In case you are as yet unfamiliar with the Feldenkrais Method and what benefits it can provide for you, please read the following brief description. I will always be happy to supplement this information personally or by giving you relevant readings, if you wish.

Most of your visits to a Feldenkrais session with me will last 45 minutes to a bit over an hour. You are likely to be most comfortable if you have not eaten within a half-hour before the session and if you wear loose trousers and a comfortable shirt or blouse, or even a sweat-suit.

Why consult a Feldenkrais practitioner?? Do you often experience a tight or tired feeling in the back, tension in the neck and shoulders, shallow breathing, or perhaps difficulty in sitting comfortably? Or do you have an occupational-caused problem, such as one caused by repetitive movements, or chronic dysfunction left by an old injury that otherwise seems to have healed? Or neurologically-determined dysfunction associated with a stroke, minimal brain damage, spinal trauma, or cerebral palsy? The Feldenkrais Method offers you not only an ever-increasing knowledge of the patterns that contribute to whatever difficulties you may be having, but also new hope for improvement in your sitting, standing, walking, and in the everyday movements needed in the activities of your own life. Feldenkrais lessons are very gentle, involving no strain or force, and they truly complement the other approaches you may have explored in the past. Even after a session is over, the work we have done together continues to generate an improved sense of how the various parts of your body and your self are connected and work in concert.

*My Feldenkrais background:* my training in this ingenious method took place in Toronto over the summers of 1984 to 1987 under the guidance of some of our top practitioners and theorists, including the Israelis Yochanan Rywerant, Anat Baniel, and Gaby Yaron, as well as the Americans Mark Reese, Dennis Leri, Russell Delman, and David Zemach-Bersin. Until May 1998, I offered Awareness Through Movement classes at Keene State College in New Hampshire, where I was a full-time professor in the Music Department for twenty-six years. For a few years I was also associated with the Aurum medical practice of Doctors Thomas Cowan and Kelly Sutton in Peterborough as a Feldenkrais practitioner offering Functional Integration sessions to a wide cross-section of individuals.

*What is Feldenkrais?* and how does it differ from other approaches? This method is based on scientific studies as uniquely interpreted by the late physicist and engineer Moshe Feldenkrais, beginning with his classic book, "Body and Mature Behavior," written in 1949. Feldenkrais himself considered his approach to be primarily an educational one, a way to teach people more effective ways of using themselves, a way to bypass limitations caused by our habitual ways of doing things. Without some effective form of intervention, these limitations tend to become more deeply ingrained at the lowest levels of consciousness, and they can cause considerable pain as well as dysfunction.

Habits are also necessary to our survival, especially at the reflex level we share in common with the animal kingdom, and some of them do raise us above the need to re-invent the wheel every time we want to do anything; but to the extent that most of our habits are learned without our awareness, many inefficient ones and ones at cross-purposes slip in and work to our detriment.

By focusing on how we organize ourselves in order to carry out our intentions as actions, we increase our awareness; this gives us a chance to weed out useless components. Over a period of time, our growing awareness enables us to take over the ownership of more and more aspects of our actions at increasingly higher levels of consciousness than before. We can truly learn to do what we want. The implications of this are great, not only for people who function somewhere around the so-called normal range, but also for people who are more disabled.

Feldenkrais invented two approaches to enable him to access levels of the nervous system through our bodily movements, and to take advantage of our abilities to monitor our own movements. One way, called *Awareness Through Movement¨*, takes place in a classroom situation involving gentle exercise and is primarily verbal in presentation. The other way, called *Functional Integration¨*, is individual, mainly non-verbal, and, somewhat more similar to other body work approaches, makes use of the Feldenkrais table. Both ways are extremely gentle and do not subscribe to the commonplace no-pain-no-gain philosophy; for pain and exaggerated effort create too much inner noise and distraction for effective learning to occur. In order to optimize this learning, both ways primarily use lying down (and occasionally sitting), because then our nervous system is not otherwise occupied with the balancing act we usually perform while we stand on a narrow base in the field of gravity. Our best learning occurs in conditions of quietude and pleasant curiosity; Feldenkrais lessons create these conditions. This is true whether I, as a Feldenkrais practitioner, speak to a class or gently touch and move a client with my hands.

MORE OF MY FELDENKRAIS PHILOSOPHY: Even before I embarked upon my Feldenkrais training of four summers in Toronto in 1984-87, I read books and articles by and about Feldenkrais, as well as materials of a more general (psychological, neurological) nature recommended in the bibliographies thereof. And before that, I did some graduate work in clinical psychology and lots of graduate work in musicology, all of which added to my ability to conduct research on a scholarly level, as well as to my intellectual and spiritual fiber.

