<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=1514203202045471&ev=PageView&noscript=1"/> 6 group class package | Core Spirit

6 group class package

Presence
Online
Format
class
Duration
60m
Language
English
Price
$54 USD
Practitioner
$54 USD

In group classes my we move in order to discover more about ourselves and our habits, and how we can become more aware of the habits that hold us back. I lead you through a series of movements, for this laboratory of the self to help you find easier ways to move.

By becoming more aware of what we are actually doing (rather than what we think we are doing), our brain makes new neural connections, and we can find new, easier ways of moving. This improved kinaesthetic skill allows us to move in a way that causes less pain, feel better, and have greater efficiency of both movement and thought.

Each step brings us closer to our potential.

Classes are at 7pm Sundays, 10 am Mondays, 7pm Wednesdays, 8pm Thursdays (UK time)

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Provided By
Hunter St, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1BG, UK

I bring my kindness, intelligence, and patience to work with clients, starting from where they are. We work together to explore the possibilities to improve the way you move.

I have successfully worked with many clients to find new ways of moving, feeling and being, to enable them to move with less pain, and do what they want more easily.

On Core Spirit since April 2020

Feldenkrais method
Emma Alter
Mar 31, 2024, 10:00
$54
6 group class package

In group classes my we move in order to discover more about ourselves and our habits, and how we can become more aware of the habits that hold us back. I lead you through a series of movements, for this laboratory of the self to help you find easier ways to move.

By becoming more aware of what we are actually doing (rather than what we think we are doing), our brain makes new neural connections, and we can find new, easier ways of moving. This improved kinaesthetic skill allows us to move in a way that causes less pain, feel better, and have greater efficiency of both movement and thought.

Each step brings us closer to our potential.

Classes are at 7pm Sundays, 10 am Mondays, 7pm Wednesdays, 8pm Thursdays (UK time)

Feldenkrais method
Emma Alter
Mar 31, 2024, 10:00
$110
One to one Online session

Many of my clients are currently shielding, or want to work with me, but don’t live near enough to come to me in person.
I offer online individual sessions, where we work together to help you work out movement patterns that are holding you back, or causing you pain.
For more information, get in touch.

Feldenkrais method
Emma Alter
Mar 31, 2024, 10:00
London WC1N, UK
$110
One to One hands on Sessions

Individual lessons are able to focus on your specific needs.
Starting from where you are, I use my expertise help you learn which movement habits are holding you back, how to let go of patterns which are unconstructive, and build new ones in their place.

Sessions last an hour. Please wear warm, loose clothes that allows easy movement.

Available both on and off line. Contact me for more details.


Emma Alter
Include more, do less

This last few years, I have been working with a few people individually thinking about RSI, and other injuries and wanted to share a little of my thinking around this.

Often we put too much effort into the task we're doing, rather than thinking about how much force we actually need. Take a very simple example. When you're opening a jar that won't open, what do you do? (This happens to me a lot. I have a small hand span, and most jam jars aren't made with me in mind!)

Do you take a big breath and try again? Do you make some kind of noise of exertion? Do you grimace, as if that would help? Do you try and use lots of effort, without thinking about precisely where that effort needs to go?If those sound a little like options you choose, next time you do open a jar, try this instead.

Look at the lid and the jar- think only about the thin band of friction/stickiness that's preventing it from opening. Focus only on your hands, not the effort you need to make, not making a sound. Feel how in order to get strength you need in your hands, you need to also use your elbows, your shoulders, even your ribs and sternum as levers.
Keep your face soft - you don't need effort in your face to work your hands, in fact, then you're taking away energy from the fingers, when you grimace. Feel if what you do with the breath helps your strength, or weakens it? Try pushing into the belly as you breathe in instead- does that give you a different feeling of support?

Everything that doesn't isn't part of the movement of opening the jar, the movement of the hands, diffuses the effort. It takes the force and focus away from where it's needed. And that's not to say that you shouldn't use your whole skeleton if you need to, include as much of you as you need. But rather focus the effort to just what you need.

