What is the Feldenkrais Method® ?
The Feldenkrais Method® is a form of somatic education that uses gentle movement and directed attention to improve movement and enhance human functioning. With this Method, you can increase your range of motion, improve your flexibility and coordination, and rediscover your innate capacity for graceful efficient movement without pain.
By expanding the self image through movement sequences, the method enables you to include more of yourself in your movements. Students become aware of their habitual neuromuscular patterns and rigidities, and learn to move in new ways. These ways bring freedom from pain, better balance and coordination, and a clearer sense of self.
Awareness Through Movement®
In Awareness Through Movement® lessons, the teacher verbally guides you through a sequence of gentle movements intended to help you develop a greater awareness of how you move.
The circumstances are organized to enable you to learn at your own rate of understanding and doing. Time is given to assimilate the idea in a leisurely way and to perceive, organize and re-organize oneself efficiently.
Through ATM®, you learn to assimilate the essential and to reject the unintended and unnecessary efforts.
Adding pleasure to the way you learn new skills relaxes the breathing, and movement becomes simple and easy.
Functional Integration®
Functional Integration® is essentially a nonverbal, hands-on form of ATM® using kinesthetic communication. It is effective when a person with any variety of injuries or a disconnection with a sense of self has lost the ability to help himself. It turns to the oldest elements of our sensory system-touch-- the feelings of pull and pressure.
Through this gentle touch and movement the practitioner communicates how the person is organized and how to reorganize to move in more functionally expanded motor patterns. The person becomes absorbed in sensing the diminishing muscular tonus, the deepening and the regularity of breathing, abdominal ease, and improved circulation in the expanding skin.
The deepest kinesthetic sensations formed in early childhood are affected. The person senses his most primitive, consciously forgotten patterns and recalls the well-being of a growing young child. At the end, one rubs one's eyes as if awakening from a restful dream. The persons eyes are brighter and wider, the movements smoother.
Upon standing there is a change of pressure distribution on the soles of the feet, a reduction of intercostal tensions, a completion of the anti-gravitational muscular patternsfor a clear feeling of vertical upright standing which occurs because of a complete change of neural functioning of the motor cortex. A feeling of well-being prevails.
Most of us are too busy and too often miss something that is this priceless. So slow down and try Functional Integration®.
How was the Feldenkrais Method® developed?
Moshe Feldenkrais,D.Sc.(1904-1984) was an engineer, physicist, and martial arts expert. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of these fields as well as linguistics, biology, perinatal development and athletics, Dr. Feldenkrais avoided surgery and taught himself to walk without pain after severe knee injury. This event was the catalyst for the development of the Feldenkrais Method®.
