WHAT IS FELDENKRAIS?
WHAT IS FELDENKRAIS?
The Feldenkrais Method® (FM) of somatic education is an educational system which uses guided movement to increase body awareness and improve the ease, balance, grace and effectiveness of action. It does this by helping students become aware of their existing patterns of action and guiding the student in the discovery of additional possibilities for action.
Awareness Through Movement® (ATM) lessons are the verbally guided group method, and Functional Integration® (FI) lessons are the hands-on individual method. ATM group classes consist of slow, gentle exploratory movement sequences, guided verbally by the instructor, and designed to clarify the nature of specific movement patterns. In FI, a practitioner uses gentle, non-invasive touch to help an individual student become aware of how he/she habitually moves and to suggest alternative movement patterns.
The result of Feldenkrais lessons is a wonderful feeling of smoothness, lightness and freedom throughout your body.
Feldenkrais once commented "You know, if you identify your greatest weakness and study it until you turn it into your greatest strength, you will discover something that no one else has discovered. And other people will think you're
a genius."
Feldenkrais often said: "If you don't know what you're doing, you can't do what you want."
FURTHER EXPLANATION
ATM classes consist of slow, gentle exploratory movement sequences designed around a specific human function (such as reaching, bending, or twisting), with the goal of increasing awareness of multiple options for organizing the action. In a lesson, the instructor talks students through movement sequences for them to explore in a slow and delicate process of awareness. Students repeat the movements over and over, focusing on feeling qualities of their movements. Every few minutes, the instructor suggests a new variation of the movement sequence, gradually taking students through an exploration of how the body can most efficiently, economically and enjoyably perform the movements.
Basic ATM sequences are usually done sitting or lying on the floor so that students don't have to worry about balancing or falling or working to support their bodies against gravity. More advanced ATM sequences can involve standing, walking, or other complex movements. The teacher does not demonstrate the desired movement, and the basic movements are usually done with the eyes closed. This way students don't see and copy someone else's movement but instead focus on experiencing and exploring their own movements. By the same token, to ensure that students approach the movement as pure exploration, there is no externally defined end product or "right" way of doing the movements. Staying focused on the process of moving rather than trying to achieve some goal helps students approach the movement with curiosity and playfulness, as an exploration of how the body works. In this spirit of playful curiosity and gentle awareness, the body will use its innate wisdom to find more comfortable and effective ways of moving.
Functional Integration® lessons are hands-on lessons for individuals. In FI, a practitioner uses words and gentle, non-invasive touch to help an individual student become aware of how he/she habitually moves and to suggest alternative movement patterns. The teacher uses touch which is extraordinarily soft and delicate to guide the student's awareness of her/his own body and to communicate new ways of breathing, using muscles, and organizing movements.
Awareness is the key to the process underlying the Feldenkrais Method. What students become aware of is the position and feeling of the body itself and the efficiency and comfort of movements. Through the exercises, students learn how to investigate their movements in a non-judgmental way. They have the time and opportunity to feel how they habitually move and to discover the unconscious ways in which they constrict their bodies and limit their movements. These unconscious tensions and restrictions waste energy. They produce strain and fatigue. Bringing these restrictions into conscious awareness results in an almost magical transformation.
As people feel what they are doing, they will have the natural, automatic experience of choosing easier, gentler, more relaxed and more efficient movement alternatives. As they let go of their old movement patterns, their bodies will become freer and more relaxed, and their movements will become more natural, balanced, and coordinated. They will begin to move in fluid, integrated spirals of graceful movement, and they will improve their posture, reduce stress, and experience more comfort in everything they do.
The Feldenkrais Method works by teaching students how to bring awareness fully into the body/self. It operates by giving people choices about how they move and function. It helps people eliminate what Feldenkrais called "parasitical movements," those extra efforts which do not result in any useful movement. These parasitic movements may include such things as clenching the jaw while walking or tensing the shoulders while talking. Eliminating parasitic movements results in increased relaxation, greater flexibility, better balance, and greater economy of movement.
A BRIEF EXPERIENCE
Sit upright on a firm, flat chair. Sit forward so that you are not leaning against the back rest. With your eyes open, turn your head to the right as far as you comfortably can. Turn your head back to the forward position. Do this a few times and notice how the movement feels. Is it smooth and easy? Does it flow without any hesitations or tense spots? How far can you turn your head comfortably? Try turning your head to the left, and notice how that feels in comparison.
