FELDENKRAIS
Image credit: Christine Barrat
There are times when we...
need to do less
need to breathe
need to spend time with ourselves
“Leonora helps me get into my body and feel where movements start. It’s both awakening and grounding. A great way to start the day!”
LESSONS
I currently offer:
Individual lessons 4 times a week (In person in Bruton: Weds 10am, 12pm, Sat 10am, 12pm)
Group classes 4 times a week (In person in Bruton: Mon 7.30pm. Online: Tues 7.15pm, Weds 8am, Fri 8am)
About the Method
The Feldenkrais Method helps people spend time in and with their body; exploring sensations, connections, and presence. Reducing effort and increasing ease is the aim.
The individual 1:1 sessions are one hour FI lessons (Functional Integration) where I use very gentle hands-on work to help you release tension and calm your nervous system, so you can move with less pain and more ease.
The group classes are called ATM (Awareness Through Movement). They are one hour sessions where you follow my voice inviting you to move in specific ways that interrupt physical habits and built-up tension.
The two modes are designed to work in tandem; teaching us to do less, to make it easier, to go slower, to move through the world with less effort. Ultimately, The Feldenkrais Method helps us feel safe in our bodies.
As someone who’s been taught to push harder all my life, I find the practice of Feldenkrais transformative. It helps me reevaluate my striving tendencies and intrigues me so much I studied to become an instructor of doing less.
The method was devised by the Ukrainian-Israeli engineer Moshe Feldenkrais in the 1950s and 60s. He was fascinated by neuroplasticity and demonstrated that small movements lead to incremental change and help us organise ourselves better physically, mentally, and emotionally.
““The aim [of the Feldenkrais Method] is a person that is organised to move with minimum effort and maximum efficiency, not through muscular strength, but through increased consciousness of how movement works.””
What if, as Moshe Feldenkrais advises, we don’t push ourselves to the end of our range? What if we allow some slack in the elastic band of our capacity? What will emerge in the space, if we decline to fill it? Will we just melt into a slump of inaction? Or will we have more options, better ideas, clearer strategies, more patience in our relationships?
Feldenkrais discovered that incremental movements can create remarkable changes in the body and mind. Doing less is definitely not about doing nothing. Doing less is about giving ourselves space to do more.
You can read my essay about the impact Feldenkrais has had on my life over on Medium.
““My purpose is to allow people to move closer to actually being creatures of free choice, to genuinely reflect individual creativity and emotion, freeing the body of habitual tensions and wired-patterns of behaviour. ””