Swan flying

FELDENKRAIS METHOD: Simple movements that integrate mind and body

Last updated: October 3rd, 2023

Sometimes I’m awestruck by the grace and agility of certain animals; the way a giraffe moves its neck when walking, the spring of a horse over a jump, or the pounce of a housecat. Animals have a natural grace in the way they move. Interestingly, babies and young children have this innate ability as well. They’re supple, flexible and move with ease.

We tend to lose that ability as we age. Our bodies adapt to the way we live. For example, I can tell from a person’s posture if they work at a computer all day or if they work outside in construction. We develop patterns of inefficiencies and we get set in our ways, literally. Our bodies adapt out of habit and it shows.

The Feldenkrais Method is based on the premise that we’ve forgotten how to move naturally. But, through deceptively simple and comfortable exercises, we can rediscover the efficient, graceful movements our bodies were born with. Essentially, we learn to move without wasted effort and energy, and to achieve greater awareness of our body positions and how we move.

Feldenkrais helps us feel at home in our bodies, relieve chronic discomfort, eliminate pain, and speed up recovery from injury. It improves posture, flexibility and coordination; helps us regain mobility and strength; refine skills; and perform better as a musician, dancer, martial artist or athlete. Also, we become more flexible in our psychological patterns.

In Awareness Through Movement® (ATM) classes, the Feldenkrais practitioner verbally leads us through a series of movements which involve thinking, sensing, moving and imagining. We learn to replace old, restrictive habits with a new sense of ease and freedom. And because Feldenkrais is noncompetitive, we learn at our own pace by working within the bounds of pain-free motion, using the least possible effort to perform each movement.

The lessons are often based on developmental movements like rolling, crawling, or moving from lying to sitting. Minute, barely perceptible movements are used extensively to reduce hidden habits in the muscles. An important goal of ATM lessons is to learn how the most basic movement functions are organized, and to become more aware of our skeleton and its orientation in space.

I attended a Feldenkrais class and found it both awe-inspiring and enlightening. Our graceful and supple instructor, Marion Harris, led a group of us through a series of movements. My walking lesson opened my eyes to how easy walking could and should be. Harris had me walk to the opposite end of the studio. She made some comments about how straight my back was, how square my shoulders were, and so forth; I was feeling quite good about my gait. Then, Harris told me to walk backwards to where I’d started. I walked back and forth across that room for about 10 minutes, but with a different twist each time; with my eyes open, with my eyes closed, with one eye open, with one arm behind my back, back and forth. Then Harris told me to rest for a minute. When I was ready, she asked me to walk across the room again. It’s hard to explain the difference or the sensation but my gait, balance, rhythm, and ease had changed. I was much more comfortable after doing the “pattern scrambling” exercises.

My body had “unlearned” its familiar walking pattern and I’d adopted a more natural way of moving.

Stephen Douglas is the Senior Health Editor/Writer for The Healing Doctor, published by Lombardi Publishing Corp.

image: jd.echenard via Compfight cc