To be able to get up and down from the floor with ease becomes more difficult for many as we age. This happens almost without us noticing and begins at a much younger age than we might think. When we were young we had no difficulty doing this but didn’t observe that even then we […]
Human beings are inherently unstable. Just think about a cat or a dog or any other animals moving on four legs. They are very stable. Humans on the other hand balance over a much smaller area – our two feet – and are much more prone to falling. So we are always in the process […]
The latest research undermines the current fad towards standing at work as a solution to difficulties experienced in sitting. [see Cochrane Review paper and Whitehall study ] This comes as no surprise to a practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method®. Humans are inherently unstable. As a physicist Moshe Feldenkrais clearly explained why the human body is […]
Moshe Feldenkrais suffered injuries to his knees and was given a 50/50 chance of being in a wheelchair if he had operations that attempted to fix his knees. As a highly trained nuclear physicist and black belt in Judo he decided to use his academic knowledge and practical experience to fix himself without the risk […]
The Feldenkrais Method® works by engaging the sense of proprioception explained by Oliver Sacks as the sense of the body’s position i.e. “in space”. In our classes this includes sensory awareness of the position of different parts of ourselves in relation to other parts – e.g. the position of our head in relation to our chest/shoulders […]
As we were driving through Kelburn to the Wellington CBD the other day I noticed several people walking to work with their heads down. One was holding an ipad in one hand and scrolling down with the other, another was keying into his smart phone, some had earphones on as they strolled along. Even those […]
As I said in my last blog, just telling people how they should stand with a so-called ‘neutral spine’, does not mean they will be able to do it. This is because how we stand, sit, walk or run etc. is the result of a lifetime of learnt habits that engages our brain and whole […]
You may have caught Simon Morton’s interview on neuroplasticity last Saturday on This Way Up. Morton was interviewing Canadian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge on his latest book The Brain’s Way of Healing. In his 2007 bestseller, The Brain that Changes Itself, Doidge made more widely known the growing body of research on brain plasticity. […]