True Learning is Open-Ended – Feldenkrais Method

The Feldenkrais Method can best be described as an intelligently structured “learning-to-learn” approach. Its characteristic playfulness is modelled on natural learning-processes as found in childhood. ‘Making mistakes’ is encouraged since they may lead to unexpected discoveries and surprising results. Predetermined goals are avoided because they tend to inhibit real learning. Feldenkrais used to say:

“In knowing what to achieve before we have learned how to learn, we can reach only the limit of our ignorance”.

Multiple sclerosis explained

What is Dr. Weil’s view regarding Feldenkrais?

Dr. Weil often recommends trying the Feldenkrais Method for the treatment of any kind of neurological injury or insult, especially since it claims success in training the nervous system in developing and utilizing new pathways around areas of damage. Feldenkrais has specifically demonstrated success in helping to rehabilitate stroke victims. It is also effective with head injuries and other neurological conditions such as cerebral palsy and multiple sclerosis. Feldenkrais can be an effective part of an integrative-medicine approach to any painful condition from degenerative arthritis to fibromyalgia. Because it can help a person feel more comfortable within his or her body, Dr. Weil also feels that Feldenkrais can be an effective adjunct to psychotherapy and the treatment of mood disorders.

https://www.drweil.com/health-wellness/balanced-living/wellness-therapies/the-feldenkrais-method/#.WPuah1Va4Js.facebook

20 Profound Quotes By Carl Jung That Will Help You To Better Understand Yourself

1.”One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.”

2. “Don’t hold on to someone who’s leaving, otherwise you won’t meet the one who’s coming.”

3. “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

4. “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”

5. “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”

6. “I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”

7. “Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”

8. “If you are a gifted person, it doesn’t mean that you gained something. It means you have something to give back.”

9. “Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.”

10. “Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”

11. “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”

12. “Loneliness does not come from having no people around, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”

13. “Depression is like a woman in black. If she turns up, don’t shoo her away. Invite her in, offer her a seat, treat her like a guest and listen to what she wants to say.”

14. “A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.”

15. “Your perception will become clear only when you can look into your soul.”

16. “I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”

17. “What you resist, persists.”

18. “A dream is a small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens up to that primeval cosmic night that was the soul, long before there was the conscious ego.”

19. “We may think that we fully control ourselves. However, a friend can easily reveal something about us that we have absolutely no idea about.”

20. “Everything about other people that doesn’t satisfy us helps us to better understand ourselves.”

Sources:

Quotes
2. http://www.cgjungpage.org/

5 Benefits of The Feldenkrais Method

How The Nervous System Senses Differences: The Feldenkrais Method explained

 

• Our nervous system senses fine differences best when the level of stimulation is small. Sensing these differences creates the most potent and lasting neuromuscular change appropriate to the individual, and it’s why there’s a strong emphasis on movement quality (light, easy, soft, slow, smooth) over quantity (we don’t do many rote repetitions or use big ranges of motion very often).

• So to dispel a common misconception: Feldenkrais lessons aren’t gentle to be nice. They’re gentle so they can work, and so that your attention won’t be distracted by stretch, strain, or pain and thus diverted from the new, very refined sensations that will lead most rapidly to your improvement, short and long-term.

• Under these healthy learning conditions, our nervous system will spontaneously begin to approximate the improved biomechanical organizations that the lesson structures point to. This process becomes fascinating and pleasurable and self-reinforcing—in or out of a Feldenkrais lesson, consciously and unconsciously. Quality of life improvements will follow by necessity as awareness improves.

• Over time (even within one lesson) a new self awareness arises. (Awareness is simply a practiced and automatic attention.) Through awareness we begin to spontaneously move more efficiently, pleasurably, and sustainably in the lesson movements and in our own activities.

• Eventually we can even consciously call up an easier image of self use when we notice we’re in pain, straining, or frustrated in our activities. Self-confidence rises as we feel we are real agents of change for ourselves through improving our comfort and effectiveness in the world.

• Given the choice, our nervous system rewires to be able to choose simpler, more efficient self organizations in any activity. This capacity to change how we function is called neuroplasticity.

• Muscles are dumb, by the way. Nearly all of them only do what our brains tell them to do. It’s just that much of the telling has become unaware habit. Feldenkrais reintroduces awareness and choice.

• Finally, we so often lie down to study because it reduces the load on the nervous system dramatically. Some studies show as much as 90% of our brain function is related to not falling when we’re standing. By doing lessons in a non-habitual orientation to gravity we have a chance to address aspects of self that were far too locked into habitual postural work to uncover new options safely.

• Our self: brain, body, consciousness, spirit if you will…it’s all operated by one nervous system. It functions as a whole at all times. We cannot separate out aspects or parts to “work on.” Fascinatingly, as we effect change in any sphere of the self image (Moshe Feldenkrais said the self image was composed of thinking, feeling, sensing, and acting), the others all change too. This leads to other applications of the method. Though movement is our “way in” and the primary language of the brain, Feldenkrais can lead to surprising psychological improvement. Many students come to stem anxiety or unlock their creativity.

Source: http://twincitiesfeldenkrais.com/feldenkrais-nuts-and-bolts/

Feldenkrais Method: Before and After a single session!

Feldenkrais Method: the ability to feel the difference

If I hold a twenty pound weight, I cannot detect a fly landing on it because the least detectable difference in the stimulus is half a pound.

On the other hand, if i hold a feather, a fly landing on it makes a great difference.

Obviously then, in order to be able to tell the differences in exertion one must first reduce the exertion.

Finer and finer performance is possible only if the sensitivity, that is, the ability to feel the difference is improved.

Moshe Feldenkrais

Feldenkrais Method and the path to genius…

Find your true weakness and surrender to it. Therein lies the path to genius. Most people spend their lives using their strengths to overcome or cover up their weaknesses. Those few who use their strengths to incorporate their weaknesses, who don’t divide themselves, those people are very rare. In any generation there are a few and they lead their generation.

Moshe Feldenkrais

The Art of Functional Integration (Feldenkrais Method)

Functional Integration is a sophisticated art form requiring a high degree of sensory acuity and the unusual ability to join ourselves with another. During Dr. Feldenkrais’ first training program in Tel-Aviv, he focused exclusively on developing his student’s Functional Integration skills.

Dr. Feldenkrais demonstrated manual techniques, worked with each student individually, and provided detailed in-the-moment feedback while they practiced on him and with each other.

The students who graduated from this training became outstanding Practitioners.

To my mind, Functional Integration has an ‘outside’ aspect and an ‘inside’ aspect.

The outside is concerned with the way a lesson is composed, the way it is adapted, which functions are embedded in it, what developmental and neurological dynamics are involved, etc.

The inner aspect of Functional Integration is concerned with the ways we use our own thoughts, images, intentions, organization, dialogical understanding and actions to communicate biologically important information to another person’s nervous system.

I believe that in order to achieve the “magic” of Functional Integration, we must fully understand and engage with this inner aspect.

David Zemach-Bersin