What You Will Learn

A central tenet of the Feldenkrais Method is that human beings have transformational potential and that all people, regardless of their age or condition, can learn. At the core of the Feldenkrais Method is a fluid and dynamic state of mind that fosters a process of inquiry, rather than one that seeks to define solutions. As a student of FTA, you will learn how to:

• Enter again and again into the process of refining your abilities;
• Acquire and fine-tune more accurate, adaptable, and resilient behavior.

Then, with these discoveries, you will learn to help others do the same.

Areas Covered:

Exploring Self-Organization when giving hands-on lessons. © Carey Haskell

Self-Organization

Self-organization will be a key focus throughout this training. As you improve your self-organization, you allow for clearer communication and more sensitivity between you and your client.

Self-organization is primary. Through Self-Organization a greater capacity for sensing, feeling and learning emerges and therefore affects comfort, ease, and efficiency. As Self-Organization improves there is a refinement of self-image, evoking a clarity of movement and its relationship of self, environment and function. This profoundly influences the learning environment. —Feldenkrais Guild of North America's Feldenkrais Practitioner Profile

In the Feldenkrais Method, how you do something is as important as what you do. Self-organization speaks to the “how.” It is the basis for what you are doing with your clients. As you learn to organize support more clearly through your skeleton, you increase your ability to sense and feel and you provide a clearer learning environment for your clients.

Good self-organization allows the practitioner to be in an attentive state from which Functional Integration lessons arise. Profound quietness and internal strength provide the basis for a practitioner to work effectively. It leads to a high quality of professional discourse between the client and practitioner.

Better self-organization is also at the heart of what you will teach your students. With it, they will be able to move more comfortably and efficiently. By finding their internal strength, they can master the challenges of an uncertain world.

studying Biomechanical Principles. © Yulia Kriskovets

Biomechanical Principles

Biomechanical principles are the foundation to the Feldenkrais Method. They are our standard for flexible behavior and good posture. You’ll be studying those principles from start to finish of the training. Your embodiment of them will deepen with your study of Awareness Through Movement and Functional Integration.
 

Playing with martial arts principles.

Knowledge from Many Subjects

The Feldenkrais Method is not limited to addressing or improving a single aspect of human function and behavior—its study requires understanding from many disciplines including: physics; anatomy; physiology; evolution; psychology; infant development; martial arts; systems theory; and learning theory. Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais was well-versed in these topics and used them to guide the creation of the work.

We are not a static building, and to restore the good functioning of a human being is a much more delicate matter, necessitating more fundamental knowledge of how we grow to function as we do, and greater information and insight to understand what the person himself does not. After all, he is a person like you and me. —Moshe Feldenkrais, The Elusive Obvious

Clarifying how the brain works. © Roger Russell.

Feldenkrais and the Brain

Understanding the brain science that supports the Feldenkrais Method is both exhilarating and important. Roger Russell, a Feldenkrais Trainer in Heidelberg, Germany, has spent a significant portion of his 40-year career making sense of existing and emerging brain science, specifically for Feldenkrais practitioners. These include: evolutionary theory; cognitive science; philosophy; neurophysiology; and child development. Roger is a core member of our staff, and will share his teaching, presentations, lectures, and reading suggestions throughout the training. He’ll be present during every segment, either online or in person.
 

Discussing what "marketing" really means. © Yulia Kriskovets

Building a Business

Building a business that sustains your practice as a Feldenkrais practitioner requires skills beyond those of teaching and understanding the Method. Client attraction and enrollment skills are critical to creating a practice that fulfills you in every way. Becoming a self-employed practitioner is one of the skills you will take with you at the end of the training.

Your guide in this arena is Allison Rapp, who has been a Feldenkrais Trainer since 1991 and a business coach since 2010. She supports Feldenkrais and other hands-on practitioners in becoming transformational leaders.

Everything you do to build your business will feel like it fits exactly to you and your clients. It's actually an application of Feldenkrais principles in another area. Allison will guide you in learning to talk about your work in ways that help people understand why they need you. You'll learn how to:

• Market your business in a way that feels like you.
• Have a client enrollment conversation.
• Give a talk about your work.
• Format a workshop so that participants are inspired to continue working with you.
• Tackle issues around money, time, and energy.
• Learn how to become known in your local area in a variety of ways.
• Claim your innate strengths and learn to use them to make building your business easier.
• Identify your potential pitfalls so that you can easily avoid them.
• Ask for and get great testimonials that will inspire others to work with you.
• Coach clients to refer people they know who need your help... and make sure the referral lands.

Your skills will deepen over time; thus, Allison will work with you throughout your training. You'll have lifetime access to the training materials and to twice-monthly group calls with her as you continue to build your business and develop it according to your own dream. You'll have access to more than $6,000 of reliable, proven business training, at no additional cost to you.

Exploring movement, finding personal growth. © Yulia Kriskovets

Personal Growth, Transformation, Maturation

The personal maturation that takes place with the Feldenkrais Method can be described as the “dignity of choice.” By studying your habits, appreciating your past, and developing new capacities for internal strength and skill, you will discover the specific means for choosing your direction in life and appreciating the internal resources you bring to the process. You’ll learn how to author your own experiences in life, rather than living out of habits and acquired history.

In a perfectly matured body which has grown without great emotional disturbances, movements tend gradually to conform to the mechanical requirements of the surrounding world. The nervous system has evolved under the influence of these laws and is fitted to them. However, in our society we do, by the promise of great reward or intense punishment, so distort the even development of the system, that many acts become excluded or restricted. The result is that we have to provide special conditions for furthering adult maturation of many arrested functions. The majority of people have to be taught not only the special movements of our repertoire, but also to reform patterns of motions and attitudes that should never have been excluded or neglected —Moshe Feldenkrais, Higher Judo

Dr. Feldenkrais during the Amherst Training. © International Feldenkrais® Federation Archive

Amherst Training Materials

In 1980, Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais taught his final practitioner training in Amherst, MA, the recordings of which you'll study in the FTA. This will help clarify your understanding of Dr. Feldenkrais’ approach to the work and allow you to experience his teaching firsthand. You will meet the genius of Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais, with his own faults and wisdom as a human being, as you learn from the founder of the Method.