FTA Curriculum

The mission of the second Feldenkrais Training Academy (FTA2) is to graduate a class of confident and competent beginning practitioners that are ready to successfully practice the Feldenkrais Method® . As a student of FTA2, you will learn to help people become self-reliant in a changing world. You will learn to help people recover their physical integrity, to restore their emotional dignity, and to thrive in the complexity of daily life.

The Feldenkrais Method is an educational system that develops a functional awareness of the self in the environment. The Method utilizes the fact that the body is the primary vehicle for learning. The Feldenkrais Method is an approach to working with people which expands their repertoire of movements, enhances awareness, improves function and enables people to express themselves more fully. The Feldenkrais Method directly addresses the question of how to facilitate the learning that is necessary for organizing the whole self and recovering excluded and unconsidered movement patterns or actions. —International Feldenkrais Federation’s Standard of Practice

To be successful at doing this work, you need to develop skills in three overlapping areas:

  • Feldenkrais Method: You'll develop the skills required to be a teacher highly-skilled in offering Awareness through Movement® classes and workshops and private Functional Integration® lessons.

  • Science: You’ll understand the scientific foundations of the Feldenkrais Method.

  • Personal Growth: You'll learn how to take advantage of opportunities to grow that will present themselves throughout your training, as you build your practice, and for the rest of your life.

What You Will Learn

A central tenet of the Feldenkrais Method is that human beings have transformational potential and that all people, regardless of their age or condition, can learn. At the core of the Feldenkrais Method is a fluid and dynamic state of mind that fosters a process of inquiry, rather than one that seeks to define solutions. As a student of FTA2, you will learn how to:

  • Enter again and again into the process of refining your abilities;

  • Acquire and fine-tune more accurate, adaptable, and resilient behavior.

  • To think for yourself, not be a mimic or rely on practiced templates of action but to actually create action plans based on your ability to inquire and synthesize information.

Then, with these discoveries, you will learn to help others do the same.

Areas Covered:
Self-Organization; Feldenkrais and the Brain; Biomechanical Principles; Interdisciplinary Understanding; Personal Growth, Transformation, Maturation; Amherst Training Materials

Self-Organization

Self-organization will be a key focus throughout this training. As you improve your self-organization, you allow for clearer communication and more sensitivity between you and your client.

Self-organization is primary. Through Self-Organization a greater capacity for sensing, feeling and learning emerges and therefore affects comfort, ease, and efficiency. As Self-Organization improves there is a refinement of self-image, evoking a clarity of movement and its relationship of self, environment and function. This profoundly influences the learning environment. —Feldenkrais Guild of North America's Feldenkrais Practitioner Profile

In the Feldenkrais Method, how you do something is as important as what you do. 

Self-organization speaks to the “how.” It is the basis for what you are doing with your clients. As you learn to organize support more clearly through your skeleton, you increase your ability to sense and feel and you provide a clearer learning environment for your clients.

Good self-organization allows the practitioner to be in an attentive state from which Functional Integration lessons emerge. Profound quietness and internal strength provide the basis for a practitioner to work effectively. It leads to a high quality of professional discourse between the client and practitioner.

Better self-organization is also at the heart of what you will teach your students. With it, they will be able to move more comfortably and efficiently. By finding their internal strength, they can master the challenges of an uncertain world.

Feldenkrais and the Brain

Understanding the brain science that supports the Feldenkrais Method is both exhilarating and important. Roger Russell, a Feldenkrais Trainer in Heidelberg, Germany, has spent a significant portion of his 40-year career making sense of existing and emerging brain science, specifically for Feldenkrais practitioners. These include: evolutionary theory; cognitive science; philosophy; neurophysiology; and child development. Roger is a core member of the FTA2 staff, and will share his teaching, presentations, lectures, and reading suggestions throughout the training via his Feldenkrais and the Brain course. This course will greatly support your knowing the how and the why of the deep roots and underpinnings of the science on which Moshe founded his method. Roger will offer 25 days of online training in-between, and folding into, the in-person segments, as we seek to develop mature, well-informed, competent beginning practitioners. 

Biomechanical Principles

Biomechanical principles are the foundation to the Feldenkrais Method. They are our standard for flexible behavior and good posture. You’ll be studying those principles from the beginning to the end of the training. Your embodiment of them will deepen with your study of Awareness Through Movement and Functional Integration.

Interdisciplinary Understanding

The Feldenkrais Method is not limited to addressing or improving a single aspect of human function and behavior—its study requires understanding from many disciplines including: physics; anatomy; physiology; evolution; psychology; infant development; martial arts; systems theory; and learning theory. Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais was well-versed in these topics and used them to guide the creation of the work.

