Refreshercise

As a massage therapist and a Pilates instructor in the city, I would see some clients with the same pain every time I saw them.  And it wasn't that I wasn't a good therapist. They would see lots of experts, and it didn't matter which treatments they had, they reported the same pain.  With other clients, their pain relief was more simple.  They would regularly attend Pilates, do more exercise which could just be walking, change their desk set up and do more activities, which relaxed them.   I used to think the more new techniques I could learn, the more I would be able to help those clients with more persistent pain. But I think less about my own techniques now, and more about the state of mind of the clients in persistent pain. Quite a few years ago, I remember one of my colleagues was in so much pain she actually couldn't sit down at her desk.  She was relatively young, she hadn't had a fall or a fracture, she hadn't pulled a muscle or torn a disc ligament...

  It’s very rare for me to mention Feldenkrais in the UK and for someone to reply that they had heard of it. I'd never heard of it either, until a few years ago, a pain specialist recommended that I see a Feldenkrais practitioner.  It was to become the start of a new pain management and movement journey for me, and if it had been 20 years earlier, I probably would’ve trained to be a Feldenkrais practitioner! History of Feldenkrais 1 It all started with Dr Moshe Feldenkrais, in the 1940s.  He researched and developed anti-submarine detection equipment for the British Admiralty, when he was forced to flee Paris. He was an inventor, a physicist and engineer, and he was also a student of Judo.  Feldenkrais studied with the founder of modern judo, Jigaro Kano, in Paris, earned his black belt (one of the first Europeans to do so) and eventually opened the first Ju Jitsu Club of Paris. It wasn’t until the return of a childhood soccer injury that he consolidated all of these...