Feldenkrais

The Feldenkrais Method is a mindfulness educational system created by Moshé Feldenkrais (1904-1984). Feldenkrais uses movement to re-educate the mind and body to help break down established patterns of behaviour and initiate change. Feldenkrais is described as somatic learning - from within reawakening mind, movement, flexibility and wellbeing.

Habitual and repetitive movement patterns can contribute towards and in some cases cause injury, pain, and dysfunction. By utilising our brain's capacity for learning, feldenkrais helps us identify and understand our habits, and helps us to learn alternatives that promote alignment, greater ease and comfort. Feldenkrais is applicable to anyone wanting to improve the quality of their life and activities.

Using kinesthetic and proprioceptive self-awareness, Feldenkrais utilises movement and attention to enhance our natural ability to discover, learn, change and continue to develop throughout our lives.

Feldenkrais encourages us to use our skeleton to bear weight and transmit force rather than over use our muscles. The feldenkrais lessons can deconstruct some of your muscular habits and create more effective skeletal use, helping our performance and creating effortlessness in our actions.

What is it used for?

Applications of the feldenkrais method include: reducing pain, improving orthopedic, neurological and learning difficulties, enhancing performance of professional athletes, dancers, musicians, and actors. People from all walks of life are drawn to the feldenkrais method to achieve greater levels of comfort, increase mobility and range of motion, improve coordination and flexibility, expand self-awareness and vitality.

Two Types of Feldenkrais lessons

Awareness Through Movement lessons are group sessions. Participants are verbally led through a series of movement sequences, which utilise attention, perception and imagination. As the lessons progress, participants become more aware of their movement habits, and the lessons help establish new movement patterns. The lessons are usually done lying down or sitting, each participant moving at their own pace and range of motion. Comfort, ease, and the quality of movement are the main criteria.

Functional Integration, is a one-to-one, hands-on learning process, specifically designed to meet the needs of the individual. The quality of touch is non-invasive, and practitioners guide students through a series of movements that help alter habitual patterns and provide new information directly to the neuromuscular system. Students usually lie or sit and are comfortably dressed. These individual sessions use movement as the means to promote changes in patterns of sensing, feeling, thinking and interacting.

What people say about Feldenkrais

In a session I will guide you through a series of movements which will be gentle and bring your awareness to different areas of the body, your breathing, and quality of the action. After a session one can often feel a deep sense of relief and relaxation and a new awareness of one's self in body and mind.

Spontaneous comments recently after feldenkrais sessions:
"That was absolutely amazing",
"I feel really relaxed",
"I feel like I'm floating on air",
"I can really feel my legs supporting me, it's great",
"Years of back and hip problems made it a struggle to walk, you have helped me pay attention to how I walk and introduced me to more efficient ways of moving, and this has given me relief from pain."

Our Feldenkrais Practitioner

Raewyn Morrison

Working with Children Practitioner.

Raewyn is also a Feldenkrais practitioner who has taken practice-orientated advance training with Nancy Aberle and Lynn Bullock called: WORKING with CHILDREN. These are advanced trainings for Feldenkrais Practitioners with theory and techniques from Anat Baniel Method for children, taught by Nancy Aberle. She attends this training in Malmo Sweden to help gain more experience in working with children and babies with brain damage and neurological difficulties as a result of premature births and strokes.