We are not a static building, and to restore the good functioning of a human being is a much more delicate matter, necessitating more fundamental knowledge of how we grow to function as we do, and greater information and insight to understand what the person himself does not. After all, he is a person like you and me. —Moshe Feldenkrais, The Elusive Obvious

Personal Growth, Transformation, Maturation

The personal maturation that takes place with the Feldenkrais Method can be described as the “dignity of choice.” By studying your habits, appreciating your past, and developing new capacities for internal strength and skill, you will discover the specific means for choosing your direction in life and appreciating the internal resources you bring to the process. You’ll learn how to author your own experiences in life, rather than living out of habits and acquired history.

In a perfectly matured body which has grown without great emotional disturbances, movements tend gradually to conform to the mechanical requirements of the surrounding world. The nervous system has evolved under the influence of these laws and is fitted to them. However, in our society we do, by the promise of great reward or intense punishment, so distort the even development of the system, that many acts become excluded or restricted. The result is that we have to provide special conditions for furthering adult maturation of many arrested functions. The majority of people have to be taught not only the special movements of our repertoire, but also to reform patterns of motions and attitudes that should never have been excluded or neglected —Moshe Feldenkrais, Higher Judo

Amherst Training Materials

In 1980, Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais taught his final practitioner training in Amherst, MA, the recordings of which you'll be introduced to in the FTA2. This will help clarify your understanding of Dr. Feldenkrais’ approach to the work and offer you the experience of some of his teaching firsthand. You will meet the genius of Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais, with his own faults and wisdom as a human being, as you learn from the founder of the Method.

When you will learn it

The training has 12 in-person segments. In every segment, students explore and further refine their understanding of material listed above. There will be three ten-day in-person segments each year for four years. The first six in-person segments will be based primarily in experientially experiencing Awareness Through Movement, learning the inner details of how these lessons expand the functional abilities of human beings. You will learn the strategies and principles involved in both experiencing these lessons and begin to develop your skills in teaching Awareness Through Movement lessons. This will be enhanced with Roger Russell’s Feldenkrais and the Brain online sessions between the in-person segments, to deepen and further your Awareness Through Movement knowledge. 

The last six in-person segments will focus primarily on learning the how and why of Functional Integration. During this time you will learn how to adapt and organize yourself while working at a Feldenkrais table with a student. You will learn how to transfer the principles and strategies you learned in Awareness Through Movement into deeply personal contact with another person to help them meet their personal world with more functional skill and dignity. Some of the topics we will cover will be:

  • Self-organization and child development;

  • Deep listening and understanding of movement patterns;

  • Basic functions (sitting, standing, rolling, reaching…);

  • Developing internal strength;

  • Perspectives on walking;

  • Refining function with emphasis on the carriage of the head;

  • Refining function with emphasis on the organization of the eyes;

  • Crafting Functional Integration lessons and studying videos of Dr. Feldenkrais giving lessons;

  • Supervision and crafting Functional Integration lessons.

How you will learn it

FTA2 is built on experiential learning. You will learn to use the sensory/motor aspects of movement for learning. You will acquire a model of refinement, not repetition, in which there is a balance between action and reflection. In addition, you’ll learn key concepts, strategies, and insights by engaging with demonstrations, discussions, presentations, homework assignments, and other resources. You will become a master of the process of learning.

FTA2's methodology features three important innovations:

  • There will be an ongoing focus on competency and self-assessment. You’ll assess your progress in terms of your goals, reflect on your development, and document your intention to reach the next learning landmarks. Our goal is to help you become a self-regulating, reflective student as you learn the artistry of being a Feldenkrais practitioner.

  • FTA2 will fully integrate the use of the FGNA’s Feldenkrais Practitioner Profile into the training process. The profile lists the basic competences that a beginning Feldenkrais practitioner needs to be successful. Your learning will be year-round. In addition to in-person segments, and online training with Roger, there will be monthly online mentoring groups to support student growth. For example, mentoring sessions will support reading of Dr. Feldenkrais’ books, like a directed bookclub. We have observed over the years that reading Feldenkrais’ material helps people develop a much more comprehensive understanding of integration, which supports the improved functional quality of life and the maturation of self.

This curriculum represents years of working in professional practitioner training programs and is the culmination of a learning process coming from each successive training iteration offered before. We hope you will join us and become part of the next generation of Feldenkrais practitioners who bring this work into the world.