How I help my clients: Reduce pain, life life.

1. Reducing Pain

People most often come to me with a chronic movement limitation, physical complaint, or a seemingly immutable experience of stress and tension after they have tried everything else and feel desperate and in need of hope. So the first step is reducing pain. When you finally feel something shift it is such a relief. Over and over again I have seen Feldenkrais offer hope to people in extremely challenging circumstances.

You can be at any level of function, whether it’s immediately following surgery or confronting a fifteen year-old injury or personal trauma. I work best with people who are inquisitive about the learning process, regardless of whether you have a severe injury or seek to get back to doing the things you love---like yoga, gardening, hiking, or golfing---without a twinge in the back or neck. If you are interested in learning about your own habits, then you will benefit from this process.

2. Finding Clarity

After working together, it often emerges that my clients want to change something deeper and more powerful in their lives. So the next step is learning to sense your own patterns without judgment so that movement, thought, and action can become coordinated and fluid. When you have more clarity about where you are in space, you have more choice about where you are going. After all, if you don't know where you are now, it's hard to find the road that will take you somewhere else!

There is often no clear way to move through a challenging relationship, job, physical trauma, or life decision. The best way I have seen is by clarifying your sense of self from the inside out. I help you do that through directed self-inquiry and self-awareness.

Because inner conflict is represented by muscular tension, when thought and action no longer struggle against each other in a muscular tango of tension and holding it awakens a sense of wholeness and joy.

Practicing Feldenkrais can help you:

• Reduce chronic pain

• Recover faster from injury

• Restore lost movement

• Improve performance

• Let go of habitual reactions

• Feel refreshed, relaxed, and focused

3. Engage with habits in a different way

How did you lose your original freedom of movement? Through long-term habits. As you develop habits, you often block yourself from doing things in the simplest and most efficient way. It sounds obvious, but when we feel stuck we stop learning and repeat the same strategy over and over. We limp along for years. Or we push for better physical performance with inefficient movement, which leads to injury. Your habits may stem from any number of causes, including:

• injury

• pain

• surgery

• disease

• stress

• fatigue

• insomnia

• poor self-use

• emotional trauma

• not knowing what the skeleton is capable of

• lack of awareness of possibilities for movement

• blocking kinesthetic information from entering the nervous system

To help you engage with your habits in a different way, I will create learning scenarios instead of apply a fixed, repetitive technique. I will direct your attention to different patterns of holding and how they affect you. I am always responding to what you need at that moment. As you notice your patterns and begin to shift out of them more and more, you find that decision-making feels easier and life is less stressful. Old patterns drift into the distance, new habits bring ease, flow, and a generosity of being.