How did you begin your journey with the Feldenkrais Method?
From high school through grad school I studied to be a concert pianist. I discovered Feldenkrais while I was trying to recover from a music performance-related injury. Medical approaches didn’t help, and eventually one of my teachers sent me to a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement (ATM) class. Lying down and quietly paying attention to small movements was difficult for me at first, probably because I was young and very driven and pretty scared of my career falling apart, but I felt better after my first class. I kept going back, and each week we did something else, usually strange and small movements, with these weird questions about noticing how one was different from another. I didn’t understand it but somehow I always felt a lot better after class. There was this intrinsic kindness in the lessons, too. Until I encountered Feldenkrais, improving by being nice to myself wasn’t in my repertoire!
Then I tried some one-to-one Functional Integration (FI) lessons with a local Feldenkrais practitioner. I got even more curious because I felt like a completely different person after each of them. I had previously tried massage and chiropractic, so at first I couldn’t believe how gently he was touching me. But I realized pretty quickly that he was actually working with my nervous system, not just my body, because of how my sensory acuity changed after FI lessons. I felt at ease and I didn’t want to move in my usual hurried, abrupt way. My breathing was noticeable and pleasurable. I liked how everything in my body felt, not just my injured arm and hand. Friends even said I was nicer! The weirdest thing I remember was that food tasted amazing after a lesson. It was like I was waking up to my own sensory experience.
Eventually I bought a few sets of ATM lessons on cassette tapes. I was blown away that I could create these changes in myself by lying down on my own floor at home. I’ve been studying Feldenkrais for 25 years since!
What advice would you give to someone completely new to Feldenkrais who would like to start engaging with it?
Trust the ATM process, and yourself. First and foremost you are learning—or relearning—how to trust your own sensory experience. It’s about safety and comfort initially, but as soon as you find an easy way to be with each lesson’s body positions and movements, then it’s helpful to become even more compassionate with yourself: go languidly, tune into the little pleasures of the movements, and turn away from any increases in pain.
Make the lesson your own: breathe and let go of all “shoulds” you might feel about what you’re being asked to do. Feldenkrais study is truly an exploration, not a performance. Your nervous system will take the detailed sensory movement information you collect in the lessons and do what it does naturally when you feel safe and curious; it will learn more optimal patterns of action.
Speaking of curiosity, cultivate it! It is your superpower. Those curious little sensory distinctions you’re asked to make about yourself during lessons are grist for your brain’s neuroplasticity mill. The brain’s ability to change so much is unique to humans. It’s how we build new and better habits. Feldenkrais lessons harness your innate curiosity by helping you become fascinated with your own moment-to-moment embodied experience in much greater detail, enabling your brain and your behavior to change.
What have you learned about how people come to the method from offering online lessons through your website?
Over the years I’ve received some incredible emails and public comments on the lesson pages about how people dive into Feldenkrais with the ATM lessons I share online. The most common story is a lot like my own: “tried everything else,” “I feel better – how does this stuff work?!” “here are the unexpected ways I’ve improved!”
But I’ve also learned how common it is for people to get disoriented when they first encounter Feldenkrais. Our messages are so counter-cultural: “Less is more,” “slow down and pay attention to the details,” “you’re the expert on you,” “you’ve got the sensitivity and means to improve yourself.” The value of these somatic realities is trained out of us by our education system and other broad cultural trends.
So I’ve found it really important to help people overcome some common hurdles when starting Feldenkrais, so they can learn to trust themselves and their learning process. The biggest two hurdles may be helping people get comfortable—since they’re often coming to us to address pain—and demystifying Feldenkrais.
Reading about neurology and biomechanics is fun and helps a lot of people connect to what they’re doing in Feldenkrais study, but I first recommend people simply try it for themselves—after all, Moshe Feldenkrais was a fan of the biblical line “We will do and we will understand.” So I invite people to dive right in.
My 10 free Getting Oriented lessons are carefully curated to be comfortable for the vast majority of people. This is especially important in the online context when no teacher is watching you. The lessons use many different positions and types of movement so that, even if you’re injured, you should be able to find many that are easily accessible for you. I emphasize that students have a choice to skip any lesson—or any part of a lesson—that isn’t comfortable for them. I’ve also found it’s helpful if the first lessons people do are not too long, so the Getting Oriented lessons are short for Feldenkrais ATM study, just 20-40 minutes.
Hundreds of public user comments prove that these lessons have created a lot of wonderful change and relief, but I’ve noticed that without at least a minimal understanding of how Feldenkrais works it’s still easy for people to disregard their experiences and drop away from study, even though they feel better after doing a lesson. It’s almost like it’s too magical! To address this I’ve created a lot of resources for demystifying Feldenkrais. Everywhere on my website, and especially in Getting Oriented, I juxtapose “try it” with “understand it”. There are short talks introducing the lessons, and interactive lesson notes listeners can click through to follow their curiosity about how the lessons work and how to do them. Each lesson page also has a rich web of outbound links to related lessons and learning, and a place to ask me questions. Over the years these discussions have become an incredibly valuable resource for newcomers.
What lessons are the best to start with?
Getting Oriented is my series of short, free Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lessons designed for newcomers. It covers some of the movements, guided attention techniques, and learning principles that Feldenkrais ATM study utilizes most often. You can go through them in order or read their descriptions and follow your curiosity.
If you’d like to continue learning about the Feldenkrais Method before you start doing lessons there are some great resources on the Feldenkrais.com website.
I have also written a number of learning guides on my own website, for example, How to engage with ATM self study and ‘Read this first’ which has student responsibilities and practical tips before doing lessons.
Nick Strauss-Klein is a 2006 graduate of the New York Feldenkrais Method Professional Training Program and has studied and taught the method since 2000 in New York City, Israel, Baltimore, and Minnesota.
His acclaimed online Feldenkrais audio lesson collection, The Feldenkrais Project, offers Feldenkrais study at no charge to thousands of monthly listeners all around the world in the form of live recordings of his classes, edited with the home user in mind. The Feldenkrais Project is entirely supported by freewill, heartfelt donations from listeners.
Nick brings to his Feldenkrais teaching the unique background of a Master of Music Pedagogy degree from the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, and over 30 years of individual and class teaching experience in music and Feldenkrais.Nick has been featured on the Future of Wellness Podcast and in Experience Life Magazine. He has been a frequent panelist and teacher in the global online Feldenkrais Awareness Summit and global Feldenkrais Festivals. He has an active in-person Functional Integration and Awareness Through Movement practice in St. Paul, Minnesota, and leads weekly live Feldenkrais classes online at FeldenkraisProject.com.