Feldenkrais Method

Feldenkrais in the News? We like to think that Moshe Feldenkrais was on to something when he developed the Method. However, searching for the term "feldenkrais" on Google News turns up only a few mentions, and even then only class announcements. I wondered what searching for terms that address some of the basic concepts that Feldenkrais used would turn up. First, though, I had to come up with what some of those basic concepts are and the terms that describe them. And since this is my weblog, I use my own idea of what those concepts are. Your mileage may vary.)

The term Feldenkrais itself yielded 8 hits on the Google news search. Only one wasn't a class listing, a story about a young woman recovering from a gunshot wound. 

 Kinesthesia turned up no hits, so I tried kinesthetic. 14 hits in a diverse set of newspapers and periodicals, one of them a press release from A company called Leapfrog about a study reinforcing handwriting's role in learning to read.

The old chestnut proprioception turned up a single story about using sensors to guide robots. Here's a quote:

"Dr. Melvin W. Siegel of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University agrees that the sensors have great promise. It stems, he says, from their ability to provide something called proprioception, a sixth sense which we all take for granted that tells us what our own parts are up to at any given moment. "That's what robots don't have," says Siegel. "They're running blind and the existence of small, lightweight, reliable sensors will let us work with machines that know where their own parts are. You know how important that is to you."" From Popular Mechanics.

So far, pretty sparse. I tried "learning to learn" next. That turned up 2 stories. And in one of them, finding the term "learning to learn" was just serendipity, as in:

"I took an online tutorial from Atomic Learning to learn Dreamweaver for the Macintosh " From The Seattle Times

Time ran short on this surfing session, so I'll have to come back another day, maybe try some different terms. So I've concluded that Feldenkrais was onto something, but is it something that ever has a chance at growing popularity?

Feldenkrais for Quants? There's lots of stuff out there on Feldenkrais, what it is, what it does, etc. And most of them say the same thing, or at least very similar things. A different, perhaps emerging, perspective is from a dynamic systems theory approach. Mark Reese offers a well-written, if longish, article here. If I had to explain the Method to anyone the least bit quant, that's where I'd start.

An approach I hadn't seen before. Kinesophics has an interesting compilation of newsgroup postings on Feldenkrais benefits from a variety of perspectives at http://www.kinesophics.com/newsgroupcull.html.

Definitions of the Method from the Web. What is the Feldenkrais Method? Seems like there are a lot of takes on this, and the obvious can be quite elusive here. One day I was thinking about this and decided to check out what different prominent and not so prominent Feldie web sites had to say. Start with the mother ship, The Feldenkrais Guild of North America. The standards of practice offers a 19 point definition at http://www.feldenkrais.com/standards/index.html#what.

Here are some links to other sites' definitions.

Feldenkrais Resources 

The UK Feldenkrais Guild The British Guild 

The Australian Feldenkrais Guild

 Northwest Feldenkrais

Movement Educators

New Zealand Feldenkrais Guild

Scott Clark

Flowing Body Flexible Mind

Lavinia Plonka

Rachel Green

Yahoo

Mary Debono

Motion Potion