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The Feldenkrais Institute’s Guide to:

Getting Your Best Results With The Feldenkrais Method®

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The Feldenkrais Institute’s Guide to Getting the Best Results with The Feldenkrais Method

A User’s GUide to doinG FeldenkrAis lessons At Home

Feldenkrais exercises are called Awareness Through Movement (ATM) lessons. The Felden-krais Institute encourages you support your progress by doing Awareness Through Move-ment lessons at home. Feldenkrais audio programs utilize the widely acclaimed movement education system of Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais and draw on scientific breakthroughs in biome-chanics, neurophysiology and stress-reduction. The lessons developed by Dr. Feldenkrais are revolutionary because instead of using repetitive, mechanical movements to re-train your muscles, they use movement to communicate directly with your brain, the control center of your body. It is your brain and nervous system — not your muscles — which deter-mine the health of your posture, and the ease and comfort of your movement.

Awareness Through Movement lessons are designed to access the motor centers of your brain and provide the information your body needs for optimum improved body usage, health and vitality. You will find that without effort or strain, you will soon enjoy relief from pain, tension, stress and discomfort, and quickly enhance your flexibility, ease of movement, relaxation, and posture far beyond what is possible with conventional exercise.

The process by which all physical learning takes place,� from walking and talking to playing an instrument or driving a car, is called sensory motor learning. This is the process which Awareness Through Movement utilizes. Sensory motor learning is the natural way your body learns and improves, and takes place through a complex feedback process between your brain, muscles and senses. Your brain directs your body’s movement and in return receives information, which it immediately uses to enhance and improve your neuromuscular activity. With the Feldenkrais Method, your brain has the opportunity to discover the most efficient and comfortable way to organize your body’s movement.

This is a brief introduction to the basic principles and concepts of Awareness Through Move-ment. By using these simple but important keys, you will reap the greatest benefit.

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settinG YoUrselF Up For sUccess

Create a Successfull EnvironmentClothing: Loose non-restrictive clothing is the best. Remove your shoes, belt, empty your pockets, remove your glasses, watch and jewelry, anything that might distract you from sens-ing and feeling yourself during the lesson.

A Quiet Space: It’s essential when doing Awareness Through Movement lessons that you create conditions that make it easier to pay attention to yourself. Choose a room with a car-peted floor and enough room for you to lay down and move about. Turn off any electronic devices that might ring, beep or compete for your attention. This is your time to attend to yourself and your movement.

Extras: Lying on the floor may not feel too comfortable the first time you do it. This will improve with experience. To increase your comfort during the lesson, you may want to have a few pillows, head pads or some rolled up towels handy to provide support under certain parts of your body. When lying on your back, support the space between the backs of your knees and the floor, also under your head, neck and maybe your shoulders. When the les-sons call for being on your side, make sure to have enough support under your head so your neck and shoulders are comfortable, but not so much to prevent your head from rolling eas-ily during specific parts of the lesson. You may also want to insert a folded towel between your knees and ankles whle lying on your side. Be sure to experiment and know what makes you comfortable before you begin, and be open to changing things as needed throughout the lesson.

Time of DayFirst thing in the morning: When you’re in the process of changing habits and improving your function and awareness, doing lessons in the morning is a great way to start the day off on the right foot. The pleasurable sensations and patterns of acting that you acquire in the lesson can immediately be transferred into your everyday activities, where they can set the tone for your whole day.

Before Bedtime: Nighttime is another advantageous time to do lessons. Much of the latest research shows that during sleep your brain continues to integrate the day’s learning.

All the Parts MatterFocus on the beginning: The beginning of the movement is where your brain has the most opportunity for change and improvement. The start of the movement is a gold mine of kinesthetic sensations that, if attended to, can bring the fastest and deepest results. Avoid spending all your time trying to increase your effort, focusing on getting further, and pay-ing attention to the limit of your movement—you’ll only end up repeating and cementing the very habits you’re trying to change. Start small, go slowly and let the structure of the lesson gradually expand the size of your movements and deepen your awareness of them.

The importance of the rests: Just like in music, where the silences between the notes are just as important as the sounds, the rests between the movements are as important as the move-ments themselves. One of the skills you are building during the lessons is the ability to re-

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duce unnecessary effort. The rests provide your body and your brain with valuable time to sense the quality of your movements, to feel the amount of effort you’ve been using and any changes in your contact with the floor. Use the rests between each movement to help you avoid mechanical repetition and fatigue.

Avoid Pain & Discomfort: You should never experience discomfort or pain while doing a lesson. Pain is an indication of physical irritation. There are several things you can do immediately when pain or discomfort arise during the lesson: 1) Stop. Change to the most comfortable position and rest. Or stand up and walk around until the discomfort subsides. 2) Reduce the size and speed of the movement. Often doing too large a movement too quickly can trigger pain. 3) Increase the length of the rests between the movements. More resting, less moving.

Doing Lessons More than OncePacing Yourself: Most of our experience with “exercises” has taught us to do our best and to execute instructions as soon as they are uttered. When you do Feldenkrais for the first time, it can be difficult to slow things down. As you get more familiar with the process, an excellent strategy when repeating a lesson is to do everything twice as slow and notice what sort of details emerge during the lessons that you may have missed the first time through.