Does it change something about how easy it is to open the jar?
One of the main reasons for injuring ourselves is that we haven't worked on our skill of sensing the difference between the effort we use, and the force we need. As we age, we need this ability to calibrate to be better, to feel how we can support through ourself.

This doesn't matter if it's once in a while, but if we put too much force into what we're doing in everything- every move of a pen, tap of a keyboard, pressure of a finger- it adds up. Or if we use extra musculature that contradicts what we're trying to do: if it's most of the time, then we're wasting energy, and we're also adding compression. If the compression isn't adding to the movement you're making, it's compressing the joints- a little as if you had tightened a screw too much, so the surfaces in the joints touching each other will rub a little more than necessary. Over time, this mounts up, and one extra small amount of effort somewhere can be the final trigger to something that causes pain.


So what effort in your fingers and hands could you take away this week? Whether you're holding a cup, a bottle, your steering wheel, a violin, or typing on a keyboard, can you reduce your effort a spoonful? When we reduce effort we gain in sensitivity. That increase of sensitivity allows us to sense ourselves in motion, move more efficiently, and can help us balance- our continuing theme for this week.

If you discover something interesting, do comment, I'd be pleased to hear from you.

Emma Alter
Spring Clean your Habits!

Now that Spring is here, why not shake out the blankets of your habit cupboard!

We all have habits, they allow us to make short-cuts- to put your clothes on without thinking, or whilst thinking about something, to doing two things at once, drive whilst talking for example.

Some of you know I lived in Holland for a while in my twenties. I was learning Dutch at the time of this particular story, and about fluent. One Saturday I went with my friend Carl to learn how to roller-skate in the local park. I had ice-skated long ago, but never really did roller skating, but he was keen for me to learn so we could go together. Carl was trying to teach me the techniques of staying up, and stopping. Which was fine, but every time Carl spoke Dutch, I fell over.

Whilst I could speak it, my language skill wasn’t enough of a habit for me to multi-task. When Carl spoke Dutch to me I swallow dived to the floor, when he spoke English I stayed up! We tried it enough times to see the correlation, after which he switched to English. Although somewhat uncomfortable I was able to see the funny side. Neither skill was habitual yet. I needed too much computing power for both to do them together!

So habits are both desirable and necessary, but when we don’t examine them over time, we don’t know which aren’t serving us any more. Some we might know about- my habit of eating too much chocolate, but some are more elusive.

What habits would you like to spring clean?

And how do we work out bad habits if we can’t feel them? It’s important to remember that most of what we do is learned. We might not remember the learning of it, but that means we can relearn, or reshape what we do. One of the strategies of a Feldenkrais lesson is to lessen the effort used, so we can start to distinguish between efficient amounts of effort, and over-efforting.

In one Feldenkrais lesson on my training, I remember realising I was trying too hard, and had the realisation that that wasn’t a habit restrained to the Feldenkrais mat! My perfectionism got in the way of me not only doing what I wanted all of the time, but being more relaxed around others- it was simply a bad habit of my thinking, which also had physical habits of holding attached. It meant I added tension all of the time, which made me more uncomfortable than I needed to be, and life a lot more difficult.

The learning we do in Feldenkrais is self discovery- lessons are purposefully set up that way. If you discover something for yourself it’s so much more powerful than someone else telling you what you should feel, precisely how you should move. It’s more useful than copying movements of others, when you’re likely to copy their bad habits without even realising- learning from the outside-in. In the process of turning words into movements everyone’s brains have to work, and make connections: Feldenkrais is about learning from the inside out. I have literally seen people’s confidence shift within the hour as they realise they can do something about the situation they’re in. You make the discoveries, the changes, they’re yours, you’ve taken action, which is empowering, it gives you agency. You’re the agent of your own change.

