Somatic Therapy: Understanding the Wholeness of the Body
Every single one of us performs a role. In society, we all contribute something of value. Some teach future generations. Some lead. Others provide nourishment, joy, healing, or encouragement. What each of us provides to society makes everyone stronger. Yet each person...
Functional Movement: How We Move Is an Expression of Our Response to Life
For every action, there is a reaction. This statement is true in both physics and in life. When it comes to movement, how you express yourself is a physical demonstration of your lived experience in your environment. When you embody healthy, functional movement, what...
Tapping Your Potential Energy for Positive Change
In physics, potential energy refers to the stored energy in an object because of its position relative to other objects or its state. An example might be a ping-pong ball rolling toward the edge of the ping-pong table. While the ball has kinetic energy by virtue of...
Our Movements and Choices Reflect Our Emotional Maturity
What is emotional maturity? Is it the ability to understand and control your emotions? If that is true, then what, if anything, does emotional maturity have to do with the choices that we make in our daily, habitual movements? Every person has a different emotional...
Creatures of Habit: How Emotion and Motion Are Linked
Our bodies and brains have a reciprocal relationship. Dysfunction in the body often leads to dysfunction in the brain and vice versa. Let’s say you’re feeling sad. Take a moment to become aware of your posture. Are your shoulders slumped forward? Is your trunk...
Sensing Your Body’s Support Can Improve Strength
The way we support ourselves in our posture and movement says a lot about what is going on in our nervous systems. Many of our habits form on a subconscious level, which can make it difficult to change them. Some of those habits take away our ability to fully utilize...
Imagination and Our Concept of Embodiment
Whether you think about it consciously or not, your nervous system creates a mental “image” or idea of how your body moves. Walking, standing, sitting, and other everyday movements and postures are pressed into the totality of your body’s essence, forming a complete...
Understanding the Levers in Your Body Can Help You Move More Efficiently
Want to move more efficiently? You need to learn about levers. In the third century BCE, the Greek mathematician, physicist, and engineer Archimedes is said to have uttered the phrase, “Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the earth.” No, he was not claiming to...
The Problem of Perceived Weakness: How Awareness Can Improve Self-Image
The ideas of self-image and self-esteem are largely considered within the realm of mental application. In other words, how we view ourselves — positively, negatively, or somewhere else on this conceptual continuum of self awareness — has an impact on our mental...
Your Skin Can Make You Fall: 3 Reasons to Care
Peripheral neuropathy changes your skin. Nerves that carry sensory information are supposed to look like a fist-full of uncooked spaghetti—a long cord with hundreds of small cords inside. At the ends of the small cords are sensors or receptors with different jobs:...
What Moshe Feldenkrais Understood about the Body Can Ease Your Pain
We overexert ourselves. We strain and we ignore the messages our bodies send to us to the detriment of our health. Moshe Feldenkrais understood this. We live in a culture that prizes the ability to grin through the pain. Our heroes are those who can put mind over...
Differentiating the Self and the Spirit
By Andrew Heimann Spirituality is not the absence of conflict; it is the ability to flourish because of it. To avoid conflict and chaos in life detracts from the human experience, which is what ultimately helps our spirit and spirituality blossom. We become our...
How the Feldenkrais Method and Somatic Education Create Possibility
Moshe Feldenkrais once said, “If you don’t know what you are doing, you can’t do what you want.” Perhaps no other phrase so captures the challenges that the Feldenkrais Method and Somatic Education, such as Integral Human Gait™, help students overcome. Phrased...
The Feldenkrais Awareness Summit: Resiliency, Freedom, and Evolution
We see every day that technology can be used for ill both unconsciously and consciously. But technology can also be used for good. This is definitely the latter. The Feldenkrais Awareness Summit: Resiliency, Freedom, and Evolution—sponsored by Future Life Now OnLine...
Feldenkrais: How Mind and Body Awareness Can Provide Natural Pain Relief
For many people, pain is part and parcel of day-to-day existence. The way they experience life, comfort is the exception, not the rule as it should be. But what many of those people don’t realize is that drugs—like those causing the opioid epidemic—and invasive...
