Welcome! I am a practitioner of the Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais Method and Emotional Freedom Technique with over 20 years experience. This page will give you a sense of the work and it's wonderful benefits. If you visit my website you'll find more articles, case studies, audio samples of my CDs, a slideshow called 'Scenes from a lesson' and information about upcoming workshops and classes.
If you mention Natural Therapy Pages you'll receive a 20% discount on your first session.
SERVICES
1/25a Avalon Pde Avalon - Individual and group classes by appointment
Fees
Two hour initial consultation - $150
Subsequent one hour sessions - $90
Extended sessions (longer than one and a half hours) - $135
Half hour sessions - $60
Fifteen Minute reminder sessions - $30
Group classes are $15 and can be attended casually.
Most people find that individual lessons achieve their objectives most quickly.
I also run three group classes.
The Expression of Vision
6.30 - 7.30am Tuesdays @ 1/25a Avalon Pde Avalon
Movement, meditation and visualisation of your dreams and goals using music, pen and paper.
Meditation
6.30 - 7.30am Wednesdays @ 1/25a Avalon Pde Avalon
A body-centred approach to mindfulness.
Feldenkrais - Awareness Through Movement
11.00 - 12.00 Saturdays @ Avalon Recreation Centre 59a Old Barrenjoey Rd Avalon
During the early part of 2008 I will be exploring lessons from my new CD series "The Movements of Love"
CDs and Tapes
“The Heavenly Gait & Other Earthly Pleasures”
This 8 CD set of Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lessons is a Feldenkrais course that can be done at home. The lessons have the potential to profoundly affect your day-to-day experience of life and the pleasure you feel in body and soul.
The set contains seven 45 –50 minute Awareness Through Movement (ATM) lessons, one 18-minute mini-lesson and a 30-minute lecture called “Is the Universe Friendly?” The lessons have many layers and can be done again and again with continuing benefit.
($89.95 plus postage)
“The Directions”
This audiocassette explores two fundamental aspects of the Alexander Technique - Direction and inhibition. ($22 plus postage)
For more details or to ask a specific question please feel free to call or email me .
In the meantime here are a few articles to give you a bit more background on each modality.
The Feldenkrais Method
The Feldenkrais Method is a movement practice for developing self-awareness and self-mastery.
It is the creation of a brilliant Israeli scientist and Judo expert named Moshe Feldenkrais.
People all over the world use the Method to remove back, neck or limb pain and find relief from many other problems. Performing artists, speakers and sportsmen at elite levels also use the method to improve their performance.
The method harnesses your innate ability to sense, explore, learn and grow. You listen to your body as you move, looking closely to see yourself as you really are. In the process you discover habits of tension that reveal the underlying causes of your stress or limitation. As the lesson unfolds you discover ease of movement and the path of least resistance.
Freedom and ease through awareness and understanding
There are two main modalities within the Feldenkrais Method - Awareness Through Movement
and Functional Integration. Awareness Through Movement lessons are verbally directed movement explorations usually done in groups. There are over a thousand lessons that explore a huge range of functions.
Functional Integration is a modality for working with individuals. A practitioner, primarily using their hands, guides a person through a sequence of movements that are all related to a specific unctional theme. The function chosen is often one that will highlight how some habits of movement may be contributing to the particular concern you may have, whether that is a pain or a skill you want to improve.
The focus is on minimal effort, ease of movement and learning. You don’t stretch or strain in Feldenkrais lessons. You seek greater freedom and ease through awareness and understanding. In this way the benefits felt in lessons are repeatable and immediately applicable to other life situations.
The Alexander Technique
What happens when you pay close attention to the way that you move or to the simple act of standing ? Is what you are feeling actually happening ? Or do you not feel anything ?
The Alexander Technique explores these questions in a unique and practical manner.
Often, many of the problems we suffer are entirely preventable if only we knew what it was that we were doing.
The most fundamental thing about the Alexander Technique is that you stop and pay attention to the way you feel. This sounds simple and it is, but within that simplicity is a kernel of infinite variability. It is one of those profoundly simple things that can generate great presence of mind.
At first you sense your body then soon realise it is the experience of your body you are sensing.
Still later you realise it is your experience of life through your body that you are actually sensing.
Even with ‘stopping’ How can you stop doing what you don’t know you are doing ? The simple act of standing, upon closer inspection reveals that you may not have stopped at all. Your mind is probably racing, your eyes and tongue are probably darting about and you are also I imagine, busy holding yourself in some sort of frozen action that is anything but standing in stillness.
Stillness in action. Stillness in being
The Alexander Technique is a search for stillness. Stillness in action, stillness in being. It is often a search for a new experience which can make it a mysterious thing. It’s like moving through a fog in a small boat. Everything is heightened. You listen with all your senses.
