A few weeks ago I was asked to replace a Feldenkrais teacher at a community centre in Ottawa for four weeks.   From my previous experiences,  I was well positioned to take on this four week commitment as  I combine components of Feldenkrais into my yoga courses as well as my private and group classes.

Moses Feldenkrais was an engineer and a science officer in the British admiralty during WW 11, and had a black belt in judo.  He taught his fellow service-men self defence techniques.  Unfortunately he re-injured an old soccer knee injury from teaching on very wet submarine decks.  He was advised to have surgery, but refusing to have an operation, he began to research and develop rehabilitation and awareness techniques .

He was fascinated by the fact that mammals learn to walk as soon as they are born,  but we (from a walking standpoint) take 8-16 months to learn to walk.   Therefore he concluded that walking is learned and unlike mammals not hard wired into our brain.  Our movement patterns are greatly influenced by our parents, our culture, and both the psychological and emotional states that occured in our environment during our childhood. You can’t change your past history, but you can certainly change the way your pain dominates your life today.  There is an emotional and  environmental element to pain.  Rarely like Moses Feldenkrais is it just (as he discovered) a result of an accident.  It most often has to do with the habits that we developed  as a child.   We have been programmed in our culture to ignore pain, but our pain is inside of us, so we can’t run away from it.  Therefore what we often do in our culture is to numb ourselves so we lose our capacity to feel.   We will use anything at our disposal, food,  drugs,  alcohol, cigarettes,  gambling and now of course mindless screen time.   Emotional suppression is a trillion dollar industry.