Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash
By Tim Sobie, PT, Ph.D., GCFPCM
The Feldenkrais Method® & Embracing the Present (...well kinda...)
“So this Feldenkrais stuff...it’s just about movement isn’t it?...”
As a practitioner in our method, I’m certain you’ve heard something to this effect while in discussion with prospective clients, referral sources, or colleagues and cohorts within related fields of health, human performance, or development. And, though accurate as a kind of allegory or category reference, it is a conclusion that is too often restrictive as a common cliché; as something that is automatically presumed or taken for granted, and on the threshold of becoming dismissive. Sometimes, this discourse is even followed by:
“Well...I already know how to move. I work out and jump rope. I give my clients corrective exercises to perform under exacting technique with foam rollers to perform 3 times per day.”
But, as practitioners with 4 years’ plus of exceptional experience; of a particular kind of experience that is yet to be realized by most persons; we know that movement means something so much more than what most fitness-based models and genres have crystallized within popular culture. Behind the usual curtain of stereotypical assumptions, movement means something much more integrative and relevant than isolated repetition, imitation, and performance as a basis for improving strength, range of motion, aerobic endurance or flexibility for their own sake. While these are all good and essential things within an exercise physiology, cellular, or metabolic framework, they have little or no tangible relationship towards clarifying the understanding of how we coordinate our body variables (our internal, self-agency relations) to meet variable situations and prediction expectancies in our immediate or anticipated environment, i.e., our other, external agency relations. (...)
