Transmitting awareness from the body into writing: bringing the Feldenkrais method into the university classroom

We propose inviting the body into the university writing process through somatic pedagogical practices. This study investigates an effort to write from our body and through our body in a course where students used the body as a site of creation. Challenging mind-body dualism and the erasure of bodily ways of knowing, students participated in Feldenkrais exercises to enhance awareness through movement by heightening habitual perception. Subsequently, students' writing revealed increased admittance of uncertainty and reflexive engagement. They reflected on their own positionalities while considering the perspectives of hypothetical others, invoking augmented senses of social responsibility. In essence, they transferred physically experienced agency through functional movement to personal agency within hierarchical systems of power. This study suggests that somatic pedagogical interventions have the potential to activate reflexivity, foregrounding causal relations that begin with self-guided, felt realities in the body.