Mind in Motion – The Future of Feldenkrais

A revolutionary approach to optimizing human ability when faced with pain, neurological disability, or the challenges of every day life.

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Your strong & supple spine

Mind in Motion - Why I do this Why I do this

High winds battered Colorado the first weekend of this month, with gusts ranging from 65 to 100 miles per hour. Because of the lessons learned from wildfires in California and Hawai’i, the local utility company shut off electricity to many communities in the northern part of the state, including Boulder, where I was teaching Unlocking the Spinal Engine, a postgraduate course for Feldenkrais teachers.

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Mind in Motion - Spring into learning Spring into learning

It’s that time of the year!

Once again, the indefatigable Cynthia Allen and her incredible team (Arlene Klein and Erifily Nikolakopoulou) are bringing together an impressive array of Feldenkrais teachers and somatic thought leaders from around the world for an online Move Better Feel Better Summit.

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Mind in Motion - Shhh Shhh

During a recent online event, I talked with the students in a Feldenkrais class about the voice announcement that plays each time a Zoom meeting recording starts or stops. I shared how this feature, while useful for privacy, can be unnerving and redundant. It wasn’t just the redundancy that bothered me; something about the speaker’s tone of voice irked me every time, a sentiment I believe you, dear reader, may well share.

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Mind in Motion - A novel paradigm A novel paradigm

When Rudyard Kipling was still right that East and West were inviolably separate and distinct, long before yoga became known throughout the West and fusion cuisine had become famous, Moshe Feldenkrais stood at the crossroads. Feldenkrais’ academic and professional training as an engineer instilled in him the quintessentially occidental perspective of the clockwork universe of classical mechanics and cause-and-effect reasoning. Years of practicing and teaching judo steeped him in the systemic and often arcane ways of the Judo master.

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Mind in Motion - Genuine Progress Genuine progress

After nearly 50 years of Feldenkrais teacher training, a different kind of program appeared a few years ago. Instead of preparing participants to teach both aspects of the method—the individual table lessons, known as Functional Integration, and collective floor classes, called Awareness Through Movement (ATM)—these programs prepare people to teach the group modality exclusively.

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Mind in Motion - Practicing Moshes methodology On becoming a Feldenkrais Teacher

Over nearly three decades of training people to teach the method he pioneered, Moshe Feldenkrais tried different lengths, varying formats, and educational plans. Each one was a unique experiment.

Studying Feldenkrais’ approaches, my colleagues and I sought to integrate the best aspects of each into our teacher training programs. Over the years, we gradually created a curriculum that we honed and refined, incorporating the most effective features and reworking those that needed improvement. We were guided by feedback from the participants and our commitment to prepare trainees to successfully practice Moshe’s methodology upon graduation.

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Mind in Motion - The language of connecting The language of connecting

One evening a couple of weeks ago, I went to Bookshop Santa Cruz to hear Charles Duhigg talk about his latest publication, Supercommunicators. I was a bit thrown off by this Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and best-selling author’s informal, interactive style until I realized he wasn’t just presenting the information in the book. Duhigg embodied ideas and brought to life the language of connection he describes and advocates for in the book.

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Mind in Motion - Aikido with a car Aikido with a car

I met Jess Curtis in the early days of the West Coast contact dance scene. Jess, a founding member of Contraband, a groundbreaking SF Bay Area dance and performance art troupe for the 1980s and ‘90s, and pioneering artist and activist, passed away last week.

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mind in motion - Feldenkraisian breathwork Feldenkraisian breathwork

In 1973, Moshe Feldenkrais started a month-long training on teaching Awareness Through Movement in Berkeley, California, by teaching a version of “See-saw breathing.” Asking the participants to explore the many means by which they can get air into and out of their lungs, Feldenkrais challenges the notion that there is only one correct way to breathe. 

As far as I know, this 1973 program was the only time Dr. Feldenkrais commenced any course by focusing on respiration. By making breathing the starting point, he laid the groundwork for exploring breathing throughout the rest of the program.

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Mind in Motion - Why Robots Fall Down Why Robots Fall Down

In 1993, I delivered the keynote address at Cybernetics in the Art of Learning, the American Society for Cybernetics annual conference in Philadelphia. The talk, titled Why Robots Fall Down, explored the link between cybernetics and human movement coordination, which was initially highlighted in Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics in 1948.

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