How Feldenkrais Helps Scoliosis

NEW IDEAS ABOUT RELIEVING SCOLIOSIS

SCARY TO KNOW, but the cause of more than 80% of scoliosis is basically unknown, not understood! (Medical term: idiopathic.)
      Intriguingly, at a recent advanced training on the pelvic floor in San Francisco with renowned Feldenkrais Practitioner Deborah Bowes, DPT, CFP I learned that there is growing evidence that function of the pelvic floor system plays a significant role in scoliosis.
     As many of you know from my earlier workshops, Dr. Feldenkrais approached scoliosis in a unique and effective way, and you can learn this.  As Feldenkrais practitioners, we use variation of movement as a primary intervention to the progression of scoliosis. Thus to introduce work with the pelvic floor as a component of this variety makes sense and adds a new dimension to our study and learning about relieving scoliosis.
     The notes below are excerpts of an article about improving scoliosis using the Feldenkrais Method, written by practitioner Maureen McHugh. The important thing is to begin look at scoliosis in a new way -- to open your mind to improvement from a different place in yourself, literally and figuratively.
///// Carole Bucher, BA, GCFP/T

Relieving Scoliosis by Cultivating Deeper Sensory Awareness and a Greater Variety of Movement Patterns... 
Despite so many unknowns, improvement (in scoliosis) is possible.
The first step is a mental one, and that is to see scoliosis as a pattern of movement. This is Moshe Feldenkrais's big insight.
     "Scoliosis" is a noun, and in hearing it you get the sense that one is discussing something fixed. When the young teen first hears, "You have a scoliosis", it sounds as fixed as the statement "You have a right arm." But what if scoliosis is better understood as a pattern of movement?
"You have moved so that your ribs are turned like this and your hip is hiked up like that." And then the statement is added: "And you can learn to move in another way."
The fixity of scoliosis is best seen as a habit, a strong and unconscious habit. Seen like this, the problem comes into the realm of how to modify habits.
     The main Feldenkrais approach to modifying habit is to create more variety. Not to contradict the pattern because that works as badly with movement patterns as it does with people. Instead, the process is to cultivate more variety. Scoliosis is a movement pattern favoring one direction and neglecting the other. Through Feldenkrais we cultivate the ability to move with ease in all directions.

/////Please contact me at renofeldenkrais@aol.com if you live in the Reno/Tahoe area and would like to explore how to use the Feldenkrais Method to help your scoliosis.  Best wishes! Carole

MINDFUL GARDENING yields great results

PAIN-FREE GARDENING?  You can do it!

Here are some important 'COMFORTABLE GARDENING' tips from Reno Feldenkrais:

(1)  Always keep some attention on your body so that you don't forget about yourself and hurt yourself unconsciously; 

(2)  CHANGE POSITIONS frequently if you feel uncomfortable or if you feel pain;  

(3) Use your whole body to support weed pulling and other tasks, working at an angle or from the side, not straight down in front of you; 

(4) Bend from the knees and hips, not from your lower spine; 

(5)  Being more mindful as you tend your beautiful garden will save you pain and give you pleasure.  AND you will reap the rewards in your well-being!

(6) If you want to learn more about how to move more comfortably, with greater stability, grace and with less pain, contact me at 775-240-7882 or renofeldenkrais@aol.com about classes or private lessons.

    

MORE Help for Scoliosis and Back Pain

2nd Scoliosis & Back Mobility Workshop - An introductory event to teach you just how much you can do to improve your condition. You don't have to put up with pain!

WHEN/WHERE:  Sunday May 20, 1-5 pm, at the Reno Buddhist Center, 820 Plumas, Reno.
COST: need-based sliding scale, $35-50.  Class is limited to 12 people; you must preregister & prepay.
BRING:  A mat, blanket or comforter and a small towel, water and a snack.
CONTACT:  Carole at renofeldenkrais@aol.com or 775-240-7882.

Finely Tuned

MUSIC AND FELDENKRAIS
Yo Yo Ma and Yehudi Menuhin were probably among the first and most famous musicians to find that the unusual, non-habitual Feldenkrais movements, done slowly and with focused attention, improved their musical abilities.  And since then, literally thousands of musicians around the world have discovered the Feldenkrais method as a unique and meaningful support for their music and for repetitive motion strain.

In this video, cellist Uri Vardi and his wife, flutist Hagit, bring the extraordinary, vivifying elements of Awareness Through Movement® to a classical orchestra setting, "...in the service of enhanced musical expression and to prevent injury."  You will see how it works for yourself.

