The Feldenkrais® Method in Singing and Performance
Berit Norberg, lektor i sång vid Ingesunds Musikhögskola har i denna undersökning studerat hur Feldenkraislektioner påverkar lärandeprocessen i sång och performance.
Jag får ofta frågan: Vad är Feldenkrais?
"Är det som Yoga, Pilates eller ????
Feldenkrais är att lära och förändras inifrån, genom att prova många olika sätt att utföra rörelser, inom dina egna rörelsegränser.
Vi håller till på matta på golvet. Det är en blandning av enkla och komplexa rörelser som hjälper dig utveckla koordination, balans, stabilitet, rörlighet. Ibland lungt, ibland intensivare. Instruktionerna är muntliga, dvs. jag talar om verbalt hur rörelsen ska utföras i ställetför att visa hur det ska se ut.
Varför då?
För att du ska få lov att göra dina egna försök. Om du härmar och gör efter mig upprepar du bara hur jag gör.
Ska man lära och utvecklas måste det vara tillåtet att göra egna försök, att prova sig fram.
Kroppen är en helhet. Enskilda muskler ska inte göra hela jobbet. Skelett, muskler, nervsystem får lära sig att jobba tillsammans på ett effektivare, funktionellt sätt.
Du får lära dig samband mellan muskler som böjer och muskler som sträcker och hur du kan använda sambandet till att bibehålla längd på dina muskler även om du tränar hårt.
Man kan säga att vi programmerar och skapar ny förståelse i nervsystem, muskler och skelett.
Precis som det lilla barnet gör som ägnar timmar åt att prova sig fram, innan det kan ligga på mage och lyfta huvudet.
Du är här och nu, medveten i din kropp och lär känna vad som sker."
Citat: Annika Gellerman
Back to oneself
är Christina Schön-Ohlssons (Feldenkraispedagog, sjukgymnast) doktorsavhandling framlagd vid Göteborgs Universitet 2010. Avhandlingen jämför verkningarna av Feldenkraismetoden respektive sjukgymnastik i samband med kronisk ländryggssmärta.
Improving Sensory Motor Function after a Spinal Cord Injury
Denna text av den nyzeländska Feldenkraispedagogen Cindy Allison från 2009 handlar om Feldenkraismetoden och ryggmärgsskador. Allison ger även en kort introduktion till det sensomotoriska systemet samt exempel på hur spasmer och värk hos ryggmärgsskadade personer kan minska.
Den levda smärtan; en etnologisk studie av kronisk smärta
C-uppsats i etnologi VT 2011 vid Stockholms Universitet av Susanne Höglin.
Artikel:
Why I Do Feldenkrais Instead of Yoga.
Via Ilona Friedon Feb 4, 2015
When I was trying to be a yogi, I wasn’t being myself.
I didn’t intend to stop doing yoga.
I had practiced fairly consistently for more than a decade, beginning with ashtanga, switching to Baron Baptiste’s Power Yoga (Boston, Denver) before migrating to Forrest yoga (Denver) where I ultimately and joyfully did a handstand. But a leg and foot injury I sustained while completing Spain’s El Camino de Santiago in autumn of 2012 made many standing yoga positions painful if not impossible.
My quest for relief led me to a podiatrist, two physical therapists, a deep tissue masseuse and a Rolfer. Despite dry needle treatments and a third set of custom orthotics, my injury showed few signs of healing. I couldn’t spend much time on my feet, period, let alone hike, dance or do yoga, activities that boosted my spirit and kept me from teetering into depression. I took up swimming and, after doing laps daily, developed a chlorine allergy.
That summer, I rented a room in Boulder so I could swim in its reservoir. That wasn’t enough to keep my spirits afloat. When I stumbled across and limped into a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement class, I was desperate. The Facebook ad said the class involved slow, gentle movements.
Those I could do, even though I yearned to do large, vigorous ones.
In that first lesson, a handful of us in street clothes lay down on folded, denim blue moving blankets. The teacher guided us through a series of movements that, for me, were excruciatingly slow and numbingly repetitive, with no obvious goal. He told us to move even more slowly and not approach our full range.
Then, he told us to rest.
My monkey mind went berserk: “Rest? We have barely budged! We have not broken a sweat!!” “This is boring!” “This is for old people!” “When will this nonsense be over?”
