This past week I taught a class called “arms to your hips” but, as with many of the names of the Feldenkrais lessons the titles are not always a true reflection of the functional outcome of the lesson. It was, in my mind, about reaching, turning and transitioning from lying to side sitting.  While teaching the lesson, I was reminded of a remark I heard from a woman in my Feldenkrais training, which was more than a hundred years ago, where she said that after her first experience with Feldenkrais she was in her car and she reached for the round volume knob on the radio and ..read more

I was intrigued by a recent article on BBC.com titled, Why some people can’t tell left from right. According to scientists, the ability to discriminate left and right involves several high-level skills such as memory, language, visual and spatial processing and mental rotation. Whether you are left-handed or right-handed seems to be determined by four regions in the brain. Right-handed people clearly predominate in our world (90%) and it was not uncommon in the recent past for left-handed folks to be ridiculed, and for their teachers and parents to believe that it was important to revert ..read more

Moshe Feldenkrais wrote a small seminal pamphlet on learning called “Learning to Learn” which he developed as a guide to accompany recorded and published Awareness Through Movement lessons. In each class that I teach one or more of the elements he discussed surfaces. Probably none is more important, and a part of each and every class, than his direction to “do a little less than you can.” I understand his directive to mean that while learning, it is counterproductive to push to the maximum of our ability. Remember, that for Feldenkrais, learning was about taking the time to explore i ..read more

A community is a group of people with common interests, values or culture. In the course of our personal and work lives we typically belong to more than one community built around common work, shared love of music or literature, group activities or outings; the list is endless. One of my communities is the group of amazing individuals who regularly attend my Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement classes. It warms my heart whenever students ask for and about their fellow classmates, when they help one another with referrals, bring favourite foods or their local produce, assist one another phys ..read more

Crocuses, a sure sign of Spring. Spring is my favourite season of the year.  It is getting warmer; the days are longer and things are budding and growing. Trees, flowers, bushes are coming to life again, the birds are chirping and there is a feeling of everything waking up and emerging after hibernating. The one drawback of course is that allergies resurface and this year they also have awakened early.  We have all had a difficult two years; as I write we are marking 2 years since the WHO declared the start of the pandemic. Over 400 million people all over the world got sic ..read more

Resiliency, again.  Resilience, the ability to bounce back from difficult situations.  As the Omicron wave swept through the world, and BC during the end of 2021 and into January 2022, we were again required to show our stuff, to hunker down in order to get through yet another wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout the last 2 years we have, as a collective, weathered a lot and have shown we have what it takes to help mitigate risks by doing our part in following  public health guidelines.  Most of us are fatigued and wish things could be different and that we c ..read more

I have always been very heart warmed at the feeling of community among students attending our Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement® classes. Students talk to each other, share stories of how they have incorporated movements into their daily lives, share resources and connections and help each other enter and leave classes. Several years ago, a tradition started at the Wednesday evening class, I think it was a student who brought in an unusual chocolate bar but I don’t remember why, and we began to “break bread” together after class each week. But the bread in this case was chocolate, not jus ..read more

I have often been asked about how to remember parts or complete lessons.  So a few years ago I started making audio recordings of many of the classes as I taught them and made them available for registered students to review but not to download.   I now have an extensive library of recorded lessons.  Some are listed on our Class Audio Recordings page and are available for immediate purchase. The benefit of purchasing these lessons is that they are then yours to keep and to review as many times as you like. Each time I repeat a lesson I learn something new, a small ..read more

I don’t need to be convinced about the features and benefits of the Feldenkrais Method®as I have been immersed in in the practice and teaching of it for more than 20 years.  But this week I had two personal experiences that validated for me its positive impact. One evening while out for a walk, I tripped while stepping up onto the sidewalk from the road.  I went down onto my hands and knees and then immediately rolled onto the grass in front of me and then popped up!  As my husband said, “that is your Feldenkrais training at work.”  I escaped with no injuries or road rash e ..read more

“For proper functioning, (the) nervous structure needs full activity followed by full rest” – Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais as noted in Chapter 18 in Feldenkrais Illustrated: The Art of Learning, edited and illustrated by Tiffany Sankary. In each Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement® class, movement sequences are interspersed with rests. Not exactly the rest time that we all enjoyed (!) in preschool, but probably rest that is as, or more, important. The purpose of frequent resting during our classes allows us to take a break from the focus on paying attention to how we are doing the movements being ..read more