One of the primary ways that Feldenkrais movement lessons are thought to operate to reduce pain, is the phenomenon known as sensory gating. Sensory gating means that the processing and perception of sense information is reduced by the presence of other competing sense information. If your nervous system is busy trying to process signals resulting from movement you are making or from the sensation of touch, it will have less ability to perceive and process pain signals and hence your pain will reduce.

Pain science is continually evolving. There have been some very important landmarks in pain research such as the research that led to the gate crontrol theory. The gate control theory of pain, proposed by Ron Melzack and Patrick Wall in 1962, is the idea that physical pain is not a direct result of activation of pain receptor neurons, but rather its perception is modulated by interaction between different neurons.

We now know that pain is not an input from the body but an output from the brain. What we erroneusly believe is that if you prick your skin with a pin it will hurt, so we assume that pain enters the body and goes up to the brain. It is not so, because though the pain will stop if you stop the input, most of the time, there are many times that it does not, and this is what chronic pain is. Pricking your finger with a pin will cause nociception (pain sensation) but the brain will decide how that signal is interpreted and how much importance is given to that signal at that particular instant.

What the brain receives are nociception signals and it decides how to interpret these and make them result in pain or not. Pain is the brain’s output after interpreting signals.

The longer pain is present, the easier it is to feel pain. In other words, the more the brain uses a certain neural pathway, the easier it becomes to use that same pathway. Neurons that fire together wire together. Emotional states like anger, depression and anxiety will reduce tolerance to pain. Your brain can relate your environment to pain.

If some signals get crossed then signals that do not originate from nociception nerve receptors get interpreted as pain and the output is pain for something that should not be experienced as pain.

Pain is an output of the brain, not an input from the body. In other words, pain perception is created by the brain! Pain is a survival mechanism with a purpose of protecting the body from harm and damage.

Pain is not an accurate measurement of the amount of tissue damage in an area. You may have extensive tissue damage and experience no pain and have very mild damage and experience a lot of pain. Pain does not equal tissue damage. Numerous studies report damage to the spine, discs and rotator cuff on MRI, but are pain-free! If you feel pain, your central nervous system is alerting you that your body is under threat.

If you are in pain, you are not always hurt. If you are hurt, you will not necessarily feel pain. An example of this is a chainsaw accident where you cut deeply into your leg but feel no pain, and only feels pain much later. This is generally the case with most accidents.

Nerves need three things; space, blood and movement. Speaking of movement, it is through using gentle small movements that the feldenkrais method works to increase mobility reduce effort and reduce the sensation of pain as a result of using more of yourself gently.

The post Feldenkrais Method of Movement Education and How it Relates to Pain appeared first on Feldenkrais Method Of Movement Education.

I found a very interesting comparison written by someone who has experienced both modalities and has gone into great detail of his experience and the differences that exist between both methods. You can read the whole post Here. Below you can read the 15 points of differences between the Feldenkrais Method and the Alexander Technique. I edited the original text from the first person to the third person and made some changes for clarity.

The Feldenkrais Method and Alexander Technique

He experienced the Alexander Technique as saying “use your body like this,” whereas he experienced the Feldenkrais Method as encouraging his own nervous system to grow and discover new possibilities for movement.He felt like the Alexander Technique was trying to make him into a new person and leave the old, “bad” self behind. Whereas the Feldenkrais Method felt like it cares more about who he was, why he had trouble using his body, and what he could do to heal and grow.In fact, after his first experience with the Feldenkrais Method, which took place after eight months of Alexander Technique, he had the strong thought “His own body was back, and it felt good!”

Alexander Technique: inhibiting habits. Feldenkrais Method: evolving habits.

The two methods have a critical difference in the way they approach the ingrained habits that may be harming one’s ability to move gracefully or causing pain. Alexander lessons attempt to “inhibit” the habit. For example, people often tighten up their neck as they exert effort so that their neck actually ends up working against them. An Alexander lesson says to the neck, “Stop that tightening, and lengthen instead.” And the Alexander training techniques are remarkably effective; the neck usually listens.

He did not encountered in the Feldenkrais Method any direction to stop doing something, but rather the suggestion that a pattern “evolve” to a more helpful pattern. Feldenkrais asks “Can the neck’s pattern of tightening be transformed into a pattern that is helpful?” He believes that when his neck tightened up and worked against him, it was actually trying to help; it just didn’t know how. But Feldenkrais has helped his neck learn to help. He found that when a body part learns how better to help a movement, magically the tightness starts to leave!

Differences in the Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais Method lessons:

During an Alexander lesson, one is supposed to “leave one’s body alone.” The teacher lays hands on one’s body and shows it how to move. Much of the lesson involves practice standing up and sitting down. One spends some time lying on a table.

During a Functional Integration lesson, one spends almost all the time lying down while the teacher gently manipulates my body to give one’s nervous system information that it can use to improve one’s organization.

He did not like several things about Alexander lessons, especially comparing them to Feldenkrais lessons. (At the time he was taking Alexander lessons, he did not find these things particularly objectionable, partly because he got used to them, partly because he thought they were necessary for meaningful change.) For example, he sometimes felt that the activities were tiring or causing pain. He also did not like that he had to leave his body alone, and he did not like that an Alexander lesson felt like a “lecture” for his body.

