The Feldenkrais Method®: Centro Benessere di Simone Broccoli

How does it work?

The Feldenkrais Method® is the development of psychomotor learning process. It is based on the deep integration of sensations, feelings, thoughts and movements chosen as a way to improve oneself. The body's structure of man is the result of a long evolutionary process that places him at the top of the zoological scale.

To adapt to gravity, the nervous system, muscles and skeleton mutually influenced and modified each other to perform increasingly complex and refined actions. The child who becomes an adult rewrites in his body the stages of the transformations of the animal species that preceded him. This inherited genetic wealth is currently not valued.
The unrestrained pace of modern life, stress and incessant social demands overwhelm the individual making him forget himself. When the body assumes and maintains the ideal posture, the person is lively, joyful and intelligent... stable on the ground ... and at the center of the world.

The Creator

Moshe Feldenkrais was born in Russia in 1904 and at the age of 14 he emigrated to Israel, where he studied and worked. In 1928 he graduated in mechanical and electrical engineering from the Sorbonne in Paris. Collaborate with Joliot Curie in nuclear fission research. Student of Jigoro Kano becomes black belt in Judo and founded the first Judo club in France. Due to a knee accident he decides to personally take care of his own re-education and comes to develop a practical working method which he exposes in an organic way in the book "Body and Mature Behavior" published in 1949. He dedicates himself to teaching and spreading his method based on ingenious and innovative intuitions of the relationship between body and mind. His pupils were David Ben Gurion, Margareth Mead Leonard Bernstein and Moshe Dayan. He died in Israel in 1984. His followers continue to spread and develop the method.

Teaching

The Feldenkrais® Method aims to bring the lost well-being, by stimulating the nervous system with unusual movements to form new cellular communications or synapses which, through the development of intellectual potential allow for recover the lost functions.

The teaching takes place in two moments:

Individual lessons or Functional Integration®: in which the teacher's hands guide the person in a non-verbal dialogue leading him to a state of awareness. The process gives to the person awareness of the unawareness, chronically rigid, badly used and often painful parts of his body, through the sensation and the relaxation. It is offered the possibility of organizing themselves from time to time in new movement patterns, breaking old postures and replacing them with new, more efficient and functional ones.

During the "Functional Integration®" (IF), the teacher uses a non-invasive manual technique to make the student aware of his own functional organization and to suggest new ways to make it more efficient. The manual contact is respectful and kind, never oriented to force but rather to create an atmosphere suitable and available for learning.

This type of lesson can generally be performed with the student normally lying on a special low bed or directly on the floor if the conditions (comfort temperature and softness of the surface) allow it.

Group lessons or Awareness through movement®: in which the teacher's voice guides the person to explore and feel their own body to awaken it through its perception and feeling, inducing him/her to perform simple, pleasant and unusual forgotten movements.

During the lessons of "Awareness Through Movement®" (ATM), the Feldenkrais Teacher leads the students with the use of only the voice, proposing sequences of movements that gradually evolve in complexity and extension, always remaining within the context of a comfortable and effortless activity.
In both cases, the students are not required to undress, but only to wear comfortable clothing, possibly free of solid objects that could disturb when interacting with the body.

Applications

The Feldenkrais® Method has been applied to people of all ages and of different professions:

• the newborn who had suffered for a trauma at the time of birth;
• to the adolescent with scoliosis and kyphosis;
• to people suffering from back pain, neck and lumbar pain;
• the elderly who could not get up from the chair;
• the disabled with precarious sensitivity of the limbs after years of immobility;
• to the differently ables;
• the obese with problems in the sexual sphere;
• the athlete with decreased competitive performance;
• to artists wishing to improve their performance;
• to people who wish to achieve deeper self-knowledge.

Nervous system

To understand the Feldenkrais Method® we have to know taht it cannot be separated from the nervous system because the Feldenkrais Method®, in addition to being a bodily knowledge, is a learning process that makes us perceiving our body. The nervous system is considered by many scholars to be unknown and complex, but explorable, and allows the organism to receive and transmit stimuli from the outside world by coordinating information with each other.

From the senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste), from the skin, from the viscera, from the external environment, the stimuli reach the brain through the nerve's pathways; the most important is the SOMATO-SENSITIVE way or KINESTHESIC way: It starts from the sensory receptors of the skin and reaches the cortex through connective tissues. The sensorial information from the surface of the body reaches the cortex and generates a response relative to the muscle control.

KINESTHESIC way

This way learning under our will, if correctly stimulated, allow us to recover our lost functions. There are interactions between childhood activities and brain development. The relationship represented in the following diagram, highlighted by arrows in the opposite direction, indicates that one influences the modifications of the other, in which, cause and effect, are continuously reversed in place in a retroactive loop precisely because the effect returns to act at backward on the cause that determined it.

Learning to move the body and coordinate it is an orderly process for a child who has not suffered childhood trauma, as he is able to carry out an organic development. On the other hand, a child who has suffered childhood trauma with macro and micro brain lesions is unable to carry out a normal development and has a limited sequence of movements. He often appears lazy, sad, unmotivated, clumsy in actions and moves with difficulty in space. It mainly uses the limbs that it moves with greater ease, forgetting the injured ones. But when he feels his body and perceives himself through a Functional Integration lesson, the muscular stiffness will almost totally disappear, restoring the functions of joints and skeleton, so that his body and his gaze will release joy.

The task of the Feldenkrais® teachers is to create new nervous circuits or synapses so that the child has the opportunity to perform new actions and live a better with himself, this is our task, because ours is a scientific method and cannot make miracles. .

Centro Benessere
di Simone Broccoli -
Feldenkrais Method®
C.F. BRC SMN 71B25 C573D
P.IVA 02666760406

Via Castello 11
47030 - STRIGARA DI SOGLIANO AL RUBICONE (FC)

(Houses/Apartments for vacation)
CIN: IT040046B4PSJSENQF

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The Feldenkrais Method®