Foreground & Background: As you become more familiar with the structure of the lesson, focus your attention more on things like breathing and the use of your eyes. These things are usually in the background of your attention the first time through the lessons, as you are paying more explicit attention to the instructions. Bring your breathing into the foreground of your attention, focus on making it smoother and more continuous, or on relaxing the movements of your eyes. These can be wonderful ways of integrating the more subtle aspects of your self into the lesson and improving your overall experience.

One Side Only: Sometimes it may be difficult to feel the kinesthetic differences and functional improvements the lesson is intended to evoke. If this is the case, perform all the movements and variations in the lesson on one side of your body only. Once you stand up, the contrast between your two sides is likely to be easier to feel. Spend some time with this feeling in standing and walking to allow your awareness of the change and improvement to sink in.

Visualization: Research has shown that when you visualize (or imagine) doing a movement, your brain sends essentially the same messages to your muscles that it sends when you are actually moving. The only difference is that messages are not intense enough to make your muscles fully contract. To visualize the movements of a lesson, close your eyes and do the movements in your imagination. Visualization is a powerful tool, and can be as effective and beneficial as physically doing the movements.

If you have any questions about the lessons, or about The Feldenkrais Method, please feel free to contact us: (800) 482-3357 or (212) 727-1014. We look forward to speaking with you.

Sincerely,

Andrew Gibbons Creative Director, Faculty

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www.FeldenkraisInstitute.com (212) 727-1014 -�- “Learn to Learn” , by Moshé Feldenkrais, D.Sc.

Learn to LearnA manual to help you get the best results from the

Awareness Through Movement® lessons

by Moshé Feldenkrais, D.Sc.

DO EVERYTHING VERY SLOWLYI do not intend to “teach” you, but to enable you to learn at your own rate of understanding and doing. Time is the most important means of learning. To enable everybody—without exception—to learn, there should be plenty of time for everybody to assimilate the idea of the movement as well as the leisure to get used to the novelty of the situation. There should be sufficient time to perceive, and organize oneself. No one can learn when hurried and hustled. Each movement is, therefore, allotted sufficient time for repeating it a number of times. Thus, you will repeat the movement as many times as it suits you during the span of time allotted.

When one becomes familiar with an act, speed increases spontaneously, and so does power. This is not so obvious as it is correct.

Efficient movement or performance of any sort is achieved by weeding out, and eliminating, parasitic superfluous exertion. The superfluous is as bad as the insufficient, only it costs more.

No one can learn to ride a bicycle or swim without allowing the time necessary to assimilate the essential, and to reject the unintended and unnecessary, efforts that the beginner performs in his ambition not to feel or appear inadequate to himself.

Fast action at the beginning of learning is synonymous with strain and confusion which, together, make learning an unpleasant exertion.

LOOK FOR THE PLEASANT SENSATIONPleasure relaxes the breathing to become simple and easy. Excessive striving-to-improve impedes learning. It is less important to learn new feats of skill than it is to master the way to learn new skills. You will get to know new skills as a reward for your attention. You will feel you deserve your acquired skill, and that will add satisfaction to the pleasurable sensation.

DO NOT “TRY” TO DO WELLTrying hard means that somehow a person knows that unless he makes a greater effort and applies himself harder he will not achieve his goals. Internal conviction of essential inadequacy is at the root of the urge to try as hard as one can, even when learning. Only when we have learned to write fluently and pleasurably can we write as fast as we wish, or more beautifully. But “trying” to write faster makes the writing illegible and ugly. Learn to do well, but do not try. The countenance of trying hard betrays the inner conviction of being unable or of not being good enough.

DO NOT TRY TO DO “NICELY”A performance is nice to watch when the person applies himself harmoniously. This means that no part of him is being directed to anything else but the job at the hand. Intent to do nicely when learning introduces disharmony. Some of the attention is misdirected, which introduces self-consciousness instead of awareness. Each and all the parts of ourself should cooperate to the final achievement only to the extent that it is useful. An act becomes nice when we do nothing but the act. Everything we do over and above that, or short of it, destroys harmony.

These courses are made to help you to turn the impossible into the feasible, the difficult into the easy: beautiful to see and lovely to do.

INSIST ON EASY, LIGHT MOVEMENTWe usually learn the hard way. We are taught that trying hard is a virtue in life, and we are misled into believing that trying hard is also a virtue when learning. We see, therefore, a beginner, learning to ride a bicycle or to swim or to learn any skill, making many futile efforts and tiring quickly.

Learning takes place through our nervous system, which is so structured as to detect and select, from among our trials and errors, the more effective trial. We thus gradually


eliminate the aimless movements until we find a sufficient body of correct and purposeful components of our final effort. These must be right in timing and direction at the same instant. In short, we gradually learn to know what is the better move. Thus it dawns on us that moving the handlebar so as to twist the front wheel in the direction in which we tend to fall stabilizes us on the bicycle. Or that if we move our arms and legs slowly forward in the swimming direction and rapidly in the other direction we actually swim easier and faster. We sense differences and select the good from the useless: that is, we differentiate.

Without distinguishing and differentiating, we perpetuate—and possibly fuse—the good and the bad moves in a haphazard order as they happen to occur and make little or no progress in spite of diligent insistence.

