Articles & Resources
Blogs, research articles and other interesting stuff!
Listening to Your Inner Dialog
Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement (ATM®) lessons help students nurture an inner dialog with their bodies. Understandably, students struggle with “doing less” and “slowing down”. Yet, slowing down allows the nervous system to pay attention to the body’s sensations and listen to its intelligence. This is difficult because we have trained our minds to automatically dismiss and override our bodies even in the presence of pain…
Optimizing Healing
Our advanced medical technologies, vaccines, and diagnostic tools are necessary to save and prolong lives. We are taught only medical professionals have the ability to heal us and don’t believe healing requires our participation. Despite witnessing how wounds slowly mend, starting with your first skinned knee, we still don’t think we have an active role in our…
Learning How to Move
I was introduced to the Feldenkrais Method® more than five years after a cycling collision with a car. Three and half years were spent in physical therapy (PT), where I was informed that my body’s ability to heal was limited to five years. Traditional PT didn’t work for me because I didn’t injure a joint or two; my entire body was injured. I had multiple…
Swim with a Beginner’s Mind
Spring is a time of renewal and new beginnings. Nature can’t resist the pull of rebirth as each day fills with new colors and longer, brighter days. Thanks to an unfortunate toenail injury in December, I stopped running and I switched to swimming. My approach to swimming was to use a Feldenkraisian approach, where a previously learned, familiar movement pattern is revisited…
The Aha! Moment
What we think we can or cannot do reinforces how our minds restrict our potential to ourselves. In one of the Awareness Through Movement (ATM®) lessons taught at the Amherst training in 1981, Dr. Feldenkrais introduced a movement in a lesson that seemed impossible to do initially but, by moving slowly and delicately, the impossible became …
Creating Sustainable Habits
In movement, the word “habit” connotes a sense of familiarity that may or may not be useful. For example, if my shoulder hurts every time I pick up my coffee cup to take a sip, that’s not good. But pain is an opportunity to explore a habitual movement pattern that can be improved. Given that perspective, I allow myself the freedom to explore an ache as…
Feldenkrais® Learning Curve
Less than two weeks before a Feldenkrais training segment in my 4th year, I was hit by a car while walking across a street in Vienna. The x-ray of my knee taken the night of the accident indicated my knee joint was not injured. An MRI taken after I returned home indicated a small tear of my anterior medial…
Power of Choice
Unlike other mammals, human movement is not hardwired; humans do not stand up and start walking hours or a few weeks after birth. Although movement begins shortly after birth, we teach ourselves how to move little by little by actively engaging our brains to learn how to move. Dr. Feldenkrais reasoned that if human movement is a learned process, movement patterns that cause pain can be unlearned and replaced with…
Light Therapy
The last solar eclipse on 4/8/2024 was highly anticipated because the next bicoastal North American total solar eclipse will be on 8/12/2045. What is about light that draws our immediate attention? Although humans can only see 0.0035% of the entire…