What is the Feldenkrais Method®?
A Guide to Awareness Through Movement® and Functional Integration®
Let’s start with the hard part: how to pronounce Feldenkrais®. Feld-en-krais, which rhymes with paradise. Feldenkrais/paradise.
Founder of Feldenkrais Method
The Feldenkrais Method
It is a revolutionary functional movement training approach created by Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais. Through Awareness Through Movement® classes and Functional Integration® sessions, individuals learn to move with greater ease and precision. Whether you’re dealing with stiffness, pain, or functional limitations, Feldenkrais training can help you rediscover comfort and improve your quality of life.
Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais
Created by Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais, the Feldenkrais Method® is a functional movement class that teaches easier and more efficient movement. Whether you’re dealing with stiffness, pain, functional limitations, or an injury that hasn’t healed, Feldenkrais training can help you move with greater ease and precision. The Feldenkrais Method is used by athletes, musicians, actors, therapists, teachers, and mostly by anyone who wants to move through the day with less discomfort and pain.
The Feldenkrais Method® encourages us to keep learning across the span of our entire lives. As adults, you might only think about learning to walk or bend in the context of someone with a serious injury who needs to relearn basic movement. In reality, over the course of our lives, we all develop habits around movements like walking, reaching, and getting up and down. These unconscious patterns can cause pain, discomfort, stiffness, and immobility.
That is where the Feldenkrais Method comes in.
Founder of Feldenkrais Method
Somatic Movement = Learning From the Inside Out
The Feldenkrais Method is part of the field of Somatic Education. “Soma” is the Greek word for the body, and “education” refers to the learning process or “learning through one’s body.” This is why we call our online Feldenkrais membership, Your Learning Body.
In the Feldenkrais Method, we help the brain become malleable to new ways of moving. This is what sets somatic education apart from approaches that focus only on strength, stretching, breath, or quick fixes like medication or surgery.
Feldenkrais is grounded in the concept of neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to change, reshape, and reform. The brain absorbs new information, sorts it, and decides what to make into a habit.
Once we reach adulthood, many of us forget how we acquired the ability to stand, walk, or even reach. As infants, toddlers, and babies, we were habit-generating powerhouses, constantly experimenting with sensation, action, the environment, and the results of our actions. We relentlessly practiced movements like rolling, reaching, thumb sucking, and sitting up. Those first steps laid the foundation for how we walk today.
Once a child develops a reasonably reliable pattern, it becomes wired in as a habit, and they move on to acquire the next skill. We are born with an innate drive to explore and learn through movement and sensation. That drive may have gone dormant, but it’s still with us—we just need a little help to reactivate it, discovering efficient and enjoyable pathways for function or expression.
Maybe you want to dance, walk, or even garden. If you’re in pain or have an injury, you might be focused solely on getting out of pain.
Bioplasticity is also available to us. We shape and form our bodies based on how we use ourselves. While we know that muscle building is within our control, we can influence almost every aspect of the human body and experience by improving the way we move. Our skeleton is remodeled every seven years, and the quality of movement guides how it’s remodeled.
By returning to learning from the inside out, just as we did as children, we can turn back the hands of time.
There are two aspects to the Feldenkrais Method: private, hands-on sessions called Functional Integration®, and group sessions called Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement® classes. The beauty of Awareness Through Movement lessons is that they can be done online with incredible success.
Cynthia Allen, partner in Future Life Now, is a Guild Certified Feldenkrais PractitionerCM who offers somatic movement through her Feldenkrais online training called Your Learning Body. She has helped over 200,000 people through summits and online classes, assisting individuals from all walks of life to move better, feel better, think better, and live better.
What happens in a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement® class during a Feldenkrais training program?
The Feldenkrais teacher provides verbal directions and cues, guiding students through movement sequences typically done lying down, sitting, or standing.
You’ll first be led to calm and center yourself. From there, you’ll be invited to direct your attention to different areas of the body, slowing down to engage in what can be described as a movement puzzle—a series of unique, novel movements designed to connect you with awareness, curiosity, and experimentation.
This process helps to improve the quality of your thinking, actions, and overall experience.
Sensing, Thinking, Feeling, Acting
The language of learning from the inside out
You will be guided through slow and small movement sequences and asked to notice the differences felt in various parts of the body. This process, simple as it may seem, promotes deep learning.
When first participating in an Awareness Through Movement lesson, you might find it easy—or even silly. But by engaging intentionally, your senses are heightened, and you gradually realize that what seemed simple holds layers of insight. Over time, even more physically challenging movement sequences become easier and more accessible through these unfolding explorations.
We all enjoy riddles or puzzles—especially those that are just challenging enough without being overwhelming. Each Awareness Through Movement lesson engages the brain with the perfect challenge of a movement puzzle. The brain becomes curious, awakening both body and mind.
Awareness Through Movement classes vary in complexity. Participants are never asked to do anything that causes pain or emotional hesitancy. If a movement feels uncomfortable, it can be done in imagination or skipped entirely.
Progression is gradual and allows each person to expand their functional range while reducing discomfort and minimizing the risk of injury. Nonjudgmental in nature, these lessons teach you to attend to your own process and to release ambition in favor of true learning.
Quieting the Nervous System
One of the key features of the Feldenkrais Method is the value it places on quieting the nervous system. A good learning state is one that’s free from judgment, anxiety, or pain.
From this place of relative calm, we can move with less tension and explore new, less familiar ways of using both our body and mind. Over time, we learn to regulate the nervous system, finding balance between states.
