An international Feldenkrais expert is on the Island this month giving private lessons and workshops to everyone from children and corporate executives to prisoners about to be released.

“Feldenkrais has so many wide applications,” said advanced certified Feldenkrais teacher Frauke Voss, who is based in Toronto. “For one thing, it is not a therapy; it is movement education, and also re-education.”

Practitioners call Feldenkrais ‘a movement modality’. It uses sequential movements to help a client re-connect with their natural ability to move. Habitual patterns are reduced and new alternative ways of movement are learned thus reducing stiffness and pain.

Ms Voss is offering Feldenkrais workshops through the Bermuda Health Co-op on the South Shore in Warwick. Sophia Cannonier, who runs the Health Co-op with her husband, is one of two certified Feldenkrais practitioners on the Island.

Feldenkrais was created by a Ukrainian engineer Moshe Feldenkrais. He was a jujitsu enthusiast who taught self-defence to British naval officers during the Second World War and patented several sonar improvements for the British. On a slippery submarine deck he re-injured an old soccer injury and was no longer able to continue with jujitsu. He refused surgery and began to develop self-awareness and movement techniques that would later lead to the Feldenkrais method. In 1949 he published his first book on the subject, ‘Body and Mature Behavior: A Study of Anxiety, Sex, Gravitation and Learning’.

Feldenkrais is mostly a slow gentle form of moving that can be tailored to the individual’s particular needs, which makes it appropriate for people of varying physical abilities. According to Ms Voss, Feldenkrais work can be done on a newborn who may be having some stiffness in one leg, a stroke patient, or a 90-year-old who wants to get some physical function back.

“The people who attend training come from very diverse backgrounds,” said Ms Voss. “We have psychologists, mathematicians, and teachers — they come from a wide spectrum. Of course, there are dancers and singers and increasingly medical people.”

She said in Toronto her client base included autistic children, people who had suffered childhood traumas, chronic pain sufferers, people with fibromyalgia, and menstrual situations. Other people came to her simply because they wanted to function or feel better.

“Everyone who does it feels so empowered,” she said. “The key to all the method is attending to the self.”

Ms Voss said all our lives we develop patterns of movement that don’t serve us well. We may have been injured, sick or depressed. This is imprinted on our muscles and effects the way we move. There may be some patterns that are detrimental that we may have to relearn.

“There is an underlying structure to movement that acts as a kind of physical grammar,” she said. “Most of us move in a ‘slangy’ kind of way.

“If the slang gets in the way of functioning then we develop pain and have trouble functioning. The main aim of the method is to reacquaint us with the grammar, underlying structure of movement and offer more movement repertoire. This increases our movement potential. We don’t have to move the same way all the time. It is like varying your diet. For a healthy diet, you can’t just eat macaroni all the time, you have to get some vitamins and health food and diversity.”

She said that doing non-habitual movements and exploring new movement patterns in Feldenkrais could be refreshing and stimulating for the brain.

“We all know the saying ‘a change is as good as a rest’,” she said. “It is the same with Feldenkrais. When people do a Feldenkrais lesson, they have done some non-habitual movement and movement patterns. This helps to update their physical grammar. The nervous system learns to mature with this method.”

There are two modalities in Feldenkrais, Awareness Through Movement (ATM) which are pattern based movement lessons; and functional integration (FI) where lessons are tailored to the client.

“When that client gets off the table there is an improved relationship to gravity,” she said. “They feel taller. Holding patterns have disappeared or are beginning to disappear. Breathing is crucial in Feldenkrais, because good effort with movement allows the breathe to flow freely. If we improve the quality of our breathing, we improve the quality of our lives.”

While in Bermuda this time around, Ms Voss gave lessons to 14 people at the Transitional Living Centre (TLC), a halfway house for Westgate Correctional Facility inmates who are about to be reintroduced to the community.

“You can appreciate that when they are in jail they don’t make any decisions, every decision is made for them,” said Ms Voss. “Feldenkrais helps you with decision making. At TLC they get counselling and talk about changing. The Feldenkrais method is a concrete example to experience change.

“Through Feldenkrais you can feel where a movement is initiated before you do the movement. There is a gap, between initiation and acting. It is this gap that allows you to think ‘do you go ahead with the initiation or do you change the initiation’. So it is a kind of thinking and pausing. ‘Am I clear about my intentions?’ It can help people in TLC to think before they carry out an action. It can be impulse control. Automatically, reflection can set in and you can ask ‘do you want to do this’. ‘What is the consequence?’”

She said that Feldenkrais could also help with the anxiety that many inmates feel.

She said more funding was needed to continue Feldenkrais lessons at TLC. Ms Voss is originally from Germany. She learned about Feldenkrais while working in Zurich, Switzerland as a fibre sculptor.

“In Switzerland, at that time, they had Feldenkrais, ATM lessons on the radio,” she said. “That was my introduction. I did yoga at the time. Every Sunday evening I lay on the floor and did Feldenkrais as directed through the radio, and I thought the whole country was lying on the floor during this hour.

“The Swiss are very health conscious and very pro-active. They send you to a spa when you are not feeling well instead of giving you medication. Also, in Germany it is the same thing.”

She said in Europe, Feldenkrais is highly respected. Many medical doctors will recommend Feldenkrais to their patients and Feldenkrais practitioners also go into schools and work with children, particularly those with special needs.

“I had repetitive strain injury from sculpting,” said Ms Voss. “In the meantime, I lived in Bermuda and then I went to Canada. Physiotherapy didn’t really address the issues I had. Then I remembered Feldenkrais and went to a Feldenkrais practitioner. The first lesson I had I thought, ‘this is what I want to do’.”

Ms Voss said she no longer sculpts because she gets enough fulfilment out of teaching Feldenkrais classes.

“I worked in fibre without any supporting structure inside,” she said. “That was a reflection of how I viewed myself. I wasn’t aware of the skeleton carrying the muscles around. Now that I do the Feldenkrais I am working in a different kind of dyad, I don’t need sculpting for self-expression. Feldenkrais is very, very creative.”

Ms Voss trained in the Feldenkrais method for four years in Montreal. Part of her training involved actually getting on the floor and relearning baby movements such as sucking and leg kicking.

“We are the only species that has to learn to move,” she said. “The information for this movement is in our nervous system. We are self-taught as children. We have the wisdom of evolution and biology behind us. Then, at some point, our teachers and parents intervene a little bit and say don’t jump and stand straight and be still. Plus, we learn by imitation. We mimic our parents.

“You will find that within any family there may be movement traits. Certain parts of themselves may never have moved before, because it is not in the family pattern.

It can be through genetics and imitation. It can be both, but usually it is imitation.”

She was introduced to the Bermuda Health Co-op several years ago through a friend of Bermudian Sophia Cannonier.. For more information about the Bermuda Health-Co-op or Feldenkrais lessons and workshops go to http://www.healthcoop.bm/ or telephone 236-0336.