IT IS EASIER TO TELL DIFFERENCES WHEN THE EFFORT IS LIGHTAll our senses are so built that we can distinguish minute differences when our senses are only slightly stimulated. If I were to carry a heavy load (say a refrigerator) on my back, I could not tell if a box of matches were added to the load, nor would I become aware of it being removed. What is, in fact, the weight that must be added or removed to make one aware that some change of effort has occurred? For muscular efforts or our kinesthetic sense, that weight is about one-fortieth (1/40) of the basic effort for very good nervous systems. On carrying 400 pounds, we can tell at once when 10 pounds are added or removed from the load. On carrying 40 pounds, we can tell a change of one pound. And everybody can tell with closed eyes when a fly alights on a thin match-like piece of wood or straw, or when it takes to the air again.

In short, the smaller the exertion, the finer the increment or decrement that we can distinguish and, also, the finer our differentiation (that is, the mobilization of our muscles in consequence of our sensations). The lighter the effort we make, the faster is our learning of any skill; and the level of perfection we can attain goes hand in hand with the finesse we obtain. We stop improving when we sense no difference in the effort made or in the movement.

LEARNING AND LIFE ARE NOT THE SAME THINGIn the course of our lives, we may be called upon to make enormous efforts—sometimes beyond what we believe we can produce. There are situations in which we must pay no heed to what the enormous effort entails. We often have to sacrifice our health, the wholeness of our limbs and body, to save our life. Obviously, then, we must be able

to act swiftly and powerfully. The question is, wouldn’t we be better equipped for such emergencies by making our efforts efficient in general, thus enabling us to exert ourselves less and achieve our purpose economically.

Learning must be slow an varied in effort until the parasitic efforts are weeded out; then we have little difficulty in acting fast, and powerfully.

WHY BOTHER TO BE SO EFFICIENT?We need not be intelligent, for God saves the fool. We need not be skillful, for even the clumsiest of us succeeds in the end. We need not be efficient, because a kilogram of sugar yields, roughly speaking, 20.000 calories, and one gram calorie produces 426 kilograms of work. From that count, we can waste energy galore. Why go to such troubles as learning and improving? The trouble lies in that energy cannot be destroyed; it can only be transformed into movement, or into another form of energy.

What, then, happens to the energy that is not transformed into movement? It is, obviously, not lost, but remains somewhere in the body. Indeed, it is transformed into heat through the wear and tear of the muscles (torn muscles, muscle catarrh) and of the ligaments and the interarticular surfaces of our joints and vertebrae. So long as we are very young, the healing and recovery powers of our bodies are sufficient to repair the damage caused by inefficient efforts, but they do so at the expense of our heart and the cleansing mechanisms of our organism. But these powers slow, even as early as at our middle age, when we have only just become an adult, and they become sluggish very soon thereafter

If we have not learned efficient action, we are in for aches and pains and for a growing inability to do what we would like to do.

Efficient movement is also pleasant to do and nice to see, and it instills that wonderful feeling of doing well and is, ultimately, aesthetically satisfying.

DO NOT CONCENTRATEDo not concentrate if concentration means to you directing your attention to one particular important point to the utmost of your ability. This is a particular kind of concentration, useful as an exercise, but rarely in normal occupation and skills.

Suppose you play basketball and concentrate on the basket to the utmost—you will never, or nearly never, have the leisure to do so unless you are alone in front of the basket. When there are two teams playing, the opening


for a throw is a short, fleeting instant in which you have to attend not only to the basket, but to the players around you, and to the balance and posture that enable you to perform a useful throw.

The best players are those who attend to the continually changing position of their own players as well as of the opposing team. Most of the time, their concentration is directed to a very large area or space; the basket is just kept dimly in the background of their awareness, from where it can, at the most fleeting opportunity, become the center of attention.

The best and most useful attention is similar to what we do when reading. When we see the whole page, we cannot perceive any of the content, although we can say whether the page is in English or some language we cannot read. To read, we must focus on a minute portion of the page, not even a full line—perhaps merely a single word, if it is a familiar one and rather short. If we are a skillful reader, we keep on picking out word after word, or groupings of words, to be attended to by our macular vision, which is only a minute portion of the retina, with sufficient good resolution to see small print clearly.

The good way of using our attention is, for the most part, similar to reading. One should perceive the background (the whole page) dimly and learn to focus sharply on the point-attended (concentration) rapidly before the next so that reading fluently means reading 200 to 1000 words a minute, as some people can.

Therefore, do not concentrate but, rather, attend well to the entire situation, your body, and your surroundings by scanning the whole sufficiently to become aware of any change or difference, concentrating just enough to perceive it.

In general, it is not what we do that is important, but how we do it. Thus, we can refuse kindly and accept ungraciously. We must also remember that this generalization is not a law and, like other generalizations, it is not always true.

