Dear Students:
Throughout the years I have passionately explored & taught the Feldenkrais Method & with each day, I come to understand more deeply what Moshe 
Feldenkrais realized about the developmental movement process for human beings. Contemplating further about why our Creator innately wired newborns’ nervous systems to go through these movements in the first year of life, (if not prevented by other circumstances) leads to never ending questions & discoveries. I organically know that it wasn’t only to organize our nervous, skeletal & muscular systems for moving, standing & walking but rather for much, much more.
Moshe Feldenkrais said, “My purpose is to allow people to move closer to actually being creatures of free choice, to genuinely reflect individual creativity and emotion, freeing the body of habitual tensions and wired-patterns of behavior so that it may respond without inhibition to do what the person wants.”
For me personally, self-love was a foreign concept when I was fresh out of college & had first discovered Feldenkrais. At that point in my life, I thought it was
loving to care for others to the detriment of my own health & believed I was doing a good thing. I gradually learned to love myself by first becoming aware of the ways I treated myself worse than anyone else. Next, I learned during Functional Integration & Awareness Through Movement (ATM) lessons to become non-judgmental, gentle & loving to myself.
Then I began assisting others to take responsibility for their own actions & decisions, & discovered a genuine compassion, empathy & concern for them. As a young Feldenkrais Practitioner, I did not anticipate that I would develop the emotional & spiritual growth that I am grateful for today, by adopting this way of living.
“To learn to feel comfort is a skill & development. Most people don’t have it-they have it naturally as babies but when we are grown up we have learned a way that we do what is necessary whether we want it or not. And therefore we have lost the skill of feeling what we really and when we really feel comfortable.” ~Moshe Feldenkrais, 1981 at San Francisco public workshop
Self-change can begin when you become aware of your habitual ways of
thinking, sensing, feeling & moving during challenging situations in ATM classes. Internal knowledge gives you the power to do what you desire. I have witnessed my dedicated students transform into better versions of themselves when they apply what they learn from sessions & classes to their lives.
“I believe actually what Jesus said, “Love thy Neighbor as Thyself” has more than one message. The real message is, if you don’t Love yourself you can’t love your neighbor. Because if you hate yourself what sort of love do you deem out to your neighbor? Just, politeness maybe or fear. ~Moshe Feldenkrais, 1981 at San Francisco public workshop
I invite you to join me in the journey of learning how to love yourself so you can love your neighbors & be a part of changing the violence all around us, one person at a time. Peace.
~Donna
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