He sometimes experience pain in Funtional Integration lessons, but the pain always felt like a result of releasing tension and discovering pain that was there all along. He actually experience the onset of this type of pain as a kind of relief.

Alexander Technique wore off quickly, frequent lessons were required. Feldenkrais Method: lots to practice on one’s own.

Basically, he usually felt great after an Alexander technique lesson, but the effect started to wear off the moment that he walked out of the lesson. In the beginning the good feelings wore off within two or three days of the lessons; later, more than a week had to pass between lessons before he noticed any wearing-off effect.

He tried to apply the Alexander directions himself, to find the “Alexander instinct” in himself. For a while he thought he had succeeded. Later he began to feel that his techniques for directing himself were actually a way of jogging his memory of what the lesson felt like. The more time that passed between lessons, the more this memory faded, and therefore the less capability he had to follow the Alexander directions.

The situation with Feldenkrais is more complex. With his early Functional Integration lessons, some of the immediate changes he noticed after a lesson persisted for about two weeks, some of them for only a few hours. However, with Feldenkrais work there was lots of practice he could do on his own that felt like it truly involved self-discovery and growth that continues the theme of the Functional Integration lesson. He thought that self-discovery and growth is probably more important than the immediate effects of the lesson.

So an Alexander lesson feels like an experience that one tries to remember and emulate but without complete success, whereas a Functional Integration lesson feels like the start of a process of self-discovery.

Alexander Technique: pain as the lessons wear off. He often experienced a great deal of pain and tension in his body, mostly his neck, between Alexander Technique lessons, particularly when he was just starting and particularly when more than a week passed between lessons. He did not really understand why. Perhaps the lesson freed up chronically tense muscles, making him un-numb to their pain, and then those muscles started to become quite tense again.

It seems that he was pretty darn good at “directing” himself upward during a lesson, perhaps better than most people, but perhaps that led to changes in his body that it couldn’t really handle for long without pain. That did not really explain the whole situation to him.He believed that pain sometimes occurs in the course of making long-term change in any part of the body/mind system. So, he stuck with the Alexander Technique in spite of the pain he experienced.

With Functional Integration lessons of the Feldenkrais Method, however, the “lesson wearing off” effect is mostly a smooth, gentle return to some of the feelings and patterns in one’s body before the lesson. He had encountered some pain between the lessons, but the vast majority of it felt like a release of tension that was blocking pre-existing pain. After the first couple of lessons, he developed some pain in his knees while walking, but that entirely disappeared a couple weeks later when he discovered a simple change he could make in his manner of walking.

In hindsight, the pain he experienced with the Alexander Technique did not feel like it was part of a healthy process. It felt more like electrodes buried in his muscles were causing them to tighten and cramp.Several times recently he has tried to direct himself according to the Alexander directions, and each time he felt some changes in his body followed quickly by the onset of this tightening and pain.

What to do with one’s conscious attention? Alexander Technique: directing and inhibiting. Feldenkrais: taking in information.

So you’re having lessons in one of these techniques, you’re feeling changes in your body. Walking is smoother, let’s say. Even without trying to walk differently, you just do. However, you would like to feel like you’re doing something with your conscious attention. Alexander Technique suggests that you “inhibit” your body’s habits and direct your body according to the Alexander directions.

That is, as you are walking, you are thinking, “I will not compress my neck as I usually do. Let my neck lengthen as it does during an A lesson, let my back widen and lengthen, let my legs release from my pelvis, let my shoulders release from my torso.” Feldenkrais suggests that you take in information, that you notice how your legs feel as you pick them up and set them down, how your torso moves or doesn’t move in synch with your walking, etc.

Alexander Technique: initial kinesthetic sense is misleading; emphasis on using outside information to make change. Feldenkrais Method: the initial kinesthetic sense can lead to positive change. An approximate definition of the “kinesthetic sense” is the sense of the body’s position, movement, effort being exerted, and so on. For example, without looking at his leg he can sense the approximate angle of his knee joint. He can estimate the distance between his feet. If he (or someone else) moves their leg, they can sense the approximate direction and speed of movement. If he picks up an object, he has an idea of its weight.

F.M. Alexander, the founder of the Alexander Technique, discovered that his kinesthetic sense was unreliable. For example, he thought he could feel his neck lengthening, but when he looked in a mirror he discovered it was contracting. He set out to study his movement in a mirror and re-educate his body, and his kinesthetic sense, based out what he saw.

The Feldenkrais Method uses the kinesthetic sense to lead to positive change. It says that as I begin to pay attention to my kinesthetic sense, whether the information I get is “objectively accurate” or not, my nervous system will begin to make positive change to my organization, and my kinesthetic sense will improve also. Rather than the kinesthetic sense being faulty and requiring outside intervention, the idea here is more like the kinethetic sense is underdeveloped and ignored, and requires practice.

