Guest Blog: Two Calculus of Life Table Sessions in Two Days with Dave Monette!

This post is written by Atlanta Feldenkrais practitioner, author, musician and music teacher Adam Cole. Adam is a book review editor for the Feldenkrais Journal.

MARCH 7, 2026

A few weeks ago I received two remarkable Calculus of Life table sessions over two days from Dave Monette. The session on my first day lasted 2 1/2 hours, but it felt much shorter due to Dave’s excellent sequencing, presence, and patience.

Dave began with a thorough evaluation of the places in my body that were locked up, out of alignment, or in some way had limited mobility. He started by showing me that most of the vertebral segments in my neck had muscular constrictions shearing them to one side, roughly in an alternating “zigzag” left-right-left pattern up the neck. One vertebra would move easily to the left, but not the right, while the next one up often had the opposite tendency — back and forth all the way up my neck. He then assessed the mobility in my hip joints and my sacro-iliac joints, all of which were fairly stiff and asymmetrically misaligned.

Dave started his manual therapy work by helped me to unlock my neck lesions in an unexpected way; by effortlessly releasing my rotated and out-of-level pelvis. I started the session with compression and misalignment in my pelvis, hips and sacro-iliac joints, which produced a scoliosis (curve in my spine). This in turn caused the compensation pattern of left and right shears in the vertibral segments of my neck.

By simply holding each leg with a neutral but informed touch and waiting for neuromuscular releases, the misalignments in my pelvis and hips resolved. This pelvic work took about 20 minutes. Dave’s sensitivity in this was high — he knew exactly how to encourage the joints to release and my pelvis to re-align with minimal effort. We followed this with similar work on my rib cage and shoulders, relieving excess muscular compressions and the resulting misalignments. This took another 20 minutes or so. He then returned to gently palpating my neck so that I could realize that my cervical spine had decompressed and realigned; all the vertebral segments were ready to move freely in any direction. This decompression and realignment provided a significant improvement in how I felt and moved. This work was especially notable given that the treatment was fast and completely painless.

Dave then asked me about the quality of my swallowing. The hyoid bone (the U-shaped bone in the neck to which 13 muscles including the tongue are anchored) was sheared forward and to the left. I had been having some pain in my throat and difficulty with clarity in my speech. Releasing the pelvic misalignments, the resulting scoliosis, and addressing the lesions at my hyoid bone provided relief. (Two weeks later Adam reported that his voice was still more clear that before his session, and that the work we did at his throat at the hyoid bone had held. One unexpected benefit of this work was that his sleep apnea when sleeping on his back was eliminated.)

The last of our structural work for the day was to give me a sense of my temporal bones (around the ears), where I often feel a lot of discomfort and pressure. This discomfort was alleviated with gentle Craniosacral work we did together that took about 10 minutes. I took the opportunity later to research this fascinating part of my skull for further exploration.

From there, Dave moved onto more meditative work. He asked me again to assess my perceived size in the room relative to the size of my physical body. He then asked me if there was a long-held repeating thought or emotion I was holding that might be hindering me. There was. We started a guided somatic meditation to assess where in my physical body the self-conviction thought/emotion was located. We used a technique of breathing in from below the feet and from above the crown of the head into the exact location in my body where the misconception was located. With Dave’s guidance in this breath exercise, I “watched” and felt the somatic source of this misconception shift. It thinned out and then dispersed with the ongoing full-body conduit breathing.

I stood up to a wonderful sense of freedom of walking and standing. My neck was extended,

the tilt of my pelvis had changed, and I found it significantly harder to believe or even imagine

the misconception we had been addressing in the meditation. This gave me a profound sense of relief and happiness. I felt somewhat tired after the long session, and retreated to my hotel where I relaxed, ate and slept.

MY SECOND SESSION

Our session the next day was shorter but no less profound. We checked in with repeat scans from the day before, and found that my body had lost some of its freedom of movement. However, a quick 15-minute neuromuscular revisit of the previous day’s work re-released the hips, SI joints, shoulder joints and neck back to where they had been at the end of the first session the day before.

From there, we started a somatic Raja Yoga meditation. Dave asked me to place my left hand over my heart and my right hand over my left hand. He asked me to describe the perceived size of my heart. I found that it seemed to be about the size of my fist. We did more sustained breathing from my feet and the crown of my head into my heart, and after a while I reported that my heart had seemed to grow to about three times the size I perceived it being when we started the meditation.

Dave asked me to imagine that energetically my heart was like a clown’s circus balloon becoming elongated as it is being blown up. With each breath from the feet and the head, my heart would extend its length like the clown’s balloon expanding vertically — upward towards my throat and downwards towards my stomach. When I had achieved this first layer of energetic expansion in my imagination, he asked me to further expand the length of the “balloon” down into my pelvis and up to my forehead. At this point, Dave asked me how old I was, and I replied, without thinking, that I was 12 years old.

As we discussed this, I revealed to him that this was a time in which my emotional life seemed to be falling apart due to a family trauma. I had blamed myself for this trauma, thinking in my adolescent way that I was all-powerful and responsible. As we talked, I began to cry from the intensity of the feeling, but I also felt that I was still an adult and still safe. I hadn’t fully regressed, but I had the opportunity to revisit an old trauma and see how it somehow related to the way in which as an adult I held misalignment in my pelvis.

With additional breath work, we slowly moved the 12-year old trauma of that moment up to my throat. With this shift, Dave again asked me how old I was. I immediately said without thinking that I was 28 years old. Upon reflection, I revealed to him that this was the age I was right before I started dating my wife; a time in which I was ready to begin a profound relationship.

With another period of circulating my breath in a conduit from my head and the feet, we were at my forehead and the “third eye.” Again, Dave asked how old I was. “48” I replied, again without thinking. I proceeded to recount that this was about the time I had reached the end of a long, traumatic period of teaching in public schools, and was about to transition to something new.

I found myself somewhat astonished at the thought that these three ages would come up, and

that I could relate three traumatic transitions through three consecutive places in my body. I

shared with Dave that right now I was at the cusp of another huge transition which I preferred to keep private, but which nonetheless surely was impacting my health and sense of self.

Recognizing and reconciling the three previous trauma hubs gave me some perspective on the

present one.

At last I elected to lie on the table under a blanket and reflect and recover for a while. As I lay

there, I let the breath come out of my mouth and I imagined, unprompted, that the previous traumas were escaping like exhaust, floating harmlessly into the air. As I stood up, I had regained my sense of freedom. I felt relaxed, happy and energized. I spent the rest of the day wandering around downtown Portland, exploring and enjoying the feeling of openness and relaxation. Above all, I found myself noticing the feeling of my breath effortlessly leaving my mouth again and again. Somehow I was less afraid to breathe now, less self-conscious, and not holding in as much. The resonance and freedom in my voice which had been locked up was beginning to return.

Dave came to our sessions with many talents and gifts that enabled me to leave with a sense

of well-being and improvement. He has a wonderful sense of how to sequence a lesson so

that it makes sense to the client. He is sensitive to the client’s needs, and his touch is

appropriate to the moment. I felt that he was guiding me to experience the relief I found, and

yet at no point did he express either an agenda or a pre-conceived notion of what we were

going to do, giving us both the freedom to discover what was needed in the moment. He had

a wealth of tools and approaches to use, and he chose the most effective ones for our work

together.

I am very grateful to Dave for the experience he facilitated, and for his compassion as a witness to my process.

Adam Cole

Feldenkrais Practitioner, Musician, Music Teacher, and Author