About Feldenkrais Method®
“We must reestablish the function of attending to oneself, to one’s desires, to one’s needs, to the feelings of the body. Then we will find an integration of the fluency of movement through each joint into action where the integration itself is a new way of being.”
– Moshe Feldenkrais
Our adult learning is so much about what to do and not how we do it. And even more potently, how do we incorporate and tune into our inner sensing while making choices and organizing our life? It starts with cultivating awareness, an incredible human capacity, and training in ISI – our innate sensory intelligence. Becoming aware of how the whole body engages in any movement. It’s a training and a process. Over time, as this sensing is clarified, we become aware of our restrictive habits that narrow our options, make us rigid and diminish our vitality. These deeply rooted habits impact all areas of our life and our self-image.
Through the Feldenkrais® lessons we can learn to overcome limitations brought on by the stresses of life, injuries, and traumas. With over 1,000+ lessons, the range of choices abounds. These lessons are geared towards creating a state shift that allows for pain relief, increased productivity, mental clarity, and optimal organization of the whole self.
What is Awareness Through Movement (ATM)?
Many ATM lessons are on the floor, where we don’t have to habitually “arrange” ourselves in gravity. They range from 15 to 60 minutes, where students are encouraged to find comfortable range of movement, creating fertile ground for awareness to flourish. If we immediately push towards our limit, we bypass the experience and hence can learn little from it. It’s like standing at the yellow line as a train is approaching, no room to move!
Students are guided verbally through a sequence of movements that build upon each other and usually (and delightfully) fall out of the range of our “typical” adult movements. For example, they could resemble the early human development stages of crawling or learning to come to sit or stand. The practitioner asks questions that might clarify a movement pattern or make it simpler, such as awareness of breath or holding in parts of ourselves that don’t need to be activated (shoulder earrings come to mind!).
It’s done with emphasis on pleasure. That helps develop a sense of integration of the fragment parts. Do you slide your arm on the floor from your spine or from the shoulder blade? Do you strain the neck, tightening the jaw? Can you become aware of your breath as you slide the arm, are you inhaling or exhaling? Are your fingers soft? What did you choose to do with the eyes? Possibilities to finesse the quality of movement are infinite!
Finally, it’s unlike “exercise” where focus is on repetition, muscular contraction and stretching. Habitual muscle contraction stems from the brain and nervous system holding pattern. It’s more about learning to enhance your ability to move in an integrative way, which is not possible without retraining the brain and cultivating awareness.
Who was Moshe Feldenkrais?
Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais (1904-1984) was a world-renowned engineer, nuclear physicist, and Judo Master.
More importantly, over his life he stayed curious and resilient, continuously reinventing himself. During young age, he singlehandedly learned to overcome an incapacitating knee injury. He healed himself through cultivating awareness through movement work that he spent the later part of his life refining.
His work was very novel and advanced for his time, yet he was at the forefront of modern neuroplasticity, retraining his brain to find alternative movement patterns, enriching his life, and turning his weakness into strength through a continuous process of integration.