the Feldenkrais Method with Emma Alter

“Heads shoulders, Knees and Toes”

Part of a song we learn as children. Connecting all the parts of our skeleton with action. 

We spend the first months, years, learning to connect and own different parts of ourselves.  In order to make complex movements such as crawling, walking or talking. As we socialise, and move towards adulthood we then learn to disconnect themselves! To cut yourselves into disconnected body parts, as if one part had no connection to the next. 

But it’s wrong thinking. It’s daft to cut ourselves up into bits, and think both problem and solution are in the same area. They rarely are. However, when we think of ourselves as a complex system, where every part affects and changes another, we can use the whole of ourselves to move out of trouble.  But it takes a while to get one’s head around it.

This isolation of body parts isn’t useful in many ways:
– When we don’t immediate solve the problem
– We lose agency. We imagine there’s nothing we can do to improve our situation. 
– We don’t look at the resources that are there already.
– We start to think of the pain/limitation  as something that won’t go, we’ll have to live with it.

Instead, try thinking of the whole self. Of the area that hurts as part of the whole system. Then we have a lot of options to think about to help out. We can move and explore movement in one part of the system to help elsewhere. We can get behind the safety curtain and help improve movement in one area with something at the other end. Our brains are ingenious at solving problems, if we let them. Our brain’s networks are so interconnected, it enables us to learn incredibly fast, in ways neuroscience is only just catching up on.

“The Feldenkrais Method is not just pushing muscles around, but really changing things in the brain.”   Dr. Karl Pribram – Neuroscientist, Stanford University

That’s what we’ll be playing with this week. Moving areas of ourselves, whilst returning to sensing the whole. Moving in ways that make changes in the brain, that improve the relationship between different areas, and the brain. To improve your movement everywhere.
If sounds too abstract, it’s because it needs to be sensed, to be felt. For you to come and join us on the floor and try it out for yourself. It’s a kinasthetic practice, not a theoretical study. 

After all, you only know what a mango is when you bite into it yourself. No amount of poetry can ever describe the sensation, the flavour, the texture – it’s something to be experienced. Kinasaethetic learning is the same.

Improving your brain connections in movement is a practice. When we improve the way we open a world of possibility. We move further away from our limitations towards our potential. We limit our movement with our thinking. And our thinking when we stop moving. So we can improve one, through the other.

“My purpose is to allow people to move closer to actually being creatures of free choice. To genuinely reflect individual creativity and emotion, freeing the body of habitual tensions and wired-patterns of behaviour so that it may respond without inhibition to do what the person wants.”    Moshe Feldenkrais

Come and find out how you can free your body of habitual tension, and live more easily and joyfully.

If you’ve not been to a class, your first is on me, to see if it might work for you. And then there are different ways of joining us after that.