by Melinda Glenister
I have been really blown away by how many people have been listening to my recordings over the last few months, form all corners of the world.. I have been receiving messages from people who have been affected or inspired or moved by them in all different ways. So I wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you…
It has definitely begun to open up different aspects of my work. When I started the recordings earlier in the year I really didn’t know what it would bring, I just knew I needed to do it. I still do not know where it might go, but I feel an increasing sense of my voice and my message reaching out to a wider audience- listen to yourself… trust yourself. And with that also a sense of responsibility to be completely authentic in my teaching. This continues to develop along with my own personal mission to be completely true to myself in my teaching and in myself. This is one reason why I find it hard to say I’m a feldenkrais teacher or I’m that teacher or whatever label.. My teaching in these lessons and in my classes and workshops is not so easily labelled.
I take my experiences from training to play tennis professionally, from the many injuries I sustained from overtraining and negligent and really abusive coaching as a teenager. From my experiences with the medical community and my fight to stand up for myself when I kept being told I wouldn’t play again. From my long search to find a way through, (and from my long searches to find the way through many different systems over the years.) The experiences I have had working with top professionals for more than 15 years, even being on the men’s tour as a young female coach in a time when that just wasn’t done. And then from my training in Feldenkrais which I started nearly 11 years ago, during an intense period of a few years where my whole world got turned upside down. Including my experiences with my beautiful nephew who had a brain injury when I was one year into my feldenkrais training, and who is the light and inspiration for much of what I do. So much of the last few years has been focused on understanding development and working with children.. Now I work with elite athletes and with children with developmental problems or brain injuries and each informs and shapes the other.
There have been so many personal challenges that I have been through and I realise that it’s all served to bring me to this point, an understanding of people, of trauma, of fears, of difficulties, loss, and struggle to find meaning. And ultimately a coming back to yourself, as the only way to navigate through.
There has been another aspect over the last year or so which has been my learning to re-attune to myself to my intuitive gifts, which has been a huge aspect of learning to trust myself.. Learning to trust yourself is something so central to Feldenkrais’ teaching, and finding it in myself, (which is a continual process) helps me to bring out this aspect of my work to another level.
I have loved developing my workshops, and feel it’s my chance to combine everything in one big melting pot. I think and hope that a little part of this gets transmitted through these audios. I’m sure that will develop more and more over time. And now I get used to you all listening to my voice, maybe I can start to use it in my writing a bit more this year too.
I am working hard to be able to give you access to all of the audios… in the meantime you can find my latest free audio here.
I hope you enjoy listening.
M x