Awareness; both methods have body awareness as a goal.Feldenkrais helps you direct your attention to important places and helps you ask useful questions about what’s happening in your body. The body can learn and grow from this sort of awareness.

His Alexander lessons led to awareness, but primarily awareness of how well his body was following the Alexander directions. He was aware that he felt good when his body was following the Alexander directions well, and he was aware that he felt bad when it wasn’t. Unlike the Feldenkrais sort of awareness, he just didn’t feel significant change from this awareness—the change from the lesson led to the awareness rather than the awareness leading to change. Perhaps that was because so much of his attention was focused on a small area, specifically on how he could maintain the Alexander directions.

Alexander Tecgnique: focuses on head/neck/back and waits for change to spread. Feldenkrais Method: can start anywhere, can focus anywhere.

His Alexander lessons focused on the head/neck/back relationship. His teacher indicated that when he got their organization right, the rest of the body would follow. He certainly did notice lots of changes all over his body. He discovered that he could soothe his wrists by giving attention to his neck.

Feldenkrais also contains the general idea that change in one part of the system can spread elsewhere, but the head/neck/back relationship is not singled out as the prime control. A Feldenkrais lesson can focus anywhere.He thinks that it was more useful to pay direct attention to his wrist and his feet (two areas where he felt pain) rather than focusing on the neck and waiting for the change to spread. Within two months of paying specific attention to his wrists and feet, he came to understand what he was doing and change major habits that were causing pain. That’s much more progress than he got in eight months of taking Alexander lessons.

In fact, he felt like his habits were “battling it out” with the Alexander directions, and the Alexander directions really only scored a victory in the head/neck/back relationship. Everywhere else, his habits stuck around, perhaps muted a little, but essentially still there and still causing problems. (By the way, this account portrays the habits as “the enemy” and he want to assert that he believes it is more useful to understand them as trying to help.)

Feldenkrais Method: small simple movements. Alexander Technique: sitting down and standing up.

There is a difference in the types of movement practiced by the methods.Alexander Technique deals largely with standing, sitting, standing up from a sitting position, and sitting down from a standing position. These are all movements/postures that many people carry out with a great deal more effort than is required.

They are also common movements. It makes sense to me to pay attention to them, because any change in those movements will have a large impact on a person’s life.The Feldenkrais Method deals more with small, simple movements that are often done lying down so as to minimize the work a person must do against gravity. Because the movements can be done with very little effort, a person has a lot of attention available to notice the feeling of the movement, and a lot of freedom to explore different ways of organizing that movement.He thinks that working with both types of movement brings immediate change to most of a person’s life.

However, he thinks that the Feldenkrais types of movement facilitate self-exploration, growth, and healing more than Alexander Technique type of movements.It’s really amazing to him that if he explores, say, tiny motions of his fingers pressing against the floor, that suddenly his typing, which involves much larger movements in many different directions, gets easier and smoother. Musicians and athletes may be familiar with the idea of isolating and practicing some very small aspect of their technique and noticing how much general effect can follow. Feldenkrais is an exploration of movement that can bring about change at a very deep and general level because it works with small, simple movements, the components of many types of movement.

Alexander Technique: CPU upggade. The Feldenkrais Method: CPU and entire operating system upgrade.

He says that the Alexander Technique is a “CPU upgrade” because it seems to make his body work better but doesn’t change how he gives motion instructions to his body. This is analogous to changing the CPU from a 386 to a 486 chip so that all software will run faster, but then running all the same software.To be more specific, let’s say you want to walk. you think “walk” in the same way you’ve always thought “walk,” and the act of giving that instruction to your body feels the same. But your body responds differently: smoother, easier, with more grace.

This is nice, but you get somewhat frustrated when you (your consciousness, ego, or whatever you want to call it) does not feel that you have much ability to explore different ways of initiating and carrying out the walking movements, when you feel that the smooth form of walking came from some mysterious place outside yourself.To be sure, you don’t believe that all levels of the neural system are under direct control of your consciousness; you don’t expect to be able to directly control every aspect of your body, but it’s nice to have an image, an understanding, a model of what these lower levels of the neural system do, and it’s nice to feel that your system did the learning and changing itself.

He also think thought the Alexander Technique can change more than the CPU; with more Alexander lessons, AT’s effects trickle further up the hierarchy of the nervous system and eventually reach consciousness. He just did not feel satisfied with that method of creating change.Feldenkrais, however, feels like it helps him learn at all levels of his nervous system. As he does an ATM (Awareness Through Movement) lesson, his ego is exploring different ways of initiating a movement at the same time lower levels of his nervous system are learning about different ways of organizing that movement.

His mental image of walking is changing; it feels like he is changing what he is “trying to do” when he walks; also, it feels like his body carries out his ego’s instructions differently, and the whole experience is more unified than the Alexander Technique experience of walking.

When you upgrade a computer’s CPU and operting system, you change not only how quickly the computer responds to commands, but you change the form of the commands themselves. I make an analogy between this and the Feldenkrais Method.

