LEARNING TO LEARN AGAIN

Feldenkrais Group Classes are called Awareness Through Movement® lessons
Students are guided through movements that explore daily functions such as reaching, turning, breathing or walking.

Awareness Through Movement® (ATM) is the Feldenkrais Method's group work. The lessons, which consist of verbally directed movement sequences, are not 'physical exercises', but highly structured movement explorations around a functional theme. Since the goals of Awareness Through Movement® are neither strengthening nor stretching, but consciously differentiated independent movement of skeletal segments & then coordination of the whole skeleton in action, emphasis is placed on instructions which direct the student's awareness to particular sensations of skeletal linkages, disconnections & connections. In order to develop sensory discrimination & attention, the initial movements are usually very small with an emphasis on ease & comfort. From seedlike beginnings, small movements grow into movements of greater complexity, magnitude & speed. The complexity is increased only to the degree that the students are able to maintain ease, comfort & sensory attention.

Since the whole point of Awareness Through Movement® is for the learning to happen from one's own sensory motor explorations & not from external dictates or models, one is not shown how to execute the movements. The verbal directions provide a structure for exploration, a laboratory for the nervous system to develop attention, to explore differences & to choose between patterns. The structure of each lesson is such that one is led to explore at least 3 or 4 possible solutions to the movement situation.

Within any Awareness Through Movement® lesson, one is led to explore several strategies of action which would use a varied coordination between skeletal segments, varied trajectories, varied timing & varied sequencing within each strategy. At times one is even led through structured 'mistakes', to develop the capacity for kinesthetic discrimination. The nervous system then chooses & incorporates the trajectories, range & timing which at the moment feel right, that is, one develops one's own efficiency & coordination. This learning can be best compared to the sensory motor learning process of an infant's movement explorations & ultimately, movement refinement. In this process, the student/client not only learns specific new movements, but like the healthy infant/toddler, learns an approach which improves the general aptitude for movement.

There is a level of learning in ATM which profoundly shifts the focus of change to the individual themselves. Sometimes in the one~on~one Functional Integration aspect of the work, a client will attribute their improvement almost totally to the Practitioner. Feeling the self~produced change in Awareness Through Movement® classes indisputably shows the person that it is their system which has the capacity to self~correct. A further sense of empowerment emerges from experiencing their own heightened kinesthetic sense as the agent of self~improvement, rather than the agent of deterioration & discomfort. Audio tapes can be made available to incorporate Awareness Through Movement® into self~care.

Read more about the Benefits of Feldenkrais...

Read about How To Get the Most Out of Awareness Through Movement™...

Make the impossible, possible...
the possible, easy...
& the easy, elegant.
Moshe Feldenkrais