About the Feldenkrais Method
Awareness Through Movement® lessons consist of a series of gentle, ingenious movements that are carefully directed, exploratory in nature, and clarify the full range of possibility for human movement and action. Students learn at their own pace, in a non-competitive environment. By utilizing the inherent intelligence of the nervous system, each person discovers new ways of using him or herself with more ease, grace, and power. Dr. Feldenkrais created hundreds of lessons which focus on different themes or interconnection between the nervous system, the muscles, the skeletal system, and how each person functions in their daily environment.
Improvement in any of these systems can positively affect all the other systems.
In Functional Integration®, the practitioner communicates through gentle touch and movement. Through this non-invasive contact, the lesson facilitates improvement in the organization and coordination of the nervous, skeletal, and muscular systems. Students regain capabilities previously relinquished due to pain or “aging”. As work progresses, people report profound and lasting shifts in inner well being, connection to self, creativity, mood, and outlook.
Correlation between the Feldenkrais’ Methodology and Current Research
Current studies in the field of neuroscience have discovered a wealth of evidence that the Feldenkrais Method® uses all the strategies found to be most useful in developing more brain power as well as recovering from a vast array of difficulties which are mediated through the nervous system.
Here are some of the principles woven into the lessons:
Variety (stereotypy is the enemy of the brain)
Learning to solve problems through many different angles of approach
Learning to attend to thought and sensation simultaneously
Dr. Feldenkrais was interested in helping people use more of their potential and often talked about learning to use more of the brain's capacity. In his lessons all the "higher parts" of the brain (attention, the visual, the auditory, the memory, the awareness of the spatial configuration of the skeletal parts) are harnessed and integrated into co-ordinated action which also includes making use of the intelligence of the "lower structures".