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Title: Awareness Through Movement: Easy-to-Do Health Exercises to Improve Your Posture, Vision, Imagination, and Personal Awareness by Moshe Feldenkrais ISBN: 0-06-250322-7 Publisher: Harper SanFrancisco Pub. Date: 15 March, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.18 (11 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Do you want answers or to learn to ask yourself questions?
Comment: I found an earlier printing of this book in a used bookstore some years ago, and that was my introduction to Feldenkrais method. I went about doing lessons from this book, other books, and cassettes, with some benefit. Then my life got busier and I quit. Only when I developed worse problems did I start up again, this time with a human teacher.
The greater difficulties I face this time force a different approach upon me. Before I might have studied the stick figures carefully and tried to reproduce the moves depicted. But I am not the stick model; I cannot act like the stick model except by force. What does my actual nervous system wish to do? Maybe afterwards I can compare what I did with the stick model, but ideally I should have been able to discover the move myself, given similar preliminaries.
It is difficult to capture this approach to learning in a book, and thus I judge this book against the limitations it faces. It is not an easy or simple book to use. Books can easily tell you what is "right" and "wrong" to do. They cannot do a good job of pacing alongside an active learner, or notice something unique in that person, etc.
But perhaps this book is the best there is with which to spark an appetite for such discovery.
Rating: 5
Summary: A simple way to a graceful, painfree body
Comment: Feldenkrais was one of the century's great geniuses. Originally recognized for his nuclear physics research and for his introduction of Judo to Europe in the 30s, he developed the gentle Feldenkrais Method during the second World War in respose to his own knee problems. In Awareness Through Movement, Feldenkrais gives you a wonderful introduction to the group part of his method--Awareness Through Movement. The processes are gentle, painless and easy. The best way to use the exercises in this book is to get yourself a cassette player and to then read the instructions aloud into the cassette. Then rewind the cassette, lie down on your back, hit play and be amazed as that magnificent voice on the cassette recording shows your body how to improve more quickly than you've ever believed possible.
Rating: 5
Summary: More about the book
Comment: This book was first published in Hebrew in the late 60s. At that time Moshe was 55 years old or so. He had already published a translation into Hebrew of Brook's book about the autosuggestion method of the sensational Que, his own guide for unarmed combat, a couple of textbooks for Judo and his scientifically oriented "Body and Mature Behaviour" (1949). He had already written - but not published - a book aimed at a more popular presentation of his theory - The Potent Self (Published only in 1985). It was around that time that he began training the first generation of future practitioners of his method. It seems that he felt the time was ripe for his method to develop not solely under his own hands, that the method matured, so to say, to the degree of beginnig a gradually more and more independent life of itself.
The 12 lessons presented in the book were selected from as many as a thousand lessons which were given at Moshe's institute in Tel Aviv. In short, it was the first presentation of his mid-life years' ideas to the wide public. The book was very successful and was soon translated into French, German, Swedish, and, of course, English.
At the time of publication Moshe already had a very extensive experience in both private sessions and group lessons. For the an exposition of the first detailed description he waited yet another 10 years. Then he published "The Case of Nora" - intended to be the first in a series, a project which was not continued.
Admittedly, Moshe's writing is never "popular" in its style. It is best read slowly, almost sentence by sentence. He refers ( (usually unexplicitly) to many writers and a variety of theories, mixing them like ingredients into his personal concept of the conditions, attitudes and techniques aimed at revitalizing individual growth and development into maturity.
About one third of the book is dedicated to a general discussion. The other two thirds present the 12 lessons. However, theoretical considerations are interwoven in the lesson part. Nowadays many hundreds of authentic lessons can be obtained from a variety of sources, on audio and video cassets and on CDs. However, the careful juxtaposition of the instructions alongside with theoretical explanations shed a unique light on this text.
As for the theory part, it is neatly divided into subtitles, so that the ideas are very conveniently organized, and as simple to read as can be concerning a concentrated presentation of an unusually original thinker whose perspective is uniquly wide.
Self image - is the first concept dealt with. As the German psychiatrist Shilder had written in the 20s - and must have impressed Moshe - a scheme of our body is represented in our brain, and is the needed for all voluntary functions of the body. Did you know, for example, that some people who lost their brain scheme of the palm of the hand have gradually lost also their capacity to count? Moshe is more interested in the brain body image not as a static scheme but rather in its dynamic image, what he later termed "acture" rather than "posture". The dynamic, functional, image of the self very rarely if ever developed to its fullnes. There seems always to be something new to discover. But what is it that we may want to do and do not do? What are the real limits of our free will? Where are we restricted by heredity and where by society, i.e. education? What are the relative shares of normative education by society and individual self-education? The answer can only be found by continuous self-education. Here we already find ourselves in the midst of a discussion of the balance between individual and social, the terms and prices extracted for allowing self value, the suggestion to develop an "inherent self value", the choice of drives that may be fulfilled and such which need to be inhibited, etc. Moshe's goal is to find an effective method of countinous self improvement. He weighs the pro's and con's of some other methods of healing and educating, including the psychologist's option. He mentions our various states of awareness. He was intrigued by the potential of self-suggestion and hypnosis. In his early years he was interested in the achievments of Que (whose techique is perhaps reflected in Silva's technique); in his later years he claimed that he was doing in movement what Milton Erikson was doing in words. He lists 9 arguments in favour of using movement as a means for self-improvement and re-education. He was certainly inspired by Freud's psychoanalytical theory: in some aspects he created a physical parllel to it, involving his clients with a renewed experience of movements from the origins of development in infancy. His aim of course is to re-open the path for growth for the whole personality, the physical process being just a medium which lends itself most easily to effective change.
A short discussion of the neuroligical framework follows. What is unique in human potential which differenciates the human being from the rest of the living world? Ability for abstraction, fine differenciation, continuous learning, the variety of individual experiences (as expressed among other things in language and art) - these are key concepts. Awarenes is discussed in terms of co-ordination between intention and action. The finale soars high: Moshe believed that human awareness is still in its infancy, on the doorstep to the emergence of the mature human species. The process required is "harmonizing the various 'components' to one unified whole". In those moments in which an awareness finds a common denominator for feeling, sensation, movement and thinking, then Man - Woman - feels an organic union within itself and in the cosmos. Then loneliness is overcome.
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Title: The Potent Self: A Study of Spontaneity and Compulsion by Moshe Feldenkrais, Michaeleen Kimmey, Mark Reese ISBN: 1583940685 Publisher: Frog Ltd Pub. Date: December, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Awareness Heals: The Feldenkrais Method for Dynamic Health by Steven Shafarman, Stephen Shafarman ISBN: 0201694697 Publisher: Perseus Publishing Pub. Date: April, 1997 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Body Awareness As Healing Therapy: The Case of Nora by Moshe Feldenkrais ISBN: 1883319080 Publisher: Frog Ltd Pub. Date: January, 1994 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Relaxercise : The Easy New Way to Health and Fitness by David Zemach-Bersi ISBN: 0062509926 Publisher: Harper SanFrancisco Pub. Date: 10 May, 1990 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: The Feldenkrais Method: Teaching by Handling by Yochanan Rywerant, Moshe Feldenkrais ISBN: 1591200229 Publisher: Basic Health Publications, Inc. Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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