September/October 2005 Alternative Health
Live With More Freedom, Comfort and Ease

by Jeff Haller, PhD

The Feldenkrais Method of somatic education is a system to develop a functional awareness of the self in the environment. It utilizes the fact that the body is the primary vehicle for learning. It is an approach allowing people to expand their repertoire of movements by enhancing awareness in order to improve function and enable full expression. The Method addresses the question of how to facilitate the learning needed to organize the whole self – mind and body. It is founded on the premise that all people, regardless of age or condition, have transformational potential and the ability to learn.

The Feldenkrais Method was developed and refined over 40 years by distinguished Israeli physicist and educator Moshe Feldenkrais (1904-1984). Dr. Feldenkrais suffered a serious knee injury and faced the possibility of confinement to a wheelchair. Dissatisfied with treatments available, Dr. Feldenkrais began exploring relationships between the mind and body to improve his own movement and function. From his investigations arose an ingenious method of neuromuscular reeducation – a method of self-organization and self-regulation that evokes greater feelings of comfort, greater capacity for learning and improved ability to function in every aspect of living. All expressions of the Method through lessons and practitioner training represent this way of thinking.

The Feldenkrais Method is taught in two parallel forms of lessons based on principles of physics, biomechanics, learning and human development: Awareness Through Movement® and Functional Integration®.

Awareness Through Movement is made up of verbally directed movement sequences presented primarily to groups and organized around a specific function, such as improving head mobility through working with the eyes. Each lesson is designed to increase awareness of habitual patterns and rigidities to enable expanding sensitivity and improving efficiency of movement and thought. The goal is learning to learn through attending to the whole self.

A lesson generally lasts from thirty to sixty minutes. The group members participate in precisely structured movement explorations involving thinking, sensing, moving and imagining. There are hundreds of lessons for all levels of ability and complexity. Lessons can be based on ordinary daily movements or on abstract environmental relationships. The result is learning to live with greater freedom, comfort and ease.

Functional Integration is a hands-on form of tactile, kinesthetic communication developed for the unique needs of a specific person at a specific moment. Each Functional Integration lesson relates to a particular desire, intention or need of the individual student. The goal is for the student to learn to reorganize his or her body and behavior in new and more effective ways. As always, the result is learning to live with greater freedom, comfort and ease

All learning strategies of the Method are oriented toward the whole process of learning and doing in the world, directing awareness toward sensing differences and perceiving whole interconnected patterns in movement and behavior, and learning how to achieve new strategies and possibilities for action in relation to one’s intentions.

For what reason do we learn the Feldenkrais Method? The answer is elusive and yet obvious: so we can live a more comfortable, esthetically pleasing life based in awareness and personal skill. Fundamentally, we learn how to learn, and we learn how to move with greater freedom. Whether you wish to improve your own quality of life through learning to learn or, learning this for yourself, want to work with people so that they will move more freely in life, investigate the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education.

The aim is a body that is organized to move with minimum effort and maximum efficiency, not through muscular strength, but increased consciousness of how it works.

– Moshe Feldenkrais

Jeff Haller, PhD is the Director of The Feldenkrais® Institute of Bend, offering Guild Certified Teacher Training courses in the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education. www.feldenkraisofbend.com.