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Although Feldenkrais is a self-help model,
you learn with the guidance of a Feldenkrais practitioner
until you have internalized the principles. A trained
eye can see where the flow — what I’ve called
the river of movement — starts to stop and show
you touch points to get it started. As you process new
movements, you let more and more of your body into your
consciousness. Waking up the left side, for instance,
has downstream effects on the right.
Moshe Feldenkrais wrote hundreds of Awareness Through
Movement sequences (called ATMs) of varying complexity
and progressive difficulty. They are designed to meet
you wherever you’re at and so are accessible to
students of all abilities, including those with severe
movement restrictions.
Several basic types of movements are:
> “Undifferentiated,”
where all parts of the body (head, shoulders, arms,
hips, legs) move in the same direction — as in
the ‘rolling’
ATM shown, good for loosening up the body as a whole.
> “Differentiated,”
shown in ‘triangle
arms,’ where some parts move in one
direction and others in the opposite — so your
torso and knees may turn left but head-shoulders-arms
roll right as one piece, opening up the shoulder blades
in so doing.
> A ‘constraining’
variant of differentiated movement, as in the ‘sliding
palms’ alternative way to loosen
shoulder blades — where one side is held stable,
encouraging the other side to be more active.
On the ‘separate then combine’ principle,
layering in one simple step at a time can wind up accomplishing
very complicated movements, just not by straight-line,
goal-oriented thinking. ‘Spiraling,’
a move common to both ATM and Bones For Life, stands
you up from the floor by moving supportively around
your center instead of stressing your back and knees.
It is a good example of how this method reaches a goal
without straining after it.
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