New sensory-motor
skills can be acquired at any age, in any condition. If you have a
brain, you can learn.
Improvement
happens regardless of structural limitations, such as fused bones,
herniated discs, or joint replacements. The non-invasive approach of
Feldenkrais is useful if you suffer from:
- stroke
- Parkinson's disease
- MS
- fibromyalgia
- neurological conditions
- arthritis
- learning disorders
- deeper issues such as addictions and body image concerns.
What about dancers, musicians, and athletes?
Allowing uninhibited force to travel through the skeleton improves mental and physical responsi veness and coordination in athletes, musicians, dancers, actors, and other
creative disciplines.
Feldenkrais has successfully improved performance in runners, treated
repetitive stress in musicians, and increased efficiency and ease in
golfers, skiiers, cyclists, and others. Ultimately, reorganizing your movement habits can reorganize how you think and how you live your life.
More on improving performance...
Articles on Feldenkrais and sports...
Feldenkrais is for anyone who wants to change habitual behavior and replace painful strategies.
It can help you:
- Relearn movement patterns after an injury has healed
- Get back to a favorite activity, like skiing or yoga
- Improve performance in swimming, biking, dancing, sitting at your desk, or driving your car
- Change habits such as smoking, drinking, or overeating
- End the stoop in your shoulders
- Eliminate the aches, pains and discomfort of daily tasks
- Access a more creative, powerful, and spontaneous response to the world
An Example of Feldenkrais: Bending
A chef comes in to see a Feldenkrais practitioner. He needs to bend down to get things out of the oven over 50 times an evening, yet he is bending in a way that causes strain. Because he wants to keep working, he is interested in learning how to move without strain.
In the session, the practitioner gently moves his skeleton to clarify new ways for him to relate to bending, ways he cannot access through his own long-standing habits. When he comes to sitting, the practitioner helps him translate what he learned into being upright, then into
standing. In all orientations the chef learns, "I can bend this way. It doesn't hurt!"
Bending now begins with a different impulse in his brain. And he can breathe easier, stand taller, and move from the center. He has learned to counter-balance his pelvis with his head and use all his joints at once. He can continue to cook for many years to come with this new-found understanding.
Other examples of Feldenkrais lessons include:
- Jazz pianists relating power in the hands to flexibility in the spine and pelvis
- Trail runners discovering how movement in the torso supports the legs
- Dancers changing their impulse to tense when they do a particular move
- An 85 year-old violinist with a stroke affecting the right side being able to play again
- Climbers sensing the efficiency of sliding the shoulder blade as the spine bends
- Bikers translating the total power of their skeleton to the movement of the pedals
- Car accident survivors learning how to turn with the whole spine, not just the neck
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