Feldenkrais Method of Movement Education

Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais was trained as a physicist in Paris and work in the Radium Institute as an assistant to the Nobel laureate Frederick Joliot-Curie. He left France and took refuge in the United Kingdom during the second world war and worked in the British admiralty on anti submarine technology. It was during his stay in the United Kingdom that he hurt his knee during a football game. He hurt it enough to not be able to walk and consulted the best surgeons of his day. They gave him a fifty percent chance of the operation failing leaving him a cripple for life. This he found unacceptable and decided against the surgery. He then read up all he could on human anatomy and physiology. He studied works that dealt with the bodies reaction to trauma to the central nervous system, one that he mentions in name is the book "A basis for the theory of new medicine" by A.D. Speransky.

As well as reading he began to explore his own body and the manners in which he could move with ease and coordination. During his stay in France, Dr. Feldenkrais had acquired a black belt in Judo. This training in martial art helped him with his research. He used his body as a laboratory. He tried many experiments and these slowly led him to develop his method. As his knee got better, people began to ask him to help them with their problems. He caught himself spending more and more time helping people and doing less of physics which was what he did for a living. He noted that he could only see so many people in a day, so he began to explore the possibility of transcribing what he did with students into verbal commands that he could then teach to a large group. I say student and not patient, as Dr. Feldenkrais insisted that his method was not therapeutic but a pedagogical one.

The Feldenkrais Method consists of one on one work done on a low table. This is called Functional Integration, here the Feldenkrais practitioner moves the student in a precise series of gentle and slow movements. It also has group classes called Awareness Through Movement. In these sessions, the Feldenkrais practitioner guides the students in slow precise movements that teaches the students how to move with more ease and regain ground lost due to a lifetime of bad habits and self imposed limitations.

Awareness Through Movement is practiced in a group. One lies on a comfortable mat with loose fitting clothing to allow for freedom of movement. The Feldenkrais Method practitioner takes us on a journey of awareness by guiding the class through a series of small precise exploratory movements. The practitioner will observe the students and adapt the instructions to fit with what he/she sees happening on the mats. You may be asked to perform back stretches by arching the spine in one direction and then it's opposite, but stretching is not the goal more important that the goal here is the journey. The more attentive we are to how we do what we do, the more free we are to do what we want to do. No two lessons are alike. Dr. Feldenkrais developed more than 1000 different lessons.

You can find a large collection of free recorded mp3 lessons online at www.openatm.org. This website was started by Falk Fedderson to give people who did not have access to Feldenkrais practitioners a chance to experience this wonderful method. If you try some lessons. Make sure that you do the movements slower and smaller than you imagine you should.

Functional Integration is practiced by a Feldenkrais Method practitioner usually on a low lying padded table. The practitioner after having observed the student walk, stand and sit is asked to lie down on the table. It is at this point that the lesson starts. The practitioner takes the student's body on a journey of movement so to speak. The internal map is helped to become more clear and the limitations are pushed back in a very gentle non intrusive manner. This modality is helpful for people with back pain, upper back pain, lower back pain, mid back pain. But it does not deal exclusively with people suffering from back pain. People come with neck pain, shoulder pain, hip pain and even no pain. Perhaps they want to walk more freely or find more ease in movement generally.