Alexander Technique: He prefers surfaces and postures like the Alexander lesson. Feldenkrais Method: like greater variety of surfaces. While he was taking AT lessons, he prefered to sit on chairs that were simple, flat, and hard, like the one used in his Alexander lesson. He prefered to sit very upright, like he did in my Alexander lesson. If he had to stand for a while, he prefered to stand with his weight equally distributed between his feet, knees slightly bent, torso and head well balanced, as he did in his Alexander lesson. Since doing Feldenkrais work, he does not feel so strongly that he need a hard flat chair to sit comfortably. He is now a little more comfortable in car seats and movie seats.

Feldenkrais: support from the ground. The Feldenkrais Method puts emphasis on the feeling of support you gets from the ground. Suppose you are lying down; Feldenkrais asks you to notice the shape of the region of contact you make with the floor, whether one side feels heavier than the other, your sense of the floor beneath you (is stable, or unsteady? hard, or soft? flat, or contoured?), and so on. During the course of an FI lesson or ATM lesson, you check your support from the floor and notice if it has changed. The way the body organizes itself to support itself is an important dimension of the body’s general organization.

His Alexander lessons did not contain this idea generally during a type of practice called “Alexander lying” he sometimes noticed his contact with the ground but the emphasis was not that the noticing itself would bring change in the manner of lying, rather that the manner of lying was an indication of how well his body was following the Alexander directions.

Alexander could provide a useful suggestion to a body that was at an advanced state of awareness. He was unsatisfied with AT because he experienced it as a non-instinctive external ideal. However, he wonders if the AT could provide useful ideas to a body that was already at an advanced state of awareness. An advanced chef, for example, might find ideas in the strange cooking of an alien society. He wouldn’t necessary want to use their recipes verbatim, but he might be able to find things he liked about them and integrate that knowledge into his own style of cooking.

Perhaps AT is better in some respects than any organization the body could discover by itself. A runner may find that he runs faster after an AT lesson than at any other time. A cross-country skier may have more endurance. A public speaker may project his voice further. Just a thought; there is no way to confirm or deny this theory at this time.

Alexander Technique: (endgaining). Feldenkrais Method: (effort) Imagine a runner trying hard to reach the finish line. Every part of the runner’s body leans forward, toward the finish. As a result, this runner is not in an efficient posture, and doesn’t run as fast as they could.This illustrates the concept of “endgaining”; trying hard to reach a goal without considering what path is best.

This is an important concept of Alexander Technique, and one that I think illustrates an important concept of body use (and mind use, too). However, I like better the concept in Feldenkrais, “using less effort.” If I perform a movement with less effort, then more information is available to my nervous system, and my nervous system can naturally discover where I might be hampering myself.

To say that I’m “endgaining” sounds like I need to inhibit another one of those nasty habits; on the other hand, the direction to “use less effort” implies that my body has many natural good instincts, that it was really trying to help all along, and that the solution is readily accessible.

searched for terms

• alexander technique and feldenkrais comparison
• what is the difference between alexander and feldenkrais
• there are no principles feldenkrais
• Similar to Feldenkrais and Alexander Technique
• is feldenkrais better than alexander technique
• how to give alexander directions
• feldenkrais vs alexander technique

The post Feldenkrais Method and the Alexander technique what are the differences appeared first on Feldenkrais Method Of Movement Education.

Too lame to even fathom. This is what the world has come to; People are so disconnected from themsleves that they exercise their petty powers over others when they get slightly jilted instead of alloqing change to occur. When you do a Feldenkrais awareness through movement lesson, or a yoga class or any other modality that requires that you stay focused on your body, your breath and your thoughts, you cannot expect to be able to send and SMS or an email or surf the web for gods sake!

Wake up people, you want to be more connected to your body and yet you want to keep all your habits and not change. How can you expect to change anything if you are unwilling to act in a new way?

Yoga Teacher Fired for Telling Facebook Employee ‘No Phones’

“At least one Facebook employee couldn’t put down her cell phone in June, even when the yoga teacher made a point of asking students to stop texting during class.Alice Van Ness was teaching a yoga class.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/13/tagblogsfindlawcom2012-legallyweird-idUS134598457920120713

These are the kind of stories which make you realize that we are really becoming adicted to our small day to day routines that are in the end destroying us from the inside. Step away from yourself and your habbits and give yourself the luxury of choice, Stop reacting and start acting.

The post Yoga Teacher Fired for Telling Facebook Employee no texting same would go for a feldenkrais exercise class appeared first on Feldenkrais Method Of Movement Education.

T

The Feldenkrais method of somatic movement education is more a philosophy than a method. It is a way of looking at ourselves. We tend to limit ourselves in all walks of life. We do not give ourselves options and tend to act in a repetitive fashion.

The Feldenkrais method teaches us to break away from this repetitive way of living and shows us that we do have choices. At first we may only allow ourselves one or two alternative ways of moving or reacting to a situation, but with practice we get closer to the good habit of never repeating ourselves and our movement patterns.

The Feldenkrais movement lessons that Moshe Feldenkrais named Awareness through Movement take us on a journey of self discovery that leads us to freedom from limitations. We focus on the way we do things, on the way we initiate a movement, on the way we carry the movement on until we understand what it is that we are doing, so that we can do otherwise.

