The Feldenkrais Method is a specialised approach to develop processes of learning. We need to relearn how to move after an injury, trauma and/or accident in order to continue living and move forward. No movement: no life.
“If you know what you are doing, you can do what you want.” Moshe Feldenkrais
While the Feldenkrais Method is a method of learning and NOT a medical procedure, treatment or therapy; it can have therapeutic outcomes such as pain relief, for example.
Clients/students are taught to perceive sequences of movement attentively. Each student is different and will therefore experience the movements to varying degrees and will need to rest at different times in the lesson. Changes and developments can be sensed through sensory impressions and traced through mental awareness. Some people are more aware than others, of course, so the impressions come in their own good time. Such processes of learning can be experienced with immediacy, some a bit later on. By raising one’s own actions into consciousness, new physical, mental and emotional movability emerges. This is why it is called a somatic education method because it addresses all these aspects body, mind and spirit/soul/whatever. The Feldenkrais Method is suitable for all ages and medical conditions.
Action is something that does not exist by itself. There is no action without feeling, without sensing, without thinking, therefore, improved actions will improve our life.
Moshe Feldenkrais
The Feldenkrais Method can help if you want it to help. First what do you wish to achieve in learning the Method? Perhaps you wish to move without pain, or carry your 2-year-old on your hip comfortably, or harvest the carrots from your allotment without having to take pain-killers for a week afterwards, maybe you want to sleep better, run better, play better. I could go on forever, but I won’t. You need to know what you want to do and then I can help you to get there. Maybe you’re in a wheelchair and want to be able to walk again: that I can’t help you with. But I can help you feel better in your chair. The Feldenkrais Method really improved my quality of life and all of the things I could already do got better. This is what my past and present clients have to say:
There is no Hokus Pokus involved. I studied an intense 4-year training (160 days in total) of the Method in an accredited international training programme in Vienna under the academic directorship of Jeremy Krauss (student of Moshe Feldenkrais, academic director of numerous Feldenkrais Training Programmes and developer of JKA). In this programme we spent two years focussing on Awareness Through Movement, which are group lessons of the Feldenkrais Method. In the last two years of the programme, the focus is on individual lessons known as Functional Integration. This is where we apply skill learnt in our own Awareness Through Movement Lessons on one person at their own pace. We learn how to follow movements, how to be careful and protect the person on our table and moreover how to treat the student’s whole self, not just his or her body. By listening to the student, I can try to understand what it is they want to do and then I can help them to do it.