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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 — spending hours on art projects in my room, 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? How do we tell what's 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. It worked, up to a point.

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A few years after Zimbabwean independence, I met an American on a motorcycle trip through Africa, moved to the United States, and married him at Tavern on the Green in Central Park. America was a puzzle at first — the big screens at sports stadiums, the mani-pedis — but I found my footing. I enrolled at Columbia University, studied post-colonialism and post-modernism, and graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa.

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My husband and I spent seven years in Hong Kong, where we raised three children and I began teaching art. Then, in my late thirties, my youngest sister was killed in a car accident in Zambia. The dissociation came back — harder. I felt jettisoned out of my own body and couldn't find my way back. I tried talk therapy. I tried meditation. I went deeper into painting, photography, and drawing.

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I wrote and published a memoir, Casting with a Fragile Thread.

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And then I met Leigh Scott, a Feldenkrais practitioner.

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In a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement class, you lie on the floor — or sit, or stand — while the teacher guides you through gentle movement sequences and invites you to become increasingly precise about what you actually feel. Does your right arm feel heavier than your left? Does your chin travel further toward your collarbone on 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 and expansive 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. I no longer needed to look outside myself to know how I felt. "Centered" and "grounded" stopped being abstract ideals and became lived, felt experiences — things I could find, lose, and find again.

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Now in my early sixties, I continue to be astonished by what my practice gives me. My posture keeps improving. I know that the twinge in my left knee connects to how I hold my right shoulder. I've become more flexible without stretching, and 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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Have I reached nirvana? Not quite yet. But Feldenkrais has coaxed me considerably further in that direction — and it is my great privilege to offer that same 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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