Now, sit with your eyes closed and your head facing forward. Turn your head to the right, very gently, very slowly, and only an inch or so. Do this many times, slowly, for about thirty or forty seconds. Then rest for half a minute or so. Turn your head again, focusing on making the movement soft, silky and continuous. Then rest again.
Sit with your head facing forward, and turn your eyes toward the right. Move your eyes back and forth from the center to the right, slowly and gently for thirty seconds. Make sure you are not straining your eyes. Take a brief rest.
Now, turn your head slowly and gently to the left, and at the same time turn your eyes to the right. Keep doing this over and over, gently and slowly, finding out how to make the movement smoother and softer. Rest for a moment.
Now, turn your eyes to the right, and at the same time turn your head to the right. Let yourself be interested in looking to the right, and let that interest lead your head in the movement of turning to the right. Notice how this combination of eyes, head and attention makes the movement feel.
Most people will find that this final movement feels smoother and easier than the first movement. Try turning your head to the left, and notice how that direction feels in comparison. Most people will find that turning left feels less alive and easy than turning to the right.
PRINCIPLES OF FELDENKRAIS
Functional Movement: The FM uses a neurological/action model. It aims not at strength or flexibility per se but at better control of movement. The exercises use spiralic, whole-body movement. They encourage easy, free, light, graceful movement.
Moshe Feldenkrais was an engineer, and the Feldenkrais Method is just the kind of thing an engineer would come up with. It focuses on movement functions, which are goal-oriented movement sequences. It helps people examine how movement flows through the body, sequencing and linking the body parts. It teaches people to differentiate the parts and then use them as an integrated assemblage. To improve a function, it removes extraneous elements and supplies missing movement components.
Effective Movement: Survival was a key concern to Feldenkrais, and he evaluated movement in terms of its effectiveness in handling danger. He often talked about how an animal in a jungle would move, with all senses alert and moving in a balanced, efficient way. He had escaped from Russia as a young man and made his way across Europe to France, later escaping the Nazis and moving to England. Feldenkrais was a judoist and an instructor of hand-to-hand combat for the Jewish underground fighting to establish the state of Israel. Many of the movement patterns in ATM are derived from the movements of judo, and Feldenkrais emphasized that good body use would allow a person to move in any direction at any moment to respond to danger. The concept of functional movement is ultimately derived from Feldenkrais' concern with effective movement for control of the environment.
Habits: A key concept in the FM is habit. Habits are learned behaviors that have become automatic and dropped out of awareness. Habitual behavior occurs without conscious awareness/choice. Our body image and kinesthetic map are built of habits of sensing and moving the body.
The positive function of habits is to save energy by having movements fire off as pre-learned packages. The problem with habits is that their automaticity eliminates the opportunity to improve actions and results in the continued inclusion of tension and wasted movements in actions. Habits feel normal and we feel them to be correct even when they are very damaging. It is not possible to discriminate correct from incorrect movements without new input.
It is possible to overcome habits by bringing awareness into the habitual movements. This allows the body to feel what is being done and make decisions which will improve efficiency. A movement challenge which requires new movements and non-stereotypical action can focus awareness into habits and alter them. Performing movements which break apart normal movement clumps and require odd combinations of movement components can break down habits and bring awareness into the body.
Sensitivity: Insensitivity makes change and growth impossible. When people cannot feel what they are doing in their bodies and movements, they cannot discover easier, more comfortable ways of being and acting.
In the Feldenkrais Method, it is important to do the exercises with as little muscular tension as possible. The two sources of muscle loading are internal tension and external force. Reminding students to move more slowly and lightly, and reminding them to do smaller rather than larger movements helps eliminate the first source of muscle effort. And doing the movements lying or sitting reduces the need for overcoming gravity and allows easier movements.
By reducing effort, students can sense more delicately just what they are doing, and they can feel more delicately what will improve their movements.
Sensitivity leads to the ability to practice movements on the intentional level. Often, students are encouraged to just think through a movement. This is not thinking about the movement in an abstract, intellectual way but sensing the delicate muscular events involved in planning and intending to do the movement. The muscles automatically respond to the intention with very slight movements, which are the subtle beginnings of the large movement. The "mental" intention to execute a movement sequence creates "physical" changes, and learning comes about as students consciously engage their kinesthetic imagination and practice movements on this delicate level of sensing.
