a note from Erin:

Friends, when I sat down to write to you this morning, my heart and mind were buzzing with so many things I want to share.
I wanted to write to you about embodying freedom and the workshop we’re teaching this Saturday, inspired by this quote from Thich Nhat Hanh:

“Freedom is a practice and a habit. You have to train yourself to walk as a free person, sit as a free person and eat as a free person. We need to train ourselves how to live.”

I wanted to write to you about my upcoming online course and how it’s not what I thought it was going to be but how I’m very excited about what it IS shaping up to be. More on that soon. :)
I wanted to write to you about befriending ourselves, truly and unconditionally, and the very tender conversation we had in my Women Embodied group on Tuesday about just this.
I wanted to write to you about being original, about living your own unprecedented life.
I wanted to write to you about the beautiful and powerful Grief and Gratitude Ritual I was honored to share with a group of lovely women at a retreat I hosted over the weekend.
I wanted to write to you about the Listening Class I’m planning to teach this summer, and about what a profound practice listening can be.
I wanted to write about many things we didn’t get time to include in our Jung Society talk a few weeks ago.
I want to share so many things…..
(We’ll be starting to post more on our blog as all this is wanting to be written and we don’t want to crowd your inbox!)

What floated to the surface when I paused with all of these seeds wanting to sprout was this one…. It’s what I most want to write about right now.

I bow to your inner authority. 

Deep bow.

Can I tell you how much I respect your inner wisdom?
Maybe even more than you do.
That’s usually the case with the clients and students that I’m blessed to work with, until they’ve been around me and this work for awhile, then they begin to grow their own deep dignity and embodied self-respect by discovering they can trust themselves.
Then they become one of those people who don’t just follow directions because someone said so.
I say hallelujah to that!

One of the most important aspects of the Feldenkrais work that we teach and practice and love love love is rooted in this quote:

Moshe Feldenkrais defined a mature human being as someone who has reappropriated inner authority. 

He said the real point of the movement lessons we do, in addition to helping heal your back pain/hip pain/shoulder pain/whatever pain, and in addition to helping you become more aware and more skillful in your movement in general is this:

The object is to remove outer authority from your inner life.
You learn to quit turning OUTWARDS to find out how you should be and what you should feel and who you should be and how you should live your life, but you learn to deeply respect your own capacity to know. You learn to access your organism’s trustworthy moment-to-moment feedback and guidance. 
It’s amazing.
We do this in a very concrete way through exploring our movement habits, liberating ourselves from unconscious rules or habits that are governing our way of being in the world. And the consequences are huge.

Can I tell you how much that means to me?
So much.

Without reclaiming our inner authority, rooted in self-friendliness and self-respect, we are always turned outward, wondering if we are living up to various others’ ideas of “the right way” to be doing x, y and z. (And a,b,c,d,e, and so on….)
Can you imagine being so rooted in your own embodied knowing that while you may be curious to learn from other sources, the ultimate proving ground as to whether something is “right” for you is your own body-mind. Not what the pope said, not what your teacher said, not what your parent said, not what the trendy magazine said – but what is right for YOU.

I have a vivid memory of being at an outdoor concert when I was about 15 years old, an age where I was, as most teens are, pretty concerned with being cool, and who was cool, and how to be cool, and all of that hoo-ha. I remember waiting for the band to come out, and looking around at all the other people at the concert, just peoplewatching. I saw a small group of people I recognized from high school and I noticed them laughing and smiling and talking to each other. And I wondered, “Why is it they are happy and look cool and seem to be having a good time?” And it dawned on me. They weren’t looking around at everyone else – they were in their own experience and enjoying it. I decided in that moment that being happy in my own life was cool, whatever anyone else thought. It’s taken me many years to live into that insight.