Until we understand what it is that we are doing, we have no choice but to move and act the way we do habitually. These lessons are done usually on a soft carpet on the floor and last from 30 minutes to one and a half hours. They are conducted by a trained Feldenkrais practitioner that has undertaken a rigorous 4 year training. In this training the future practitioner does all the lessons herself so that her body images becomes more clear and therefor she can pass that knowledge onto other.

As the Feldenkrais method deals with body image and breaking away from limited movement patters, the “side effects” are that the body begins to function more harmoniously and so the skeleton and muscles are used in a more efficient manner. This reduces strain on bones and muscles and results in aches and pains reducing. The

The head hold all our Teleceptors and so is constantly moving about. It is therefor the area which is most prone to accumulating stress and strains. The Awareness Through Movement lessons help balance out the muscular tonus and allows us to let go of a lot of the unnecessary tensions that we hold onto. It is this letting go of unnecessary tension and allowing ourselves to use a wider range of movements that end up helping us with our neck pain.

We have to be careful here, because we have accumulated a lifetime of bad habits and so we cannot  fool ourselves into believing that our aches and pains will magically vanish after an hour of work. The Feldenkrais work is something that we should do on a regular basis and make part of our lives. In this way we will increase our movement capital and move more functionally.

searched for terms

• feldenkrais for neck pain
• Feldenkrais Method and Somatics what is it
• teleceptors

The post Feldenkrais Method For Neck Pain appeared first on Feldenkrais Method Of Movement Education.

T

The Feldenkrais Method is about playing and experimenting on ourselves using movement as a means to get to know ourselves better.

Our body image is a map of the terrain that we are consciously aware of. It is often very distorted and incomplete.

Moshe Feldenkrais developed movement lessons that he termed Awareness Through Movement to expand and fill out our body image.

They are small, slow playful movements that  take us on a journey of awareness and show us where we are “stuck”. Often we cannot at first do the movements demanded of us and think them to be impossible, but with repetition and exploring soon they become easy to perform and we end up being able to do them in a fluid and graceful manner.

At first this method appears to be counter intuitive; we imagine that we have to forcefully stretch to gain flexibility, but the reality is that the muscle tonus that restricts our range of motion is controlled by our brain and we can teach it to let go without stretching.

If you have never heard of the Feldenkrais Method and would like to try out some of these mysterious movement lessons developed by Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais you can visit a website that has many lessons recorded on MP3 and available for download so that you can do them at home.

You should remember to do these is a slow non strenuous manner and not try and go as far as you can. If after doing a few of these you find that you are getting benefit from them, then I advise you to attend a live class given by a Feldenkrais practitioner near you as you will be in an environment where the Feldenkrais practitioner will be observing all the students and will be able to tailor the class to the group’s needs.

The resource called Open ATM was created to allow people to experience Feldenkrais movement lessons even if they do not have access to a Feldenkrais practitioner. They have been put at the disposal of the general public in the spirit of the open source moevment, hence the name of the site Open ATM.

The post Feldenkrais Method: We are the laboratory appeared first on Feldenkrais Method Of Movement Education.

T

I was in the hills of south India last week speaking to a farmer. His wife had recently suffered from a bout of lower back pain. They had gone down the hills to the nearest big city with a hospital to get her seen by a doctor.

The doctor had her take an x-ray of the lower back and prescribed some pain killers and anti-inflamatory pills. The farmer asked me to look at her x-ray as I am an Osteopath and he knew that. I looked and the x-rays of the woman’s lumbar vertebrae and found that the spine was in good shape.

This is sadly what is often the outcome of these x-rays, they come out showing that nothing is wrong with the spine and the sciatic pain that this woman was suffering from could be the result of a myriad different things. Perhaps an MRI would have revealed that a disc was slightly impinging on one of her nerve roots, but that would do noting for getting her well again.

I told the farmer that exercises, to be more precise Feldenkrais awareness through movement exercises would be beneficial and would help her deal with the symptoms of her “sciatica”. But how could I start giving a lesson in English to the farmer’s wife who did not understand a word of English.

Woman in India wear a dress called a Sari which you can see in the image above. It is challenging to perform an awareness through movement lesson in a Sari, but nor impossible. That is when I realized how much the Feldenkrais method was needed in rural India and decided that I should try and create lessons in the local languages to help out the rural population who do not have access to such luxuries as the Feldenkrais method.

The Internet has helped make Feldenkrais awareness through movement, ATM lessons available to people who otherwise would not have had access to the method, but most of the world does not yet have access to the Internet. This is why it is important to find a way to bring these valuable lessons in movement created by Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais to those who need it most.

Let us see if this dream materializes and becomes one day a reality. India is a nation of 1.2 billion souls and could benefit greatly from Moshe’s genius. To read more on the Feldenkrais method click here.

The post The Feldenkrais Method Of Movement Education In India appeared first on Feldenkrais Method Of Movement Education.

The Feldenkrais Method & The Alexander Technique

Of the two modalities, the Alexander technique is the older one. Matthias Alexander was the founder of the Alexander technique. This technique deals with body alignment and body image like the Feldenkrais method.

