Mentens, Feldenkrais Trainer

Quote of the week

“Patience is not just waiting, but finding peace and contentment in the process."

- Elisabeth Tova Bailey