Whether you are a musician or want to learn more about the deep and remarkable changes that can occur in your brain and body from working attentively in this way, I know you will enjoy watching this video.  From it you will get a clear taste of the magic that can be found in applying the Feldenkrais Method to any activity.  And the music is gorgeous, the depth of feeling wonderful.

2nd SCOLIOSIS WORKSHOP, A different perspective

APPROACHING OURSELVES FROM A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE...

How we use our bodies in our daily activities, sport and in workouts exerts a significant influence on our skeletons and bone remodeling (bone build up and breakdown), per Wolff's law.  This means that the forces traveling through our skeletons as we move (or don't move) affect the shape and structure of our bones at a minute but powerful level.  This is seen most easily in athletes whose bones are actually larger in the parts of their anatomy most affected by their sport.

If we move and use ourselves more mindfully, intelligently and with more efficiency and comfort, the effects can be very wide reaching indeed.  This is of particular importance to people who have structural irregularities, chronic pain, or limited movement, including scoliosis.

Thus, we can --and do-- whether intentionally or not, affect the integrity and comfort of our bodies. We have the capacity and power to do this in a positive way, but it requires working with attention and intention.  If you are interested in rediscovering yourself in this way, I invite you to join us for a workshop or class.  The next Scoliosis workshop is May 20. Best wishes, Carole Bucher, 2012

A New Approach to Chronic Pain

Bridget Quebodeaux, a GCFP in Los Angeles, shares her experience and insight into chronic pain in this very interesting article. If you suffer from pain, I bet you will find this intriguing:         

Why toaster ovens don't get fibromyalgia...By Bridget Quebodeaux, GCFP

As a Feldenkrais® practitioner, I often work with people who have chronic conditions and unexplained pain. They come from different walks of life. They have different personal histories and life experiences. They have different strengths and weaknesses and different temperaments and moods. They are different. Their pain is different. And yet the first words they speak are often the same: “I’ve tried everything and nothing helps.”

Sometimes it’s as if I’m being offered a fair warning, “Don’t feel badly if what you do doesn’t work. Nothing does.” Other times, I feel as if I’m being dared to make any difference at all. Always present is the hesitant hope that the Feldenkrais Method® will be the something that finally helps.

  



In recent decades, the biopsychosocial model has become the most accepted model for viewing chronic pain. The biopsychosocial approach says chronic pain is just part of the experience of a whole person living in the world. Hurting bodies cannot be understood in parts or in isolation of the thinking, sensing, feeling person walking around in them and the environment in which they live and ache. Personal histories, feeling management strategies, relationships, and beliefs are no less a part of felt pain than an old injury or a job that requires repetitive movement, and getting better is not a linear process of problem identification and symptom removal.

 



Research suggests a multidisciplinary healing strategy. Many people take that to mean they need a physical therapist, psychotherapist, massage therapist, energy healer and breath coach (to name a few). My belief is that less is usually more. Doing more won’t make what you do more helpful. Doing more won’t make it more likely that you will stumble onto the one approach or combination of approaches that “fixes” your problem and ends your pain. Doing more makes you tired and it isn’t necessary.

Doing well is much easier and will yield much better results. I suggest beginning by banishing the hope of being fixed. People can’t be fixed like kitchen appliances and old cars.

It may feel as though all your pain exists in one or more parts of your body and if you could just fix those parts, you’d be flying high. Indeed, if you were a ’69 Mustang or a toaster oven, you could have those parts repaired or replaced and be on your way. Not so with the parts of you that hurt.

I began the last lecture I gave on chronic pain with the following quote from the NOI group, “Discs do not cause pain anymore than genital stimulation causes love. Discs contribute to the pain experience.” If discs in fact merely contribute to the pain experience (as I believe they do) then consider the following:

FEEL MUCH BETTER THIS WINTER!

Hi Everyone!

We seem to feel our aches, pains and physical issues more, when the weather is cold or changeable, so stability and balance are even more important to us when the ground is wet or icy.  Who hasn't taken a tumble from stepping on an unseen slippery place during winter?

To support better balance and to relieve wintery aches and pains, Feldenkrais will help you keep your feet on the ground in comfort and stability.  Dr. Feldenkrais' primary focus was to create lessons that teach to us bring more of ourselves into our conscious brain map, thereby connecting to ourselves more fully.  In this way, your body is more able to call upon its own natural internal intelligence in all the movements you undertake.

