Awareness Through Movement: Easy-to-Do Health Exercises to Improve Your Posture, Vision, Imagination, and Personal Awareness

Thousands have found renewed health and increased sensory awareness through the Feldenkrais method as explained in Awareness Through Movement. Here is a way for people of every age to integrate physical and mental development into a new, invigorating wholeness. Feldenkrais provides a modern-day, practical program for the perennial ideal of a healthy mind in a healthy body. His down-to-earth method carefully avoids any mystical component and never obliges any pupil to master abstruse theories. Exercises for posture, eyes, imagination, and more will simultaneously build better body habits and focus new dimensions of awareness, self-image, and human potential.

That choice, however, would have been a huge mistake.

This book offers a series of "lessons" that take the human body through movements most children could do easily but had been pushed out of my movement repertoire. These are also movements most people, including my extremely strong and lean 30 year old daughter(who's a personal trainer I might add), cannot do with ease. The movement patterns provided in the book help me rollerblade without fear (well, a reasonable level of fear!) and increase the likelihood that I'll still be able to chase men when I'm old enough to know better but still too young--what's 95 anyway?-- to care. On a more serious side these strengths will be absolutely crucial if we want to be able to get into a shower or go to the restroom alone when we get older.

I've been a runner and fitness specialist for a LONG time and have worked from just about every angle in the fitness field that exists, from aerobic instruction to power lifting to yoga and the Awareness Through Movement theory was alien to anything I'd learned in the traditional "western" pursuit of fitness.

Instruction like this was not in any of my personal training courses. Though certified in anatomy and strength training for several years, this just didn't even appear on my fitness 'radar'. I wasn't used to working that hard for information. I wanted cut and dried instructions with pictures to boot. It was normal to use traditional exercise methods because they aren't very complex, are easy to teach and mistakes are fairly easy to see and correct.

Books that instruct bench presses, abdominal crunches, and squats also are easy to read and follow; unfortunately they miss the subtlties necessary to truly powerful human movement. No good athlete depends on exercises like those alone. That's where this book has helped. It has required some intense think and move sessions but all these movement lessons yield surprising results if you have the patience to stick with them. One note: you must have the patience of a baby learning to walk.

I read Feldenkrais' other books which actually gave Awareness Through Movement context and made it easier with which to work . Feldenkrais was a judo master as well as one of the earliest developers of cybernetic science and all of this shows in his book but it also means the book isn't light reading. Learning to do the method from written text will be as difficult as learning the basics of one of the martial arts.

I agree that the photos of wooden models are difficult to use, front and back are almost impossible to discern (I did some creative artwork..noses, ears, etc. once I figured out where they needed to be) and might make it difficult to understand the movement clearly. There is also no index or reference table which is a little frustrating at times.
Despite these drawbacks I wouldn't give the book to a family member unless I knew a replacement would be easy to find!

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.