Universal Healing Arts
Enlighten Your Mind, Heal Your Body and Nourish Your Soul
What is "Awareness
Through Movement"®
Awareness Through Movement® (ATM) classes are gentle, verbally guided movement lessons developed as part of the Feldenkrais Method®. In these classes, participants are led through slow, mindful movement sequences-often while lying, sitting, or standing-with the goal of increasing body awareness, improving movement efficiency, and reducing unnecessary effort or pain.
Unlike traditional exercise, ATM classes emphasize paying close attention to how you move, encouraging self-discovery and adaptation rather than following a “correct” way to move. The instructor guides your attention to different sensations, helping you notice habitual patterns and explore new ways of moving that feel easier and more integrated.
ATM classes are suitable for people of all ages and abilities, including those seeking relief from pain, greater ease in daily activities, or a deeper sense of well-being. Many participants report feeling calmer, more grounded, and freer in their movements after class
Did you know that you can train your BRAIN to release patterns of stress and tension in your musculoskeletal system?
Your NERVOUS SYSTEM and BRAIN are actually in charge of your unconscious holding patterns!
Try an Awareness Through Movement® Class and release unwanted stress and tension through gentle, yet powerful exercise.
Introductory Class:
Sun Jun 22 • 2 pm • free
'Awareness Through Movement'® Class
Sat Jun 28 • 1 pm • $20
“My purpose is to allow people to move closer to actually being creatures of free choice, to genuinely reflect individual creativity and emotion, freeing the body of habitual tensions and wired-patterns of behavior so that it may respond without inhibition to do what the person wants.”
~Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais
More Than You Know:
Let's Dive A Little Deeper
Embody Somatic Movements to Transform Habitual Physical & Emotional Postures
Healthy Aging
The Feldenkrais Method® is uniquely poised to offer you greater freedom and mobility while keeping your brain active. As you improve your attention, balance, flexibility, and movement efficiency, you also expand your capacity for resilience and resourcefulness when life offers you challenges. Feldenkrais® lessons are not like traditional exercise or therapy. They offer a new way of learning about how you move, and how you move through life. So whether it’s playing music, hiking on a trail, or picking up your grandchild – the Feldenkrais Method can help you to create better quality in everything you enjoy.
Movement Disorders
For no group of people is this more true than those who live with neurological movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease and MS. If you have been diagnosed with a movement disorder, it’s time to become a movement expert – and the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education can help! Impaired ability in the movements of daily life – walking, balance, lifting, swallowing, etc. – is a scary thing to face. The good news is that our bodies are capable of doing most movements in a number of different ways. The key is to train our attention on how we are doing what we want to do. Just like there is a huge difference between breathing unconsciously and taking a pause for a nice, full breath, so there is a difference between doing movements in old, habitual ways and learning how to do them with skillful presence. Scientific studies increasingly bear out this view, showing that movement-based embodied practices like the Feldenkrais Method increase grey-matter density, decrease stress, and boost quality of life. All over the world, people with movement disorders have found that the Feldenkrais Method can help them recover a sense of safety, confidence, and power in their movement.
Posture & Balance
Posture and Balance If you have hunched shoulders, or a heavy head, you can’t be at the top of your game, and your balance will be off. Yet you can’t force yourself to have good posture. After all, if that worked, you wouldn’t be here now. Feldenkrais® lessons can help you re-train yourself effortlessly and elegantly. Without stress or strain, you can discover your true, balanced posture for any situation. It’s such an exciting possibility that Moshe Feldenkrais coined a new word for it. He called it acture: the ability to move in any direction without strain.
Child Development
Dr. Feldenkrais spent much of his time and good energy working with infants and children with neurological and developmental disorders. Whether the baby or child was born with the injury or something happened after birth, he knew it was important to create a learning environment rich with healthy variations of movement and developmental patterns. A parent might bring their child to a Feldenkrais® practitioner because their child has cerebral palsy, autism, learning difficulties, scoliosis, brain injury, genetic movement disorders, They might simply notice coordination issues and have a practitioner watch to see how their child moves and speaks. The Feldenkrais Method® is a wholistic way of looking at development and growth. We look at the whole person, no matter the age. The practitioner engages specific movement sequences that are playful, developmental or very specific and detailed, all while paying close attention to the process of learning and curiosity. This is where self-growth can really happen and it is wonderful to see this in each child. The practitioner can choose to work in ways such as neurological, biological or developmental. They can also look at the emotional and social aspects of movement and development in relation to the family as a whole.