WE DO NOT SAY AT THE START WHAT THE FINAL STAGE WILL BEWe are so drilled or wired-in by prevailing educational methods that when we know what is required of us, we go all-out to achieve it, for fear of loss of face, regardless of what it costs us to do so. We have it instilled in our system that we must not be the worst of the lot. We will bite our lips, hold our breath, and screw up our straining self in an ugly way in order to achieve something if we have no clear idea of how to mobilize ourselves for that task. The result is excessive effort, harmful strain, and ugly performance. The Awareness Through Movement® lessons will help

you to reach your inborn potentiality in the best way and avoid giving you just another opportunity for using yourself in the accustomed way which led you, initially, to seek a better one.

By reducing the urge to achieve, and attending also to the means for achieving, we learn easier. In achieving, we lose the incentive for learning and, therefore, accept a lower level than the potential we are endowed with. When we delay the final achievement by attending efficiently to our means, we set ourselves a higher level of achievement if we are not aware that that is what we are doing. On knowing what to achieve before we have learned to learn, we can reach only the limit of our ignorance, which is often general. Such limits are intrinsically lower than those we can foresee after knowing better.

The Feldenkrais InstituteTeaching the Art & Science of Human Movement and Physical Intelligence

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Smithsonian MagazineVol. 11 No. 10 January 1981 By Albert Rosenfeld

Teaching the body how to program the brain is Moshe’s ‘miracle’


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The little boy enters, his mother at his side. Seemingly unfazed by the audience turning to watch him, he heads directly toward Moshe Feldenkrais, who is in Toronto to hold a series of workshops. The boy has cerebral palsy. His gait is stiff and ungainly, and he leans for support on a wheeled walker. As he approaches, Feldenkrais points out how the boy’s knees rub together; they have spasti-cally locked into position for years. “The doctors want to cut his adductor muscles, “ says Feldenkrais, in an ac-cent that is part Russian, part British, part Hebrew. (The adductors are the long muscles on the inner sides of the thighs that draw the knees together.)

The boy stops expectantly in front of Feldenkrais, who is sitting on a stool at the foot of a cot. He tells the boy to take off his shoes. “Notice.” He says, “that Ephram’s heels do not touch the floor.”

Ephram lies on the cot and Feldenkrais, with his strong hands, begins to touch and manipulate-at first ever so gently, with tiny movements and pressures. The boy be-gins to relax, though he looks very attentive. “His breath-ing is getting much easier, you notice,” says Feldenkrais. “His eyes are moving to the right as he listens carefully-not to my words, but to the internal language, the mes-sages between the muscles and the brain.”

His hands are moving slowly down the boy’s distorted body as he talks. He works silently for a while on the feet and legs, in a listening attitude, occasionally nodding or grunting with satisfaction. He is probing sensitively for responses and connections he recognizes from years of experience with hundreds of pupils. (Feldenkrais has only “pupils,” never patients. He does not give treat-ment, only “lessons.” He claims to be simply a teacher.)

Soon, working carefully, flexing the boy’s legs, Felden-krais has managed to cross one knee over the other, without forcing or hurting. The boy looks really pleased. “This is the first time he has been able to cross his knees,” say Feldenkrais.

He now uncrosses the boy’s knees, which remain slightly separated, no longer locked in place. Feldenkrais makes a fist, places it in the new space between the knees. “Now, Ephram,” he says. “Please, can you press your knees against my fist.” Then: “Come on, you can do better than that! Close your knees on my fist as hard as you can.” He keeps it up, and Ephram, no longer relaxed, is now straining mightily with the weak muscles on the inside of his thighs, an unaccustomed workout. Soon, “listen-ing” carefully with his fist, Feldenkrais is satisfied that the time is right.

“All right, Ephram,” he says, “you don’t have to close your knees any more. You can open them now.” With clear re-lief, Ephram relaxes, and opens his knees-all the way.

An Israeli scientist teaches subtle exercises that appear to help invalids, athletes and everyone else to function at a higher level

Standing at left rear, Moshe Feldenkrais instructs a clas at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. Photographs by Richard Howard

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“See how much easier it is to have your knees open, you don’t have to do anything at all.” The boy moves his legs in and out, in apparent disbelief, then bursts into a peal of delighted laughter.

When he leaves, he still needs the walker for support. But his knees no longer rub together.

At 76, Moshe Feldenkrais bears a resemblance to his longtime friend and supporter, the late David Ben-Guri-on-the same strong face, the same nearly bald head with its halo of upward-curling white hair, the same short powerful build. What he does, though always difficult to explain in quick and simple terms, is apply principles and exercises that help the body program the brain so that the whole mind-body system benefits. Moreover, his techniques are eminently teachable, and he does teach them—to a long-term core of devoted students in Tel Aviv, where he now lives; at workshops all over the world; and in the United States, principally in San Francisco, where he spent several consecutive summers training a cadre of pupils, who have fanned out across the country to be teachers themselves. Most are associ-ated with the Feldenkrais Guild in San Francisco.

This year he started a new series of nine-week profes-sional training programs scheduled to go on for the next two, possible three, summers at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, with more than 200 eager new students from an astonishing diversity of backgrounds as well as many of the old graduates who feel they have much more to learn. On visitor at Amherst was Julius Erving—“Dr. J.” of basketball fame- who was impressed enough to plan some private Feldenkrais lessons of his own. Another was Jack Heggie, who has put together a booklet called Improve Your Skiing, based on Felden-krais training techniques.

