Awareness Through Movement

Awareness Through Movement is the name Moshe Feldenkrais gave to a series of demonstrations he began to devise when some of his scientific colleagues wanted to know how he was learning to walk normally with a seriously damaged knee. Being an experimental scientist himself, he gave them literal directions on how to move to discover for themselves what he was learning.

Related Topics:
Moshe Feldenkrais - Walk - Knee

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This is a small example: Cup your hands so you could drink from them and bring them to your mouth. Observe how you place your fingers. Which set of fingers lies inside the other? Perhaps the edge of this palm is also a bit inside the other. Now cup your hands again but reverse the way you place your fingers. Put the fingers that were inside to the outside now. Bring your hands to your mouth with the fingers reversed and observe how different it feels to do it this way.

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A simple action like this could become the first step in a lesson that would end with a marked difference in ones overall ability to move.

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Each such lesson enabled the student to temporarily set aside habitual patterns in order to enjoy freer, easier movement. This was accompanied by a more accurate and more complete perception of the body and movement in general.

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Feldenkrais understood these changes to be improvements of the body image, which from a technical viewpoint is the arrangement of areas of the motor cortex relative to the body. The body image was depicted by Dr Wilder Penfield in the form of a homunculus. Since activity in the motor cortex plays a key role in proprioception Feldenkrais realized that changes in our ability to move are inseparable from changes in our conscious perception of ourselves as embodied. This relationship is clear and open to introspection. Make a quick list of body parts you know you have but which you cannot feel consciously and compare it with a list of those you can feel. Which list contains the members you can move?

Related Topics:
Body image - Wilder Penfield - Homunculus - Motor cortex - Conscious - Perception

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Thus Awareness Through Movement Lessons are intended to do just what their title says. Firstly they improve awareness by using and improving the student's ability to move. And secondly they do this by way of demonstration. Eventually the student realizes that each lesson is an example of exploratory learning like that which all human children engage in when they play.

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