By understanding and identifying your habits in movement, you can learn and acquire alternatives that promote greater ease and wellbeing. It utilizes your brain’s innate capacity for learning and its potential for lifelong maturation and growth.
Rather than teaching ‘the right’ way to move it provides you with ‘more choices’ of how you might move; so depending on your own structure, the context you are in and the action you are intending, you can choose the most efficient and most comfortable way of acting.
It evokes a more skeletal use of your self; your skeleton being the part of you that bears weight and transmits force. We tend to under utilize our skeleton and overwork our musculature. These gentle processes help you to deconstruct some of your muscular habits and create a more effective skeletal use of yourself resulting in improved functioning, performance and effortlessness in your everyday actions
Throughout the world, the FELDENKRAIS METHOD® of somatic education is growing in recognition and in its relevance in the sciences, the arts and rehabilitation. The applications of the method range from reducing pain, improving orthopedic, neurological and learning difficulties, to enhancing performance of professional athletes, dancers, musicians, and actors. People from all walks of life are drawn to the method for its ability to achieve greater levels of comfort, increase mobility and range of motion, improve coordination and flexibility, expand self–awareness, enhance self image and evoke greater clarity and vitality.
There are two main modalities of learning in the FELDENKRAIS METHOD®:
AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT® lessons are group sessions. Participants are verbally led through a series of structured movement sequences, which utilize attention, perception and imagination. Designed to evoke a more synergistic use of yourself, the lessons establish new patterns of movement. As the lessons progress, participants become more aware of their movement habits, affording them new patterns of behavior. There are more than a thousand different lessons with movements ranging from developmentally-based patterns to innovative and novel configurations. The movements are usually done lying down or sitting, and in a manner that recognizes each participant’s own pace and range of motion. Comfort, ease, and the quality of movement are the main criteria used towards developing greater volition over what you do and how you do it.
• Click here for Alan’s CDs of public AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT® workshops.
FUNCTIONAL INTEGRATION®, is a one-to-one, hands-on interaction specifically designed to meet the needs of an individual. Practitioners, primarily through the use of their hands, guide students to a new and more varied use of themselves. The quality of touch is non-invasive, informative, and interactive in nature. Students usually lie or sit and are comfortably dressed. As with AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT® group lessons, these individualized sessions use movement as the means to promote changes in patterns of thinking, sensing, feeling and interacting with others.
The FELDENKRAIS METHOD® provides intensive personal learning and growth and for many may be the means to an exciting and new profession.
• Click here for information about FELDENKRAIS® Professional Training Programs.
FELDENKRAIS®, FELDENKRAIS METHOD®, Awareness Through Movement®, and Functional Integration® are registered service marks of the FELDENKRAIS Guild® of North America.
