Newsletter #133 • August 2026

Clarity first.
Breath follows.

First moments from Cantal 6, a closer look at why the breath may pause when movement feels uncertain, and an invitation to leave room for questions rather than settling too quickly on perfect answers.

— 01   Announcement

Cantal 6: first moments

Cantal 6 is underway, and its first segment came to a close just over a week ago. These photos offer a few glimpses of the opening weeks.

Big thanks to Yvo Mentens and Pia Appelquist for guiding this beginning, and to everyone in the group for the attention and curiosity they brought to it.

You can still join Cantal 6 in 2026! A few places remain available, with make-up options for new students.

— 02   Student corner

Student corner

Claire from Paris asked me this after a lesson:

“Why is it that as soon as something gets tricky, I suddenly notice I’m not breathing?”

It’s a great question, because breath-holding isn’t a bad habit or a lack of attention. It’s a perfectly logical nervous-system response.

When a movement becomes difficult, unfamiliar, or uncertain, your nervous system has a small problem to solve:
“What’s about to happen, and how safe is it?”

If the answer isn’t clear, the system reduces uncertainty by doing what it knows best: stabilising.
One of the fastest ways to stabilise the body is to:

• increase muscular tone,
• stiffen the chest,
• and pause the breath.

This isn’t about air.
It’s about reducing movement and sensory noise so the system can feel more in control. In that sense, holding the breath is a mild form of freezing, not panic, just caution.

Breathing is rhythmic, changeable, and internally mobile. When things feel predictable, that’s no problem. But when coordination feels unsure, breathing becomes a variable the system temporarily removes from the equation.

This is why telling yourself to “remember to breathe” often doesn’t help. The breath isn’t forgotten, it’s intentionally suspended by the nervous system as a stabilising strategy.

What does help is improving orientation and clarity. When you sense where you are in space, how parts relate, and how movement can unfold, the system no longer needs rigid stability. Tone softens, the chest is relieved of its bracing role, and breathing resumes, without effort or instruction.

In Feldenkrais lessons, this is why images, relationships, and gentle variations matter so much. They don’t fix breathing directly. They make breath-holding unnecessary.

So if you notice you’ve stopped breathing during a movement, there’s no need to judge it. It’s simply useful information: something feels uncertain, and your system is doing its best to help.

Clarity first. Breath follows.

Yvo Mentens, Feldenkrais Trainer

— 03   Book recommendation

Ultra-Solutions, or How to Fail Most Successfully

by Paul Watzlawick
- A Movement Perspective

In Ultra-Solutions: How to Fail Most Successfully, Paul Watzlawick takes us into the realm of human problem-solving gone wrong. He shows how our best intentions, when executed as rigid “final solutions”, can lead to the opposite of what we intended. The cure becomes the disease; the solution becomes the trap.

For students of the Feldenkrais Method, this book carries fertile ground for reflection. In movement, as in life, we often search for a “fix, a perfect posture, a “correct” pattern, an efficient algorithm for every action. But Watzlawick reminds us that such “final fixes” may in fact be ultra-solutions: they may eliminate the felt problem but at the cost of flexibility, relationship with the self, and capacity for change.

Consider a student who rigidly tries to maintain “perfect alignment” in every movement. At first glance, the posture might seem “correct” to the student. But over time, this insistence may create tension, reduce responsiveness, and degrade awareness. In Watzlawick’s language, it is akin to applying “twice as much” and expecting “twice as good”, only to find that the system changes qualitatively and negatively.

In Feldenkrais lessons, we aim not for rigid “solutions” but for exploration, variation, and awareness of relational movement. Watzlawick’s chapter on “It’s good to Be good” ( « The paradox of goodness ») warns us: what appears to be improvement may mask new constraints. What we could call “better movement” may inadvertently become less adaptable, less alive.

Watzlawick also warns against binary thinking: “correct vs incorrect,” “fixed vs flexible.” He illustrates how rigid either/or positions block the excluded middle, the space of nuance, exploration, and transformation. This resonates deeply with Feldenkrais’ principle of reversibility and learning through subtle variation. Awareness lives in the space between extremes, not in the imposition of one over the other.

For your practice: ask yourself when you might be chasing an ultra‐solution. Are you striving for a movement “ideal” so persistently that you lose the sensation of ease, relational coordination, inner feedback? Are you converting a felt improvement into a rigid standard so that variations become faults? Watzlawick suggests humility: the better path may be not the final solution, but the evolving process.

In essence, Ultra-Solutions invites us to embrace not “perfect answers,” but ongoing inquiry, movement that adapts, learns, and remains alive. In the Feldenkrais classroom, when a student suspends the need for certainty, allows variation, listens deeply to what the body is doing, then the real dialogue begins.

— 04   Did you know?

Touch Is the First Sense to Develop — and the Last to Fade

Around 8 weeks after conception, a tiny human embryo begins to respond to touch. Even before sight or hearing exist, the skin feels pressure, warmth, and vibration, mapping the world through contact. Throughout life, touch remains the most direct way to sense connection, the nervous system’s anchor to safety and presence. And near life’s end, when other senses grow dim, gentle touch can still reach the person within. Clinical and hospice observations confirm that tactile and auditory pathways persist even when other forms of awareness diminish. Gentle touch can still evoke calm, recognition, or presence.

Touch is our oldest conversation with existence.

— 05   Upcoming workshops & advanced trainings

Two workshops in Brussels

With warm wishes,

The Feldenkrais Education team