This improved connection with your internal body intelligence will have a positive influence on all your activities!

• In yoga classes and fitness training
  
• walking the dog, or going up or down stairs
• skiing and other winter sports
  
• or going out for the mail, getting in or out of your car!

And as your range of movement and stability improve, aches and pains lessen; tension releases, feeling returns and a sense of comfort develops, no matter what your age or condition.

Note that 'no matter what your age and condition' is a key Feldenkrais concept and I will say more about it soon.  The point is, you can optimize how you feel and move, whether you are 20 or 80 yrs old; whether you are a professional athlete or using a walker.  Each of us can find movement that is more comfortable and efficient, when we are are more fully present in our bodies, instead of dissociated from our physical conditions.  This is what Feldenkrais teaches and I invite you to explore for yourself what this can mean for you. 

Classes will be going all winter:
It's a good opportunity to take time for yourself, make feeling better a personal priority.  It can give you more energy and capacity to do the things you love.  Maps and complete schedules are in the left side bar.  Check often for Holiday schedule updates.
Meanwhile, stay warm and feel well!
Best wishes,
Carole

How is Feldenkrais different from other modalities?

The purpose of the material below is to address in a simple way questions people often ask me about the Feldenkrais Method -- it looks at a few basic elements of form, and does not touch on philosophy, function, or the endless list of possible comparatives. The material is a synthesis of existing information and my own thoughts.  I hope the reader will take these brief paragraphs in the spirit in which they are meant.  Thanks! Carole


FUNDAMENTAL FELDENKRAIS® = LEARNING
Awareness Through Movement® and Functional Integration®

The basis of the Feldenkrais Method is about learning in the body and the nervous system — learning that happens profoundly through your own experience, while doing gentle, guided, non-habitual movement sequences. As you direct your attention to sense and feel yourself in movement, your brain understands at a deep level that it is no longer limited by habits. The body and mind learn to release and connect more deeply; new patterns of thinking, feeling and movement emerge that can be used at any age and in every activity.

How Feldenkrais is different than…

· Yoga: The Feldenkrais Method is focused on movement, function and individual, dynamic organization, i.e., each person discovering their own most efficient and comfortable way to accomplish the action required in each moment. Yoga focuses on perfecting specific positions or static poses that everyone seeks to perform or hold in the same, ideal way.

· T’ai Chi: Feldenkrais, though similar to T’ai Chi in focusing on movement with the whole self, builds up incrementally to a refined quality of movement using simple, developmentally oriented steps. Each person performs Feldenkrais movements differently, according to capacity and physical condition; i.e., there is no form. T’ai Chi movements are precise forms that are learned in whole, and are performed in the the same by everyone.

· Pilates: Feldenkrais is similar to Pilates, being concerned with physical coordination and organization; it differs by being oriented toward efficient, easy and reversible movement and not only building strength. Your body is the only equipment you need for Feldenkrais.

How is Feldenkrais different from physical therapy?

The Feldenkrais Method centers on helping students study their existing movement patterns and re-learn the transmission of movement throughout their whole body, while minimizing unnecessary muscular contraction and tension. Examining movement in all parts of the body and its effect on all other parts, supports the development of stable, comfortable and efficient action and movement. Physical therapy targets specific muscles or muscle groups that are isolated from the rest of the body for repair and/or strengthening.

How is Feldenkrais different from chiropractic?

Feldenkrais lessons do not adjust or manipulate bones per se. Instead, lessons present new movement patterns and possibilities to your nervous system that safely help you regulate your own movement choices--both consciously and subconsciously. Chiropractic manipulates bones directly; but because muscles pull bones out of alignment, if new movement patterns aren’t presented, your muscles return to their old patterns, despite numerous skeletal adjustments--and the sequence of events causing misalignment begins anew.

Carole Bucher, BA, GCFP/T
renofeldenkrais.blogspot.com
775-240-7882

What Awareness Means for Musicians (and the rest of us, too...)

Musicians (and others) have long used the Feldenkrais Method® to refine and improve their playing; in effect, tuning themselves, by bringing their bodies and brains into greater harmony. When we use ourselves with more conscious awareness, we cannot fail to improve nearly any undertaking. This is one of the gifts that people often receive as their capacity for self-awareness and sensing develops and accumulates. This capacity becomes apparent in our daily activities and in nearly everything we do, enriching our experience in living.

