Advanced Training

• Follow That Bone

• Emotional Learning

• The Evolution of Learning

• Motor Concept

• Day on the Pelvis

• Posture as an Expressive Act

• How to Prepare Yourself

• Presentations

• How Do We Recognize Learning?
  How Do We Touch Awareness?

• Movement Strategies

Follow That Bone

In this workshop we will explore how lessons can be better designed by understanding in detail the relationship between anatomy and history of the human body. We will pick a bone or two and follow the evolution of perceptions and actions that gave birth to form. We will clarify how structures and functions of the body interact with the environment.

Using these insights you will learn how to develop more potent Awareness Through Movement® and Functional Integration® lessons that connect bone through muscle and brain to the environment.

This course will provide you with the tools to see and sense movement in a more precise and expansive manner and create more meaningful lessons for your clients.

Emotional Learning
From Biomechanics to Emotions

Our experience is shaped by complex combinations of beliefs, perceptions, hormones, social values, and desires. Every thought, action, and feeling finds its expression in movement. Even our posture can be understood as a thought phrase, a preparation for new possible movements and new possible feelings. In order to understand how to create change, we must become aware of how our whole self is embodied in our movements. To work with a person's emotions becomes a technical question, which falls within the realm of Moshe's notion of function, no different than addressing a back problem or arthritis.

In this workshop, we will technically explore the inseparability of body mechanics from our embodied emotions and investigate function, learning, and emotions by integrating information from psychology and anthropology to better inform us.

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The Evolution of Learning
Sequences, Transitions, and Consequences in Lessons

"Without light there would be no eyes."
- Moshe Feldenkrais

"What can I do when a lesson doesn't seem to be working? Should I change to another lesson and if that doesn't help maybe even try concepts and movements from still another lesson?" Every practitioner is familiar with these questions and with the confusion they generate in ourselves and in our clients. What options are available to us in the design of a lesson, to make transitions smooth and easy?

There are fundamental principles shared between the development of awareness in the Feldenkrais Method and the biological evolution of life on earth. We will approach the mysteries and the mechanisms of organic development and human learning in terms of similar underlying processes. We will work with the similarities in the design and generation of Awareness Through Movement® and Functional Integration® lessons to the similarities in the emergence and development of new life forms. Understanding how consciousness, awareness, and learning evolved in the natural world can better inform us in designing more effective and generative lessons.

This will be an evolutionary learning experience.

The Motor Concept
Using Motor Learning and Motor Control Theories in the Design of Lesson Plans and Themes

How do we learn front and back, up and down, left and right? How do we learn to time and coordinate our movements? The understanding of these temporal and spatial learning processes can prove very helpful in choosing lesson plans or predicting and influencing the outcome of a lesson.

These spatial and temporal learnings are well mapped in research and occasionally chanced upon by practitioners who find themselves surprised by the success of a particular lesson. The Motor Concept was developed by Dr. Frank Wildman in order to provide a useful model to better control and predict the outcome of lessons and select lesson plans suited to the individual needs of clients.

Students will experience the Motor Concept through Awareness Through Movement® and Functional Integration® lessons.

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A Day on the Pelvis

Taught for many years to physicians at the American Back Society, physical therapists working in gerontology, and Yoga practicioners, this workshop focuses on the practical benefits of understanding the evolutionary structure and functions of the pelvis. This is particularly useful in assisting people, who suffer from the back and hip problems frequently associated with pelvic instability, hypermobility, as well as loss of perineal control.

The distortion of weight transference with pelvic instability contributes to both lower back, sacroiliac and hip pain. Students will learn to identify when there is too much relative movement, which can be aggravated by certain ATM or FI lessons.

Bone, muscle, perineum, and other pelvic soft tissues and their innervation will be addressed with short ATM's and FI practice interspersed throughout the day.

Posture as an Expressive Act

Our posture expresses itself whether we stand sit or lie down. It is usually congruent with our facial expressions, the use of throat and mouth, and our basic orienting responses. The condition of our autonomic nervous system both supports our posture and is activated by our preparations for action.

In this workshop you will learn to organize Functional Integration® lessons by seeing movement as a continuity of ever changing postures. Through Awareness Through Movement® and Functional Integration® lessons you will move towards integrating all expressive functions in order to work more completely with the whole person.

Our postural preparation is a crucial factor in organizing our perceptions and actions. How we prepare ourselves for a presentation, an Awareness Through Movement® or Functional Integration® lesson, can influence the outcome more than our technical proficiency on that particular day.

How do you reach inside yourself to create a profound and unique experience for your students and clients? How do you use yourself to create a specific feeling in a teaching situation? How can you share your passion with an audience in a way that engages them more fully? How can you utilize your doubts and insecurities as assets to create a unique teaching style?

This workshop will show you how to become a more effective guide by preparing for surprises and challenges from the inside. You will learn how to engage your students by creating situations that are outside of their usual habits and experiences.

Whether it's an initial interview with a client, your first visit to your prospective in-laws or a presentation for medical professionals, artists, athletes, or the general public, your style of answering this question can determine whether you gain rapport or not. This in turn can make the difference between gaining your livelihood with the Feldenkrais Method or not.

One of the major problems in the Feldenkrais community is presenting the Method to professional and other audiences. We need skills in design and presentation to effectively communicate to communities outside our own.

The ability to present yourself and the Method in an effective and interesting manner, are as important as your skills practicing the Method. This may very well be the most crucial workshop you can take to sustain your career and further the recognition of the Method.

We will use theater exercises and video feedback to make your personal style of communication more effective in addressing audiences that are important to you.

How Do We Recognize Learning?
How Do We Touch Awareness?

Working With the Immaterial Body

How do learning and awareness emerge from tissues and organs? Both learning and awareness are non-material aspects of a human being. To say that learning takes place in the brain is to explain away the mysteries of learning and awareness. How do these immaterial aspects of the body express themselves in motion and how do we touch and move these non-physical aspects of the physical body?

What kind of learning takes place in the method that is unique? We will approach these questions as technical questions related to the notion of function.

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Movement Strategies

What is efficient movement? What constitutes “normal” movement? Is this movement an example for mobility or for a lack of stability? Is this person's movement style ingenious and unique or merely inefficient?

This workshop was developed watching hundreds of students in training programs struggle with these and similar questions. It has been designed to provide the skills to know what to look and feel for in a movement and examine how a person's available physical resources, e.g. the condition of the skeletal and neuromuscular system and the changes in the environment can be used to develop a variety of effective strategies for action.

You will learn to:

• see how specific movements are indicators of a movement strategy that will reappear in many functional activities
  
• understand how the strategies underlying any one movement are expressed in many seemingly unrelated movements
  
• think beyond the “right”, “best”, “most efficient” way of performing an action and have a new way of perceiving awarness and movement
  
• overcome confusing categories such as: “tighter - looser”, “involved-uninvolved”, “organized-disorganized” and evaluate what people are really learning from movement.