How are you feeling?

How are you feeling? This is the question I ask my clients at the beginning of each session. How would you answer this question? With a general “Fine” without any further thought put into it? When I work with people, I *really want to know the answer to this question, but I do have an appreciation for the fact that many of us actually don’t know the answer. I don’t believe it’s understatement to claim that many of us go through our days, essentially our lives, numb. For most of us, the only time we really explore how our bodies are feeling is when there is pain. Most new clients I meet generally have two answers to my question:

Me: “So how is your body feeling today?”

Client A: “My knee hurts a lot”

or Client B: “Fine. I feel fine.”

Usually it’s when I start having people move, either through the assessments, fascial release, Pilates or Yoga movements that the comments really start flowing:

Client A: “That hurts my knee more when I do this, right here, but this doesn’t hurt when I do this.”

or Client B: “Oh, I guess I’m really tight in my hamstrings. And my shoulders feel like they are freeing up when I twist my spine in this direction! Should I be doing this everyday? Maybe its because I sat in front of my computer for 45 hours this week.”

I want to know the answer to this question because my workouts are

I believe that if you become in-tune with your body, that answering this question won’t be so foreign and it will become more commonplace for us. Why shouldn’t it be? I mean we have ONE body and we literally inhabit it for our entire lives. Why shouldn’t we know our own bodies? Frankly, it should be our priority to be able to answer this question with authority.

Truth is, I can usually find the imbalances and recognize patterns in my student’s bodies once they begin to move (see my blog post “Yes, I can see that”). But I have a particular appreciation for clients who can work in partnership with me to re-pattern these imbalances and as a result, strengthen themselves in ways they never imagined possible. It is true, two heads are better than one, especially when one of those heads are attached to the body that we’re collectively working with. In my years of teaching, no matter how “detached” I find a client is to their body, once they attempt to answer the question “How is your body feeling?”, no matter how simple or complicated their answer, it is almost 100% accurate and leading. No one can know your body better than you.

My sessions generally begin with an assessment. I have clients I’ve been seeing for 10 years, but I still assess their bodies every time and while generally similar to their patterns I’ve come to know well, its not always the same! And for some clients, can be dramatically different from week to week. With assessments I take into account the “my knee hurts, like right here…” and start to explore reasons why that knee pain might be happening.

It is not intended to be a general greeting, but rather a prompt for my students to awaken their proprioception, or more commonly referred to in mass media today, their “mind-body” connection.