About the Feldenkrais Method®

We all desire improvement in our lives. Whether this involves more vitality, more joy, or the improvement of specific abilities, at the heart we need to continue that learning that was part of our growth process. The Feldenkrais Method® is a way to access that special learning process through the experiencing of one’s movement in a new way. We accomplish that through gentle, non-invasive attending to how we move and how we can stop interfering with ourselves in our intention to succeed. You learn without stress and with respect for your own needs and your own pathways. In the process you begin to recover what you have neglected and excluded in your self. The key is in improving sensory and kinesthetic awareness. Thus we have a group learning process, Awareness Through Movement®, and an individual learning process, Functional Integration®. There is no essential difference in the two processes in relation to learning, or how self-correction and new self-organization can result. Both processes apply the same basic understanding of how learning can be facilitated through touch, feeling, slowness, and connectedness.

Awareness Through Movement® (ATM) lessons are guided stepwise self-explorations involving easy gentle movements that increase in complexity. While the primary intent of these lessons is developing a more acute sensory and kinesthetic awareness of one’s self in moving and daily functioning, there are many other benefits to engaging in this process. Among benefits reported by those who have experienced the lessons are reductions in excess tonus of the musculature, improvements in breathing, reduction of neuromuscular pain, and increased efficiency in daily activities. What can happen in the process is that your natural abilities for self-correction wake up allowing your system to organize action differently from your normal habits. When such changes happen, you begin to achieve a new self-perception, or self-image, allowing for many other changes in your self-appreciation and feeling of ability and self-worth.

Functional Integration® (FI) lessons involve the same basic learning process involving the natural seeking of a more coherent organization of your movement and action. However, the practitioner guides you through touch and contact to awaken areas of your self that are normally not in your awareness. In the end you discover a way to move that is more inclusive and integrated. The advantage in Functional Integration is the participation of the practitioner who can guide you individually to those parts of your self that otherwise left out of your moving, and to bring you through movements that evoke integrated pathways in your self.

Both modalities of the work bring you to discover and develop the unrecognized potentials of your self to heal, learn, and continue a growing in life that never should have been abandoned.

“Moshe Feldenkrais was a great friend of ours. His work, in our times, is extremely important. He evolved the study of body movement more precisely and scientifically, I think, then any other of the schools of his contemporaries. It remains very important, because the basis of all theater work is the body. The body is the instrument.”

- Peter Brook, Vienna, 1994

“This is the most sophisticated and effective method I have seen for the prevention and reversal of deterioration of function.”

- Margaret Mead