Classes and one-to-one lessons

I teach classes in person and online. If it isn’t possible to make an in-person class, the online classes are always possible. Each of these possibilities is beneficial, the more you experience Feldenkrais® the deeper your understanding of yourself can be.

INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP CLASSES

The Feldenkrais Method® is shared with you in two ways. Group classes, called Awareness Through Movement®, and in one-to-one sessions called Functional Integration®. During a group class you join a small community of people, somanauts, who are actively exploring how they can get more out of their moving self. During an individual session, you might be exploring a particular issue of interest or concern to you. In the former I guide you verbally, in the later I guide you with my hands. For these days of zoom there is a hybrid form called Functional Awareness, also shared one-to-one.

Just to say again how much I am loving the sessions and finding them really beneficial. As we build up the movement towards the end I just find it so ‘voluptuous’ (Strange word maybe but that’s how it feels!). All the work recently on the upper ribs and neck have really sensitised me to this area and how ‘dead’ it was before.

JG, Isle of Arran, Scotland 2021

Let the calm of simple curiosity descend all around you. In the quiet place, accompanied by my voice, you will discover new parts and capabilities of your personal real-estate – curling, folding, opening, twisting, turning and reaching. You will encounter ways of doing and being that you might not have experience since you were ever-so-young and in the process of building knowledge about your world for the first time.

By the end of a class, it is very often the case that some deep changes have occurred. The deep explorations will have changed your breathing, your balance, your speaking, your looking, your touching. You will be in the here-and-now of re-imagining, perhaps re-organising your relationship to the world around you of things, people and happenings.

If change has occurred, even for a fleeting but visible second, then your nervous system has registered the fact that change is possible.

A window is opened on a world of limitless adaptation.

HOW CAN YOU FIND OUT MORE?

Here you can find out about the two ways you can meet The Feldenkrais Method® and begin to create radical changes in the way you move in, think, and relate to, your world:

  • Awareness Through Movement®
  • Functional Integration®.
  • Functional Awareness
  • The costs connected with each of these approaches is at the bottom of each introduction.
  • My bank details are at the bottom of the page.
  • All sessions are payable in advance.

AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT®

(ATM)

Online Class Times – Summer term starting 18 April 2023, and running until 27 June

  1. Tuesday Evenings 6.30 – 7.30pm
  2. Thursday Mornings 10.30 – 11.30am
BUY A PACKAGE OF FOUR CLASSES for online classes
4 weeks @ £10 per class £40

This ticket entitles you to any class, until you have used up your four. I am an imperfect policeman, but I will try to keep tabs on your attendance.

NB: It would be great if you could try to use up your four tickets within a month (12 class possibilities to choose from).

  • Please buy in advance of class, if you possibly can.
  • If you can, please let me know which class you intend to come to.
  • If no-one shows up with 10 mins of a class time, I will abandon the session.
  • When you buy your first package I will send you the Zoom link.
  • Booking freedomtomove@outlook.com

During a 45-60 minute ATM lesson, guided by my voice, you spend time in a deep, personal, sensory and observational study of yourself. As the class continues you experience the increasingly pleasing and loud presence of your own curiosity.

This curiosity has been with you since the very beginning, but it gets drowned out by other kinds of voices – necessity, obligation, schedules, the ideas of others and so on. Feldenkrais creates a haven in which you are allowed to make your own discoveries.

The more you experience the unique and highly personal environment that Feldenkrais creates around and within you, the more this elemental voice becomes available for you to hear once again.Each class is different, starting with a focus in one area of your body. By the end your whole self is in movement.

Classes each week will follow the same broad movement theme, set at the beginning of the term. However, the approach differs from group to group as I adapt to each assembly of individuals. This means that if ever you chose to do three classes in a week, you would experience the same material from very different perspectives – further extending the range of your thinking and moving.

Working with Alan over the last few months has been an intriguing and enriching experience. The movements take us into a heightened state of awareness of ourselves and our  surroundings which we almost never experience in our chaotic lives . Alan’s dedication and passion for his work enhance the experience.

GC, Bombay November 2020

About online classes via zoom

Zoom classes in The Feldenkrais Method® are doing something that is more profound than many of us expected. In your own space, which you can configure to your own comfort, you begin to go very deep into your experience of yourself. Moshe Feldenkrais’s ideas and inspirations help you tell the the true story of yourself to yourself.

So, why not come along:

  • clear a you-shaped space where you can lie on the floor, have a towel handy that can become a pad to support your head,
  • wear something easy to move in that can keep you warm if you need it,
  • angle your camera so that I can see you well to enough to adapt my guidance.

Payment details can be found by scrolling down to the bottom of this page.

IN PERSON CLASSES

EDINBURGH

26 April – 28 June 2023

Every Wednesday for 10 weeks

10.30 – 12 noon.

At:
Yoga Collective Edinburgh, Studio 6:2, St Margaret’s House, 151 London Road, Edinburgh
https://goo.gl/maps/EoC5SJzWbS3KfiKJ8

Cost:
  • £100/£85 conc for full course of 10 weeks
  • £60/45 CONC FOR A 5-WEEK BLOCK
  • £15/£10 conc Drop-in.
Conc: Over 65/ Disabled/ in receipt of State Benefit.

  • Invigorate your week with new ideas in your moving and thinking.
  • Discover your in-built ability to astonish yourself.
  • Overcome habitual blocks and frictions in your movement.

If you haven’t experienced the special atmosphere of a Feldenkrais class come along and try it out. You won’t be disappointed! The movement processes of Feldenkrais respect your body where it is, bring improved and deepened awareness to what you are already doing, then begin to expand and enhance your capabilities.

