Felden-what?!

Working with the Feldenkrais Method can help you find more functional support in yourself, move with more ease and efficiency and reduce habitual tension and stress.
 

By developing a differentiated self-perception, you develop a valuable tool to question habitual patterns, discover alternative ways of acting and discover previously unrecognised potential and increased creativity.
 

The Feldenkrais Method is a holistic approach that makes particular use of neuronal plasticity - the ability of the nervous system to change and adapt. It is based on an empirical, scientific approach. The method incorporates principles, insights and methodologies from the fields of physics, biomechanics, neuro- and behavioural physiology, psychology, evolutionary theory and the Japanese martial art of judo. The method was founded and named after the physicist and black-belt judoka Moshé Feldenkrais.

«My purpose is to allow people to move closer to actually being creatures of free choice»

Moshé Feldenkrais

Overcoming injuries, limitations and pain?

Feldenkrais lessons create the conditions for you to find the resources within yourself to:

  • Improve your balance
  • Gain more stability
  • Find effortless strength
  • Regain lightness and elgance
  • Improve your coordination
  • Prevent overloading
  • Let go of unnecessary tension
  • Reduce physical and mental stress
  • Use your attention for a more detailed self-perception
  • how?!

    The Feldenkrais Method approach is characterised by not focusing on the symptoms of a problem, but rather exploring the associated movement patterns and habits. With a holistic view of the adaptive human nervous system, resources can be rediscovered that clarify fundamental functional relationships.

    The feeling of pain and tension is often associated with an imbalance; working with the Feldenkrais Method helps you to return to a natural, efficient " distribution of work" in dealing with gravity: the skeleton provides stability and optimal power transmission, the large muscles do the big work and the small muscles do the fine work.

     

    Following injuries, various processes ensure that injured tissue and bones are protected from further damage. This results in complex patterns with additional muscle tension and altered movement sequences, and sometimes also anxiety. Some of these patterns often persist even after the actual injury has subsided and can therefore directly or indirectly cause restrictions and pain.
    With the help of Feldenkrais lessons, you can learn to let go of these unconscious protective mechanisms once your injury has healed.

    «What I’m after isn’t flexible bodies, but flexible brains.
    What I’m after is to restore each person to their human dignity»

    Moshé Feldenkrais

    Continuously develop yourself and your skills?
    discover new things?

    Perhaps there is an everyday task, such as sitting at the computer, that triggers discomfort, or you do a sport that you want to improve at, or you have a particular challenge such as a chronic illness.

    The question usually goes in a similar direction: What resources can be used to overcome these challenges? Are there alternative options that are more pleasant and easier?

    «Making the impossible possible,
    the possible easy, the easy elegant»
    Moshé Feldenkrais

    The Feldenkrais Method sees itself as the basis for a continuous personal practice, similar to Tai Chi, Aikido or Zen meditation.

    The approach of the Feldenkrais Method is process-orientated. It is not the achievement of a specific goal but the "how", the "learning to learn", that is at the centre of the method. The conscious perception of one's own movements and their connections with thoughts and emotions leads to a clearer self-image and is the basic tool for a continuous self-determined development process.

    Whilst individual lessons are well suited to dealing very specifically with individual questions and topics, group lessons are ideal for learning, researching and discovering in a playful way and at your own pace.

    «Movement is life, life is a process. Improve the quality of the process and you improve the quality of life itself»

    Moshé Feldenkrais

    What are the benefits of the Feldenkrais method for me as a musician, dancer or artist? 

    The Feldenkrais Method is also used for people with specific challenges in their profession.
    Unsere Wahrnehmung, unser Denken, unsere Emotionen und unser körperlicher Ausdruck sind untrennbar miteinander verbunden.

    Artists are also confronted with these connections for the quality of their performance. Working with the Feldenkrais Method can help you with the following topics:

    • Training in self-perception and external perception
      ("If you know what you're doing, you can do what you want")

    • More differentiated movements in favour of clearer artistic expression

    • Less muscular effort and more lightness

    • Listening to yourself and others

    • Develop several possible courses of action for each situation

    • Realise your creative potential

    • Increase your self-confidence

    • Detachment from external authority for assessing your own performance / quality in favour of more autonomy

    • Find a non-judgemental and playful way of dealing with yourself

    • Enable stress-free learning and re-learning

    neuronal plasticity

    In contrast to other mammals such as goats, cows or horses, which can stand, walk and hop around on their own legs just a few hours after birth, humans are not born with a great ready-to-use movement control. Every developmental step is the result of our nervous system's ability to learn. Although this makes the first steps at the beginning of our lives slow, it ensures that we can continue to develop and learn new things in a highly individualised way until the end of our lives.

    Gravity is the basic prerequisite for our lives, which we all have in common. We have all found a more or less sophisticated way of organising ourselves with gravity. Our nervous system is constantly busy processing a multitude of impressions and adapting our own organisation accordingly.
    This is one of the reasons why Feldenkrais lessons mostly take place lying or sitting on the floor, where the constant search for balance is minimised and the nervous system can calm down. This allows you to focus on your own patterns of action and explore and refine your own movements and habits.

    Our nervous system consists mainly of the motor part (responsible for activating muscles) and the sensory part (responsible for feeling, external and self-perception). Training in sport and practising a musical instrument is often characterised by a lot of motor repetition, with endurance and willpower as driving factors.

    The Feldenkrais Method is particularly concerned with this inseparable interplay between sensory and motor skills. In order to refine one's activities and question one's habits, one's own body awareness is trained and developed in a very precise and function-related way.

    en_GBEnglish