The Feldenkrais Method is a highly effective approach to helping you feel the connections throughout your body. It primarily focuses on gentle movement and directed attention to enhance your self-awareness, so that movement becomes more effortless, and you can function optimally, gaining greater quality-of-life. It can be an excellent compliment to your comprehensive therapy program.

Your movements and posture may be compromised by stresses you barely notice. Or you may have chronic problems which affect your health and ability to function. But you can learn to improve regardless of your age or physical condition. The Feldenkrais Method helps you re-connect with your natural ability to move, using an exploratory process of learning we see in children.

Moshe Feldenkrais developed this method in the late 1940's after experiencing a crippling knee injury. He combined his extensive knowledge of mechanical engineering , physics, research, Judo (where he received a black belt), and his own innate curiosity of anatomy, physiology, and psychology to teach himself to walk again -- without pain. The Feldenkrais Method effects many areas of function; from healing benefits after suffering trauma, injury, or neurological damage, to enhancing performance in sports, music, and the arts.

The method facilitates healing through gentle movements that releases holding patterns in your muscles that interfere with your natural skeletal balance. Your practitioner helps guide you through a unique learning process where you begin to feel how you balance and align your body through your skeleton. Over time, small, multiple holding patterns that are your characteristic movement patterns, add up to large stresses on your muscular-skeletal system. These stress patterns may elicit pain or discomfort, they may hinder complete recovery after an injury or accident, or they may interfere with your ability to improve to "the next level" in your favorite sport or musical instrument. As you participate in recognizing these subtle, yet profound interferences, you become empowered to make changes that affect function on many levels.

The Feldenkrais Method utilizes two approaches: In Awareness Through Movementlessons, the Feldenkrais teacher verbally guides you through a sequence of movements. The emphasis is on learning which movements work better and noticing the quality of these changes in your body. You learn to relax. You learn to abandon habitual patterns and develop new alternatives. The subtle ATM movements develop not only awareness but also flexibility and coordination. After ATM lessons, people often feel taller and lighter, breathe more freely and find that their discomforts have eased.

Functional Integration is the other application of the Feldenkrais Method. This one-to-one learning process is the most direct way of experiencing results. Here the learning is communicated through slow gentle touch of the practitioner. As you sit or lie on a padded table, you are guided through a series of precise movements that relax tense areas. The movements alter habitual patterns and provide new information directly to the neuro-muscular system.

The Feldenkrais Method is unique because the intent is to engage your nervous system in learning and incorporating new ways of using your body. As you alter your functional movement patterns you learn to move with greater ease and balance. You learn to use more of yourself, so that separate areas of your body do not become overworked, resulting in stress, fatigue, and pain. You learn to be mindful of your movements so that life can be lived fully, with ease, grace, and pleasure.

Allison Suran, owner of Healing Bridge Physical Therapy, has been practicing physical therapy since 1987, and is able to incorporate her training as a Feldenkrais practitioner with her physical therapy interventions.

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