Functional Integration® is the one-to-one, hands-on session in which the Feldenkrais practitioner and client work together to increase the client’s movement awareness and capacity, in supportive and non-invasive ways. Usually, the practitioner works with the client (fully clothed) on a low table, using gentle touch and verbal direction to guide the movement sequences that encourage new awareness and learning. The result is improved pain-free movement and improved performance in almost any area—be it sitting, walking, running, playing tennis, playing piano, gardening—whatever involves movement.
A typical session last about an hour. It begins with learning what the concerns of the client are; listening to what they want to improve; or what painful situation may be occurring and how that situation may be connected to their way of moving or acting. Through careful observation of a typical movement pattern (like sitting, walking, reaching), a reference movement, I observe the client’s pattern of action and bring attention to the way they are moving. I use gentle, non-invasive movements with the person lying on a table, sitting or standing, working through the skeletal system to communicate with the nervous system. Through language and movement, I guide the person to recognize their habitual way of moving and then re-educate them to move differently.
We really want to do what is easier. If we can become aware of the amount of effort we are using and find an easier way to do a similar action, we usually adopt it.
Working with Hip Pain
Janet limped into my office and told me her story: Three years earlier she had surgery for a broken ankle. Since then, when walking she had severe pain in her right hip, and she often woke in the middle of the night with similar pain.
I asked her to walk and to notice how she swung her left leg and placed her left foot on the floor, and then to notice what she did with her right side. She was surprised to feel the differences and said she hadn’t been aware of them before. It reminded her of how she had walked when her leg was in a cast.
I suggested that she was walking today as if her ankle were still broken and in a cast. Though her ankle injury had long since healed, the habitual way she had to compensate for her injury and cast had continued. The pain she was experiencing was not a problem with her hip, but a consequence of her habitual way of walking.
Over the next several months, I worked with Janet one-on-one, helping her sense and feel her habitual movement patterns and to learn new ways of walking, standing, sitting and lying down that were comfortable, easier and more efficient. She felt differences almost immediately, and was soon walking without any limp and sleeping through the night, pain-free.
Individual sessions, called Functional Integration®, are one of two ways of experiencing the Feldenkrais Method®. Functional Integration varies with individuals, but a common starting place is observing how a person moves.
How humans move depends on the constraints and variety that are inherent in the design of the skeletal system. In Functional Integration®, I use gentle, non-invasive movements with the person lying on a table, sitting or standing, working through the skeletal system to communicate with the nervous system. Through language and movement, I guide the person to recognize their habitual way of moving and then re-educate them to move differently.
We really want to do what is easier. If we can become aware of the amount of effort we are using and find an easier way to do a similar action, we usually adopt it.
As with Janet, the physical problems so many people experience are rarely just muscular. Muscles only do what the nervous system tell them to do.
The Feldenkrais Method® is an educational and experiential approach that works through movement. We teach people to move more efficiently so they don’t continue to stress the affected area. As Moshe Feldenkrais wrote, “Movement is life, without movement life is unthinkable.”