But the paradigm of looking to move more easily, more gracefully is not we’re used with movement, so for some it can be challenging - to focus, and do less.

So how can we employ Feldenkrais strategies off the mat to spring clean our habits?

1. Create a learning environment: take time to explore ideas or movements, without looking for concrete answers or outcomes. Keep an open mind to what might be possible. In this “beginners mind” where we are open and curious, we can make space for ideas to come up, to create connections

2. Look to improve the quality of what you’re already doing: What great habits do you have? How can you learn from what you’re already doing well?

3. Lean into your bad habits- get to know them. Do you eat chocolate only at certain times of day, or when you have particular emotions, after you talk to certain people. (Substitute your own habits that you’d like to shift). The more three-dimensional the habit, the easier you can learn what the triggers are, and to provide an alternative.

4. Look for at least 3 options. Don’t think of it as just an on/off binary question. What are possibilities between 0-100? Perhaps (continuing the chocolate analogy) eating less milk chocolate, more dark - its harder to eat as much. Or confining oneself to certain times per day. One friend who’s a chocoholic only allows himself to eat chocolate at the weekend. Or making sure you have other snacks handy. The important thing being that there are at least 3 alternatives. Feldenkrais thought that only one option was pathological, and even two options wasn’t really a choice- you need three ways of doing things, minimum.

5. Create... Spring is about the newness of life, beginning again after the winter. And we’re all born creative. We can all create. Carve out an hour a week to do something creative for you, and see what it dislodges, where that little seed of creativity can lead. Allow yourself the freedom to be bad at what you’re doing, to make mistakes, and to enjoy the mistakes. It really doesn’t matter whether it’s good or not, we’re not doing it to be the next Picasso after all. But rather to introduce a little freedom, a little sense of making something, something that comes from nothing into being.

Feldenkrais thought that “Learning is turning darkness, which is the absence of light, into light. Learning is creation. It is making something out of nothing.” So any kind of learning is creative. We’re hardwired for learning, and creativity.

If this was interesting, resonated, or you have an opinion, I’d love to know. Get in touch.

Emma Alter
Micro-movements: Finding Movement in Stillness

Whilst my concert dress has stayed sadly in its wardrobe other than a brief outing in April, I did have one trip of fascination. Just before this second Lockdown I was invited to Sandhurst to teach some Feldenkrais to the British Army, to their Brass Band.

Having been someone who wouldn’t have made it through the medical, to be in the army, and certainly not super fit, I was a little in awe. But there was nothing to be nervous about, I was made very welcome by Dean Nixon, the assistant bandmaster and the rest of the band.

I asked them to play at the beginning, and made my way around the room to look at their playing and resting postures, where they moved, where the constraints of playing their instruments were, and where their habits of not moving where as well.

We worked on ideas that would serve them in the long periods of standing they have to do before playing.

One of my concepts is that of micro-movements, that I worked out over a long period of experimentation. It was borne out of needing to physically survive playing in orchestras for hours on end as a small person playing a big instrument.

But I think it is useful for all of us, either whilst like the Army Band members when we have to stand for long periods of time; playing/singing for any length of time; or simply seated for hours: in front of the computer, at the wheel…

My thinking for the band was: how can you give the illusion of stillness, and yet move? Where is the border between thought and action?

How arched does one’s back actually need to be to look “military grade smart”? How much room is there to play with which parts of one’s back is arching at any one time? How much can one use the support of these very structured uniforms to find fluidity and flexibility within? How can you use your pelvis to more easily support an arched spine? Are all the parts below: hips, knees, ankles and feet doing their part to make it easier? These were all questions I posed, and together through the workshop we looked at possible answers.

But they apply more generally to all of us: What are the constraints (what you have to do), and where is the freedom within the limits to move more easily, more simply, more usefully?

