Feldenkrais®
For Better Business.
Without human movement, day-to-day business just wouldn't move forward. Consider investing in your people by offering some
Feldenkrais® Awareness Through Movement® classes to help them enjoy the workplace as a dynamic space to create and contribute from.
IMAGINE...
You're sitting relaxed with your shoulders soft and supple.
Your neck is fluid - free - and it's a delight to be simply breathing.
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Would it be easier to enjoy your place of work?
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Would you emanate more energy to contribute to your company, organisation, community - to your family?
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Feeling good within yourself, what kind of heart and mindspace would you be generating ideas and solutions from?
Expanding your mobility can empower you to share more skill, creativity, and spirit at the workplace.
Feldenkrais®
for better business.
Hello! I'm Paul, and I offer the Feldenkrais Method® to companies and organisations as a tool to guide their people to expand their personal capabilities, so they may enhance their everyday experience and performance in the workplace.
Feldenkrais® Awareness Through Movement® lessons guide people to approach themselves from different angles to discover more efficient, intelligent, and sustainable ways for them to contribute from the heights of their human potential. As more companies gift their employees with free meals, gym passes, massages, etc., these ATM® lessons are another form of investing in and nurturing your talent.
Work can only be achieved through the actions of people, which is why I consider it smart business management (and good heart) to provide a way for individuals to expand their capacity to take action more easily, so they may better cope with the professional challenges without sacrificing their well-being. Many attribute stiffness, discomfort, and even pain, to their sedentary routine and repetitive actions at work. These irritating issues stem from habits of inefficient self-use for which the Feldenkrais Method® can help by improving people's "self-image" to develop more favourable movement strategies that underlie their everyday actions. The method uses our ability to rework our habits to reduce stress and injury, increase well-being, expand one's confidence and competence, and boost the dynamics at the workplace.
Examples of skills explored in ATM® lessons:
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ability of your pelvis to move in all directions to help you organise yourself for more effortless sitting, a more resonant voice, and better mental focus...
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ability to glide your shoulder blades more fully to offer more room to breathe, to free shoulders and necks, and to improve one's presence in front of others...
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liberating movements of ribs for easier breathing, increased stability in feet, and a less anxious mind...
Optimising the quality of people's "self-management" is simultaneously improving the conditions of their work environment; when people acquire more personal skill and flexibility to enjoy comfort and ease at their work place, they have more freedom and motivation to experience their job as an exciting opportunity to create exemplary work and generate flow in their professional community.
ABOUT ME
My career started as a contemporary dancer, and I am now shifting into helping people become better movers. I once felt that movement was frivolous - utterly impractical, but then I realised that life would be impossible without it. We're moving to breathe, eat, see, engage with others, communicate our thoughts and feelings, walk to work, take care of our families...
In helping people discover more of their personal possibilities to move, I see that I am equipping them to be masters of themselves; to expand their freedom to create and live their lives according to their dreams.
When someone learns to let go of unnecessary effort and use themself more intelligently, more creatively, they develop more flexibility and ease. They could feel liberation in their shoulders, their neck, and they might even resolve their chronic back pain. However, their comfort and pleasure is only the beginning. What are they more capable to do now? What curiosity and desire awakens and inspires them to create and give?! This is where the beauty and excitement begins...
So my work as a Feldenkrais® teacher, I consider it an extension of my creative road.
Paul Pui Wo Lee
Certified Feldenkrais® teacher
Movement/self-use consultant
Feldenkrais Method®
The Feldenkrais Method® is an educational method helping people learn to sense themselves more clearly to discover more intelligent and efficient ways of moving that increase their mobility and flexibility. It is certainly helpful for injury prevention and recovery, but it's true spirit is to help people continuously improve and essentially realise more of their human potential to take action in life.
Awareness Through Movement® (ATM®) Lessons
An ATM® is a movement lesson held in a group setting. It offers the environment for people to slow down and gently rework the way they organise ourselves to move. The lessons are structured explorations, and everyone does only as much as they wish to at their own pace.
In the process, people learn to reduce their effort to help their brain engage their musculature differently for more efficient movement patterns, which gives them a renewed sense of balance and ease when returning to their usual activities: walking, sitting, talking, standing, moving our arms, seeing around us, etc..
In the ATM® lessons, we might explore all the possible movements of the pelvis, experience the gliding of the shoulder blades over the ribs, softening of the ribs for better turning of the head, fuller breathing of the chest cavity and abdomen for better stability over our feet, etc.
The majority of the lessons are done on the floor to relieve the nervous system of the work to maintain upright, so it can be calmer to sense differences in effort. This process of learning broadens their repertoire of movements and enhance their movement intelligence. Feldenkrais would be the opposite of the no-pain-no-gain mentality.
Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais
Founder of the Feldenkrais Method®
Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais was born May 6th, 1904, in a city called Slavuta, in what is present-day Ukraine. He left his family to move to Palestine in his early teens. He was an active man and it was here that he began learning jujitsu and even trained people in unarmed combat, as they were not allowed to carry weapons in this time.
In the 1930s, Feldenkrais moved to France to study, and after earning degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering there, he went on to obtain his Doctor of Science in Physics from the Sorbonne in Paris. During this time he worked with Nobel Laureate Nicholas Joliot-Curie in his laboratory. It was in Paris where Moshé met Professor Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo. Apparently in their first meeting Feldenkrais decided to test his martial arts skills against Professor Kano's. After being thrown down so effortlessly by this slight professor over and over again, Feldenkrais was convinced that he had to study with the professor. Feldenkrais became one of the first Europeans to earn a black belt, and also helped establish judo in Europe.
In the 1940s Feldenkrais moved to Britain to avoid the incoming Nazis and worked for the British Admiralty to research anti-submarine weaponry. He had suffered a serious knee-injury as a young man, and it worsened during this time. After surgeons predicted only a fifty-percent chance of him regaining use of his knee after surgery, he refused those odds and began immersing himself in a whole range of subjects, such as physiology, anatomy, etc. to understand the problem with his knee. This led to the discoveries that are the foundations to his own method.
*(An anecdote from our training recounts how Feldenkrais was asked about how he dealt with problems of the neck, back, knees, feet, etc. His answer was that he didn't deal with body parts - he always worked with the person.)
Feldenkrais trained thirteen students when he moved back to Tel Aviv and was presenting his method throughout North America and Europe. He was invited to the Esalen Institute in California in 1972 to teach ATM® lessons, as part of the Human Potential Movement, and in 1978, famed English theatre and film director, Peter Brook, invited Feldenkrais to work with his touring theatre troupe. These are just a few of Feldenkrais' many teaching engagements.
After the San Francisco training, and halfway through the subsequent training in Amherst, Moshé fell ill and passed away July 1st, 1984.
Photo of Dr. Feldenkrais by: Irene Sieben
Upcoming
ATM® classes
MALMÖ
Regular Wednesday + Saturday classes @ YogaGården
All information can be found here:
