A Brief Introduction to The Feldenkrais® Method

I am grateful for this opportunity to introduce you to my work. The Feldenkrais method is a very effective and gentle practice that offers many benefits. It can help improve posture, balance coordination, reduce stress and anxiety and overall help a person feel more balanced physically and emotionally.

What is unique about this work is that it offers a way to improve wellbeing by working in alliance with the person’s nervous system and helps develop a more accepting and kind attitude towards oneself and others, while offering a practical and accessible way to feel better.

This is crucial, because many people are so used to fighting with themselves in order to feel better, they don’t even realize it. The’ve been conditioned to believe that the only way to improve is by forcing a change.

And unfortunately many wellness practices encourage people to fight against their nervous system by trying to fix their posture and correcting the way they move

There are two issues with this approach:
1) On a practical level –  these corrections rarely work – trying to correct posture is picking a fight with your own nervous system. You can’t win the fight against your own nervous system, because it defends it’s integrity and will reject corrections from the outside.

2) The other issue is more global. Fixing mentality sneaks into the rest of people’s lives and they try to fix the way they think or feel and encourage others to do the same, often without realizing how much damage is being done.

How do we create change without a fight?

Increasing awareness leads to change! Increasing awareness is enough, because your nervous system is intelligent, because your brain designed to rewire itself based on the experience. Moving gently and slowly, without trying to correct or fix anything naturally increase awareness, because you are able to sense more subtle details about your movement. Your nervous system uses this new information to make your movements more efficient, let go of unnecessary tension, improve self-regulation. These changes emerge naturally, because every nervous system “wants” to function better and given an opportunity will trend in a positive direction.

This might sound very counter intuitive, because we are so used to fixing mindset “In order to improve, you must find a problem and fix it. It might feel very strange to simply attend to how you move, but it is easy to do and does not require any special skills, just some patience and a bit of curiosity.

Try It For Yourself – Free Lesson You Can Do At Home.

I am posting below are recording of a group class (called Awareness Through Movement). In class participants are guided through gentle functional movement sequences, designed to help them naturally feel better. 

Please see the video below, or click here to watch on youtube.

For best experience I recommend lying on a soft quilt or soft carpet. Don’t use a yoga mat because sticky surface prevents movement from being easy . No movement directions are intended to cause pain or discomfort or make you struggle with yourself. If a movement feels difficult, make it so tiny that it feels easy, or skip it altogether and rest, until the next movement. The goal is to explore how you move naturally, no body parts should be forced to move or to remain still. The goal is to simply try the movement in a way that’s natural to you. No need to try to correct your movement, don’t bother trying to make it better. The correction will happen naturally from within your nervous system. Some changes can be noticed during the class, and others might be noticed at the end of the lesson when you get up or later, since the nervous system continues to integrate what is being learned for the next day or two.