What is living well with dementia?
Read MoreEach of these will take five minutes of your time.
I've written much over the years about my own experience. I've asked other people to write this month's article by commenting on why they do Feldenkrais.
Read MoreWillpower never works for maintaining self-control, trying to hold a position or doing a movement in a certain way. It's stressful, impossible to maintain, and creates rigidity. We fatigue and break down.
Read MorePeople often come into my office saying, "I'm weak, my muscles aren't firing, I need to strengthen my core, my glutes, my shoulder, my back..."
In fact, when we feel weak, it can often be because our muscles are constantly firing, that is, they are engaged and contracted with a "do not disturb" sign on the door, and hence unavailable for movement. We feel weak because we don't have access to the most efficient distribution of work, so we over-effort and exhaust ourselves.
In school it is what we learn that's important. The quicker we can produce information, the smarter we appear. However, we can train ourselves in anything we can imagine! It's like swinging your arm. Perhaps you can swing your arm to throw a ball, but can you throw a lasso, a golf club, a frisbee, a dance partner, or a custard pie?
Dr. Feldenkrais says over and over that the learning we do in this method involves separating the goal from the process. It sounds outrageous, but think for a moment: Settling for a single, correct endpoint is like limiting yourself to a single food the rest of your life. Who wants to eat boiled potatoes forever
Who doesn't struggle with an achy back? No matter how you struggle or what you do, try this:
First of all, tight hips do not exist by themselves. The experience of contracted hip flexors is a relationship between many functions, most notably the hips, low back, and belly. Here are some options to help alleviate this experience
Read MoreMoshe Feldenkrais never taught anyone how to move. He taught how to forget.
Read MoreOne of the major ways we construct feelings of anxiety is by pulling ourselves up and away from the ground. A sense of physical support from the ground is basic to any sense of emotional security and well being.
Read MoreMany people come to me with sciatica. One of the causes of sciatica is the lack of movement in the hip joint and an excess of compression in the lumbar spine, which sends the lovely shooting pain down the leg.
I'm going to say something that might sound shocking at first: An intellectual understanding of mechanics does not improve movement. If you know, intellectually, how many degrees of rotation there are in the spine, does it help you move your actual spine?
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