Sunday, February 16, 2025
February 16, 2025

Feldenkrais ideas and experiences shared

BY JEFFERY WILSON

Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement© Teacher

I am a movement coach of sorts, aiding people to more easily rise from their bed or chair, or do a gentler swimming crawl stroke, or to walk with no familiar ache.

I am a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement© Teacher. The number-one question asked of me is “What is Feldenkrais?”

Feldenkrais refers to the originating work of Moshe Pinchas Feldenkrais. He was born May 6, 1904 in today’s Ukraine and died July 1, 1984 in Jaffa, Israel, a physicist, who fervently, if not defiantly, challenged the therapy-thinking of the day by arguing that movement — not thought, not sense, not feeling — must be the primary vehicle for effecting change to the better in one’s life.

According to Feldenkrais, the neuroses of Freudian thought are the parasitic habits that we form in our movement that get in the way of our sense of ease, comfort and ultimately self-respect. He pioneered a method — “awareness through movement” — which he argued we can all learn, and which learning inspires the capacity to change our self-image and to feel better about ourselves by enjoying movement of comfort and ease. He was one of the first to articulate the inextricable link between the mind and movement, such that working with one without the other does little to fundamentally change one’s sense of self, and thus, he had little patience or regard for psychoanalytic and other insight therapies that did not integrate the essentiality of movement for one’s well-being.

A repeated teaching observation coined by Feldenkrais and reverently repeated in contemporary trainings is that of our capacity to make “the possible out of the impossible,” founded on his empirical belief that humans can change from their condition of discomfort or misery through his method.

Feldenkrais taught people to learn his principles the way judo is taught, in Awareness Through Movement group classes. Another aspect of his training is that of “functional integration,” working with an individual client lying on a table.

Today, there are over 10,000 Feldenkrais practitioners with national and international professional guilds. On Salt Spring Island, there are at least two certified Feldenkrais practitioners and one certified Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement© teacher.

I am 73 years of age. I began my training at the age of 70. I was one of those people who had to go fast, to be first (and best), and to almost enjoy pain, as in “no pain no gain.” Now, amongst other things, I wear and hand out T-shirts that have “Go Slow Find Joy” printed on the front. The opportunity, for me, to discover the capacity to be aware of my movement and how to organize it to experience ease is akin to a miracle.

Thus, I presently lead self-inquiry Awareness Through Movement© weekly sessions in Victoria, Chemainus and Salt Spring, and forthcoming spring and summer two-day monthly workshops will be offered at the Ucluelet Community Centre.

The offerings are intentionally held at community centres at a low non-private cost, hopefully affordable by all to give all an equal opportunity for the fascination of movement exploration and ease.

I invite curiosity to discover, explore and find joy with the Feldenkrais method of movement awareness and change in self-respect.

I can be reached at jefferywilson660@gmail.com.

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