WHAT IS WAKEUP FELDENKRAIS?

UNDO DEFICITS,
ENHANCE EXCELLENCE,
WAKE UP TO NOW.

That's the eight word definition.

We can try these as well:

• One word:
  TRANSFORMATION


• Two words:
  WAKING UP.


• Three words:
  LEARNING NEW OPTIONS


• Four words:
  EXPANDING LIFE BY AWARENESS


• Five words:
  LIVING LIFE AS A GLORIOUS FEAST


Or:

One sentence:

• With human beings basically asleep to their lives, waking up is essential to knowing who we really are.


Two sentences:

• While the Feldenkrais Method, in and of itself, is one of the primary systems in the world in coming to an awareness of who we really are, WakeUp Feldenkrais makes this explicit.


• The goal is to not just wake in the lessons, but in all of our lives.


Three sentences:

• Take everything written in the What is the Feldenkrais Method? essay/composition.


• Mix in the incentive of waking from our ongoing sleep.


• Add to the mix a realization that to truly transform our lives, an ongoing connection to pleasure and learning and awareness is necessary.


Four sentences:

• People basically want to stay stuck.


• We have this magical thinking: sure I want to change, as long as I don't have to change anything.


• Although the unfamiliar can be “scary,” even more scary, to me, is staying in the same rut for years and years.


• WakeUp Feldenkrais applies to all areas of our life: work, talking, moving, thinking, feeling, making love, taking a walk, changing a diaper, washing a dish.


Check this out, too, as highly pertinent:

• 
  Feldenkrais and our Big Self

What is WakeUp Feldenkrais?

UNDO DEFICITS,

Because Feldenkrais work is modeled on how we, as genius babies, learned from blobs to crawling and walking and talking, it is the premier approach for people who want to come to a higher state of organization and use of themselves.

This could be the undoing of deficits. Deficits could be in childhood, as with cerebral palsy, autism, or various learning difficulties. Dyslexia and the normal reaction to the confinement and rigidity of even a 'good' school system create a narrowing down and a limiting of a child. This limiting cries out for waking up options to learning and growing.

This is the Feldenkrais Method and the WakeUp Feldenkrais Way: How many more options for a full and rich and aware and now cenered and delight centered life can we together create?

Deficits could be in adulthood, strokes, pains in the back or neck, shoulder, hands, stuff that happens from accidents and strokes, recovery from surgeries. or even the wish to avoid surgery. These are troubled times, with one good aspect: people decide it's finally okay to do something besides what they've always done.

In desperation they return to one of the most wonderful aspects of human life: learning.


But this work is not just bringing back of deficits.

We want people to recover from a stroke or an accident or a sore shoulder or back and keep learning and end up functioning better than they have since they were a child.

This is learning, not fixing.

ENHANCE EXCELLENCE,

So, another use I'm interested in is the enhancing of excellence,helping people who are already good at teaching, or some sport like golf or skiing, or are excellent at an instrument or singing or acting, helping them, by getting them to tap into learning and learning about learning in new ways, to become even better at what they are already good at.

WAKE UP TO THE MOMENT

And finally: my work, the work of WakeUp Feldenkrais, is about Waking Up into the moment.

This is where we learn, this is where we are happy, this is where we love, this is where we love life.

To live in a state of Presence is to live a full and wonderfull life.

To be aware of this very moment, is a beautiful place to live.

Yes.

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For a List of Many
Fantastic Benefits,
see:
The Glories of Feldenkrais
in Sidebar to the left

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And since Feldenkrais is about having options,
let's go thru this again,
if you are in the mood:

What is WakeUp Feldenkrais?

WakeUp Feldenkrais is my term for what I emphasize in the Feldenkrais Method. The Feldenkrais Method, in and of itself, is based on the premise that core to being a human being is our ability to learn, that unlike a baby cow or goat or deer that has wired in the ability to walk and run, we humans need to learn vast ranges of behavior, from rolling over to crawling to walking to running and talking.

This leaves us open to huge variations in how we cope with the challenges of gravity and motion and living in a family and a social order and some of these variations we have learned have become habits that get in the way of our having a good life.

The Feldenkrais Method is about learning, through variation and awareness and slowing down of tempo and effort and getting out of our verbal minds, how to move in more pleasant and efficient ways. It is also about how to re-discover how to go about learning ANYTHING new.

For now, let this suffice: we are human, we need to learn, some of our learning isn't serving us well, we can undo and transform our old habits and rise to a new level of organization and living.

My take, the WakeUp Feldenkrais take, which is not exclusive to me at all, is that this method is about learning how to unlearn habits in all areas of our life, not just movement. So WakeUp Feldenkrais, to me, is about getting free of social habits, such as addiction to automobiles, and emotional habits, such as addiction to blaming others when we feel bad, to health habits, of wanting and using "experts" to "fix" us when we are unhealthy.

And, that's not the core of WakeUp Feldenkrais. The core, is a focusing on Presence and awareness of this moment as the core of what the work is all about, the core of what the method is all about.. Indeed, along with love and connection to our Earth, awareness is at the core of what life is about, in my take.

So in WakeUp Feldenkrais I am trying to set up an idea of coming to class or lesson in a state of awareness, and having that awareness deepened during class or lesson, and then after class or lesson, instead of falling into the usual sleep and yammer of most post-yoga, post-meditation, and even (sadly, alas) post-Feldenkrais class. The goal is to wake up, before, during and after class, or lesson, or any encounter we have with any human being, or part of our world, be it tree or cup of tea or door handle.

The goal is to wake up in our lives.

Cool, eh?

And doubly cool that right now, we can practice and experience and enjoy this awareness of our life as it is going on right now and we are aware right now of our life going on right now.

Sweet, eh?