If you’d like to, try this short lesson out. (N.B. Move within your easy range of movement, don’t strain, and keep all the movements comfortable. If it hurts, stop. It is your responsibility to move in a way that is safe for you)

In standing, sense your weight distribution over your feet: has one foot have more contact with the floor than the other? Do you have more weight towards the heels or the toes, or is it evenly spread? Is that the same on both feet? See if you can feel where your pelvis is over your feet, what’s the shape of the curve of your lumbar spine, how vertical is your ribcage? How comfortable are your shoulders on top of your ribs? What’s your sense of space across the chest, or between the shoulders and your ears- is that the same on both sides, and where does your head rest on top. Where’s your horizon- notice where you’re looking in your room.

I have written it with sitting in mind, but you could try it in standing too (this is the end- movement inquiry we did in the workshop, after a lesson on arching and rounding in other orientations.)

Sit at the front of a firm chair, with both feet flat on the floor to begin.

Can you roll your pelvis forwards and backwards, (take your waist band backwards and forwards) and allow your spine (and head) to follow, in arching and rounding? Go slowly and pause in the middle each time. Repeat the movement, without forcing, without power, but pay attention all the way up and down the whole length of your spine to where your spine and ribs can curve, and where they doesn’t. Where is it easy for your spine to curve in the two directions, and where is it less easy? Pause and rest for a moment.

Can you feel the echo of the movement in your spine? Can you imagine the movement still continuing whilst you’re still? Can you make the movement a fraction bigger so it’s no longer imaginary, but real; until you feel you’re moving, but someone 6 feet away wouldn’t notice it?

Pause again. Bring your attention to your breathing. Feel how as you breathe in the ribs expand, and contract, where does your sternum move in space? How could you use your breath to create a tiny movement of arching and rounding. How could you ride your breath, connecting the pelvis through the spine all the way to the head in these two curves backwards and forwards? Can you still include all the vertebrae in your mind’s eye when you are making a smaller movement? Can you think of the front of yourself as you make these movements too? Feel your ribs, sternum and collarbones moving?

Try from the other end. Come back to making a bigger movement, within your comfortable limits of course, not causing yourself any pain (no pain=better learning). Slowly make the movement smaller and smaller until once more you’re in that space between movement and thought. Many of our problems come from when we are too still. We aren’t designed to rest except sitting or lying down. We’re designed for movement. When we’re still it’s harder to sense ourselves, the muscle spindles which have most of the nerves don’t have as much information to send back to the brain stem when we’re still. Rest again.

It is simply easier to feel ourselves in space when we’re moving, no matter how small.

For the musicians, once you have done this a few times without your instrument, put your instrument in playing position (or yourself) and make the movements. The next step is to play something relatively easy and make the movements whilst playing. You’ll have to work out what is possible. After that, work on refinement, making it a smooth movement, asking all of the vertebrae to work together.

When you’re sitting again, see if you can move your spine forwards and backwards from different places in the spine. When we shift initiation point of the movement, it might look the same on the outside, but on the inside its a different experience for your nervous system. And that’s what so much of what the learning I am interested is about.

Sometimes efficient doesn’t mean less movement, but less tension. How can your muscles stay more neutral to allow easy movement of the skeleton, without tensing unnecessarily and getting in the way? When we add tension in the muscles that doesn’t directly lead to the movement of the skeleton that those muscles are designed to help make, the excess tension compresses joints, causing more wear and tear than is truly necessary.

Get up slowly, and come to standing. Come back to the questions at the beginning, ask them again: Do you feel differently organised from your feet up to your head? Walk around a little, and feel if that feels a little different too.

After most lessons, my Feldenkrais students say that they feel more relaxed. But I would say that “Relaxed” is simply the state of neutral, when we’re not over tensing one side of pairs of muscles- when they’re well balanced, if you like. They are able to both elongate, and constrict without getting stuck in either direction. But for many of us that’s not the case even in our youth. Our long extensor muscles of the back (for example) forget over time that they can elongate, and at some point we simply stop noticing that we’re not as neutral as we could be when we’re not active.