Excitement is needed for larger, active demands, while calmness is essential for rest. The ability to shift between these states is vital for both health and survival.
What effect does a Feldenkrais
Method training have?
Initially, students notice subtle changes, such as a decrease in stiffness and an increase in range of motion. Over time, these initial gains lead to significant transformations—like the ability to walk, run, climb stairs, and handle everyday tasks such as vacuuming, gardening, or carrying heavy grocery bags.
Classes are often planned around a theme—such as neck comfort, back health, or getting up and down from the floor. However, every lesson integrates movement from head to toe. Even if the focus is on knees, you may experience impressive results for neck pain.
Lessons are often profoundly relaxing, with improvements that can continue unfolding for days afterward. With a series of sessions, learning builds, and everyday experiences are enhanced. Students often discover themselves achieving potential they never thought possible.
Feldenkrais Awareness
Through Movement can help people with
- Excessively tight muscles begin to move freely again
- Fear of movement get out into the world again
- Arthritis and disc disease move with less pain and more joy
- Physical or emotional trauma find a way to thrive
- Feeling old and confined in movement
- Becoming comfortable with one’s body and movement at any age
- Little or no awareness of their body learn to slow down and listen to themselves
- Fibromyalgia or CRPS learn to calm their nervous system and experience less pain
- Injury that doesn’t seem to resolve can suddenly get much better
- Getting back to the sports you love
- Prolonging their career as a bodyworker or therapist
- Playing that musical instrument without all the pain
- Neurological challenges where the quality of movement is impacted, such as Parkinson’s Disease, Multiple Sclerosis, Muscular Dystrophy or a stroke. You can reclaim some of what has been lost.
The list is LONG, and we can’t mention every situation—but we know you are out there. If you’re facing a problem that feels unsolvable, we invite you to try the Feldenkrais approach.
It offers hope by helping you experience your body-mind as a creative ally, not the enemy of disease or despair.
What Does Feldenkrais Fix or Cure?
This is not a treatment protocol. It is not a medical modality. It is a powerful way of harnessing your innate capacity to help yourself.
In that process, people may say the Feldenkrais Method fixed their back or knee pain, restored their voice, or got them back to playing pickleball. And yes, that—and much more—has occurred for thousands of people in our practice. But it is not a cure or a fix.
Yet, it is powerful because YOU are powerful. When your brain and body get the right stimulation, you can improve the quality of your life immensely.
What is Feldenkrais like?
It is NOT like physical or occupational therapy.
It is NOT Tai Chi.
It is NOT yoga or Pilates.
It is NOT massage therapy.
Feldenkrais is a method that stands on its own, offering something unique. The modalities above can be great, but if they aren’t giving you what you need and you’re looking for a respectful, painLESS approach to healing and performance, run—don’t walk—to try out the Feldenkrais Method.
What Online Feldenkrais Training Program do you offer?
If you are here, you may have already tried traditional therapy, medications, surgery, exercise classes, meditation and found they simply didn’t deliver all the help you are looking for.
Your Learning Body, Cynthia Allen’s online Feldenkrais membership, offers something different. Using Awareness Through Movement, we focus on:
- Gentle, pain-free movement.
- Teaching YOU how to guide yourself to healing.
- Gradually reintroducing flexibility through the mind/body connection.
- Easing joint and muscle pain by redistributing effort throughout your body instead of relying on a few areas so much.
Your Learning Body is a virtual community of people who share the common desire to unite body, mind, and spirit while finding solutions to their unique physical and emotional challenges.
Within the membership, Allen provides key teachings, such as the 7 Secret Keys to Discovering Your Learning Body.
The membership includes the option to participate in all our LIVE online Awareness Through Movement series, taught by Cynthia Allen and guest teachers throughout the year. While the membership is primarily based on Feldenkrais work, Allen brings in guest teachers from fields like NLP and Bones for Life.
It also includes an online library of hundreds of on-demand lessons that can be accessed at anytime.
Something special happens when the mind becomes flexible through slow, central nervous system-rich movement explorations. Physical options open up.
Your Learning Body Student
FAQs
Let’s address some of the most common questions.
What is Feldenkrais Method training?
Feldenkrais Method training is a revolutionary functional movement approach created by Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais. Through Awareness Through Movement® classes and Functional Integration® sessions, individuals learn to move with greater ease and precision. Whether you’re dealing with stiffness, pain, or functional limitations, Feldenkrais training can help you rediscover comfort and improve your quality of life.
How much does Feldenkrais training cost?
There are many levels to exploring the Method. If you wish to benefit for your health and wellbeing, you can study with us for as low as $1.72/day. No travel is required. You can do it from your own home or office when you are a member of our Your Learning Body community.
If you wish to become a practitioner, you will need to locate a Guild-approved trainer. The costs will vary according to the training program and the country they are offered. You will need to allow yourself a few weeks a year for 3-4 years to attend the course and between $6,000 to $10,000 USD per year. We do NOT offer practitioner training here at Future Life Now.
Can I do Awareness Through Movement lessons online?
Absolutely! Awareness Through Movement works extremely well online. We have a virtual community called Your Learning Body. Cynthia Allen, Feldenkrais teacher, guides students to get the most out of the Feldenkrais program, addressing their specific challenges through that program. You can learn more and get on a waitlist here.
Is Feldenkrais training suitable for people with osteoporosis?
Feldenkrais can be appropriate for people with osteoporosis with modifications. But, we generally recommend those with concerns about Osteopenia or Osteoporosis use our Bones for Life program. It requires far fewer modifications and more directly addresses the issue of bone health.