As you know, in an actual session, my patients remain fully clad and usually lie down on my Feldenkrais table (usually prone, supine, or on their side, and usually in a position different from that of the previous session). I listen to and sense what bothers them, seeking clues about things they now do that might have been helpful in the past (to ease an injury, perhaps) but are now counter-productive. I look for movements (and self-concepts) that seem contradictory in purpose and can lead to pain or malfunction. I seek blind-spots, places of which they have become increasingly unaware. I gently push and pull these people, checking for preferred directions of movement according to habits as well as for ideally available directions that are becoming more unavailable in actual life. Feldenkrais said, *If you know what you are doing, you can do what you want,*and as my patients become more conscious of choices of which they were previously unaware, they thereby become freer and more flexible individuals who can heal themselves better. Sometimes their symptoms will change in location during this process, as people learn better and better action, and that encourages them in their new belief that perhaps their condition is not as structural and immutable as they had previously thought. That can be quite liberating!

Functional Integration¨ is the name of what I do in my individual sessions with our patients. This refers to working that places your possibly artificially isolated *problem* within a larger context of a basic function (or movement pattern) in life such as walking, within which all gains in our sessions will tend to be reinforced in later action in real life; it also refers to your gained feeling (based on reality) that everything seems to be working together more smoothly and harmoniously now, at the end of our session (*and I find that this new way of doing things feels better than the old way, at least part of which I may now choose to discard*).

And so, I do not like to linger on symptoms or problems during a session, though they do need to be honored at first as the presenting situation felt by my client. Feldenkrais warned that if you have a problem or a symptom, you can become so expert about it that it is yours for life. He preferred to deal with what the other person wishes to do better in the direction of self-realization. Complete cure is a final condition of perfection that may occur on the deathbed, perhaps, but in the meantime, we can get better and better every day of our lives; he believed in the famous maxim by Coue that *day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better* as a powerful tool that transcends its surface naivety. When asked (at his own prompting) why he never killed himself (for life can be quite hard), he said it was *because I am too curious about what comes next.* Change, whether towards growth or towards ultimate physical death, is the very stuff of life; I like to refer to change as movement, both within oneself and in relation to everyone and everything else. My Feldenkrais work meets people at that level and seeks their benefit, with their cooperation. Their curiosity often needs refocussing, away from all the gory details of their problem and towards the myriad fascinating choices available to them to make their lives more gratifying *and esthetically pleasing,* as Feldenkrais would say.

Yes, my method is primarily physical in its material manifestation, but it often relies on carefully chosen words and on respectful listening to people in pain. It seeks to respect their individuality and the complexity, and even the creativity, of the ways they have chosen for coping with the challenges of life. Surely, in the best sessions, I am changed as well as my patients because of the special qualities of the interaction in which I have put myself out on a limb to help a fellow human. At my best, I believe I work with bodies, nervous systems, minds, emotions, beliefs about oneself, and on spiritual levels as well. In the field of psychology, the work of Milton Erickson is said to be the closest to the thinking of Moshe Feldenkrais, and the two men apparently knew the work of each other well.

Whether or not my patients are spiritually inclined, I do often find myself instinctively reaching out to their spiritual being and offering it all the nurturance of which I am capable. Occasionally I feel some conflict about the idea of myself as a healer possessing special powers (a very tempting notion) and the idea of being merely a sensitive facilitator of the innate healing capacities of someone else that only need to be nudged a bit into motion by means of a somewhat mysterious dialogue or dance in which I have been trained. Yes, I do have a bag of tricks, techniques I can always fall back on when my intuition runs dry, things that seem to work for most people most of the time, and are quite effective in fact. But my Feldenkrais training has also taught me the vital importance of respecting the individuality and creativity of any person seeking my help. Whoever you are, kind reader, far from merely being a collection of symptoms that need to be eradicated, you are a person of depth, experience, and ingenuity, with whom I would be most honored to work.

*More about practitioner Ray Rosenstock*: Is it because of the remarkable philosophy behind my extensive Feldenkrais studies, and behind the concrete movement patterns themselves, that I suddenly decided to become a writer? And an accordionist and folk-fiddler for our local Mandala Folk Dance Ensemble and Vinovana ensemble? Be that as it may, in June 1998 I was granted early retirement as a musicologist and professor of music at Keene State College in NH at age 60 and moved to Brighton to live full-time with my wife Paula and stepson Jonah. My son Joshua is off in Oakland and San Francisco fulfilling his dreams. Paula is an Occupational Therapist, and we often swap ideas about the healing arts. We are both international folk dancers and folk musicians. I am also a viola da gambist and I have directed various early music ensembles. I have just taken up again with my trusty modern viola and joined the Brookline Symphony. I hope that all this activity will still leave me time to write the Great American Novel.

Thank you for inquiring about the Feldenkrais Method.I hope that my dedicated work with you will help nourish your own creative energy as well. Welcome aboard.