What is the Feldenkrais Method?

Have you ever experienced a state of flow? You may have experienced this in sports, dance, painting, writing, or even out on a walk. Flow is when everything feels easy and pleasant, unfolding without willpower or effort. How do we enhance our ability to be in this peak state? What keeps us from achieving this state of being?

Developed by Ph.D. Physicist and Judo blackbelt Moshe Feldenkrais, the Feldenkrais method is a movement education system to develop self-knowledge and inner authority to expose inefficient habits. These can be habits of movement, thought, emotion, and sensation that can zap your energy and create internal resistance. This method uses movement lessons as the primary means to refine your habits. The lessons expose unconscious patterns of habitual tension and wired behavior patterns that keep us tense, rigid, or stuck.

Whether you're looking to reduce pain, recover from an injury or accident, or improve your balance, posture, athletic or artistic performance, this method takes a systems approach, organizing movement through your whole body rather than focusing on a symptom. You gain insights into your anatomy, how to leverage your skeleton, and create efficient movements that feel effortless.

This method provides two learning formats, and clients often benefit from a combination of both. There are Private Functional Integration sessions and Awareness Through Movement group classes.

Private Functional Integration

Functional Integration is a personally tailored lesson to address your specific wants and unique needs. We will start by exploring your historical patterns of habit that perpetuate your discomfort or stifle your potential. We might uncover a lack of clear skeletal support, an inhibited part of your body, lost proprioception (body positioning/self-movement in space), or incongruent actions contributing to your current life circumstances.

I'll use my tools of touch, voice, breath, presence, support, constraints, resistance, and specific questions to guide your self-discovery and learning process. You'll become aware of areas within yourself that are offline, unconscious, or dormant, possibly due to an old injury or negative experience. We then investigate how to re-integrate these areas to develop more efficient and pleasurable actions and a complete self-image.

You will gain greater awareness of how your body works and how you can elicit more efficient and effective means to find support. By understanding the difference between evoking willpower versus refining the acquisition of skill and ability, you will reduce your system's unnecessary contraction and tension. These shifts in behavior ultimately create lasting transformations in your actions and functional patterns. We will also discuss creating a practice around the movement principles you discover to develop continuous improvement outside our time together.  

I typically see clients 1-2 times per week for 1-hour lessons. However, depending on your circumstances, we can do more intensive work. I strongly encourage clients also to participate in Awareness Through Movement lessons outside of our private treatments to continue the learning process.

• 1-Hour Private Session $155

• 6-Session Package $140/session

 Awareness Through Movement Lessons

These lessons develop greater self-knowledge and self-awareness while cultivating skillful movement. In daily life and sports, we move so quickly that we can't begin to process our movement or intention to act. These lessons purposely use slow and gentle movements to allow your brain and nervous system a gap between stimulus and response. This creates the environment for learning how you improve the sequence, pathway, initiation, flow, etc., to create effortless, enjoyable movement.

Designed to elicit changes through movement' challenges,' the lessons take you out of your habits. They use a systems approach, working to organize movement through your whole body rather than isolating movements like in physical conditioning. Unlike the repetitive movements of exercise, you will explore many movement variations to create a robust and resilient neuromuscular system. The lesson's constraints and variations rewire the nervous system, re-establishing or enhancing your motor patterns.

The lessons can be done via recordings or live and explore a variety of everyday movements like walking, squatting, sitting, rolling, and breathing. As the lessons progress, you will deconstruct more complex and faster movements, body positioning, and orientation changes that will challenge you to find new neuromuscular coordination throughout your whole body. The uniqueness of each lesson creates a rich sensory experience requiring attention to detail that you don't find in your typical daily experience or exercise routines.

The lessons are designed for you to gain a comprehensive understanding of the pieces involved in creating new, more effective habits. You will learn concrete movement principles to improve efficiency, motor control, and attention to detail. As you move through the material, you will begin to experience movement that is skillful, easy, efficient, and creates lasting change.