Pain Relief
Are you finding that once simple movements – bending, getting in and out of the car, turning to back out of the driveway – are becoming uncomfortable? Does your lower back nag you? Have you sustained an injury that left you with constant discomfort? Has life become a literal “pain in the neck”? With its emphasis on learning, the Feldenkrais Method® offers a gentle, comfortable way of shifting your pain by exploring your movement patterns. You’ll begin by exploring movements that are well within your comfort zone – no matter how small. Gradually, as your brain learns that freedom and comfort are possible, you’ll experience your body letting go of unnecessary tension. Pain will begin to dissolve. You’ll discover greater range of motion and ease of movement.
Sports & Fitness
Moshe Feldenkrais was a martial artist who studied athletes and noticed that elite movers perform difficult tasks with a minimum of muscular effort. He developed the Feldenkrais Method® to help people emulate this efficiency in their daily life and exercise. The Feldenkrais Method is a way to improve your physical performance by moving very slowly and gently. This allows you to become aware of unnecessary muscular effort in fundamental movement patterns, and to discover more efficient alternatives. For example, imagine that the muscles in the front of your hip feel stiff or painful as you extend your leg while running. This might be caused by what Feldenkrais called “parasitic tension” – an unconscious habit of tensing muscles when they should be relaxing. This unnecessary effort would probably be very hard to notice and release while running, because of all the other vigorous movements happening at the same time. But during a Feldenkrais® lesson, such distractions are eliminated since the movements are so slow, often done lying down.Your attention is directed in a way that makes unnecessary tension much easier to recognize and release.
Mindful Movement
Whether you are solo kayaking on a pristine lake, bowing onto the mat to spar, perfecting your Garudasana or finding your ideal meditation posture, the Feldenkrais Method can support and improve your mindfulness in practice. Moshe Feldenkrais was an athlete, an engineer, and a martial artist who studied many of the inner arts. Mindful movement can take many forms: from hiking to Tai chi to Pilates. The huge variety of Awareness Through Movement lessons (there are over 1000!) offer new ways of approaching your relationship to your embodiment practice.
Performing Arts
For performing artists, the Feldenkrais Method®: will bring you the kind of intimate connection to yourself that all artists are looking for will bring you a self-awareness practice that will transform the way you think about warming up and preparing for performance will bring you more comfort, ease, and mastery in both your daily and artistic life will bring you a smart, creative, and fun way to figure out any artistic problem that you might face! If you haven’t already, find a Feldenkrais® Awareness Through Movement® class near you. Work privately with a local practitioner. Because the Feldenkrais Method works in the background of experience through movement, ANY lesson, even if not explicitly related to singing, acting, dancing, or playing an instrument, will bring something new and useful to your craft. But, there are also practitioners who are changing the way we think about learning, practicing, and performing from within the field itself.
About Carol Moran
'Awareness Through Movement'®
Feldenkrais Instructor
Carol Moran is a Guild-Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner offering individual functional integration® sessions as well as Awareness Through Movement® classes for groups. She
has certificates in The Bowen Technique, a holistic technique that uses gentle stretching of the soft connective tissue in the body to promote pain relief, and in Craniosacral Therapy, having taken a recognized training program, involving both theory and hands-on practice, in the principles and techniques of CST.
Carol was a professional dancer who studied at the Metropolitan Opera School of Ballet and owned a dance studio for a period in Brooklyn, NY that she ran for twelve years. It was her dance experience that led her to the work of Moshe Feldenkrais and his gentle method of somatic movement techniques.
Carol has participated in numerous advanced workshops from around the country and abroad. She has taught several workshops of her own, helping people of all ages, from children to seniors.
Some Key accomplishments:
• Educating parents on the progression of movement from birth to 18 months.
• Working with Gifted children with various challenges
• Working through Hospice to provide comfort and mobility to those at the end stages of life
• Helping people recover from surgeries, or with injuries, arthritis, joint pain, and back issues
• Working with singers, dancers, actors, musicians, and athletes who want to improve their performance skills
Carol’s passion is to help people function at their maximum capacity and to make a positive
difference in their lives.
Come To A Free Introduction
Sun, Jun 22, 2 pm
Sat, Jun 28, 1 pm