Most of us understand that our mind and body are one, but can’t quite shake the thought of our brains being more important, while our bodies are unpredictable, unreliable, and maybe even embarrassing – a sort of humble mule whose task it is to carry that lofty brain around.
This belief has us missing out on a vital and easy path to self-knowledge, according to Wendy Kann, artist, Reiki Master initate and Feldenkrais Practitioner.
Our nervous system is not just a brain, but also a spinal cord, billions of neurons and several dense neural plexuses throughout our body. Moving, sensing, feeling, and thinking are not discrete and separate aspects of this system, but widely overlapping facets of it. Even more interesting, this nervous system doesn’t develop in a contained, discrete manner under our own skin, but in a boisterous, symphonic, whole-self dance with our specific environment.
We may speak our history, but on a deeper level we wear it. Unconscious bracing and chronic states of fight, flight or freeze, once necessary to protect ourselves as children, become habit,
“how it feels to be me”.
Attention to these patterns of subtle, muscular bracing as we move through our environment, while asking ourselves,
“is this the easiest way?”
is a simple and concrete path to letting go of that history and more comfortably inhabiting your own skin, Wendy says.
“If the state of the soul changes, this also changes the appearance of the body and vice versa: If the appearance of the body changes, this also changes the state of the soul.” This insight goes back to Aristotle (358 BC). “So what’s new?” quips René and thus an excursion into the dynamics of our holistic being is undertaken in this RTalk. A personal conversation with infectious laughter.
Biography
Wendy grew up in Zimbabwe before marrying an American and moving to New York City. She graduated with a history degree from Columbia University In Manhattan. She and her husband lived in Hong Kong for a few years, where Wendy got initiated to the Reiki Master’s level, a counseling diploma, and taught adult-level art classes.
After returning to the United States, Wendy continued with her artistic practice (and its creative offshoots in cooking, gardening and, most importantly, child rearing). She published a memoir, Casting with a Fragile Thread, about her African childhood (see Publications below).
Since completing her four-year Feldenkrais Practitioner Training Program, she has been teaching people how they might more fully sense and feel themselves.
Publications
‘Casting with a Fragile Thread: A Story of Sisters and Africa’ book as well as Ebook, Picador; ISBN-13 : 978-0312425722
Website
References
Dori-Michelle Beeler, Jojan Jonker: Reiki Practice and Surrender – An Intersection of Body, Spirituality and Religion, LIT Verlag
Sogyal Rinpoche: The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
