My family and I clear the view so that I can lead them through a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lesson in front of the house where we spent summers growing up. The lesson is called “Exaggerating your pattern and adopting the opposite.” Side-by-side, about a window’s width apart, we take our places in a line-up that resembles a sex ed chart, except that we’re ordered according to age alone rather than sex or height—father, mother, sister, sister, brother, ______, brother—holding the place of our brother Nicholas, who was Down syndrome and passed away eight years ago. — Helen Miller
Helen Miller is an artist and movement educator trained in the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education. Embodied aspects of visual representation inform her drawing, painting, video and performance. She received her BA in Art Practice and English from UC Berkeley in 2006, her EdM in Arts Education and her MDesS in Public Art from Harvard University in 2010 and 2015, and her Feldenkrais Certification through the International Institute for the Study of Somatic Education in Turin, Italy and The Feldenkrais Institute of New York in 2013. Miller writes regularly on art and somatics and is an Assistant Editor of The Feldenkrais Journal.