FELDENKRAIS METHOD Bristol

THE FELDENKRAIS METHOD is a revolutionary neuro-muscular therapy that promotes unprecedented improvements in the efficiency, coordination, and ease of body movement. It is a unique experiential demonstration of how even the subtlest levels of faulty muscular habit can exacerbate or cause a variety of physical complaints, or simply restrict even high levels of performance and well-being. The rapidity of detection and un-learning of faulty, damaging movement patterns, which the technique achieves, is facilitated by its unique and precise mirroring of the organic ways infants learn to move in the first place. Involved is a very subtle, pleasurable, exploratory form of bodily manipulation that hightens communication between brain and muscles. This supplies the brain with the information it needs for creating a wider and more harmonious repertoire of movement possibilities. Along with the alleviation of many symptoms, the recipient commonly experiences euphoric feelings of lightness, ease, and mental clarity.

The Feldenkrais Method includes two ways of working with people:

1. FUNCTIONAL INTEGRATION® (FI) is a one-on-one approach to working with people. The practicioner uses gentle touch in guiding your movements delicately as you lie or sit in comfortable clothing on a low, padded table. With precised handling, the practicioner conveys new or forgotten movement options, new neuro-muscular patterns in the place of often outmoded, faulty habits. The very detection and gentle exploration of minute resistances in movement patterns offer a unique, painless way of guiding you to a liberation from them, thus helping you to discover a broad range of options from which to choose and making space for your innate spontaneity. This process is a thoroughly nourishing and liberating one, melting useless defenses and offering a profound sense of relief and enhanced well-being on the physical, mental, and emotional levels.

2. AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT® (ATM) is based on a sequence of exercises which are verbally directed by the practicioner and explored by the student on one's own. ATM consists of thousands of carefully constructed exercises, creating a setting for the exploration and refinement of specific movements, breaking up old habits, and instilling new or forgotten patterns of thinking, moving and feeling by the student. The discovery of the ways of limiting oneself unconsciously through unchallenged muscular patterns leads not only to a healthier body functioning but, owing to the subtle connections between muscular and mental/emotional patterns, also to a freer, more spontaneous personality.