A lifetime of learning guides our every movement. The Feldenkrais Method provides a subtle, yet palatable, intervention to habit, creating the conditions for meaningful change in our everyday. Here we consider habit not just as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but more broadly as a learned patterning of how we live. Habit forms a neural foundation for how we move, act and react, and our broader sense of self. Sometimes change from a class or session can happen without our noticing; it can be weeks or months before realizing all that has shifted.
Method
Working with the scaffolding of my Feldenkrais training, I offer private sessions tailored toward each clients’ individual needs and desires. These sessions can look like many things; typically a first session involves some getting to know your intentions and movement history, and then some touch and observation of your movements. Sessions can occur on a table, sitting, or laying on the ground, and can involve hands-on or verbally guided cues to move. This can depend on your comfort and what you want to work on together. As a practitioner, my work is grounded in communication and consent.
Touch in a Feldenkrais session does not serve the same purpose as massage or other manual therapies. Touch communicates with the nervous system to regulate and providing sensory information about the neuromuscular system to the brain. The result is a state of deep self observation, allowing the brain to process without doing, relating the ways you are being moved to what you already know and what you imagine yourself capable of.
This kind of work offers a graceful alternative (or accompaniment!) to physical therapy and other movement therapies. In exploring the roots of how and why one moves the ways they do, we can address chronic injuries, imbalances, neurological impairment, emotional regulation, improving coordination, balance, and stability, and problems that may not have been successfully resolved in traditional types of physical therapy.
A first session is 75 minutes. Subsequent sessions are typically 60 minutes. (This too, can be adjusted according to need.) Private sessions can be in person in my studio in Florence, or online. Wear clothing that you feel comfortable being touched and moving in. I offer sessions in English.
Schedule a private session with me here, by clicking on the schedule tab at the top of the page, or by email (lizobrien@gmail.com).
You can find my group class offerings here or by clicking the classes tab at the top of the page.
