Movement Re-organisation
We don’t tend to pay a lot of attention to how we organise ourselves to move; you have probably been instructed to lift heavy things with a straight back and bent knees, and most of us have discovered how ineffective it is to be told to “sit up straight!”. However, there are hundreds of ways to improve how we go about our everyday actions — sitting, standing, reaching, leaning, bending, rolling over in bed, the list is endless — by increasing our awareness of our muscles and our skeletal structure, and how they can be organised to work more efficiently together.
Gentle and Effective Learning
This learning process helps us to release ourselves from long-term, chronic muscle tensions that distort our posture and make it difficult to do the things we used to do with ease as children, and it also shows us how to maintain those improvements by incorporating what has been learnt into our daily lives. The most wonderful thing about the Feldenkrais Method is that although the potential for change is great, the movements employed for the purpose are slow and subtle, avoiding extremes, and are therefore suitable for people unable to handle more strenuous bodywork methods. Awareness Through Movement group classes are so gentle that they are popular with M.E. sufferers.
Improving Posture
Improvements can be achieved quickly with this method, but obviously posture problems that have taken many years to develop don’t disappear overnight — that kind of change necessitates long-term commitment and “homework”. Because the work involves hands-on stimulation of the nervous system, via the skeleton, it is effective for serious conditions like Multiple Sclerosis, Cerebellar Palsy or Parkinson’s Disease — not by providing a “cure”, but by making everyday life easier and less painful. It is particularly ideal for locating and eradicating the causes of Repetitive Strain Injury (R.S.I.).
Learning How to Learn
We tend to notice quickly when others’ assumptions and certainties are interfering with the openness of their minds; it is much less easy to be aware of how our own beliefs are limiting our possibilities. There is magic in the suspension of certainty — the ability to simply observe and wonder a little, putting what you already know on hold. Feldenkrais knew that most human cultures privilege doing things “correctly”, and so he included in his teaching method processes designed to guide his students away from the inflexibility of knowing the one right way to do something.
Awareness Through Movement classes and Functional Integration one-to-one lessons are tools to enable the student to become aware of rigidities of mind AND body — indeed it is only the fundamental inaccuracies of our language that encourage the limiting idea that these aspects of ourselves are in any way separate from each other.