The Feldenkrais® Method of Somatic Education

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Feldenkrais® is a somatic movement education system that will teach you how to improve your day-to-day functional movement in a deep way. People discover Feldenkrais® for a wide range of reasons, including looking for solutions to physical pain, to improve in an art or sport, or to ease tension and anxiety. The method is gentle and accessible to all people. Using your sensory experience, you will learn to move simpler, lighter, and with more comfort - whatever your unique challenges may be.  When you learn to move easier, you also feel and function better.  The idea is that your movement isn't separate from you —it IS you. 

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Feldenkrais® improves your movement by attracting your brain to learn easier movement options in an organic and enjoyable way, challenging less efficient habits over time. You will learn to sense yourself in space more clearly, improve the quality of your movements, reduce unnecessary muscular efforts, increase movement choices, and better coordinate between the many parts of you with more confidence and clarity.

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The Feldenkrais® method was invented by Moshe Feldenkrais (1904-1984), a renown physicist, engineer, and the 1st European Judo master.  With his unique mix of expert knowledge in a variety of fields and forward-thinking sensibility, Moshe Feldenkrais developed and shared his method over the course of decades, writing 9 books and holding 3 teacher training programs in the process.

 

His method includes topics such as calming your nervous system, using your brain's neuroplasticity to make lasting behavioral changes, developing one's kinesthetic skills (knowing where you are and how you move in space), an understanding of the bio-physics of human movement, the relationship of the skeletal structure to movement and space, tapping into the same kind of learning that happens in childhood development, and applying the evolutionary order and development of human movement into the one's experience.  But you need not understand any of these topics to benefit from the method and improve your movement.

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There are two ways to learn Feldenkrais®:  in the group class format known as Awareness Through Movement® (ATM) and in the one-on-one format known as Functional Integration® (FI).  ATM and FI use the same principals and overall approach, the main difference is that in ATM, you are verbally guided to do your own movements, and in FI, you are gently moved by a guild certified practitioner.  ​

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