Where it differs among other things is in the group work. Matthias Alexander did not develop group lessons for his work, but worked individually on people and gave them what he termed lessons.

Moshe Feldenkrais also terms his table work one to one a lesson. But he realised that he could only see so many people in one day and hence transcribed what he did one to one with his students into lessons that he could speak out and give to large groups.

These lessons Moshe Feldenkrais named Awareness Through Movement. His one to one work he termed Functional Integration. Moshe Feldenkrais and Matthias Alexander in their work used chairs and tables as tools to help their students get a better sense of their bodies and increase their awareness of themselves.

It seems that in the Alexander Technique community it is said that Moshe based his work on their technique. This only Moshe himself can comment on, and he is no more among us. Though they have similarities, they differ in many aspects. Moshe did take individual lessons with Matthias Alexander and must surely have got inspiration from Alexander’s great skill and knowledge.

One thing is sure is that both methods are very appreciated and find a following with comedians, actors, dancers and people in the performing arts who have traditionally been more exposed to such work.

Many Alexander Technique teachers have gone on to undertake training to become Feldenkrais practitioners and vice versa, many Feldenkrais practitioners have gone on to train to become Alexander technique teachers.

If you get a chance to experience either method you should take the opportunity as it will open up a new world of sensory awareness.

Both Moshe Feldenkrais and Matthias Alexander made it a point to call the people they worked with students and not patients, because what they did was not administer some passive therapy, but engaged the individual’s learning process and active participation.

If you would like to get to know both methods a bit better, I will include a short video on both the methods so that you can get a better idea of what these methods are about. I hope that you enjoyed the read.

You can purchase both books online on Amazon.com by clicking on the images above.

The Alexander Technique

The Feldenkrais Method

searched for terms

• how do the feldenkrais method and the alexander technique differ?
• moshe feldenkrais and matthias alexander

The post The Feldenkrais Method and The Alexander Technique appeared first on Feldenkrais Method Of Movement Education.

What is the right Recorder for recording your Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement Lessons?

I have been looking for a device to record myself giving awareness through movement classes. I had been given an Olympus Dictaphone but the quality of the sound was not good. There was too much background noise.

I recalled that a few practitioners had mentioned some expensive devices, but after extensive research I cam up with two models that shine above the rest for the price you pay.

So after doing my  research online, I came up with two first class recorder made by a company called Tascam. The first recorder is the Tascam DR-05 and this one will cost you 79.77$ on Amazon.com to buy.

Then there is the newer Tascam DR-2D which is pictured on the right and below left which will set you back 149.94$ at the time of writing this post when bought on Amazon.com.

I decided to go for the DR-2D recorder as it offered a lot of advanced recording features as well as better microphones than the cheaper entry level version DR-05. The DR-05 has excellent reviews on Amazon as would also have done a great job.

I consider both these recorders to be suitable for Feldenkrais practitioners who want to record themselves giving an ATM. They both can be fitted onto a tripod to be in an optimal position to pick up the sound.

The DR-2D Tascam solid state recorder is a new sturdily build recorder that comes with a handy remote control. There were initial issues with it consuming a lot of batteries, but this has been taken care of by a firmware update.

The firmware update can be downloaded from the Tascam site if need be.  If you have any plans to buy a device to record you ATMs, then look at the DR-05 and DR-2D by Tascam. You can read all the reviews on Amazon.com and make up your own mind if they can fulfill your requirements. Happy recording.

The post Sound Recorder For Recording Feldenkrais Lessons in MP3 appeared first on Feldenkrais Method Of Movement Education.

See Moshe Feldenkrais give a lecture on his method at Cern in

Switzerland.

searched for terms

• aurovici sercomanens mp3
• what feldenkrais said about yoga
• illusion cup and face
• feldenkrais method is not yoga
• cup/face optical illusion
• cup or face
• cup of faces paradox

The post Is the Feldenkrais Method Like Yoga – The Feldenkrais Method is all about a Flexible Brain and Not a Flexible body appeared first on Feldenkrais Method Of Movement Education.

The back pain that most of us experience is not life threatening, but some causes of back pain are, so it is advisable to get a professional medically qualified person to have a look at you and discount any sinister causes.

Once you know that your back pain is not life threatening you will fall into one of the many confusing categories of back pain causes. The causes of back pain and the ensuing nerve pain are not well understood. That is why there is such a vast range of treatment modalities.

Mostly anti inflammatory medication is used to treat back pain along with a mild pain killer.  This obviously does nothing for the cause of the problem. Some people will try spinal manipulation in the hands of a trained Chiropractor or Osteopath. Massage is also a popular means to tackle back pain.

There are alternative methods available to deal with back pain. You can do Pilates to strengthen your core and balance the musculature around the spine and in the abdominal area. This method is good as it is proactive and to a certain extent deals with the actual cause.

Moving on from Pilates, you find techniques that deal with the body image such as the Alexander technique and the Feldenkrais method. The Feldenkrais method is the new kid on the block, it was developed by Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais in the fifties and is a very effective method to help your body function more optimally.

