Lying on your back. Awareness through movement as new form of ecojustice sensitivity

During an aesthetic and embodied experience of Feldenkrais Method, participants are lying down most of the time. In this way, lying on their back reduces the influence of the external representation of the world and allows learners to pay attention to their body-centred signals (Unwalla, Cadieux, & Shore, 2021). Their body moves as their mind moves. A lesson, called Awareness Through Movement, is a somatic practice (Hanna, 1970), an ongoing and experiential journey where individuals can learn to act while they think and to think while they act (Feldenkrais, 1990, p. 60). In the last three decades, the Feldenkrais Method was integrating into performing arts programmes in Higher Education (Igweonu, 2019) and it is also exploring by adults in different contexts outside the academy (e.g., gyms, contemporary dance courses, seminar for musicians, studios of somatic practices). Moreover, in the last two years has spread the practice of the method online as a strategy, during the Covid-19 pandemic, to take care of yourself. The researcher, a Feldenkrais practitioner who is also an adult educator, presents her autoethnographic reflections (Holman Jones, Adams & Ellis, 2015) about an informal and qualitative research (Denzin, 2013) generated with diverse groups of adult participants of her Feldenkrais’s lessons online that she has been conducting from the beginning of the pandemic to today. Most of them are social workers, teachers, and philosophers, so they tell of their experience of lying down to sensing and feeling better the connection between mind & body and all the environments. In particular, she analyses critically the emails that she received from them in which they describe feelings, sensations, and new thoughts. The contribution aims to show how learning a way to feel the body movements could develop an ecojustice sensitivity to perceive the pattern to connect (Bateson, 1972) all in nature at macro-meso-micro levels, to become awareness of biodiversity and to develop an ecological perspective on learning (Bainbridge, Formenti & West, 2021) and reflexivity that makes adults capable to fell that material and social environment are not separated in human experience.