By making your own comfort and well-being a priority, you can continue to move in health and without pain into your old age.  This approach does not fit conveniently into a 15 minute time slot of the current medical insurance model. But it does work and will lead you to rich improvements in your quality of life.

Most importantly, participation in the Feldenkrais Method hands you back the reins of your well-being. You will learn how to move comfortably and not have to accept anyone else’s pronouncement of the limits to your improvement. This is very, very possible. It happens all the time. It just does not seem to happen enough in Monmouth County, NJ.

In the living of our lives – stress, injury, repetitive motion, sitting at computer workstations – we develop  movement patterns that use less and less of ourselves. When that happens, the parts that ARE still moving become overworked and are subject to more injury.

Through using the principles of how your nervous system learns, I can help you put yourself back together again.

The good news is that anybody with a nervous system (that’s everybody) can benefit from the Feldenkrais Method. The FM has helped individuals with chronic pain, Repetitive Stress Injuries, Multiple Sclerosis, as well as highly trained athletes. Because the Feldenkrais Method activates the parasympathetic nervous system, it is also effective in helping people who suffer chronic anxiety or PTSD.

The beauty of the Feldenkrais Method is that it takes each student from his or her own starting point, rather than attempting to impose a standard template of “correct” movement.  Anybody can improve or feel better.

 Any. Body.

These lessons are mostly done with the student lying on the table. Loose, comfortable clothing is best.

As a Feldenkrais practitioner, I’ve been trained, through touch and observation, to understand the patterns of muscular effort each student uses in his/her movement. In a non-judgemental environment, we will work together to help you develop an awareness of your movement habits. Through this process, you will begin to rediscover more optimal, efficient, and comfortable ways of moving.

Because the principles of organizing the nervous system are the same, no matter whom I am working with, Functional Integration sessions are effective with a wide range of conditions. For example, chronic pain, limited mobility, arthritis, fibromyalgia, shoulder issues, breathing issues, scoliosis and chronic anxiety are all conditions that respond to individual sessions.

There are many people for whom traditional methods of care have brought them a certain degree of improvement, but they’ve hit a plateau. By addressing the unique organization of each person, Functional Integration sessions often take people past the point of improvement that they believed or were told was possible.

The important thing to remember is that every individual has the capacity to improve, feel better and participate more fully in his/her life.

Here are just a few things you can do to “wake up your brain” and help your whole self stay on your cutting edge.

1. Interlace your fingers. Now interlace them the other way.
2. Move your head to the right, but look to the left with your eyes. Then do the opposite.
3. Reach into your silverware drawer with your other hand.
4. Put your pants on starting with the other leg.
5. Turn doorknobs with your other hand.
6. Take the first step (either up or forward) with your other leg.
7. Walk backwards.
8. Put on your lipstick starting with the opposite lip.
9. Stand, cross your left leg over your right, feet next to one another and shift weight side to side.
10. Repeat above, right leg crossed over left.  (keep a chair handy to steady yourself!)

There is an endless variety of ways to challenge yourself. Your brain needs a regular diet of novelty to stay young – Feed it!

Often the lessons are like puzzles in which you figure out how to move around fixed constraints. This puzzle-like situation prompts the nervous system to activate a different muscle pattern than you usually use. As a result, at the end of a lesson habitual muscle tension releases. You sense the stability of a balanced skeleton. Your breathing is freer, walking lighter, and eyes clearer. Your kinesthetic perception enhanced, you can move in ways that you thought were restricted. Being mindful of your sensory experience as you move through space helps ease chronic pain, improve the health of the joints, and change painful habits.

Whether you want to recover from an injury you’ve sustained, been told that you cannot improve from a condition that you’ve developed, or want to continue to participate fully in your life for a long time – The Feldenkrais Method can offer you the tools to participate in your own improvement.

Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais (a Ph.D. in physics) used the principles of neurological learning, martial arts and physics to develop his comprehensive approach to human improvement.  During the 1950s, he began working with people who wanted to recover from injuries or who found that participating in classes or individual sessions kept them injury and pain free. In the 1980s, he came to the United States to train the first group of Feldenkrais teachers outside of Israel.

In many approaches to helping people recover from injury, the human body is treated as a series of levers, pulleys and hinges, without much attention to how the brain regulates and coordinates the complex movement between the parts.

The Feldenkrais Method uses the extraordinary capacity of our brain to use sensory feedback to coordinate and regulate complex movement of the human body.  As our bodies begin to move as a whole again (as we did as children), stress is removed from our  joints and muscles, we have greater capacity to move easily, our breathing improves – and even our stress levels decline.

Most importantly, your ability to improve is very much within your reach. No matter what condition you’ve been told you have, you have more options to improve than you probably realize.