“The aim is a person who is organized to move with minimum effort and maximum efficiency, not through muscular strength, but through increased consciousness of how movement works”

Moshe Feldenkrais

What happens in a lesson ?

How does this happen in a lesson ?

Well, when you come in, the practitioner will listen to your concerns. You may have pain in your body or a desire to improve your ability to run or sing. They will observe the way you move and carry yourself looking for any habits of posture or movement that may contribute to your problem.

The practitioner will then choose a function or action that will be a good vehicle for you to discover a way of moving that removes the strain or fills a gap in your self-awareness. The lesson may take place in standing or sitting but will usually occur lying on a low table.

Your body will be supported so you can be completely comfortable. This makes it easy to become relaxed and quiet.

The practitioner will guide you through a sequence of movements that will help you feel the difference between how you move now and how it feels if you spread the effort to move through your whole body. The quality of the practitioners touch will be gentle, exploratory and instructive, as opposed to invasive. Their goal will not be just to remove your difficulty but to enable you to remove it yourself, through gaining a better awareness of your body and how to use it.

There will be frequent rests within the lesson to give you time to feel the effect of the movements you have just done. Learning to perceive subtle differences in sensation enables you to feel the difference between harmonious and harmful movements, after the lesson has finished. The problem with harmful movements is that they are often very subtle. You don’t feel the effect straight away. It’s only after you have been doing it for years that you get a problem.

The practitioner may employ many strategies during your lesson and all of them will be gentle. If they meet resistance when moving you they won’t use more force to make you move. They’ll probably pull back and look for other directions of movement or perhaps a new orientation.

For instance, if you are lying on your back and they feel resistance when moving your shoulder, they may move you onto your side or stomach and try the same movement there. They may try to do the same movement in this position by moving your hip or ribcage. When you finally return to lying on your back you realise your shoulder is free. In that moment you realise the connection between parts. As the lesson progresses the connections spread into an experience of your whole body.

It is this process of discovery and exploration that is the real benefit of lessons. Your pain may go but it is more important that you know how it happened and are in a position to continue refining the way you move after your lesson has finished.

At the end of the session, when you get up off the table and pay attention to the way that you feel, the practitioner may relate the content of the lesson to everyday actions. They may suggest you experiment with the movements on your own or even suggest another Awareness Through Movement lesson that could be explored to deepen your understanding.

As you leave the lesson you are often aware of something new. Something in the way you move or feel. Something in the way you carry yourself. Throughout the day, throughout the week, you may find yourself reflecting back on what you had learnt or perhaps realising that you now have a freedom that previously wasn’t there.

The nice thing is that the more you do, the better it gets.

Copyright control 2006 David Hall All rights reserved