Deeper Consciousness: The Feldenkrais Method leads to a very different consciousness in movement. It leads to a non-verbal, non-cognitive way of being in movement. This is a playful child-mind in which to explore and learn. It is a much more fundamental way of learning than the intellectual, see/copy kind of learning that adults generally do. Curiosity and play access the innate wisdom of the body.
Slow, gentle, repetitive movements act as a focus of mindfulness and create a meditative state. The movements are not demonstrated; there is no right or wrong defined; and no practical goal for the movements is given or exists -- so students must focus on the moment-by-moment process of awareness rather than on a product or goal.
Bringing full concentration into a movement focuses the whole self into a single intentional pattern, which allows conflicting/extraneous intentional habits to subside. This leads to a state of natural movement, in which students let the body's wisdom of movement execute the movement, rather than having the movements proceed from the conscious mind or learned habits. When awareness is engaged, the body will automatically choose comfortable, effective, safe ways of moving. And this way of being in movement will carry over into daily life and the development of calmer more effective ways of daily functioning.
RESULTS
I (Paul Linden) wrote the following brief article in the early 80's for the Feldenkrais Journal:
Aikido, Karate, and the Feldenkrais Method
One day, after an intensive period of Feldenkrais movement, I had an experience which brought home to me how valuable Feldenkrais could be for my martial arts training. I had gone out on the lawn to practice my karate kata. I started to do a punch. I remember it quite clearly. I started the movement of a punch, but I couldn’t tell where to end the movement. I suddenly realized that I had normally put a lot of needless tension into every movement I made. It didn’t accomplish anything useful. It just wasted energy, but I judged how far I had moved by how much effort I had expended. All of a sudden it took so little effort to execute the punch that all my habitual movement cues were irrelevant, and so my punch just kept going. I had to watch my fist to see when it had gone far enough. Over the course of the next few months, my body recalibrated itself so that moving with much less effort became normal.
Later on with more Feldenkrais work, my sense of movement sequencing in my body began to improve as well. In the slow, introspective movements of the Feldenkrais lessons, I learned more clearly how to start movements in one part of my body and transmit the motion in smooth, sequential spirals from joint to joint to joint through the rest of my body. Many of the movements in Aikido and Karate depend on just this kind of action. Rather than moving the body in rigid chunks, power is built up and delivered through sequencing, the way a whip generates and magnifies power.
This same movement sequencing is the foundation for Aikido joint locks as well. For example, when I do the Aikido elbow/shoulder control technique (ikkyo), I have to be able to control the attacker’s pelvis and legs by sending movement from the wrist and elbow to the shoulder, through the spinal column and to the pelvis.
Moshe Feldenkrais was himself an accomplished Judo practitioner, and the martial way of moving has been preserved in his body awareness lessons. The Feldenkrais Method offers martial artists a new and more specific way of studying a crucial element in movement coordination that is part of all martial art traditions.
This book by Feldenkrais begins with a sixty page introduction to the theory of the work, written in an easy-to-understand style. The book goes on to present 12 ATM lessons, which readers can play with on their own.
This book provides an extensive discussion of the theory underlying the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education.
This book is a clear, easy to read discussion of the theory of the Feldenkrais Method. It presents a number of ATM lessons on key elements underlying all movement functioning. This book offers a very readable statement of the nature and results of Feldenkrais work.
Feldenkrais Resources
A catalog of books and audio tapes relating to the Feldenkrais Method. The audiotapes, by a number of different teachers, present Awareness Through Movement lessons that people can do on their own at home.
Feldenkrais Resources
830 Bancroft Way, Suite 112
Berkeley, CA 94710
Phone: 800-765-1907 or 510-540-7600
Fax: 510-540-7683
Email: Feldenres@aol.com
Website: www.feldenkrais-resources.com
The professional association of Feldenkrais practitioners. Contact the Guild for information on finding practitioners in North America and Feldenkrais associations in other countries. The Guild also has a catalog of available video and audio tapes, books, and articles.
Feldenkrais Guild
P.O. Box 489
Albany, OR 97321-0143 USA
Phone: 541-926-0981
Fax: 541-926-0572
Email: feldngld@peak.org
Website: www.feldenkrais.com