There’s even a law about it: the Second law of thermodynamics: without input, all enclosed systems tend to decay. Not re-examining our habits over time can assist in this deterioration. We call it ageing. But what if not all of it is inevitable? What if we keep learning and evolving through examining our habits? Keeping the ones that work, and throwing out those that are no longer useful.

If we thought of ‘calm’ or ‘relaxed’ as neutral we wouldn’t see it as something special, but rather where we are when we’re not active. A space of rest or repose. We all need to be a balance between work and rest for brains and our bodies. Self care shouldn’t be the provence of the narcissistic. After all, we don’t let our phone batteries run down to nothing, but we often do that to ourselves, continuing through pain, rather than listening to what our bodies are trying to tell us, and looking for ways to tweak, ways to improve how we’re doing what we’re doing so it doesn’t cause pain.

Sometimes moving can be a rest too, certainly in this military scenario where one has to stand at attention for hours on end. When our muscles are relaxed, ie not over working, then we’re able to move with less compression on the joints, less wear and tear on the joints, and more ease. Less energy going into unnecessary compression means greater stamina- minimum effort for maximum gain. Surely that’s something worth working towards.

At the end of our morning, one of the players suggested I should come back to help the new recruits on their first parade- often they fall over and faint from the stress of having to stand still for so long. I am pretty sure I could solve that for them, let’s hope they ask!

Emma Alter
Feldenkrais and Arms

This post will have extra resonance if you’re a singer, musician or performer, but we all use our arms, hand and fingers, so also relevant to all of us!

When we play or sing, one’s fingers and the instrument, the notes, the sound all come into the foreground, and sometimes crowd out the sense of the rest of one’s own physicality, which can get pushed so far into the background, it’s no longer in the picture.

The idea of practising something like Feldenkrais is to have more awareness of what you’re moving when. We improve our skill of listening to ourselves, to distinguish between different qualities of movement. The idea is to be able to play with what’s in the foreground, what’s in the background, to divide our attention around ourselves as well as the music, in order to play or sing with greater control and expressive freedom.

But let’s talk more about support. So, we need to think of the base of our support, the feet, and /or bottom if we are sitting or standing. But what supports our fingers and hands?

Our hands are what makes the environment around us concrete, we both give and take material things in the worlds with them, but in order to move them freely, pleasurably, they need to be supported. There-in , for many of us lies the problem. We sometimes see them as something separate to the rest, so we don’t equate how we hold our arms, shoulders or ribs as having something to do with how the fingers can respond. Or vice versa, how the shoulders can be in rest or motion, has something to do with the quality of how we use our fingers.

And then if we add another layer of support, we can think of our arms as wings (bear with me…). The musculature of the shoulders is that of fan-shape strands of muscles, attaching along the sternum at the front, and from the base of the head down into the mid-back. We also have all of the muscles of the ribs as well, which can assist in supporting from below-

Try slowly and gently moving your arms upwards and seeing how far down your back you can feel the muscles moving. If we think of those muscles, when we move, we can support the arms in a very different way, from a different place.

If you don’t not already, you should think of the spine as mobile. It is designed that we can side-bend many vertebrae- either all in one piece, but also in segments.

Gently take your fingertips out to the side at shoulders height. Keep your arm straight, and extend your fingers towards the wall. Repeat this a few times

As you take your fingers closer to the wall , (keeping your arms straight) can you feel a little curve in your spine as you take your arm out to the side one way? You’ll need to “allow” it. If you take your other arm in the opposite direction (allow the first to return), see if you can sense a little curve in the spine in the other direction.

Then keep your spine straight in in the middle, don’t allow any movement at all, and feel how easily your arms extend to either side now.

Return to the first idea, and see if you sense any more curving this time round.

So the spine is not a stiff straight line in the middle of our backs, but in finding its mobile curves and participation of all the vertebrae we can support the shoulders, arms and hands in their movements more fully.

