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This website is intended for those interested in the Feldenkrais Method’s extraordinary range of application. General articles and interviews form the bulk of the archive. Specialized texts present an approach to 'working with air', developed by Ilana Nevill over many years in response to students and clients with special needs.

The Feldenkrais Method

Awareness Through Movement (ATM) and Functional Integration (FI)

"Without learning to know ourselves as intimately as we possibly can, we limit our choice.

Life is not very sweet without freedom of choice. Change is very difficult with no alternatives in sight;

we then resign ourselves to not dealing with our difficulties as if they were prescribed by heaven."

(Moshe Feldenkrais, The Elusive Obvious)

This method was created and constantly refined by Moshe Feldenkrais (1904-1984), engineer-physicist and eminent practitioner of the Martial Arts. As a practical approach to mature self-knowledge and intelligent self-education, it is based on the understanding that mind and body are one. In other words, all our actions are ultimately the outcome of complex interaction between thinking, feeling, sensing, and moving.

Movement and sensing are most easily accessible to observation combined with exploration of alternatives to habitual, often harmful, ways of using our bodies. The Feldenkrais Method thus aims at assisting people who wish to move - and live - with greater awareness and ease.

The ultimate aim is to provide opportunities for attaining dynamic equilibrium and a growing sense of wholeness by creating an environment favouring what was once the prerogative of our earliest days: re-kindling a capacity for learning how to learn. That capacity is the essential basis for human survival in a fast changing world.

Both individual lessons (FI) and work in groups (ATM) offer possibilities:

• of getting in touch with the extraordinary, hitherto hardly acknowledged, intelligence of the body

• developing our abilities beyond the present limit

• discovering latent capacities of which we are often unaware

• cultivating aspects of ourselves – such as curiosity and vital interest in the miracle of being alive. Blossoming of such aspects has usually been prevented by conventional values in upbringing and education since early childhood

• gradually escaping from the prison of ingrained habits of acting and thinking responsible for so much stupidity and suffering in our personal lives and in the world at large

• and as a result finding ourselves enriched by a joy in life we knew as small children, at best coupled with the maturity of response-ability based on restored sensitivity and compassion for ourselves and others.

ILANA NEVILL

I completed my university studies in Germany with a degree in education and worked as a language teacher, researcher, journalist, and Yoga teacher. In 1990 I qualified as a Feldenkrais practitioner in England, becoming an assistant trainer in 1996. Among my particular interests are developing mutually supportive forms of continuous professional education and finding effective ways of speaking and writing about the Method.

Between 2006 and 2020 I had a little Feldenkrais center in the French Pyrenees where I worked as a teacher/practitioner . Now I am living at Aurillac, in the middle of France, where I joined the staff of the international Feldenkrais Education Center FELDENKRAIS CANTAL :

www feldenkrais-education.com

From the beginning one of my main concerns has been introducing interested practitioners to an innovative and highly effective approach to organic learning involving the use of inflatable balls of varying sizes and shapes in Feldenkrais education.

I started exploring « Feldenkrais on Air » soon after finishing the London Training (1986-90) when faced with the needs of people suffering from serious stress symptoms, auto-immune conditions such as Multiple Sclerosis and Parkinsons disease, the consequences of strokes and accidents of all kinds. Children with cerebral palsy responded enthusiastically to the colourful learning tools and taught me a lot about playfully integrating them into ‘Feldenkrais work’.

The positive results of these investigations led me to adopt inflatable balls more generally; and over the years they became extremely effective in both FI and ATM . Not only for myself but also for a growing number of colleagues who experienced them and helped me refine their use during Advanced Trainings and ‘Laboratory’ Workshops devoted to « Dynamic Equilibrium », organized annually in the Pyrenees. Also during Joëlle Minvielle’s « Stages de partage  d’experience» at Poitiers where practitioners had an inspiring opportunity to encounter and exchange learning experiences with members of her group of special students suffering from neurological conditions for which the medical profession still has few answers.

For more information click: Supported by Air