October 29, 2021
The Magazine By, For, and About
Feldenkrais® Practitioners and Trainees
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Welcome!InTouch is a monthly e-newsletter about developing one's competence as a Feldenkrais® teacher. Issues will contain articles about teaching the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education, running your own business, and more.
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Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash
From the EditorsAnatomy learning is often associated with the boring, mind-numbing memorizations of body parts. As Feldenkrais® practitioners, we speak of working with the whole person, not the parts. Yet an understanding of how the parts work together seems essential. How can we learn anatomy in a functional way, so that we can help our clients better? Why is learning anatomy important? What are the best ways to gain anatomical competency? These questions and more are answered in this issue of InTouch.
True anatomy wizards are sharing their ideas: watch an interview with Candy Conino known for her inspiring anatomy classes, read ideas from Julie Peck, whose insightful book offers new ways of looking at movement, and get a very interesting perspective from Olena Nitefor, everyone’s favorite anatomist, in her original article.
Happy learning!
Lavinia and Yulia
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Anatomical Competency: An Interview with Candy Conino
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Candy Conino shares her insights about why anatomy knowledge is so important to Feldenkrais® Practitioners and what are the best strategies to become anatomically competent. Interviewed by Yulia Kriskovets.
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About Candy:Candy Conino is an Assistant Trainer and an international facilitator. She is currently the Director of Learning for the Feldenkrais® Training Academy in Seattle. Candy has a busy online mentoring practice for Feldenkrais® practitioners and students as well as private Feldenkrais practice in North Carolina. She works predominantly with people who have complex pain disorders. Her website: www.center-of-motion.org
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Learning Anatomy: An Interview with Julie Peck
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Photo by Robert Collins on Unsplash
Why is anatomy knowledge so important for Feldenkrais® Practitioners?
Well, the first question would be how we define anatomy. The reason this is so interesting to me is that I was a physiotherapist before I became a Feldenkrais practitioner. So I already had to learn anatomy in depth. Yet my knowledge of anatomy was very conceptual. I knew what all the joints did, all the names, and where the nerves went. But it was all “out there.” What I loved about the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education is that it made a living anatomy, embodied anatomy. That’s when I realized that if we wanted anatomy included in the teaching programs, it had to be something that is very embodied, something that combines different perspectives, something iterated and reiterated from different angles.
Anatomy learning is like all learning: it takes time, it takes paying attention and it takes making distinctions. The thing I love about Feldenkrais Method is that it comes from within, it’s all those ATM® lessons that we continue to do where we embody anatomy, biomechanics, and, most of all, learning.
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About Julie: Julie graduated from the Sydney 1 Feldenkrais training in 1990, became an accredited Feldenkrais trainer in 2003, and also has a background in physiotherapy. Julie finds her private practice – where she works with a wide range of clients, teaching – in numerous trainings and advanced trainings, and sharing learning experiences with colleagues, clients and students are the main source of her continual learning. Julie has coauthored a book – ‘Moving From the Inside Out’ with Lesley McLennan which looks at 7 Principles of well-organised movement, which are useful to ignite curiosity in people about their movement. She & Lesley will also be running online workshops next year to delve more deeply into each of these principles. If you are interested in finding more about these workshops you can contact Julie.The website for Julie's book is potentself.com
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Skeletal Anatomy as a Basis for Constellating Attention Within the Whole
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Drawing by Suzanne Mertner. Used with permission of the artist.
By Olena Nitefor, GCFP
When it comes to “learning anatomy,” people assume that what they are learning is facts. The joints, the muscles, the nerves… they just are. That is certainly true. But if you think about it, surgeons use their knowledge of anatomy differently from the PT’s who work with the same person post operatively. A Pilates instructor likely utilizes the same factual information differently from a Feldenkrais® Practitioner. I studied anatomy, kinesiology and took a full lab course of cadaver dissection in a Physiotherapy curriculum. We learned joint by joint, studied muscle groups and their actions around joints, and linked joints into joint chains. This was tailored to what was coming ahead: clinical application for working with peoples’ joints and muscles. That is how I started out teaching anatomy in the Feldenkrais context, because it seemed to me that that WAS the way to teach and to learn. First learn the structures and local functions, and then proceed to global functioning.
In the 30 some years that I have been teaching anatomy in trainings and designing advanced trainings, I have developed a very different approach. I am finding a way of teaching anatomy that is tailored to how we, as practitioners, need to see and understand human movement. Starting with structure and proceeding to function, is not necessarily the best path for us. We need to be able to attend globally, have an understanding of how to sense functional linkages in ourselves, and then look into the skeleton to see how those emerge from the structural possibilities of the joints. This helps us understand the transition from doing ATM to working in FI. I think we need to start with the skeleton and we need to set its relationships into motion in our thinking, seeing and imagining. (...)
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About Olena: Olena Nitefor, M.Ed. graduated in 1987, has assisted in North America and Europe since 1995 and started teaching advanced trainings in the late 90’s. Her background is in modern dance and anatomy. Feldenkrais Resources released an anatomy video, Sensing and Seeing the Skeleton in the 1990’s (out of print) and Working with the Subjective Middle which is available on the FR site. Her website: olenanitefor.com
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- Watch Olena Nitefor's workshop looking at an aspect of AY #302 Releasing the hips by holding the feet. Watch here.
- AY lesson collections to learn anatomy compiled by Candy Conino and available at International Feldenkrais® Federation website. Click here to view.
- Moving from the Inside Out 7 Principles for Ease and Mastery in Movement-A Feldenkrais Approach, a book by Julie Peck and Lesley McLennan. Click here to purchase.
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