Other pupils and admirers have included violinists Ye-hudi Menuhin, director Peter Brook, neuropsychologist Karl Pribram, the late anthropologist Margaret Mead and David Ben-Gurion. (When journalist Charles Fox ques-tioned him about famous people, Feldenkrais scoffed at a “social registry,” saying “nothing is more important to me that the work I am doing. It is the work that deserves what space you have.”)

Feldenkrais is not an M.D. Before he became, almost by inadvertence, a mind-body guru—embraced by the holis-tic-health, humanistic-psychology and New Age move-ments—he was an engineer with degrees in both mechan-ical and electrical engineering as well as a physicist. He got his science doctorate at the Sorbonne, studied with Frederic Joliot-Curie, and worked on the French atom-ic-research program as well as the British antisubmarine program. While cultivating his mind, Feldenkrais had always been interested in the body’s mechanics. Among his other activities, he excelled as a judo master and soc-cer player. In fact, it was the flaring-up of an old soc-

Feldenkrais works with Helena Carleton, who has mild cerebral palsy, to make her aware of contraction in calf muscle. Since her lessons, her mother says, Helena now “sees her body as something she can heal.”

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cer-inflicted knee injury that first led him to supply his engineering mind to the mechanics of body and brain-a task that soon became his absorbing preoccupation.

“In Israel now,” says Avram Baniel, a professor of indus-trial chemistry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, “I consider him a national treasure.” Baniel, who has been a long-time Feldenkrais-watcher, says, “ If I have ever met a genius in the flesh, it is Moshe Feldenkrais.”

This genius rating is enthusiastically seconded by Robert Masters, co-director with his wife, Jean Houston, of the Foundation for Mind Research in Pomona, New York. Masters has been for years both a student and teacher of many of the world’s body-mind systems, ancient and modern Oriental and Occidental, from F.M. Alexander to Zen. “Feldenkrais is the man who has gone further than anyone else, past or present,” says Masters. “Employ-ing his methods, even I can do some amazing things for people. And the potential applications of it have scarcely begun to be realized-they are clearly useful throughout life, from early childhood to advanced old age.”

Learning to walk with grace.The first time I met Moshe in his cramped New York hotel room, he was giving a lesson to Sarah Rosinsky, a young woman with cerebral palsy whom he head “taught” previously in San Francisco. When she heard he was back in the country, but not coming west this time, she had flown in to have a few sessions. Moshe, she related months later, had not only taught her to talk and breathe more freely but also to walk with grace and balance, something which helped her go through a preg-nancy in comfort and without falling. “Before I saw him, I had perpetual scabs on my knees,” she said.

Journalist Fox, whose own movements were affected by multiple sclerosis, wrote that after only one session with Feldenkrais “there was a very peculiar rush of sensation from feet to brain. Intuitively, I sensed that this was a transmission of vital information.”

In cases like these and hundreds more-including the one he writes about in his slender, fascinating book, The Case of Nora-Moshe’s ministrations are often perceived as therapy, as healing. But Moshe protests: “I don’t know much about diseases-only what’s necessary to under-stand them in my terms. If someone says to me, ‘I have a disease, I have cerebral palsy, I have multiple sclerosis, I have osteogenesis imperfecta’-I know what these mean only in terms of body activity. I don’t need to know any-thing about ‘cures’ either. I do know that a disease giv-en a name, especially if it is also labeled ‘incurable,’ can have self-fulfilling effects, I also know that if a person is having troubles with his movements, I can probably improve the movements, and thereby improve his health and well-being.

“And you know what?” he adds, lifting his eyebrows in

Below: moving her head, he has put Helena’s arms on his for support, “to make her feel safe.”

Below Left: Feldenkrais supports Helena’s back with one hand while he gently moves her head with the other.

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mock surprise. “When a person is healthy, it turns out that he is not ill!”

Improvements-these “routine miracle,” as one of Felden-krais’ followers has called them-are usually brought about on a one-to-one basis through what Feldenkrais terms “Functional Integration” (variations on the tech-niques he used with the boy Ephram in Toronto, usu-ally with the teacher actually manipulating the pupil’s movements). The other aspect of Moshe’s work he calls “Awareness Through Movement,” usually carried out through group workshops. These are more like con-ventional exercises in format, with the teacher guiding the class with words rather than by personal manipula-tion. Awareness Through Movement-which is also the title of Moshe’s most popular and accessible book-is of special interest to professionals who want to fine-hone their skills-dancers and musicians, for instance; but it is intended for everyone, for people who want to im-prove their awareness, their physical and mental perfor-mance.

We are all brain-damaged

Moshe doesn’t like to emphasize the separateness of Functional Integration and Awareness Through Move-ment, other than as convenient labels for doing essen-tially the same thing in different ways. “I especially don’t like it,” says Moshe, “if the distinction is made that one is for ‘sick; or ‘brain-damaged’ people, and the other is for ‘normal, healthy’ people. Which of us, after all, is not brain-damaged, I the sense that we allow many ar-eas of our brains to atrophy through misuse or nonuse? We settle for so little! As long as we can get by, we let it go at that. We can have terrible posture and movement patterns and habits which are distorting and damaging to our bodies and brains-and still be classified as ‘nor-

mal.’ Most of us use perhaps five percent of body-brain potential. Who are we, then, to call other people brain-damaged simply because their particular deficiency pro-duces visible effects that we label ‘disease’?”

