Dr. Feldenkrais said: ”I am not after flexible bodies, I am after flexible brains.” In one sense, he meant that the brain regulates all activities, physical or mental. But he also believed that his work can change the quality of thinking , including abstract thinking. “I believe that the unity of mind and body is an objective reality. They are not just parts somehow related to each other, but an inseparable whole while functioning. A brain without a body could not think… the muscles themselves are part and parcel of our higher functions. This is true not only of those higher functions like singing, painting and loving, which are impossible without muscular activity, but also of thinking, recalling, remembering and feeling”.

Dr. Feldenkrais’ Awareness Through Movement lessons are unique in providing the opportunity to actually feel the process of thinking. The movements follow a thread of thinking and feeling until a new skill emerges and a new thought with it. In order to learn a new movement and do it with a quality of ease and freedom, there can be no gaps in the thinking process. Most people that engage in the process report a dramatic increase in the clarity of their thinking, especially if thinking is central to what they do.

Aliza Stewart teaches classes designed to highlight this property of the Feldenkrais lessons. They are open to anyone who looks for new ways to nourish the mind.

“As a philosopher and educator, I have spent countless hours in places and pursuits that have ostensibly been concerned with thinking—or more eloquently, with “the life of the mind.” While we philosophers have long known that dualisms such as mind/body are problematic, we have not found a way to demonstrate a unity. We have not found an alternative way to explain how we go about thinking, learning, and being the bodies that we are.
The Feldenkrais Method addresses this issue. As a practitioner, I have been able to understand the work I do as a philosopher and educator, in a more dynamic and compelling way. I find myself thinking, not merely abstractly, but as a tangible experience. With the Feldenkrais Method, ideas become a creative act that emerge in the full physicality of the world”.

- Chris Moffett, Philosopher and Educator


Copyright © 2007 Aliza Stewart, New-York City and Baltimore, Maryland.