How can you usefully use this in your practice? As a violinist, I would most immediately think of bowing- in your scale or study practice bring your attention to your spine, and sense the difference of how the bow can move. Do this same exploration- keep your spine stiff as you bow, or help with the bowing by allowing the spine to gently curve in its different directions as you move the bow.

As a non-musician when you’re reaching for something, think of how you can allow your spine to join in the movement, or if you’re lifting your arms think of their support starting from just above the waist!

In my weekly classes, starting next week, we’re looking at the movements and connections of the shoulders- perfect if you have shoulder, neck or back problems- (we can use the shoulders as a way into working with the neck and back or vice- versa). If that sounds interesting do join us. You can find out more via my services page.

For those of you who are musicians and singers would like a more in depth experience, we’re offering a Well Musician Autumn Course: Feldenkrais for Musicians Online, on the 21st and 22nd November. (This will be together with my colleagues Anita Morrison, and Niall O’Riordan). All of the sessions will recorded and available for 6 months after the course.

For more information, get in touch.

Picture credit: Adrien King, Unsplash.

Emma Alter
Comfort at your Computer

In these past few months, many of us have been spending a lot more time in front of our computer screens: whether conference calling for business or pleasure, teaching on screen, or spending more leisure time inside our four walls.

When we work at a computer we tend to be sitting on a chair. And most of us have some habits of asymmetry or unnecessary holding of muscles when we sit for any length of time. With the brightness of a screen, or focus on a particular task, we tend to lose some sense of ourselves, the moving image taking over from our physical senses. Add to that staring at a screen at a set distance from our eyes for hours a day, and it is a recipe for un-ease.

We’re not designed to sit still. Our bio-mechanics are designed for movement. It’s why children have to be trained to sit for schooling, and little children find it one of the hardest things to do. It is not inherent to our system.

Even ribs were built first of all for motoring around, and then later the ribs enclosed our lungs. We originate from water creatures, with gills. Lungs came along second.

Why is that important to know? Well, if you think your ribs are only there to protect your most important organs (the heart and lungs) you’ll think of them as protective armour, and be more prone to stiffening them, but if you think of your ribs as being around to help you and your spine be and stay mobile, to move more easily, I’ll bet you’d then move them a little more than if you imagine the latter idea.

So, how does this help one’s comfort at the screen? Often I see clients who have developed shoulder pain, or back pain whilst working. And its usually from a lack of support from the base, added to holding themselves stiffly. If that’s just once in a while, but if its day in and day out, leaning to one side (probably the opposite one from your mouse) then at some point your back/neck/shoulder may start to complain at the habitual asymmetrical posture of the spine, ribs and fascia (connective tissue- everything but the bones).

When we’re sitting, using our hands, we need a good base of support, from the bottom and the feet. When we sit behind the sitting bones, (more at the top of the buttocks) then we’re using muscular effort to hold ourselves up instead of the more structural support of the skeleton. Which then limits how we can hold our ribs, and from that use and move our shoulders and neck. If we don’t use our legs to assist, then we’re also missing out on an easier way to support the low back and abdomen. And over time, the small habits we have of sitting, little blocks missing in the ladder of support for our shoulders and head can add up in a negative way.

If you think of needing to move as you work, even if constrained by your eyes looking at the screen or your fingers on the keyboard, then there’s more room to play. with changing the weight over your buttocks or feet as you type (which I’m doing as I type this. A little micro-dancing in the chair always livens up life I find!

If you don’t think that there’s a connection between the freedom of your shoulders and your fingers, then you wouldn’t think to lessen the strain on your wrists by thinking about your spine and shoulders, or to assist discomfort in the shoulders with finding greater mobility in your ribs, so that they can support the shoulders in any position.

In case you’re wondering the benefits you might feel from joining a lesson, here some comments from a recent Feldenkrais lesson:

“Thanks for a great session this morning. Am finding the process so interesting in how it resets the body, which is then emotionally transformative.”

