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Discover Feldenkrais
DISCOVERING THE FELDENKRAIS METHOD®
Dr. Staffan Elgelid and Chrish Kresge, editors of The Feldenkrais Method: Learning through Movement, introduce this educational method focusing on learning and movement, which can bring about improved movement and enhanced functioning…
Feldenkrais is named after its originator, Moshe Feldenkrais (1904-1984), an engineer and physicist as well as a Judo teacher.
The Feldenkrais Method® approach combines movement, breathing and body alignment in a context of mindfulness. It offers a unique and practical way to realise physical and mental potential more fully. It is not just pushing muscles around, but changing things in the brain itself so that the patient can gradually adjust his whole muscular dysfunction to what we call a normal image. The Feldenkrais Method® transmits the image and you organise your brain to meet it.
There are two main ways to learn about The Feldenkrais Method® and to explore its benefits: The first is in lessons, which Feldenkrais named Awareness Through Movement sessions. A qualified teacher takes a small group through a sequence of movements, some of them unusual or unaccustomed, so that participants can explore a movement journey and then use their increased awareness to release chronic patterns of tension and to create new movement possibilities. As an alternative or addition, individual one-toone Functional Integration sessions involve a teacher working with an individual to explore new ways of moving, addressing particular habits and increasing selfawareness. Feldenkrais Method® classes are responsive to individual needs and can improve the quality of life for people with a range of mental and physical health conditions.
The Feldenkrais Method® can help with chronic back problems, repetitive strain injury (RSI), tension and stress. There is also evidence of it helping with neurological conditions such as multiple sclerosis, the symptoms of a stroke and cerebral palsy. There are over 120 Feldenkrais Method® practitioners across the UK who are all members of The Feldenkrais Guild UK.
Jeff Healy shares a Feldenkrais case study
When people come to my office for relief from pain from physical or emotional wounding, they are bearing the weight of the life they have confronted and lived in. They don’t know that they really come to me to improve the quality of their life but often become increasingly aware of the underlying issues that affect their well-being. I worked with Beverly, a strong, athletic woman in her early 50s who had played soccer her entire adult life. She was experiencing severe knee pain because her lower leg was angled significantly outward and her foot was unable to support her knee when standing.
She walked with a pronounced limp; each time she stood on her leg, her weight dropped into her knee. She could not find a clear path of support from the floor up through her skeleton. Each step was painful.
Beverly was falling and shearing across her knee, which had been damaged through years of playing soccer. Pain, a product of the brain, was trying to protect her from further harm, but she was overriding the pain to play soccer. During our first lesson, I helped her learn how to organise herself so that her skeleton could support her more clearly. Afterward, she was able to walk around my office, and for most of the next week she walked without significant discomfort. In our second lesson (the sessions are called lessons because as Feldenkrais practitioners we create the environment for learning and acquiring new functional behaviour), she was even more clearly capable of finding support through her leg. No pain was attached to the movement of walking.
She had experienced two weeks of relief, so she decided to return to the soccer field and play an 80-minute game. Not surprisingly, she returned to my office in agony. I helped her regain her integrated sense of wholeness, support, and composure. When she sat up, her face was bright and open, the pain that had etched her face supplanted by calmness. She looked at me and said, “This is the happiest I have ever been in my life.”
Happiness and a sense of peace had been uncovered from within her. And then she said, “But playing soccer is such a pleasure for me. I would hate to give it up.” No doubt being embodied and playing with a team is a great experience and easy to identify with as a source of pleasure. It is easy to have these experiences As a means to recover from our injuries, most of us participate in currently accepted modes of physical training and therapeutic exercises. These are for the most part prescriptive, repetitive directives that don’t necessarily lead to changes in behaviour. A key ingredient of the Feldenkrais Method is that a student learns clear new patterns of action, movement, and support that are more efficient and effective for acting in gravity and in society. n
become our self-worth, and this reward has been derived from an external source. We see, in this instant, two paradigms of living life before us.
In one, we utilise outcomes driven by our will and conditioning as a basis of self-worth. In the other – the road less travelled, but deeply sought after and yearned for by many – is learning how to care for our most essential nature, to care for ourselves. For some, to give up the “pleasure” of their activities is too much. Others realise that their injury has been a part of their path into the inner domain and dimensions of self-realisation and self-worth that are based on who they essentially are, not on what they can produce. This is the very nature of the midlife crisis for the self-made person, who looks back at their life and asks, “Is this all there is?”
When my students initially come for lessons, I ask them to imagine the future. If they keep doing what they’re doing, what will their quality of life be like in five years’ time, or in 25 years?
Everyone – especially those in pain who come to me as a last resort – can see their fate and the trajectory they are on. Unless they experience a new intervention that helps them with how they function in life, something that creates a new way for to utilise their own natural inherent way of learning, they will be relegated to the predictable outcomes of their conditioned way of acting.
Chrish Kresge
Dr. Staffan Elgelid
DR STAFFAN ELGELID, PT, PHD, GCFP,
C-IAYT, RYT-500, NBC-HWC, is a professor of physical therapy at Nazareth College in Rochester, NY. He is also a Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner and yoga therapist. Find out more at www.somatologik.com
CHRISH KRESGE, GCFP, has been teaching the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education for over 20 years all over the world. She is also an actor, theatre producer, and director. Find out more at www.Chrishkresge.com
Learn more about Feldenkrais and discover training programmes at The Feldenkrais Guild UK http://www.feldenkrais.co.uk/
