Why Does This Blog Exist?

About a week ago, around the middle of February, I noticed how quickly March was going to show up. March 1st is the start of Segment 3 of my training, where I will leave work for a month and go practice and learn Feldenkrais 7 hours a day. The Seattle Eastside Feldenkrais Training III (SEFTIII) is a 4 year program made up of 8 one-month intensive segments that happen about every six months. Segment 1 was March '09, Segment 2 was November '09, Segment 3 will be March '10, and so on until November 2012. That leaves time in between intensives to soak up everything you learned and figure out how to use it. This next segment snuck up on me, especially once I realized that since the end of Segment 2, I've done very little directly related to Feldenkrais and I don't know why. Now I feel like I have a bunch of catch-up work to do.

As I was thinking about all the things I didn't do between the two segments, all of the new ideas and physical possibilities that I let slip through my fingers, I remembered an activity from the end of Segment 2. We started talking about ways of learning - individual vs. group, structured vs. emergent, intellectual vs. experiential - and we talked about our preferences in how we personally learn best based on those concepts. We were asked to group ourselves in the room based on those preferences, and I placed myself with the group experiential learners, closer emergent than structured.

We were asked to talk within our groups and examine our decisions about where we placed ourselves and why. Personally, I find motivation from working in a group, insight from experiential situations, and access to creativity when there isn't too much structure. We were then asked to talk about how we could possibly change our habits in how we learn, and become more comfortable in a variety of learning situations. The most difficult learning situation for me is highly structured and intellectual where the responsibility for learning is placed entirely on the individual.

That is why this blog exists. Instead of trying to do a bunch of catch-up work, I thought I'd pose a challenge to myself and how I learn best in the form of a blog. Almost any writing I've done in the past year about Feldenkrais has been private, not very coherent, and definitely not intellectual or structured, so writing about it on a public blog will be a sort of test for myself to see what I can learn from making what I'm doing accessible to people who know nothing about it. It's an experiment, so please bear with me if I make no sense at times.

Here we go...