Our brief journey below into one musician's experience is uplifting and exciting, and most important, his experience can apply to us all. 

I hope you enjoy reading it.  Best wishes, Carole

Freeing Your Body Towards Greater Motion and Emotion
By Patricia Holman, GCFP

A saxophone player once came to me suffering through arm, shoulder and back pain. He was familiar with the Feldenkrais Method because he had taken the group classes, called Awareness Through Movement, during his college music training. His practices were becoming more and more troublesome and he found he needed to inhibit certain movements in order to make it through a performance. Technically, he had mastered his instrument. His level of virtuosity was quite apparent. Yet, he was physically uncomfortable. This same virtuosity, as well as his livelihood, was being threatened by his current condition.
In the beginning of one of our first lessons, I asked him to play a few musical passages that were: a.) easy and comfortable, b.) difficult and required significant effort, and c.) poignant and full of emotion. Observing him play, I noticed a great attention to the music, but considerably less attention to himself. The musical notes were the foreground, and his body a distant background. I noticed there was little acknowledgment of the ground through his feet. His difficulty manifested itself in back and shoulder pain. His eyes were strongly tensed and his head position forward, as if he were trying to reach the musical notes on an imaginary music stand. His habitual tensions were forming the quality of tone, effort and expression in his playing.
When we are unaware of habits such as tensing our shoulders, neck and jaw, or stressing our backs unnecessarily, or are unaware of the support of the ground through our feet, we may develop some kind of difficulty. In the series of lessons we would have together, I was hoping to show him the relationships among these forgotten parts of himself and how this new awareness could change his overall effort and tension. I wanted to help him become more present to the process of music making.
After this initial exercise, I had him lie down on a table, where I began to explore with him the simple act of lifting and lowering his right arm, then his left arm, on the table, resting for several breaths between each series of small lifts. We proceeded to lifting and lowering his right leg, then 

How the Feldenkrais Method works, by Dr. Feldenkrais!

‘Bodily Expressions’ Moshe Feldenkrais D.Sc.

Published posthumously in Somatics, Vol. 6, No. 4, Spring/Summer 1988. (Translated from the French by Thomas Hanna)  http://www.feldworks.com/kbp/entry/9/

Our self-image is a body-image, which not only determines what we think of ourselves but also what we do and how we do it. The behaviour of human beings is firmly based on the self-image they have made for themselves. Accordingly, if one wishes to change one's behaviour, it will be necessary to change this image.

What is a self-image? I would argue that it is a body image; namely, it is the shape and relationship of the bodily parts, which means the spatial and temporal relationships, as well as the kinaesthetic feelings. Included with this are feelings and emotions and one's thoughts. All of these form an integrated whole. How does a self-image come about? Everyone feels that his way of walking, speaking, and behaving is uniquely his own and unchangeable. He totally identifies with this behaviour-as if he were born with it. The way he sees objects in space, the way he tracks movements, the way he inclines his head, and the way he looks at things seem to be innate; and he believes it impossible to change any of these things --other than perhaps their rate of speed or intensity or duration.

Despite this belief, everything central to human behaviour is acquired only by a long period of learning: to walk, to speak, to see a photo or painting in three dimensions -one's very movements, attitude, and language are acquired purely according to the accidental circumstances of one's place of birth and environment. Thus, when we learn to speak a second language, we always speak it with an accent-an earlier learning always stands in the way of a new learning. It is always difficult to sit as the Japanese or Hindus do, because earlier habits stand in the way.

Thus, whatever the accident of one's birth, the difficulty we experience when attempting to change mental or physical habits has little to do with heredity and everything to do with the general problem of changing any habit that has already been acquired. It is obvious that the difficulty is not in the habit per se but with the earlier point in time at which these accidental habits were formed. And so it appears that our self-image is acquired purely by accident.

Hence, the question arises as to whether it might be possible that one can freely choose new habit patterns which are more appropriate and fitting to one's unique person. Understand that what is in question here is not simply the replacement of one mode of acting with another which would be purely a static change. What I am suggesting is a change in our way of acting which aims at a dynamic change in the whole process of one's action.

Before we go any further, it may be worthwhile to engage in a brief experiment that will allow one to feel this possibility rather than merely to understand it.

If you lie down on your stomach and bend the right knee so that the lower leg points up toward the ceiling, you will find that the relation of the foot with respect to the leg is highly variable with different people. Everyone does not hold his foot in the same position. This becomes obvious if we place a book on the sole of the foot: The plane of the book will most