M O V I N G   T O   L E A R N
A gift from childhood that keeps on giving

From early childhood to the end of life, movement helps us learn....

A simple but profound truth about human beings:  We can learn to move, and we can move in order to learn.

Said another way,  the highway that runs between your brain and the rest of your body is a two-way street.  Your brain tells your muscles what to do, and as you are moving,  messages are being sent back to your brain.  Without this two-way flow of information, you could not form habits -- that would mean no driving, no typing, no expertise in throwing darts, no ... well, you get the idea.

Every time you move, you initiate a flow of information IN, through your nervous system back to your brain.  This inflow of information, which is also activated by touch, creates or strengthens neural pathways which are used by your brain to guide everything you do.

Having a variety of movements in your life, including new, novel movements that you don't use every day, is a way to expand the size of the transportation system your brain uses for relaying messages.  When you decide that you want to have better posture, a more dynamic gait, an improved golf swing, or better balance, having this enhanced capacity is essential.*

Let's go back...When you were very young, chances are you moved freely for hours a day. You didn’t know it at the time, but your early playful, exploratory movement was important!   During your innocent playtime, you were laying a path for your future abilities to move – and also to think, feel and sense.

You learned to roll over: that enabled you to crawl. You learned to crawl, enabling you to stand.   What we now know is that your early childhood movements created a kind of  'infrastructure of experience' on which all of your subsequent life functions have been built. (Developmental specialists now recognize that crawling may have even impacted your future ability to read!).

Many people believe, in error,  that you lose the capacity for this kind of learning after childhood! In fact, you can use movement, as long as you’re alive, to reorganize, rebuild and ‘modernize’ that framework -- your ‘infrastructure of experience'. 

The entire field of somatic education -- of which the Feldenkrais Method is a preeminent example -- is based on exploring and exploiting this capacity to learn through movement.  Other examples of somatic education are the Alexander Technique,  Body Mind Centering, Hannah Somatics, and Tragering. 

Having said all that, you'll understand this kind of learning much more by experiencing it than you ever will by reading about it! (Kind of like eating a peach... how could you possibly know the flavor, the delight of eating this yummy fruit by reading the Wikipedia entry on PEACH?!)

Learn more about the Feldenkrais Method

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*This is a highly oversimplified account of what takes place in the brain, and between the brain and the mind, as learning occurs. For an interesting discussion of the intellectual dilemmas involved in 'explaining how the Feldenkrais Method works', follow this link.  You may enjoy reading the articles by Carl Ginsburg and Ruthy Alon.