The Feldenkrais Method

Monday, 22 November 2010

THE FELDENKRAIS METHOD is a revolutionary neuro-muscular training or therapy that promotes unprecedented improvements in the efficiency, coordination, and ease of body movement. It is a unique experiential demonstration of how even the subtlest levels of faulty muscular habit can exacerbate or cause a variety of physical complaints, or simply restrict even high levels of performance and well-being. The rapidity of detection and un-learning of faulty, damaging movement patterns, which the technique achieves, is facilitated by its unique and precise mirroring of the organic ways infants learn to move in the first place. Involved is a very subtle, pleasurable, exploratory form of bodily manipulation that heightens communication between brain and muscles. This supplies the brain with the information it needs for creating a wider and more harmonious repertoire of movement possibilities. Along with the alleviation of many symptoms, the recipient commonly experiences euphoric feelings of lightness, ease, and mental clarity.

The Feldenkrais Method includes two ways of working with people:

1. FUNCTIONAL INTEGRATION® (FI) is a one-on-one approach to working with people. The practitioner uses gentle touch in guiding your movements delicately as you lie or sit in comfortable clothing on a low, padded table. With precised handling, the practitioner conveys new or forgotten movement options, new neuro-muscular patterns in the place of often outmoded, faulty habits. The very detection and gentle exploration of minute resistances in movement patterns offer a unique, painless way of guiding you to a liberation from them, thus helping you to discover a broad range of options from which to choose and making space for your innate spontaneity. This process is a thoroughly nourishing and liberating one, melting useless defenses and offering a profound sense of relief and enhanced well-being on the physical, mental, and emotional levels.

2. AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT® (ATM) is based on a sequence of exercises which are verbally directed by the practitioner and explored by the student on one's own. ATM consists of thousands of carefully constructed exercises, creating a setting for the exploration and refinement of specific movements, breaking up old habits, and instilling new or forgotten patterns of thinking, moving and feeling by the student. The discovery of the ways of limiting oneself unconsciously through unchallenged muscular patterns leads not only to a healthier body functioning but, owing to the subtle connections between muscular and mental/emotional patterns, also to a freer, more spontaneous personality.

Dr. MOSHE FELDENKRAIS, D. Sc., (1904-1984) developed the Feldenkrais Method out of his unique understanding of such diverse fields as physics, neuro-science, the martial arts (he earned a Black Belt in Judo in 1936), learning processes, cybernetics, linguistics and body mechanics. He was an eminent physicist, and a close associate of the Nobel Laureate Frederic Joliot-Curie in Paris before he became one of the world's foremost authorities on sensory-motor functioning.

During World War II, Dr. Feldenkrais suffered crippling knee injuries and was given little chance of ever recovering. He literally taught himself to walk again--without pain--and it was during this process that he developed his unique system of accessing the power of the nervous system to improve human functioning.

Applying his understanding of the role of body movement in the functioning of body and mind, during the last forty years of his life Moshe Feldenkrais taught his method throughout Europe and the United States. He personally trained a small number of practitioners, among them Michael, to continue his work. Today there are nearly 3,000 certified Feldenkrais teachers around the globe.

Benefits of the Feldendrais Method

THE FELDENKRAIS METHOD is an intriguingly gentle, pleasurable learning process that profoundly enhances the functioning of the body/mind. It is beneficial both for people seeking to improve their general well-being and for people with specific conditions.

On the one hand, the Feldenkrais Method

• improves posture, flexibility, coordination
• widens perception and creativity
• enhances personal growth, physical and emotional well-being
• refines performance skills for athletes, actors, dancers, and musicians
• increases your ability to experience or re-discover your capacity for pleasure
• develops greater thinking capabilities

On the other hand, this method

• aids in effortless breathing
• helps you to release emotional blockages
• eliminates pain and movement restrictions

Improves function in individuals with:

• neuro-muscular disorders such as stroke, spinal injury, cerebral palsy
• muscular-skeletal problems such as chronic neck- and back pain,
• sciatica
• repetitive strain syndrome
• stress related to past or present trauma

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