FTA Pre-training Events

Saturday, September 19, 2026, 9:30–11:30am PT:
Teaching and Understanding the Feldenkrais Method—Three Kinds of Skills

Moshe Feldenkrais began his book Awareness through Movement with the words, “We act in accordance with our self-image.”

He later followed up with: “Systematic correction of the image is more useful than correction of single actions.”

The Feldenkrais Training Academy 2 delivers three key professional skills that empower every participant to systematically practice and explain the Feldenkrais Method.

• The capacity to develop—through experience—teaching skills of ATM and Functional Integration®. 

• A knowledge base for understanding how Feldenkrais lessons are so surprisingly effective.

• Meta-thinking skills for coherently interweaving practice and explanation into applications in any field that addresses human development. 

In this first of five free online meetings, Jeff Haller and Roger Russell will discuss how each participant discovers an individual path towards professional proficiency.

Sunday, October 25, 2026, 10am–12pm PT:
Feldenkrais—Connecting Know-How and Know-What for Professional Skills and Deep Understanding

Connecting the experiential know-how of teaching with theory (know-what) functions best if we understand something about understanding. For a professional, this demands clear thinking, all of the necessary facts and a road map for connecting the dots. 

In this session, we will map out clear thinking about Feldenkrais lessons by naming seven dimensions of understanding. This clarifies the balance between:

• Knowing the necessary facts;

• Clear thinking;

• An explicit frame of values including honesty and humility in our teaching;

• Being comfortable with complexity;

• Second order curiosity;

• Intellectual integrity.

This provides us with a framework for a deeper look at what we need to know in the next session in December.

Saturday, December 5, 2026, 9–11am PT:
Mastering the Challenges—Levels of Explanation of the Feldenkrais Body of Work

We will explore what it means to be comfortable with complexity, and how second-order curiosity enables us to avoid the “Simplicity Trap.”

Consider: 

• Life is not simple;

• A lifetime of moving—mastering challenges, sidestepping setbacks, finding alternatives and thriving—is not simple;

• Each person’s individuality of learning is not even close to being simple.

Why expect promises of simple, one-time, quick-fix techniques when we could have complex solutions, deep discovery and lasting resolution?

This doesn’t come cheap. We take time to immerse ourselves and experience rich dynamics. This asks for patience and curiosity, which we offer aplenty: hundreds of Awareness through Movement lessons and the unlimited flexibility of Functional Integration.

When we ask “How do these lessons work?” and look from our seven dimensions of understanding, we discover that each dimension can be imagined as a magnifying glass with eight levels of focus. 

Indeed, Feldenkrais is remarkably complex. Just as life itself.

In this third online meeting, we look at how this tool provides aid for finding unimagined connections and unexpected applications for Feldenkrais lessons… solving conundrums that simple approaches leave untouched.

Saturday, January 23, 2027, 9–11am PT:
The Biology of the Feldenkrais Method: Connecting Experiential Learning with wide-ranging Professional Literature

Having experienced the Pelvic Clock lesson, one of Moshe Feldenkrais’s classics, we find our mood has changed by moving our “body.” How could that be?

Many people, confronted with a surprising experience in a Feldenkrais lesson, adopt an explanatory strategy called “reduction to the familiar.” This is a comfortable strategy. Any kind of puzzling experience can be shorn of the profound implications it awakens, and embedded into a familiar “web of belief.” A personal theory emerges that limits our imagination of possible applications of the lesson.

We will not adopt this strategy. Instead, we will take up John Dewey’s idea that thinking is kick-started by an uncomfortable sense of confusion brought about when our habitual ways of thinking fail to capture the entire experience. This idea reframes what thinking is. It is what we do when we don’t know what to do. 

In his Amherst teacher training, Feldenkrais stated, “Thinking that does not lead to a change of action is mere cerebration.”

First, as we learn to think in original ways, we agree to feel confused and expand our thinking horizons. Stretching our net of curiosity across a wide range of professional literature, we apply our thinking tools, go to the library, and go to work. 

There we will find, literally, millions of books. Where to start? Let us go back to the lesson: what could we possibly find in the library that can inform us about how our skeleton, muscles and brain work together to bring about a profound shift of our mood and our presence with other people? 

Looking first not to the facts but to how the facts are presented and why, we will find five kinds of literature. 

Using this organizing principle, we will select an example of each and consider how they can inform us about the full dimensions of the Feldenkrais Method. 

There will be surprises, puzzles and a view of the range of thinking that we can mobilize to understand and practice the Feldenkrais Method.

Saturday, February 27, 2027, 9–11am PT:
Feldenkrais and the Brain—The Highest Common Denominator

Having done our homework, we can now build a curriculum that provides an outline for a complete and coherent theoretical understanding of the Feldenkrais Method. This is no simple thing. This curriculum brings order and overview to the learning process. 

In this last online meeting, we will present the scope and range of the Feldenkrais and the Brain project, with a plan for interweaving experience and understanding at a professional level. Both skill and clear thinking emerge as we wrestle with this project in Feldenkrais Training Academy 2 training. The net result for you as a participant? A rich repertoire of lessons, applicable for any person in response to their unique needs.

Pre-Training Workshops

Coming soon…