My dear friend shared a story of a famous experiment in which volunteers were invited to press a button to give electric shocks to a person in another room, whom they couldn’t see but could hear. Unbeknownst to them, the person on the other side was an actor, not receiving any shocks. An authority sat near to the button pusher, inviting them to up the electric shocks bit by bit. The actor on the other side made progressively more agonized sounds as the electric shock increased in intensity, begging them to stop. Out of all the volunteers, only a very small percentage stopped and said, “No, I’m not doing this,” even when the one “receiving shocks” screamed in agony. My friend wept as she shared the story of one woman who, even with the authoritative man in a uniform who was conducting the experiment standing over her shoulder and asking her to continue, simply turned the machine off and left. She had access to her inner authority.Reclaiming our inner authority is seriously important, and its implications go far beyond our personal movement patterns.

Here’s what I really want to say about your inner authority, along with my deep bow. 

I believe in you.
I believe in what you know.
I believe in your capacity.
I believe in your inner wisdom.
I believe in your vast potential to make positive change, inner and outer.
I believe in your infinite ability to learn.
I believe in the wisdom of your gut, your heart, your mind, your body, and your life; altogether.
I believe an atmosphere of kindness helps to grow your access to all of this.
I believe in your capacity to heal. To be present. To rise to the occasion. To dive deep. To be your one-of-a-kind self.
I believe you are not stuck.
I believe you deserve to live a sovereign life.
I know it will be one we’ve never seen before. Because it’s never been done. Show us, won’t you?

Here’s a longtime favorite poem from Octavio Paz:

“No one behind, no one ahead.
The path the ancients cleared has closed.
And the other path, everyone’s path,
easy and wide, goes nowhere.
I am alone and find my way.”

I bow to you as you find your way, as I find my way.

A few times a year, I open the door for new clients to come into my private practice… And I’ve decided to open that door for working with clients over the summer.
If you’re interested in exploring a deep dive into your body/mind/life, embodying your inner authority and bravely befriending all of it, I’d be delighted to explore the possibility of our working together. You can read about my 1:1 work here and if your heart lights up with a big “YES!” I hope you’ll let me know. :)  Read what people have shared about this work here. 

Right now I’m working with clients on Thursday and Friday afternoons. If you’re interested in diving in, I’ll send you an intake form with some questions to make sure we’re a great fit for each other. If you’re local, our time can include hands-on Feldenkrais work. If you’re out of town, we can meet on skype or zoom and work in that format. It’s fun!
I’m notorious for answering questions with questions. Why? Because I respect the hell out of you. I believe I can be most helpful when I support you to access your own answers. This isn’t a vague thing…. a skillful question at the right time and with the right kind of support for integration can unlock an inner inquiry that can change everything.
Please note: I work best with people who are open to learning new perspectives, who appreciate being invited to take both more responsibility and have more respect and kindness for themselves; and with people who understand that “bodywork” is inevitably (if it’s to be effective) whole-person and whole-life work. If you’re not really oriented toward a growth path and are longing for someone to just “fix you” without your having to engage much or change? I’m not the gal for you. :)
Everything I do is rooted in kindness. (I promise to be kind to you, and I promise to invite you to seriously deepen your kindness for yourself.) My work is rooted in getting intimate with your own body/mind/life. It’s rooted in presence and awareness and my deep respect for your human freedom. Without being rooted in this soil of kindness, clarity, presence, and respect, you won’t be liberated from your stuck places in a lasting way and whatever work you do may even have harmful side-effects. I love to with people who resonate with this integrated approach. The work may challenge you. Certainly it will ask you to learn, to change, and to feel yourself with greater intimacy than before. When we dive deep together, magic can happen. And even after working with people for so many years, it still blows me away. Every time. If you’d like to claim one of the spots in my practice and experience some mentoring in this vein this summer, just reply to this email and we can go from there. I’d love to hear from you!

And I can’t help but include this fave from Mary Oliver.

p.s. A few updates we want to share:

1. My Free Online Women Embodied Taster Course is still available for you to enjoy through the month of May. There are 7 days of teachings on living a more embodied life including 2 Feldenkrais lessons and several Embodied Life practices, plus great quotes, poems, and all kinds of inspiration. Lessons are in video, audio, and written form (short and sweet.) I’ll leave the course online through the rest of the month of May so you can take it in at your own pace. We have an awesome community of women from all around the world, sharing such wise and thoughtful experiences and observations. You can still join here.