I remember the first Feldenkrais exercise I tried. Jean Houston told me to lie on my back (many feldenkrais lessons are done this way to relieve the body of the antigravity efforts it routinely exerts I the standing position) and go through quite a repertory of very tiny movements, all on the right side of my body, from head to toe. As one example, with my hand barely off the floor, then back, then up again, then back. Tiny mo-tions are not necessarily easy motions, especially when repeated 20 or 30 times, because we are not used to making tiny muscular movements voluntarily.

At the end of that first lesson, having pretty thoroughly worked on my right side, and not at all on my left side, jean told me to stand up. “Does the right side feel any different now?” she asked.

“I guess it does, somehow,” I said, trying to find words to clothe vague sensations.

“It ought to,” said Jean. “ You look like a Picasso!”

I went to the mirror. Jean had exaggerated, of course, but there was a noticeable difference. My right eye seemed somewhat larger. The muscles on the right side of my face seemed more relaxed. My right shoulder looked lower than my left.

Vivid use of the imagination is an important part of the Feldenkrais Method. I remember doing what seemed at the time a silly exercise. I was sprawled on the ground, face down, with arms and legs spread-eagled. I was told to imagine that I had a continuous groove running all the way from the tip of my left hand, down my arm, then running form my left shoulder diagonally across my back down to my right buttock, then down my right leg to the heel. (Later, the imaginary groove ran from my right hand to my left heel.) Then I was asked to imagine a tiny steel ball that I was to propel along the entire length of the groove, through the use of whatever muscles I wished-only I was not to get up or to move my arms or legs from the spread-eagle position. I can tell you that, in concentrating on this activity, I under-went a lot of unfamiliar sensations and exercised a lost of tiny muscles I didn’t even know I had. And that is part of the Feldenkrais idea:

The motor cortex has many connections and nerve cells that are directly related to specific muscles that pro-duce specific movements. If the muscle patterns never change-and enormous numbers of them never do, espe-cially after childhood (this is true even of professional athletes)-then those areas of the brain remain in fixed patterns. The more completely you utilize your entire muscular apparatus, says Feldenkrais, and the more aware you are of those movements, the more will the brain be activated-and the-activated regions will stim-

Student tries unaccustomed movements, using rarely utilized muscles to stimulate the brain.

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ulate adjacent areas. The more parts of the brain that function well, the better the whole brain will function.

Feldenkrais has devised thousands of exercises. One does not, of course, have to do all of them all of the time-only a few at a time as reminders. Some exercises have to be done only once-and the brain-body has learned its lesson. “So smart is the brain, when we permit it,” says Moshe, “that even after doing something a million times the wrong way, doing it right even one time feels so good that the brain-body system recognizes it immediately as right.”

So, in some instances, he wants us to become aware of a deficiency or a habit only so that, having substituted a better way, we can forget it. We tend, he says, to be mainly aware of the front and upper parts of our body, very little of the back and lower parts. He would like us to be aware of the entire surface of the body, as well as the joints and skeletal structure. He wants us to be aware that there are muscles constantly holding up our eyelids, holding up our jawbones, against the pull of gravity; that the flexors and extensors of our legs are in constant use (more likely, misuse), keeping us stable in the Earth’s gravitational field. By being aware, he holds, we will un-derstand how much unnecessary tension we have, how much pleasure and grace we miss, how inefficiently and stressfully we live our lives.

In sum, we can, with the conscious brain, instruct the body to move in ways that will in turn instruct the brain to permit the body (and hence itself ) to function at a level much closer to its full human potential. Through aware-ness, he believes, we can learn to move with astonish-ing lightness and freedom-at almost any age-and thereby improve our living circumstances not only physically, (he says we may even find ourselves an inch or two taller!) but also emotionally, intellectually and spiritually.

Moshe would like to devote his remaining years and en-ergies to consolidating his theories, to teaching more teachers, to completing the additional books he fells are necessary to round out his work. “Even without any further contributions to our knowledge, however,”

says Jerry Karzen of San Francisco, an epidemiologist turned Feldenkrais teacher, “Moshe already represents a revolution in human health. He may not call what we do therapy, but if it makes people better, what we call it doesn’t matter.”

Albert Rosenfeld, who has won many major science-writing awares, last wrote for Smithsonian on sociobiology in the Setpmeber 1980 issue.

At a two-day workshop, the teacher autographs copies of his books for some of his students. page 6

Have you ever watched a baby learn how to crawl, sit, stand or walk? The Feldenkrais Method is based on the premise that we have all forgotten how to move

with such natural ease and awareness. By paying close atten-tion to the signals our bodies give us and gently exploring new ways of moving, claim practitioners, we can rediscover the free, e� ortless sense of movement we had in the fi rst few years of life—and undo many of the aches and pains that plague us as adults who have become literally too set in our ways.

I have long been intrigued by this subtle form of retraining the nervous system, which I currently recommend to patients whose movement has been restricted by injury, cerebral palsy, stroke, fi bromyalgia, or chronic pain. (I fi nd it be much more useful than standard physical therapy.) I also believe that the Feldenkrais Method can help older people achieve greater range of motion and fl exibility, and help all of us feel more comfortable in our bodies.

