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I was born in Zimbabwe, when the country was still a British colony called Rhodesia. As a child I loved reading, writing, painting and poetry — dreaming of becoming a professional ballerina.

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Rhodesia fought a civil war from the time I was six until I was twenty. My mother was bipolar. Both shaped me in ways I'm still discovering. I became deeply interested in the nature of reality — how do we know what we think we know? What is actually real?

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I also developed a habit of dissociating. Leaving my body felt like a reasonable strategy, particularly after my father died in a car accident when I was fifteen.

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A few years after Zimbabwean independence, I met an American on a motorcycle trip through Africa, followed him home to Manhattan, and we married in Central Park. What struck me most about America wasn't just its dizzying abundance — it was its unexamined certainties.

 

Zimbabwe had been a place of scarcity and improvisation, where the stories told about the land and its people were vicious and hotly contested. America seemed to operate on a different assumption entirely — that its version of the real was simply, naturally, true. I enrolled at Columbia, studied post-colonialism and post-modernism, and graduated Magna Cum Laude — spending my academic years giving language to something I had understood in my bones since childhood.

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After seven years in Hong Kong, where we raised three children and I began teaching art, my youngest sister was killed in a car accident in Zambia. The dissociation came back — harder. I felt ejected from my own body and couldn't find my way back. I tried talk therapy, meditation, painting, photography. I wrote and published a memoir, Casting with a Fragile Thread.

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And then I tried a Feldenkrais class.

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In an Awareness Through Movement class, you lie on the floor while the teacher guides you through gentle movement sequences, inviting you to become increasingly precise about what you actually feel. Does your right arm feel heavier than your left? Does your chin travel further to one side when you roll your head? There is no right answer, nothing to fix, no effort to push through. It's a little like being at the optometrist's — better with this lens, or that one?

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Through Feldenkrais, I learned to feel solid within my own skin. I learned that following my breath, or feeling the soles of my feet on the floor, could quiet anxiety almost immediately. "Centered" and "grounded" stopped being abstract ideals and became lived experiences — things I could find, lose, and find again.

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Now in my sixties, I continue to be astonished by what my practice gives me. My posture keeps improving. I've become more flexible without stretching, stronger because I've learned to distribute effort across my whole body. I'm confident on uneven ground because I know, moment to moment, exactly where I am in space.

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People come to me carrying chronic pain, anxiety, or a vague sense of disconnection from themselves. I know that place well. It is my great privilege to offer this journey to others.

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Wendy Kann is a Guild Certified Feldenkrais Teacher based in Westport, CT, offering online group classes worldwide and private Functional Integration sessions out of her studio in Westport, CT.

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