AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT®
When asked for a name for his 'method' by a member of the World Health Organisation in the early 1950s, Moshe Feldenkrais chose, calling a dog a dog, 'Awareness Through Movement'. The name stuck fast and is now one of the twin pillars of The Feldenkrais Method. And it does exactly what it says on the packaging.
In an AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT® (or ATM®) lesson, sequences of movement are announced and guided verbally by a Practitioner, with the aim of drawing a student's attention to a specific area of bodily functioning. The practitioner will not demonstrate a movement, since the danger is that the student simply copies it and the learning capacity of the lesson is minimal. Since awareness flows where attention goes, the student becomes absorbed in the exploration of how the body carries out a specific action, or indeed how they might be hindering the action and making it less fluid. Gently these hindrances are smoothed away through the student's own explorations. The movement presents fewer and fewer challenges, and when the student returns to standing and moving 'normally' they feel in many cases freer, easier, taller, broader and more squarely connected with the ground. Many people breathe more fully or see their surroundings in a new, more satisfying way.
You don't have to be a movement expert, be athletic or be otherwise physically 'fit', to do AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT®. ATMs are generally group activities, with students dressed in easy, movement-friendly clothes. The lesson begins with 'scanning' - students, lying comfortably on their backs, take stock of how they sense their bodies. Using this a reference point to which they return frequently, the ATM is then an exploration which progresses from focus upon a specific bodily location to involvement of the whole body in movement. The lesson is unhurried, the class being guided gently but firmly by the Practitioner's voice, allowing the students to concentrate on becoming fully aware of how they are doing the movement, and to investigate ways in which they could make the movement easier for themselves. Moshe Feldenkrais himself devised over 3,000 ATM® lessons, and more continue to be discovered every day!
Moshe said 'Movement without awareness is just work!'. He also said 'How can you know what you want to do, if you don't know what you are doing?'. Deepening awareness leads a student to develop consciously an increased range of movement choices, and this leads to greater confidence in movement and greater ease and resourcefulness in achieving their desired goals.
Many people are limited in their movement choices, perhaps through habit, perhaps through an instruction that was once given when they were around 7 years old, or perhaps through having had a poor movement 'role model' - all of which may be past their sell-by dates, and simply be causing damage to their bodies. Why should we be imprisoned by one unique way of, say, getting out of bed in the morning? Why, on hearing the alarm clock should we feel obliged to sit bolt upright, eyes like organ stops, simply because this is what we have always done? Why could we not, for a change, simply ignore the alarm for a moment, roll gently over and out of bed and take our time in switching off the noise?
The human body is, if we allow it, instinctively economical - if it learns a movement that uses less effort to achieve a desired goal, it will always prioritise this movement over one that causes it to work harder. Logical - I hear you cry! Indeed, but how many of us feel that certain aspects of our lives must be accompanied by hard work, or effort? Our instinctive economy is frequently overruled by conscious control. Feldenkrais proposes that developing greater awareness of our physical actions can reap benefits in terms of uncomplicated confidence in our abilities and economic focus on our goals. Put simply, doing less gets better results than grunting and sweating, when accompanied with focused awareness!
AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT® is a vital tool for anyone who feels that, in their everyday lives, or when called upon in their chosen occupations, movements which should be easy are causing them difficulty and sometimes pain. It is a vital tool for anyone who wishes to extend and develop their physical functioning - and the facsinating twist in the tail of Feldenkrais's method is that through changing and developing movement, thinking is also affected.