From the Summer 2005 Schedule

Expanding your Repertoire

 Many of the people who come to the Feldenkrais Method wish to get rid of something. Sometimes a person has pain that she wants to go away, sometimes a kink, and sometimes the accumulated tensions of a busy life. The Feldenkrais Method is often good for each of these conditions. But how does the Method produce these benefits?

In trying to explain, I will call upon help from fairy tales. There is one from Germany that I read as a child and that has remained vividly in my memory:

 An old woman who was poor and foolish had only one blanket to keep her warm at night. Early one winter she discovered that the blanket had a hole.  She went into the village and asked a well-respected man what she should do. The man advised her to cut the hole out.  He even lent her the scissors to do so. The old woman went home and, while humming a tune, carefully cut out all around the edges of the hole.

That night she went to bed content in the expectation that she would sleep in warmth. When she woke in the morning, she realized that she had been cold all night again. She figured that, being uneducated, probably she had not done a good job in cutting out the hole. As the months went by, more holes appeared in the blanket, and each time she borrowed the scissors and fully cut the hole out. In a short time, she had no blanket at all!

     Laugh and cry at the same time! We can all have pity on the foolish old woman and possibly see instances in our own life when we have, regrettably, done the same.

 In relation to movement, our culture has done a lot of cutting out. Who walks to work any more? Who uses their body in heavy labor? Who uses their body in fine movement? Practically no one because nearly every one sits on a chair to eat, to eliminate, to get to work, to be at work and to relax in the evening. The unrecognized consequences of this sedentary lifestyle are the source of many pains.

 Taking a class in the Feldenkrais Method is a way to reintroduce movement into your life, and particularly variety of movement. During a class, you are often lying on a mat on the floor and making gentle movements following my spoken instructions. Each class explores a specific movement theme, such as rolling, reaching and bending. We explore many different ways to do similar things. At the end of the class, you usually feel better. This is because a good way to make negative things disappear is to increase your options in positive things.