FAQ
Private Alexander Technique or Feldenkrais lessons are available to everyone for an additional fee.
Private Feldenkrais lessons, called Functional Integration® lessons, are tailored to each student's individual learning needs. The teacher guides your movements through gentle non-invasive touching and words. The student is fully clothed, lying on a table, or in a sitting or standing position. At times, various props (pillows, rollers, blankets) are used in an effort to support the student, or to facilitate certain movements. The learning process is carried out without the use of any invasive or forceful procedure.
With the Alexander Technique, these benefits are accomplished by the application in one's own experience of what Frederick (F. M.) Alexander called constructive conscious control. Constructive conscious control is a process of self-observation and self-analysis, wherein one becomes intimately knowledgeable about one's own habits so that one can suspend habitual muscular tightening (sometimes called downward pull), where it exists, and gradually consciously replace it with constructive behavior. Often one simply suspends unnatural movement and waits for natural movement to emerge. Natural movement is discovered to be that movement which is most supported and sustained by the body's whole complex of postural reflexes, including the much prized "Primary Control", the natural lengthening and gathering of the spine in movement, which depends on a dynamic, initiating relationship of the head to the spine.
The student carefully corrects his or her own body map by assimilating accurate information provided by kinesthetic experience, the mirror, models, books, pictures, and teachers. One thereby learns to recognize the source of inefficient or harmful movement and how to replace it with movement that is efficient, elegant, direct, and powerful based on the truth about one's structure, function, and size.
Body Mapping was discovered by William Conable, professor of cello at the Ohio State University School of Music. Conable inferred the body map from the congruence of students' movement in playing with their reports of their notions of their own structures. He observed that students move according to how they think they're structured rather than according to how they are actually structured. When the students' movement in playing becomes based on the students' direct perception of their actual structure, it becomes efficient, expressive, and appropriate for making music. Conable's observations are currently being confirmed by discoveries in neurophysiology concerning the locations, functions, and coordination of body maps in movement.
Body Mapping is the conscious correcting and refining of one's body map to produce efficient, graceful, coordinated, effective movement. Body Mapping, over time, with application, allows any musician to play like a natural.
Barbara Conable, the founder of Andover Educators, is now retired from her career as an internationally renowned teacher of the Alexander Technique. What Every Musician Needs to Know about the Body, her book and her course, are informed by the insights of F. M. Alexander, as well as other Somatic disciplines and current findings in the neuroscience of movement.
By expanding the self-image through movement sequences, the Method enables you to include more of yourself in your movements. Students become aware of their habitual neuromuscular patterns and rigidities, and learn to move in new ways.
The Feldenkrais Method® helps those experiencing chronic or acute pain of the back, neck, shoulders, hips, legs, or knees, as well as healthy individuals who wish to enhance their movement abilities. The Method has been very helpful in dealing with central nervous system conditions such as multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, and stroke. Musicians, actors, and artists can extend their abilities and enhance their creativity. Seniors enjoy using it to retain or regain their ability to move without strain or discomfort.
