About these lessons
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Please read the introduction before you dive in. As always, email me with questions. The odd titles are how these lessons are known throughout the Feldenkrais community, so I have used them here for easy reference.
How to approach longer series
These lessons are full-length, and they assume you have the patience, skill, and ability to listen to yourself, pace your learning, and modify the movement as needed.
Feldenkrais is a process of self-discovery through creating options in your movement. If, by now, you still feel you must complete, perform, or perfect a movement, you have missed the point of experimentation and testing leading to self-discovery and self-compassion.
Approach these lessons with a rigorous attention to curiosity and wonder rather than as an exercise or a checklist and you will reap lifelong benefits. Otherwise, you will entrench your habits of pain, limitation, and contraction even further.
Sometimes the movements will be challenging
You are not alone. Don’t expect to be able to do every movement right away.
The training is in taking care of yourself in an intelligent way when a movement seems puzzling, challenging, or elusive. Try sticking with a whole series, even if you skip a few variations. There are so many repetitions and options that the pattern will slowly become more possible, then easy, and, at last, elegant.
Tip: Modify the movement to suit you.
Raise the floor if you can’t reach the floor with a towel or blanket (not a pillow).
Adjust your orientation/position/force/speed so you don’t feel strain.
Use a rolled towel, blanket, or foam pad for support when needed.
Imagine the movement and train yourself in motor imagery.
Note on the training material
Here is Moshe Feldenkrais teaching several hundred people at the Amherst, Massachusetts, training in 1980.
The Treasury is not a complete list of what you might find in a training, but it is a good start. They are not in any order for learning, rather they are alphabetical for ease of use.
Many of these are from the Alexander-Yanai lessons. Some are from the 1980 Amherst training, or the 1975 San Francisco training, and one or two have been developed by other trainers (e.g., Elizabeth Beringer’s wonderful book-on-the-foot series).
And not all of these are taught in every training, it depends on how each educational director (ED) compiles them. In any four-year training, these would be interwoven into a well-rounded curriculum.
Usually, two series are taught across a single training segment, with one from the first series taught in the morning, and one from the second series in the afternoon. This process would continue over two, three, or four weeks, depending on the length of the segment, which is also different for each training.
A four-year training offers around 250 to 350 Awareness Through Movement® lessons. Although each training is organized differently, they are all certified by the training and accreditation board (NATAB) of the North American Feldenkrais Guild, the EuroTAB for Europe and Israel, or the AusTAB for Australia and Asia.
I have met practitioners from Italy, Japan, Sweden, Norway, UK, Hungary, Spain, and Colombia, and we all speak exactly the same “language.” It is wonderful to feel these unifying connections, regardless of where we were trained. (Click here for a list of websites worldwide.)
Finally, Treasury lessons are for the general public and not designed to replace the depth and rigor of a four-year training.
“The gradual reduction of useless effort is necessary in order to increase kinesthetic sensitivity, without which a person cannot become self-regulating.”