Retraining the Nervous System Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais (1904-84), a Russian-born physicist, martial arts expert, and mechanical engineer, developed the modality that bears his name to cure his own debilitating injury. As a young man, Feldenkrais moved to Paris to acquire a doctorate in science from the Sorbonne and also worked with Jigaro Kano, the developer of modern judo, to become one of the fi rst Europeans to earn a black belt. When a bus accident around 1940 aggravated an old knee injury and doctors told him he would never walk again without surgery—which o� ered only a 50 percent chance of success—Feldenkrais decided there must be a better way. Drawing from his background in mar-tial arts, physics, and engineering, as well as his observations of children’s movements, he used his body as a laboratory, experimenting with minimal motions and carefully noting the results. After months on this practice, he regained full use of his knee and soon began teaching his discoveries to friends.

Feldenkrais believed that most of us go through life using ha-bitual patterns of movement that may be limiting or ine� cient. We may have developed these patterns to compensate for past injuries or learned them on the job (through performing repeti-tive motions or sitting for long periods). Yet few of us really pay attention to how our bodies move until something hurts.The key to healing, Feldenkrais felt, is learning to be aware of these unconscious patterns of movement, and experimenting with new possibilities until you fi nd ways to move with the least e� ort and strain. Through repetition, your body “learns” these new, more-e� cient movements and can program the brain and nervous system to incorporate them into your every-day functioning.

Today, there are more than 1,000 Feldenkrais Method prac-titioners working in the United States and Canada, leading group classes and o� ering private sessions to everyone from cab drivers and computerbound o� ce workers to su� erers of arthritis and multiple sclerosis. It is a popular modality among musicians and athletes (including violinist Yehudi Menuhin,cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and basketball star Julius Erving), who use it to improve coordination and enhance performance, as well as actors who simply want to use their bodies more gracefully.

Last year an interesting German study even found the Felden-krais Method to be a useful treatment for eating disorders:Compared to a control group, the patients who attended a series of Feldenkrais classes showed increased acceptance of their bodies, decreased feelings of helplessness, and more self-confi dent behavior.

A Moving Experience Feldenkrais work is taught in two di� erent modes: Aware-ness Through Movement group classes use verbal instruc-tions to guide students in deceptively simple fl oor exercises, using common movements like bending, turning, leaning, and breathing to help each person discover the ways he or she moves most easily. In private “Functional Integration” sessions, the practitioner o� ers gentle hands-on guidance in performing movements that are tailored to the individual’s particular condition.

An initial private session typically lasts 60 minutes and begins with a health history and a “body scan,” with the practitioner guiding you in a series of self-observations designed to detect areas of tension or dysfunction. Then the practitioner asks you to lie or sit on a low padded table, fully clothed, and lightly guides you in a fl uid series of movements while noting, and avoiding, areas of strain. In working with someone who has arthritic pain in the hands, for example, the practitioner might help the client exploresubtle movements involving the hands but which don’t stress the a� ected joints. The client might then be instructed to practice these movements at home until the body “learns” them through repetition.

Because Feldenkrais work is a learning process, most prac-titioners recommend a minimum of four private sessions, scheduled once or twice a week, in order to a� ect a sustainable result. Some people with chronic pain or other serious condi-tions opt for ongoing sessions. Another, less-expensive option is to attend the group classes, which arenow being o� ered in settings from music schools to nursinghomes to holistic health centers.

Certifi ed Feldenkrais practitioners must complete 800 to 1,000 hours of training over a three to four-year period, involving both theoretical study and hands-on practice. To locate a quali-fi ed instructor near you,contact the Feldenkrais Guild (800) 775-2118 or (541) 926-0981; www.feldenkrais.com. While there is no real substitute for working with a practitioner, I recommend the clearly written book Awareness Heals:The Feldenkrais Method for Dynamic Health, by Steven Shafarman (Addison-Wesley,1997). It includes six basic lessons to help you become more aware of how you sit, walk, and otherwise move.

Reproduced with permission from Dr. Andrew Weil’s Self Healing (May 1998. Subscriptions from: 800-523-3296)

The Feldenkrais Method: Moving with Ease

Dr. Andrew Weil’s

Self HealingCREATING NATURAL HEALTH FOR YOUR BODY AND MIND

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New Hope for Aching, Creaky Yuppie Bodies

by Dr. Norman Doidge for the National Post, October 6, 1999

A nyone who is subject to the grim tug of gravity might count themselves lucky that one day,

about 50 years ago, Moshe Feldenkrais, in his late thirties, while standing on a wet submarine deck, slipped and aggravated an old knee injury. They should also be grateful to the doctors who told him he would never walk again without surgery (surgery that offered only a 50% cure rate), because Feldenkrais decided to fix himself, and invented a new treatment in the process. Feldenkrais was a remarkable man and a genius. Born in 1904 in Russia, he fled pogroms to pre-state Israel when he was 14. At the time, the British Mandate pro-hibited Jews, but not Arabs, from carry-ing arms, so Feldenkrais trained himself in unarmed combat, then tutored others. With the money he made tutoring he went to Paris where he trained as a me-chanical and electrical engineer. He then became a physicist, working and co-authoring papers with Frederic Joliot-Curie (who with his wife received the Nobel Prize in 1938). F eldenkrais, in the meantime, became one of Europe’s first black belts in judo, and set up the Jiu-Jitso Club de France with the founder of modern judo, Jigoro Kano.

