Frank Wildman, PhD, offers Feldenkrais workshops and training programs in the Palo Alto area through the Body Therapy Center. Frank first offered Feldenkrais trainings through OPEN EXCHANGE in the mid-1970s!

The older we get, the cleverer we must become: we must learn to use our bodies more efficiently, improve our quality and ease of motion, our coordination, our sense of balance, control and comfort, learn to reduce stress while increasing muscular efficiency in a pleasurable and comfortable manner.

Old age, for many people, is a time of increasing physical discomfort, stiffness, and fatigue. Everyday activities like walking up a flight of stairs or bending down to pick something off the floor become more and more difficult. To counteract this process of bodily decline, it is often recommended that older persons exercise to strengthen muscles or increase endurance. But traditional exercise programs often involve a degree of strain and fatigue most older people are unwilling to partake in. A seventy-year-old woman with degenerative joint disease is neither ready for nor enthusiastic about jogging or weightlifting.

The Feldenkrais Method provides an innovative and exciting sensory-based movement program that can enhance ease of movement, flexibility, relaxation, and posture faster and further than any form of conventional exercise. Feldenkrais lessons begin with the proposition that correct movement is movement with minimal effort, and that most people use more effort than is required to perform a given action.

For example, when moving from a lying to a sitting position, many people strain their abdominal and neck muscles. Through the Feldenkrais Method they would first become aware of how they sit up, then explore many different ways they can sit up, and finally sit up in the manner requiring the least effort.

At a movement program for older adults, students were introduced to the gentle and intriguing Feldenkrais lessons. The results were astonishing. In the first class many participants needed help getting to and off the floor and some even needed help in standing. Lying flat on the firm floor was a painful experience for many. By the tenth class, people simply got down to the floor and up by themselves. During class, they lay flat on their backs without pain, some for the first time in decades.

The results of this class reached beyond improved posture and muscular efficiency. The students gained an awareness of how to use their bodies better. Standing up from a chair does not take much leg strength if done properly, if we have an understanding of the relationship of legs to back to pelvis to shoulders to head. However, if we do not understand how to coordinate this simple action, it can be an extraordinarily difficult task.

Some people had stopped going out alone because they feared they would tire or lose their balance or not be able to get up from sitting without asking for help from a stranger.
When they learned how to get out of a chair in a balanced, smooth fashion, they were amazed; some cried. The world had opened up to them again.