What is Feldenkrais®?
The Feldenkrais Method® uses movement for you to discover, learn, change and continue to develop throughout your life.
Feldenkrais helps anyone wanting to enhance the quality of their everyday life and activities.
People from all walks of life are drawn to the Feldenkrais method for its ability to enable them 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. The applications of the method range from reducing pain, improving orthopedic, neurological, and learning difficulties, to enhancing the performance of professional athletes, dancers, musicians, and actors.
How does it work?
By understanding and identifying your habitual movement, you can learn and acquire alternatives that promote greater ease and well-being. This method uses the brain’s innate capacity for learning and its potential for lifelong maturation and growth.
Throughout the world, the Feldenkrais Method® is growing in recognition. Its relevance is being recognized in the sciences, the arts, and the rehabilitation community.
There are two main modalities of learning in the Feldenkrais Method®:
Awareness Through Movement®
Awareness Through Movement® lessons are group sessions. Participants are verbally guided through a series of 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, you become more aware of your movement habits, giving you new options to explore. 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 your pace and range of motion. Comfort, ease, and the quality of movement are the focus over 'achieving' movements.
Functional Integration®
Functional Integration® is a one-on-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 down or sit and are comfortably dressed. As with Awareness Through Movement® group lessons, these individual sessions use movement as the means to promote changes in patterns of thinking, sensing, feeling, and interacting with others.