After enduring 45 minutes of self-inflicted torture while moving slowly, I heard the teacher tell us to stand and notice any differences. To my astonishment, I felt refreshed and extremely present, as if someone had hit the reset button on my nervous system.
Gone were the anxiety and despair I had experienced less than an hour before, even though my life circumstances were unchanged and my leg still hurt. But I had changed, in a way that I couldn’t immediately comprehend, let alone explain. The shift in my sense of self felt more profound than anything I had ever experienced in yoga, despite years of practice. My leg injury, which had dominated my emotional landscape for months, suddenly receded into the background. I knew I’d be fine even if I never bagged another peak.
Each time I returned to class, I experienced magic. I stopped resenting the unglamorous, pose-less and pointless movements and appreciated that they helped me learn to pay extremely close attention to myself.
I began reading books by Moshe Feldenkrais, the Jewish physicist, engineer and Judo master who developed his method while healing his own incapacitating knee injuries. I became more fascinated with, than frustrated by, the mechanics of my injury and began to view my chronic but intermittent hip pain, for which I once found temporary relief in pigeon pose, as a puzzle to solve or a code to crack, rather than continuing to believe what many yoga teachers had said, that “grief is stored in the hips.”
The more I practiced Feldenkrais, the more I appreciated its premise. In a society acculturated to fast, dynamic or sexy moves, the Feldenkrais Method can seem baffling. But the idea behind the small and sometimes barely perceptible movements is simple: moving very slowly, in a limited range and with awareness helps the brain discern differences so it can choose the easier pathway. The brain, like a wine connoisseur, samples small amounts to make distinctions. It requires periodic pauses to integrate the new information.
Moving quickly or with too much effort is, from the brain’s standpoint, a bit like getting drunk: it might feel good temporarily but is less likely to lead to improved functioning.
The more I immersed myself in Feldenkrais, the more I valued its low frills culture. That students often wear regular clothing was a huge relief from the Lululemon “look” infiltrating the yoga world. That I didn’t break a sweat meant I could attend class without needing to shower afterward, simplifying logistics. That there are no poses, only suggestions for movement, allowed me to find my own way of doing things, without comparing myself to others or being adjusted. That the Feldenkrais classes lacked the beehive vibe of many yoga studios made me, a highly sensitive introvert, feel more comfortable.
I liked Feldenkrais so much I enrolled in a training program to deepen my somatic awareness. I’m still years from being certified, but even after 11 weeks of training over nine months, here’s a short list of what I’ve observed from moving slowly while lying, sitting or rolling on the floor:
- My hip pain has resolved almost completely, which hundreds of pigeon poses didn’t address
- My vertebrae stack comfortably and effortlessly when I meditate, without my having to adjust my alignment
- My breathing is consistently deeper and more relaxed
- My body moves with an unprecedented lightness and ease that feels miraculous
Since the Feldenkrais Method makes all movement easier—whether that’s getting out of a chair, onto a horse, or into chaturanga—many yoga poses are probably more accessible to me today than when I was trying to be a yogi. And that, I see now, was precisely the problem: when I did yoga, I was trying to be someone I wasn’t. With Feldenkrais, I feel more like myself and more at one with the world.
En artikel som Philipp Phil, en kollega i Danmark delat:
From an article I found, the author is Novon Daron
A former Israeli special force, and highly respected martial artist in various arts but also in mine (Bujinkan):
"The Subtle Power".
In Japan he was also introduced to the Feldenkrais method, a movement training system developed by Israeli physicist Moshe Feldenkrais. The system, which has roots in a variety of sciences as well as in the martial arts, was developed to allow people to make more efficient use of their bodies. Navon feels that practice in the Feldenkrais method is a useful supplement to martial arts training and travels extensively teaching both.
how you can improve yourself. So it is not only for dealing with injuries, it is for people who want to improve their martial art or their sport or their dancing. You can advance 100% faster in whatever movement or art you are in by learning it because it heightens the understanding of the self, especially in the body and the motor system, much more than anything I have ever seen. I am not boasting about it, I have used it for many years and I can see it working with my students. I have taken people that had no chance of becoming good martial artists and they have become great martial artists just because of the Feldenkrais method. It allowed them to go beyond the limitation of what they could have done if they just did martial arts. I think it is a tool that allows the talented to be more talented and the non-talented to be talented.