The most common cause of injury, be it spinal injury, or other musculoskeletal injury is poor use of self. We generally do  not move in a manner that is conducive to healthy joint mechanics. We tend due to habits we picked up to move in awkward ways that unnecessarily stress our joints.

The Feldenkrais Method developed by Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais bases itself on the principle that we under utilise our potential. We limit ourselves and tend to function in a very narrow field. This translates into a limited way of moving about and living life. By doing lessons  that Moshe Feldenkrais termed awareness through  movement or ATM for short, you expand your palette of movement and give yourself choice.

This is done by doing small controlled slow movements to increase body awareness and allow the nervous system and the brain to learn again how to move more gracefully and freely. This does not only help back pain, or sciatica, or nerve pain. You can benefit from it if you have no pain and also if you have shoulder pain, hip pain or even knee pain.

It works on the function of the whole body so all parts work together more harmoniously. This method is now used by athletes who want to learn how to function more efficiently and avoid injury. I am including below a recording of Dr. moshe Feldenkrais answering the question of why people come to him to take movement lessons.

source

The post back pain and the feldenkrais method – can backpain be helped by doing feldenkrais lessons appeared first on Feldenkrais Method Of Movement Education.

The first time I heard of a tribe that has a very different attitude to life than we do was in 1992. It was a recording of a lecture given by Dr. Deepak Chopra. He talked of the body mind and how our mindset determined the way we lived and died. He said that a tribe existed in Mexico that had running at its core and that an 80 year old ran faster and farther than a 20 year old.

He pointed out that in our society a 20 year old is considered at his peak and that an 80 year old is considered worn out and at the end of his. But this tribe had things the other way around. You got stronger as you aged and their 80 year old died quietly in their sleep and not immobilized in a hospice.

Though this sounded attractive to my 20 year old ears, it also sounded dubious. Though he did not mention the tribes name, I later found out that this people are called the Tarahumara. They are many tribes, though now most of the tribes have fallen victim to the vices that are associated with “modern” civilization: poor diet, drugs and alcohol.

The Tarahumara run in the copper canyons of Mexico, they are known as the Raramuri (the running people). I found all this out after my wife read Christopher McDougall’s book Born to Run. In this book he mentions a person that goes by the name Barefoot Ted. I met Barefoot Ted in Auroville in February this year at Auroville’s annual Marathon. Auroville organizes a Marathon every year and the course is as of this year 100% asphalt free, so very conducive to barefoot running.

I spoke with Barefoot Ted on the subject of barefoot running and how we as humans were “built to run” so to speak. It is true that we tend to not see ourselves as natural long distance runners; most of us would gasp at the thought of participating in a Marathon. But the facts point to us being built to run.

This I found out more about after reading the book Born To Run. If you have any interest in running I would recommend you get hold of the book and read it. How does the Feldenkrais method fit into this. Well our modern lifestyle has cut us off from our “runner” birthright and instead given us very poor posture and movement habits. It is our poor movement form and poor biomechanical movement habits that have resulted in all our injuries.

We suffer so much from back pain and spinal problems as a result of the way we live life now. Moshe Feldenkrais injured himself playing football and found no one who could help him. So he deconstructed the way he functioned and found a way to function better. To function more efficiently, to regain some of our birthright.

This he achieved by creating movement lessons that he termed Awareness Through Movement. I strongly believe that these movement lessons could be very useful in learning to move in a more functional manner so that our inate running self can come forward and allow us to run without injuring ourselves.

The post the genius of barefoot running – is man born to run – how the feldenkrais method fits in appeared first on Feldenkrais Method Of Movement Education.

Moshe Feldenkrais And The Central Nervous System

Moshe Feldenkrais was very interested in Neuroscience and the evolution of the human brain. He liked to bounce ideas off the experts of his day to test his own theories. He was a big believer in the power of our central nervous system to learn and this made up the foundation of the system that has come to be known as the Feldenkrais method of somatic education.

Simple worms are closet brainiacs

• 14 March 2012 by Michael Marshall
• Magazine issue 2856. Subscribe and save
• For similar stories, visit the The Human Brain and Evolution Topic Guides

DON’T be offended, but you have the brain of a worm. Clusters of cells that are instrumental in building complex brains have been found in a simple worm that barely has a brain at all.

The discovery suggests that, around 600 million years ago, primitive worms had the machinery to develop complex brains. They may even have had complex brains themselves – which were later lost.

Vertebrates, such as humans and fish, have the biggest and most complex brains in the animal kingdom. Yet all their closest non-vertebrate relatives, such as the eel-like lancelets and sea squirts, have simple brains that lack the dozens of specialised nerve centres typical of complex brains. As a result, evolutionary biologists have long thought that complex brains only evolved after animals with backbones appeared.

Not so, says Christopher Lowe of Stanford University in California. His team studies a species of acorn worm, Saccoglossus kowalevskii, which has a rudimentary nervous system made up of two nerve cords and nerves spread out in its skin. The worms live in burrows in the seabed and pull in passing particles of food.