You are aware of the water under your boat, the current on your rudder, the sound of water lapping and in the distance, other boats. As it is a new experience, how can you be sure of what is happening ? Are you actually moving or are you still harnessed to an old mooring ?
How do you find the other shore or perhaps the great current of your destiny ?
Alexander used to say that “You can’t do what you don’t know if you keep doing what you do know”. So you stop, pay attention and reduce effort. You go to move, sweeping your attention through your whole body, listening to what you are doing. If you find yourself moving in abitual or inefficient ways you stop and listen once again. In the stillness an image of where and who you are begins to merge. You soon find yourself experiencing your body in new ways. Movement becomes effortless and the way forward becomes clearer. In the distance you catch a glimpse of the great effortless stream and you set your bearings anew.
The path of least resistance
The Alexander Technique reveals the path of least resistance by removing your self-imposed barriers. One of the cornerstones of the Alexander Technique is learning to maintain the delicate balance of our head on top of our spine. To do this requires a certain organization of the rest of your body and ensures you will be moving in the most efficient manner possible.
Alexander noticed that when he used his body inefficiently he used more muscular effort than necessary. The unnecessary effort had the effect of compressing his body. He also noticed that the back of his neck was the first place to be affected. He found that if he was able to stop the tension there, he stopped it through the rest of his body as well. He realised that the balance of the head on top of the spine had a controlling influence on the rest of the body, which he called ‘primary control’.
During a course of Alexander lessons you will learn to become aware of the way your head is balanced on top of your spine and the influence this balance, or lack of it, has on the rest of your body. If you have an ache or pain you can usually trace a related tension to your neck.
Freeing your neck so your head moves freely can have the most surprising consequences.
A profound sense of peace
On the surface the Alexander Technique seems concerned with posture or with maintaining a sense of ease in all movements. The actual experience can seem a lot more than that.
Many habits of tension and poor movement are a reaction to old fears - fears that survive long after the threat has passed. Releasing tensions such as these can give a profound sense of peace. Stopping to pay attention gives you the opportunity to reassess the relevance of old perceptions and be present to what you perceive now. It can create a great sense of freedom and possibility.
In a way it is rather like travelling, except that your surroundings don’t change. It is your ability to perceive your surroundings that changes. It is a profound experience that can have many consequences. It is not just that you learn a way to move that removes pain or feels robust and graceful. It is an experience that can fill you with awe and appreciation for who you are and what you have.
What is EFT ?
EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) is a process that enables you to feel equanimity in the face of negative emotion. It can enable you to reduce the intensity of a negative emotion until it is no longer there. It is based on the contention that the source of negative emotion is a disruption in the body’s energy system. By energy system, I refer to the system delineated by the Chinese nearly five thousand years ago.
The purpose is not to eradicate negative emotion altogether. It does not seek to make us artificially happy all the time. Sadness, fear, anxiety and other negative emotions are a rich and valuable part of the flow of life.
The negative emotions EFT works with are the habitual states of mind governed by fear, anger, depression or other emotions that impair the way we function.
A simple invaluable tool
To use EFT you hold an emotion or issue in your mind whilst tapping on or near the ends of series of acupuncture meridians. The meridians that may have been dysfunctional in the face of the issue are stimulated into becoming functional and the negative emotion dissipates.
EFT can be applied to fears, phobias, poor functioning resulting from traumatic experience, depression and in fact anything that has an emotional component. It is essentially a self-help technique and as such not a replacement for treatment of serious mental illness. However, for the average person negotiating their personal mountain it is an invaluable tool that can shine a light on the limiting fears and beliefs that obscure their path to fulfilment.
Feldenkrais, Alexander & EFT
The gentle enquiring nature of this work enables you to penetrate more and more deeply into your experience of your body and self. Exploring the methods in depth can enable you to act in ways appropriate to your abilities and innermost vision. Feldenkrais maintained that this was at the heart of wellbeing. His definition of health is interesting in this regard. It is – “Living fully your avowed and unavowed dreams free from any compulsive habit or coercive reaction”. He argued that if you never got sick but spent your life disliking your work, living in a bad relationship and never really doing what you wanted, could you really say you were healthy? You don’t get off the fire until you can feel the heat. Many people are so out of touch with the way they feel, they don’t even notice their strain.
Self-awareness makes it easier to move well and to remove strain before it becomes a problem, but perhaps more importantly it can make it easier to act in accordance with your deepest values.
Copyright 2006 David Hall
All rights reserved. No part of the written or graphic material on this webpage may be reproduced or disseminated in any form without the prior permission of the author.
QUALIFICATION DETAILS
Certified Member Feldenkrais Guild,
Certified Member AUSTAT
Service Categories
Alexander Technique, EFT, Feldenkrais
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