Oh, I can do this!” professional artist Theresa Ganley remembers an inner voice exclaiming as she experienced her first Awareness Through Movement® lesson with Feldenkrais® practitioner Bob Hunter.  Moving her eyes in an easy pain-free way was a revelation and a delight.

During several years of double vision and constant pain that baffled medical authorities she had found no relief.  Now she was discovering that, as she allowed her entire self to participate in the movement of her eyes, what she had thought impossible became easy. As a child she had been diagnosed with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a degenerative nervous system disorder similar to Multiple Sclerosis.

“Over the years I had experienced a loss of feeling and mobility in my limbs, and then I had a spinal fusion operation because of severe scoliosis.  I see now that I had developed the habit of forcing my eyes to be always on full alert.  They were one of the few tools I felt I had to keep my balance. In overworking my eyes I had strained them and lost control.” Her creative work as well as the tasks of daily life became extremely difficult. Driving a car was inadvisable.

In the course of further Feldenkrais lessons with Bob, Theresa has recovered significant movement in all her actions and can engage in life more fully again.  Her balance, her walking, her driving have all improved.  She is happily painting and exhibiting.  “My most recent work was a joy!”

“I work with more freedom now. I trust my intuition more. And I have no pain in my eyes, hands or anywhere!” Theresa has also found that her growing knowledge of the Feldenkrais Method® as a learning process has informed and improved her work with Luke, her service dog, and with horses and riders as a volunteer assistant in the local Therapeutic Riding program.

“Initially I was seeking pain relief—no small thing.  But now I’ve come to understand the Feldenkrais Method more globally. It can be embraced in all aspects of living.”

Yoga poses and movements are meant to unfold from the core of an individual’s spine, breath, and awareness, rather than be copied from a model outside ourselves. The Feldenkrais® approach evokes this unfolding from within, gradually and steadily developing suppleness and release through the rib cage, stable balance through the limbs, shoulders, and pelvis, and fluid integration through the spine, tail to crown. These are the skills that make challenging poses easy! In fact, Moshe’s promise, “ to make the impossible possible” is listed in the Yoga Sutra as a benefit of yoga practice.

“I used to feel limited in my capacity to do these (yoga) movements. Now after the Functional Integration® work, I see that was just my perception. My perception has changed. I feel whole! These movements are within my reach,” Cathy Suttle beamed to me.”

I love to witness students’ delight as they discover yoga poses unfolding from within themselves. A Feldenkrais learning process primes their intelligence, readying the feet, hands, buttocks, eyes, mouth - the dynamic whole - to engage wholeheartedly, with great ease, in a practice sequence. No more pushing and pulling in an arbitrary manner to achieve a form foreign to them: rather, a simple inquisitive process to unleash their own self-knowledge, which guides them to a new, stable and open balance. Since both the Feldenkrais Method® and yoga explore unknown personal experience of the human nervous system, they delve deep into common ground:

• * body as an expression of, and handle on, one’s emotional and social makeup
• right and left sides of the body in an intricate dance of duality and union, conflict and cooperation
• breath as a bridge between upper and lower body, conscious and unconscious action
• imagination and inner gaze as an entry into and preparation for action.

Donna Maeboori, a physical therapist in Portland, Oregon, offers both the Feldenkrais Method and yoga strategies to people who seek help with chronic pain. She finds that small Feldenkrais movements give subtle information that augments yoga poses and guides people to move smoothly in and out of a pose. Her Feldenkrais window on yoga deepens her kinesthetic descriptions, freeing her students to find ease, confidence, and spontaneous full breathing in their poses. Feldenkrais lessons are akin to, and prepare for, meditation. Eryl Kubicka co-director of the Madison Zen Centre, who has decades of meditation experience, found that the quiet, relentless self-discovery process of an Awareness Through Movement® lesson reminded her of the intimacy engendered in meditation practice. “We encounter the same resistance, and must navigate our way through.” Yoga means attentiveness in action, and it shares with the Feldenkrais Method a thoroughly practical approach to improving one’s life, step by step.

Although Ida Rolf and Moshe Feldenkrais used to argue about their differences when they met at Esalen Institute in the early 1970’s, they were good friends and they agreed that the methods they developed have much in common and are strongly related to each other.

First, the power of both Rolf’s Structural Integration approach, and Feldenkrais’ Functional Integration® lessons flow from knowledge of the blueprint of perfection that is in each person. These innate patterns and potential for healing and changing ourselves far surpass anything medical science can currently comprehend.  Ida Rolf talked about our fascia, our network of connective tissue, bones and muscles, and its built-in drive to align itself with the powerful energy field of gravity.  Rolfers™ use Structural Integration to achieve this alignment. Moshe Feldenkrais talked about the responsiveness of the human brain and nervous system to our awareness and its built-in drive to organize our skeleton in relation to gravity for optimum functioning. Both Rolfing® and the Feldenkrais Method® bring improvement in energy and immune system function, so that our bodies can heal themselves.

Second, instead of the medical approach of narrowly focusing on a symptom or diagnosis, each method involves our entire bodies. A Certified Rolfer™ knows that low back pain reflects structural imbalances throughout the body, such as distortions in shoulder, hip or knee joints or tight abdominal fascia.  A Guild Certified Feldenkrais Teacher® knows that the healthiest flow of movement and energy comes from involvement of the client’s entire being and that symptoms or problems always reflect some gap in awareness.  Feldenkrais® Practitioners and Rolfing Practitioners are skilled in helping clients to fill in these gaps.

We invite you to learn more about the methods of these two movement and learning pioneers.

For information about the Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education please go here: www.feldenkrais.com

To see our quarterly e-newsletter which includes some sample Awareness Through Movement® lessons, visit: www.feldenkrais.com/resources/senseability/

For books, CDs, DVDs and other Feldenkrais products, visit our online bookstore: www.feldenkrais.com/shop/

More information about Rolfing and Structural Integration can be found here:

Rolf Institute of Structural Intergration™: www.rolf.org

The Guild for Structural Integration: www.rolfguild.org