Most of the students can not do it, they all need effort. The Feldenkrais method deals with the essence of movement. When we see a master we try to imitate his movements, but imitating his movement externally does not give you the ability. The ability that he has is an internal combination of his movement, mind, and personality. Feldenkrais will allow a huge percentage of people to become very good because it teaches the secret to the way we, as human beings, move.
Explainer: The Feldenkrais Method
Remember how you learned to play a musical instrument? You became aware of feedback to improve. This ability to make sense of our sensory feedback in more and more refined ways is what people do in Feldenkrais. (Oli Scarff/Getty Images)
The Feldenkrais Method is a way of exploring movement, posture, and breathing through hands-on touch, used by dancers, musicians, athletes, actors, and people living with and rehabilitating from a range of illnesses and injuries. Terms integral to the method such as awareness and integration are not easy concepts.
But think of it this way—in order for any system to work at its peak, it needs a mechanism to receive feedback on its performance so that it can adjust and improve.
Remember how you learned to play a musical instrument or play a new sport? You became aware of feedback to improve; you listened to the sounds you were making with the violin and adjusted how you used the bow or where you put your fingers to make a better sound.
When you used a tennis racquet, you monitored where the ball landed after you hit it to gauge how to adjust to strike the next ball. Then you monitored the new way and either continued to adapt and integrate and the cycle of improvement hopefully continued.
If you didn’t adapt then you probably got stuck in a habit or relatively fixed way of being. So we use our senses for feedback (sound, vision, touch and body position/motion) to learn a new skill or to refine and improve an existing skill—to learn to perform better.
We become aware of the effects of what we are doing, try new ways, and then we integrate those ways that work better.
This ability to make sense of our sensory feedback in more and more refined ways is what people do in Feldenkrais—you can become more discerning and so your quality improvement loop gets more accurate. You can use this improved sensitivity to (body) feedback to improve all kinds of performance.
In the performing arts, awareness of one’s self is pretty critical—where you are in space and how you are moving, the way you are producing voice, producing body language, how to adapt to the role or song or action in any given moment.
It is this ability to pay attention to subtle feedback and respond that makes the difference between perfect pitch and effortless coordination and simply “close enough.”
In Feldenkrais lessons, this ability to attend and respond is systematically practiced. Carefully crafted movement sequences are delivered either in class or in one-to-one sessions.
You practice sensing these subtle distinctions of your performance. You learn how to learn; you practice the foundations of improvement.
Moshe Feldenkrais was a polymath who had a background in engineering, martial arts, hard science, child development … and an incredible curiosity.
He realized during his own rehabilitation from soccer injuries that if he paid better attention to what he was doing he could perform better—and the key things to pay attention to were these ideas of how he was using himself; sensing effort and, by contrast, sensing ease; being aware of the feedback and adjusting and experimenting with better ways of performing an action or task.
He famously taught the then prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, to stand on his head at the age of 77.
Feldenkrais refined the method over many decades before he died in the mid-1980s. The method is now being taught in many areas—from health and well-being clinics, through to acting, circus, and voice training in many performing arts schools.
Feldenkrais famously said what he wanted was “flexible minds, not flexible bodies.” He was interested in minds that could use feedback to find flexible solutions, minds that could move beyond automatic, mindless, repetitive habits of thinking, feeling, sensing and moving. Minds that could self-reflect, find new ways and change. Creative minds!
Feldenkrais is in many ways a simple message that can be incredibly hard to put into operation. It is finding resonance in the current understandings of mindfulness and the ability of the brain to change (neuroplasticity) and puts these ideas into action.
The evidence for the effectiveness of the method is growing, particularly in areas where body awareness is paramount such as balance and dexterity. There is also evidence for finding greater comfort and ease for people who have been injured.
In the area of performing arts there are no research trials as such but a growing interest in the phenomenology of learning in the arts context. Self-reflective practice and generating creativity are emerging themes from the work to date and will be the subject of future study.
Susan Hillier is an associate professor in neuroscience and rehabilitation at the University of South Australia. This article was originally published on The Conversation.com
Några bra sidor på svenska att kika in på är:
www.feldengood.se www.anneliewennberg.se www.feldenkraismetoden.org www.feldenrid.se