You do not have to prior movement skills to explore and benefit from Feldenkrais. However if you do, whatever movement discipline you engage will be enhanced by time spent understanding how to create, ease, flow, extension and calm confidence in your moving. Feldenkrais can help you find solutions to nagging issues in your everyday movement.

By the end of five sessions, you will have a very much richer sense of how you, personally, move. By the end of term, you will be noticing some profound changes in how you adapt to your world.

The secret to getting more out of your moving body is to refine your ability to observe yourself in action and to throw off the restrictions that life and living places upon you. Your own self has the possibility to astonish you with its hidden potential – whatever your life has been up to this point

For payment details please scroll to the bottom of the page. If you have any questions, please email or message me – details below.

FUNCTIONAL INTEGRATION®

in-person

Cost: £55 per session, with a reduction of £5 per session if a package of five is booked at the outset (reduction of £25).

During an FI® session you lie on a low, wide and long table, fully dressed in comfortable clothing. In some cases, you lie on the floor, or sit in a chair.

image: Wojiech Nowak

After an initial conversation with you concerning the pattern of needs and concerns that brought you to me in the first place, using calm and non-invasive touch, I will gently guide your body through sequences of movement. You will be fully conscious and aware of what is to happen and we will often discuss the results. Occasionally I will ask you to participate in movements.

  • Functional Integration® is not a medical procedure. It is an intensive process of co-learning between you and the practitioner, through which new possibilities and solutions emerge for you in your moving and thinking. My work with you is based on supporting you to develop more detailed knowledge about how your moving and thinking deal with the physical challenges you identify. Expect changes.

The effect of Functional Integration® builds up over time – as with the other Feldenkrais® techniques. I recommend that you consider signing up for a minimum of five sessions, at the end of which your nervous system will have built up a store of memories that allow the insights from our sessions to fully establish in your nervous system and become useful to you. The aim is to build confidence in your resilience to the many destabilising things that the world can throw at you.

  • For an excellent appraisal of the pervasive ways in which Functional Integration® operates check out the chapter on Moshe Feldenkrais’s work in the excellent book The Brain That Changes Itself by the champion of the idea of neuroplasticity, Norman Doidge M.D., https://www.normandoidge.com/?page_id=1259. It used to be thought that after the age of 21 our brain cells begin to die off and that our moving and thinking was therefore fixed and unchangeable as we aged. This has of course been totally disproved in many, many reports. Doidge outlines the excitement of discovering that your brain is near-limitless in its potential to rewire, reform and rebuild.

In many cases, people complete a ‘course’ of FI and go on to attend Awareness Through Movement® classes to continue exploring by themselves.

Feldenkrais can bring about deep changes in the way that you relate both to yourself and to the world around you. You progressively give yourself permission to carry on exploring, in often quite unexpected ways.

The sessions will take place at my studio in the Meadowbank area of Edinburgh, where there is ample parking. In East Anglia, I work from a studio in Manningtree, just a short journey from the mainline railway station.

  • Session 1a: detailed conversation around your particular needs and wishes concerning your moving being. We note any important events in your past that have affected your moving and your ambitions for your moving. This will lead to an agreement between us about how to proceed.
  • Session 1b: Based on our conversation, we embark on a journey. The Method has a philosophy of progressive approximation as you and I move towards a greater sense of integration of your movement with what you wish to achieve. The process of removing restrictions and obstacle to free movement takes time, discussion, play and patience.
  • Sessions 2 to 5: as your nervous system becomes familiar with the approach and the environment of FI®, the sessions become increasingly focused on the needs and concerns that brought you to me.

FUNCTIONAL AWARENESS online

Cost: £50 per session, bookable in advance. Payment in advance following the instructions below.

Functional Awareness is a more intensive, more targeted version of Awareness through Movement®. I devised it during Covid days, but it has proved very usual for some of my clients who require a more personalised approach focused on what might be happening with them and in their moving.

I aim to support you to find a more free, satisfying and playful relationship with the world you move around in everyday.

These sessions are preceded by a detailed conversation between us to give me an idea of the challenges you are facing and to allow us to devise a strategy.

Functional Awareness sessions are based on the process of guidance by my voice and the development of calm curiosity and somatic exploration. I bring to you the full intuitive background of a Feldenkrais practitioner to observe and offer solutions

I recommend that a course of 5 individual lessons be followed, as it takes time for the ‘message’ of Feldenkrais to embed itself firmly in your perceptual, cognitive and motor processes. During your programme, I encourage a process of journaling to facilitate change and energise the discussions between us.

  • Session 1a: detailed conversation around your particular needs, noting any important events in your past that have affected your moving and your ambitions for your moving as we progress through a short programme of lessons. This will lead to an agreement between us about how to proceed.
  • Session 1b: A short, exploratory ATM – we embark on a journey, as you tell me how it is that you sense your moving to be affected in the present moment.
  • Sessions 2 to 5: specially tailored ATM explorations designed around our initial conversations.

Payment details

Payment in advance please.

Please specify your choice of package, and if applicable the specific date you would like to attend, when you contact me to make a booking.

The Zoom link for online classes and the access code for St Margarets House will be shared once payment has cleared into my bank account.

  • Booking: freedomtomove@outlook.com or tel./whatsapp 07782 190615
  • Please reference bank payment [yourname]FK
  • Account details: Co-op Bank – Alan G Wilson
  • A/c no 04394550.
  • Bank sort code 08-92-49

For further information: freedomtomove@outlook.com