“THAT WAS GREAT. I felt very much lighter after the moving”

“Wonderful to feel a different sensation afterwards. Much ‘softer’ neck and jaw, and my breath seemed much smoother and more even.”

I loved this session. My pelvis felt as though it was lighter and I was able to find greater flexibility in the spine. Thank you, Emma!”

Photo credit: Marvin Meyer @Unsplash.

Emma Alter
Changing Habits

Much of Feldenkrais’s thinking was that if we change the way people move, we also change the way that they think. And that’s very much part of the process when we start to work with Feldenkrais.

Many of our habits are learnt via a reward-based process, of “negative and positive reinforcement”, whether sensorially, or socially, (or anything else). These reinforcements are one of the processes that has allowed us to make it through the evolutionary process. There’s some kind of trigger; we do something; and then feedback- put simply: that was good, lets do it again, or that was bad, let’s not try that again.

But when we get curious about what is happening in the moment for us, we change from this positive/negative reinforcement of habit (often with a reduced sensation), to a more visceral, or felt feeling, and sensing more realistic outcomes of behaviour. To take a small example, when I eat in a way that takes time to sense the movement and feel the break down of food in my mouth, I am less likely to overeat- I have a visceral, felt sense of how much I have eaten, rather than solely the flavour on the tongue,and the emotion that accompanies it.

In a similar way, I might cognitively know that I “need better posture”, but sensorially, I can’t back it up with a felt sense of how I position myself in space, in relation to other areas of the body. So I can’t change it, or sense what to do, should an area of myself start becoming uncomfortable. I might try and push myself around to get rid of discomfort, but for the majority of us this is a negative feedback loop: My shoulder hurts, I feel something is in the wrong position, I push my shoulder around, and that doesn’t help, and I feel more stuck and out of control. Which mostly leads to more tension, not less.

In Feldenkrais lessons we learn to learn through curiosity and information feedback, which calls on different areas in the brain. We move into curiosity, getting up close to our habits, without trying to look the other way, but spending a little time to really see what’s there without closing our eyes to any area of ourselves, rather the opposite- how can you include more of you?. A physical mindfulness if you like. Trying different ways of moving, without being goal oriented, trying to be as un-judgemental as possible, can allow us to let go of what we are doing that is causing us strain.

Feldenkrais is no magic bullet. It takes some level of commitment for most to find the benefit of Feldenkrais, like any practice. But where it excels is that Feldenkrais uses the way that we all learn, that we all learnt pre-verbally as infants: through movement, to rediscover connections and sensations that we may have forgotten about.

We use the space of a lesson to experiment, to be curious about ourselves: how we’re put together, how we move, how we feel, what we sense changing. A Feldenkrais lesson is a moment of time to explore this, without needing a particular outcome. Whilst learning of connections in the body, we are also learning that we are rarely as fixed as we believe ourselves to be, that as our bodies can become more mouldable, more fluid, so can our thoughts and beliefs, without sacrificing our sense of self. The evolution is a quieter one.

When we become curious about ourselves we can move away from fearful movements to rather accepting the stream of information in as neither good nor bad, and parsing through it, in an unconscious way.

Interestingly, in studies of the brains of meditators, scientists discovered that the area of the brain that creates a “brain loop”, the posterior cingulate cortex gets activated when we become obsessed with a craving or thought: (that kind of thinking when we think around a notion endlessly).

When one becomes curious, that same brain region quiets itself, allowing a calmer simpler experience of oneself, and ones’ thoughts.


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alterbows3y

hi Sherry, the group class varies, depending on who’s there that week. They’re usually between 5-9 at the moment. Group classes address universal themes, whereas individual sessions are tailored just for you and what you want to improve. Classes are a more cost effective way of learning, individual sessions are usually a faster route there.

Sherry Turnbull3y

Hello. How many people are in the group class? Could you please tell me, is group classes more effective than personally?