Feldenkrais and J oliot -Curie were working on the French atomic-research program when the Nazis invaded Paris. Joliot Curie knew F eldenkrais would be arrested as a Jew, so he arranged for him to escape to London — with two suit-cases full of the French atomic secrets, thereby keeping them out of Nazi hands. Through the intervention of the British scientist J.D. Bernal, he worked for the British anti-submarine program. Felden-krais also led the training of British paratroopers in hand-to-hand combat. After the war, he completed his doctor-ate in physics at the Sorbonne. When the State oflsrael was created he became director of the electronics department for the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and wrote the book on hand-to-hand com-bat for the Israeli army. He now spoke Russian, Hebrew, French, German and English. But back to the bum knee.

Feldenkrais used his incredible scientific mind, extraordinary observational skills, and his expertise in judo to determine what made his knee better or worse. His new treatment was based not just on the understanding of individual joints, muscles, and ligaments, but on the role of awareness in movement and body mechanics. Animals have an enviable grace, and so do babies and young chil-dren, but that grace is often lost as we age, thought Feldenkrais, not because

we age, but because we learn bad habits. These include postures which have emerged to protect injuries, but which now add chronic bodily insult to injury. Feldenkrais taught limping people to walk by first teaching them to crawl like babies. The method can be used for a variety of conditions — back, neck, head and jaw pain, problems due to artificial hips and knees, fused spines, and ar-thritic conditions. It is useful to anyone who has to sit at a computer all day, or for those who have to be particularly physically active or aware, including athletes, soldiers, surgeons and actors. Many musicians in New York have a Feldenkrais practitioner. Yehudi Menuin swore by Feldenkrais, and so does Yo-Yo Ma. The director of the Royal Shake-speare Theatre, Peter Brook, was a ma-jor fan as were anthropologist Margaret Mead and neurophysiologist Dr. Karl Pribram, who thought Feldenkrais in tune with the most advanced knowledge we have of the brain. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, sought out Feldenkrais when he was 75 years old and could barely stand in Parliament because of his serious back problem. Af-ter treatment, “the old man” could leap onto tanks and stand on his head.

Feldenkrais eventually used his ap-proach in extreme cases, helping people with strokes learn how to read, speak, and walk again, or for treating people with cerebral palsy or multiple sclero-sis. Many well-known treatments for musculoskeletal pain treat the problem locally, by strengthening the affected area (physiotherapy), using surgery, or twisting the spine with force (chiro-practics). Feldenkrais’ method focuses on general functioning. Regardless of the cause — an aching back, artificial joint, arthritis, or tension Feldenkrais as-signs exercises to make his pupils aware of movement. “Errors” of movement are not “corrected.” Rather, lack of flow is noticed. Then, in the low stimulus envi-ronment, barely detectable movements are prescribed. These minute changes induce the nervous system to lower the general tone of muscular contraction, so the sufferer can become consciously aware of the unconscious movement patterns that exacerbate or cause the problem.

Watching and listening to lithesome Marion Harris, who trained with Feldenkrais, conducting classes at The Feldenkrais Centre in Toronto, I was amazed to see how many of the concepts are similar to those used in psychother-apy done properly — which is patiently. Feldenkrais knew, as did Sherrington, the great neurologist, that most of the brain’s activity is inhibitory: it stops, retards or modifies the actions of our more flowing primitive animal brain. Most bad habits include jerky inhibitory compensations or vestigial “defenses” that once protected an injury, but now are locked in. Instead of attacking bad postural habits directly (which often only makes them get worse), the master


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practitioner finds ingenious ways to release the bad habits.

For instance, new non-habitual ways of moving are introduced, to confuse the current pattern. People with bad posture secondary to knee problems might be asked to walk backwards for a bit, both to scramble the bad habit, and because bad compensations haven’t yet attached themselves to backward walking. Then, having experienced what it is like to walk without bad posture, they relearn walking forward, spontaneously, in a re-organized, nimble way, so they don’t hurt their tender knees. The aim is always to move without wasted energy or willpower. Often, at the end of a class, muscles have softened, eyes are more open, breathing is deeper and pain has decreased. People may stand an inch taller.

Feldenkrais also conducted one-on-one sessions, called Functional Integration, where he used his hands to diagnose movement problems, and then gently moved people’s limbs, necks, and heads, teaching a suppleness that could be generalized to all movements.

Feldenkrais died in 1984, but his work is spreading, especially in Europe. There are too few Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioners in Canada, but they are spread from Vancouver Island to New-foundland, and there is a Feldenkrais clinic in the Ottawa General Hospital. Qualified practitioners who are mem-bers of the Feldenkrais Guild can be contacted by calling 1-800-775-2118.Dr. Doidge is a research psychiatrist and psy-choanalyst in Toronto. He is also the author of the acclaimed book “The Brain That Changes Itself ”. Available in paperback.

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