Lowe found that young S. kowalevskii have three clusters of cells identical to the ones vertebrates use to shape their brains. In developing vertebrate brains, these clusters – called signalling centres – make proteins that orchestrate the formation of specialised brain regions. The acorn worm, Lowe found, produces the same proteins, and they spread through its developing body in patterns similar to those they follow in the developing vertebrate brain (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature10838)….

More at Simple worms are closet brainiacs

The Feldenkrais Method http://t.co/xiOvehol

— BrassMusician (Brass Musician) (@BrassMusician) Thu Mar 29 2012

 

The Feldenkrais method is a very interesting modality and has helped thousands of people move better and relieve pain in the last thirty years. If you want to learn more about this technique click here.

The post The Evolution of the Brain and the Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education appeared first on Feldenkrais Method Of Movement Education.

Share This With Your Friends

searched for terms

• aurovici sercomanens back pain and the feldenkrais
• feldenkrais sciatica

The post Feldenkrais Method For Lower Back Pain And Sciatica Pain appeared first on Feldenkrais Method Of Movement Education.

Vibram Five Finger Barefoot Shoes

Feldenkrais And Barefoot Running

Today I met barefoot Ted and spoke with him about barefoot running. He explained to me that he was working on a new line of minimalist running shoes called Luna Sandals. They will be made using very durable and environmentally friendly soles manufactured by Vibram. He wants the soles to be durable so as to avoid having to change the sandals often and thus creating unnecessary waste.

He also spoke about his running style. He explained to me that he looks for a place in himself where he feels that he is not straining himself in the least. A place he called “the zone.” When he gets into the zone he can run a hundred miles and feel fine afterwards.

An interesting point he made was the use of animals as an example. Birds can fly hundreds of miles and not hurt themselves, wolves can run also very large distances. They are running and moving as they were built to move and so do not hurt themselves.

This is exactly what the Feldenkrais method aims to do. It aims at eliminating all the redundant movements we make that slow us down and make us strain. We generate a lot of “parasitic” movements where we push and pull at them same time, in effect fighting with ourselves through years of bad movement habits.

Becoming aware of this is what an Awareness Through Movement class aims to do. It helps you see where you are using too much effort and where you stop yourself and “hold” yourself unnecessarily and thus your movements become more efficient and fluid. The Feldenkrais method can definitely be used to increase the flexibility of ones feet and the efficiency of ones movements to help with barefoot running.

Barefoot Ted discovered this by experimenting on himself and listening to himself so he did not have to look outside for answers. But we all cannot do that so it is good to get someone who is qualified to teach you efficient movement. This you can learn by attending an Awareness Through Movement Class given by a Feldenkrais practitioner near you.

If you do not have a Feldenkrais practitioner near you, you can try some free lessons that are available online on MP3. Remember to do the lessons in loose clothing and to make very small unforced movements and only move in a pain free range. Never move to the point where you feel discomfort or pain.  Here is the link to the Free Awareness Through Movement Lessons.

searched for terms

• barefoot 5 finger shoes Fekdenkrais
• barefoot ted

The post Barefoot Running and The Feldenkrais Method – ATM class – Barefoot Ted appeared first on Feldenkrais Method Of Movement Education.

The Sciatic Nerve

Can The Feldenkrais Method help with Sciatica and Sciatic Pain?

Backpain has many causes and most of them are difficult to pinpoint. Once you have established that your backpain and sciatic pain is not of malicious origin and life threatening you can look at the options available to you to alleviate the pain and treat the underlying cause.

Most people will consult a doctor when they suffer from backpain and they should as backpain can signal more serious health problems. Mostly the doctor will prescribe rest and some form of medication such as non steroidal anti-inflamatories and some form of pain-killer.

Many people who experience recurring backpain will try to look for an alternative to medication and consult a Physiotherapist, Chiropractor or Osteopath to name a few common choices, very few will consult a Feldenkrais practitioner. This is because the Feldenkrais method is still relatively unknown. It is not a passive method, but an active one, by this I mean that your back is not adjusted for you or put right. You explore your own body and actively participate in your own recovery.

Most of the musculoskeletal pains we suffer from are a result of poor use of oneself. As we grow up we take on bad habits as a result of our lifestyle. Sitting long hours at school and after school, not exercising much, leading sedentary lives. We move in a very limited way. This causes sections of our back, usually the lower back to take on more work than it should as other parts are not functioning as they should be.

The feldenkrais method works with this issue and helps you regain more freedom in movement and give you a choice where before you only did a movement in one particular way. When you add choice of movement in all the different vertebral bones of your back and allow them to move in a differentiated way and not as a few large blocks you begin you reduce the load and pressures on the parts that are under strain. This in turn reduces the pain and brings you back to a place where the pain is less acute.

If you practice Awareness Through Movement Lessons regularly you will notice the effect on the way you move about, the way you walk and do physical activities. With enough practice you will regain flexibility and suppleness where once you had reduced mobility and pain.

The post Can The Feldenkrais Method Help With Sciatica – Sciatic Nerve Pain appeared first on Feldenkrais Method Of Movement Education.