I’m pleased to share with you that I’ve made significant progress in my free audio project. This fall I set out to capture good recordings of my live classes with lessons I’ve sourced directly from Moshe’s 1972 classic Feldenkrais text Awareness Through Movement. As of now we’ve got five already available online, with a sixth currently in editing, coming early next week.
Whenever I’ve needed to study or reinvigorate my knowledge of the basics of the Feldenkrais Method I’ve found this text incredibly useful. I explored it when I was originally studying Feldenkrais as a music student trying to recover from my own injury, and later as a practitioner trainee. I still pick it up frequently now, and I’m almost 10 years into my professional life as a Feldenkrais Practitioner. I even wrote a blog post with recommendations about studying the text and lessons. Moshe’s introductory chapters explaining the theory of the method, as well as his asides within the lessons which explain how the changes students are experiencing are taking place, are a goldmine for understanding the value of Feldenkrais.
But I’ve always found the lessons themselves quite difficult to do directly out of the book. There’s the large distraction of trying to read a lesson while doing it (it’s not a lot of fun to keep grabbing the book and putting it down, hoping you remember what you’re supposed to be doing and attending to), and Moshe’s descriptions of movements and configurations are often a little obtuse. So, I challenged myself to teach these important lessons in my own words, while staying very close to my understanding of Moshe’s original intention.
And I’m pretty happy with how they’re coming out! I’d like to share with you my developing ATM Series 3: Lessons from Moshe Feldenkrais’s 1972 book titled “Awareness Through Movement”. It’s not the complete set yet. In fact there are 12 lessons originally, and I’ve got six so far. But there’s a lot of good substance for study here and I thought it would be great to share. I’m hoping to find ways to capture recordings of the rest of the lessons in the coming months, though they’re a bit harder to teach in regular weekly public classes (my normal recording venue), so I may have to be creative.
As always feedback is welcome, below, by email, or in comments on the lesson pages themselves.