Standing Forward Fold Yoga Pose: Practical Yoga Therapy, Part 4
This is the fourth part of a four part blog post on the standing forward fold yoga therapy pose. If you haven’t yet, please go back and read parts one, two, and three. Standing Forward Fold Yoga Therapy Pose Cue 4: Arms Move at the Same Level as the Head If starting...
Standing Forward Fold Yoga Pose: Practical Yoga Therapy, Part 3
This is the third part of a four part blog post on the standing forward fold yoga pose. If you haven’t yet, please go back and read parts one and two. By following the first link, you can read more about disengaging the toe pads. The second link contains information...
Standing Forward Fold Yoga Pose: Practical Yoga Therapy, Part 2
This is the second part of a four part blog post on the standing forward fold yoga pose. If you haven’t yet, please go back and read part one. Standing Forward Fold Yoga Pose Cue 2: Pelvis Sways behind the Heels and Feet Most instructors cue “exhale forward hinging at...
Standing Forward Fold Yoga Pose: Practical Yoga Therapy, Part 1
Searching the internet, one can find many videos and detailed lists on how to correctly perform the Standing Forward Fold Yoga Pose or Uttanasana. Seeing how popular yoga has become, that should come as no surprise. According to the 2007 National Health Interview...
Celebrating National Yoga Month: The Standing Forward Fold Yoga Pose
Searching the internet, one can find many videos and detailed lists on how to correctly perform the Standing Forward Fold Yoga Pose or Uttanasana. Seeing how popular yoga has become, that should come as no surprise. According to the 2007 National Health Interview...
Bones for Life ® and Senior Citizen Day Somatic Education for the Elderly
Bones for Life and Senior Citizen Day On August 21st, Americans have an opportunity to celebrate the wisdom and achievements of their elders, as well as advocate for the rights of older people all over the world. Senior Citizens Day, which was originally celebrated on...
The Physiology of Social Wellness: Why Social Connections Matter and How to Learn from Your Body’s Reactions to Them
What is social wellness? While retweets and mentions can be validating, it certainly isn’t how many friends, followers, or likes you have on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Even though social media can close the social gap between two...
What is Bones for Life®? An interview with Carol Montgomery.
What is Bones For Life? “The opportunity to improve your posture occurs not when you are standing still, motionless in the center, but when activity is taking place, when you have a biological necessity to regenerate your skill for adjustability, and you find...
Alternative Movement Program in Geriatric Rehabilitation: Bones for Life®
Geriatric Rehabilitation and Bones For Life: In about a month’s time, I will have the honor of presenting the research that my colleagues—Cynthia M. Allen, Shereen D. Farber, and Mark O. Farber—and I have been putting together on the Bones for Life® program. The...
Handling Stress: It’s Really All About Resilience
Handling Stress and The Role of Resilience: When you see or hear the word “stress,” what image comes to mind? You might see a business executive poring over the latest numbers with a concerned look in her eye. Or perhaps you see a mother waiting up late, her gaze...
Treating Sleep as an Illness: Why Our Attitude Toward Sleep is Wrong
In what ways can we view lack of sleep as an illness? “Sleep…Take all the time you need for each breath.” – Michael Krugman, Feldenkrais Practitioner and creator of Sounder Sleep What happens when we sleep? It’s something we spend about a third of our...
Self Compassion: Be Kind to Yourself, and You’ll Be Kind to Others
Self compassion: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” – Mahatma Gandhi I’m sure you’ve seen the above quotation floating around, perhaps slapped on a bumper or printed on a motivational poster. These words are a great reminder that making an impact in the...
January is Thyroid Awareness Month: Why the Psychosomatic Connection Matters
The Psychosomatic Connection: If you’ve looked at a diagram of a thyroid during Thyroid Awareness Month this January, you may not think this little butterfly-shaped gland could do too much to affect your body or mind. Of course, you would be wrong. I certainly didn’t...