FELDENKRAIS

What can it do for you?

Imagine a comfortably warm room,

...a low, padded table.

It has been a difficult week. You are tired, tense, you ache. The practitioner invites you to remove your shoes and lie down. He picks up your leg and gently brings it to a place where, suddenly, the discomfort vanishes, muscles relax, your leg feels wonderfully light. He rests the leg on a soft roller, cushioned under the knee, and you continue to feel a gentle move here, a push there. Things fall into place. It reaches every part of you, bringing a fuller sense of support and freedom. You float, totally comfortable, a feeling of coming home! The feeling stays as you get up and walk around, taller, steadier, weightless. That night you sleep like a baby and wake up the next morning, looking and feeling great.

The skill of the Feldenkrais practitioner

is in knowing how to organize you so that all effort disappears. You learn to rely on your skeleton so that muscles need no longer work so hard. The resulting sense of freedom and lightness stays because the experience is yours.

Feldenkrais is a method of improving the way you live and move.

By focusing attention on how the different segments of the body articulate one with the other, the technique bypasses all structural complications, to concentrate on improving how you move and act.

The practitioner is able to identify those limitations you impose on yourself.

We get into trouble in our own blind spots so we cannot see the source of those limitations. It takes an outside look.
An original perspective, it is a systems approach, with a vast array of techniques that allows new patterns to emerge and so avoid limitations and improve functioning. It requires a clear understanding of how a perfectly organized person moves.

In the group classes, you do the moving:

When you follow instructions in a Feldenkrais class, you learn that you have the ability to do something about your own state. By moving in new and unusual ways, long forgotten muscle combinations are revived: no longer tense they are involved. The feeling is one of intense relief, flexibility and control.

How well you move determines how effectively and how enjoyably you can carry out your daily activities.

A few minutes of attention will improve your basic abilities more than hours of repetitive, strenuous exercise. You can handle yourself better than any external agent when you let your body function the way it was designed to function.

It's like dance...
with a difference:
not what moves to make,
but finding your own way to move.
Dancing your dance with ease, comfort and power.
Discovering the way your life is meant to be lived
with more youthful vitality, more energy,
no more aches and pains,
no more sore back.

Some questions and answers

   

Articles: Stress  Flexercise at the computer meet Philippe Leblond  Main menu

Myths about backache to dispell

960916 020125 050117