Olivia CheeverThe desire to study and practice the art of healing is deep and strongly rooted in my heritage, and in my heart. I was raised in a family where many chose to serve in the field of medicine, and from the time I was a young girl, I was fascinated by the world of healing, as it was practiced by different peoples and in many different ways. My grandfathers and my great grandfathers were all medical doctors, and my grandfather, Augustus Thorndike, was, like me, particularly interested in the pain free use and optimal functioning of the physical body. He researched and authored one of the first texts in Sports Medicine: Athletic Injuries: Prevention, Diagnosis, and Treatment (Philadelphia, Lea & Febiger,3rd ed. 1950) during his tenure as Harvard University’s team doctor.
With this legacy, I seriously considered medical school, but soon realized that I could contribute more through a less conventional, but still rigorous approach. And so I chose the Feldenkrais Method. I have blended this methodology with my training and experience in psychotherapy and massage therapy to create the skills and expertise I most use today in my work as a holistic body centered practitioner.
Feldenkrais Method
At first glance, this work can look a lot like garden-variety exercising. In a Feldenkrais class, I guide students through slow sequences of gentle movements, often done lying on the floor or maybe rolling around much as a baby does.
What you can’t see is how the repetition of seemingly simple, nonhabitual movements is actually working to radically reeducate your nervous and muscular systems, by waking up your brain to new possibilities.
There are two complementary ways to work with the Feldenkrais Method. Awareness Through Movement® (ATM) is the verbally-guided, group lesson form. Functional Integration® (FI) is a hands-on individualized session. In both, you learn to be aware of what you’re doing as you’re doing it. This means noticing nonjudgmentally where you’re carrying needless tension and exploring alternate ways to move with efficiency and ease.
Moshe Feldenkrais, the genius who invented this system of somatic education, used to tell those of us he trained that the flexibility he cared about was first in our minds and only later in our bodies. Since we were learning how to be our own teachers, he called himself the last teacher we would ever need.
The Feldenkrais Method is a passport to independence. One of my students calls it a “get out of jail free” card. Worth noting: Feldenkrais practitioners (some 3,000 trained worldwide since 1969) think of the people we work with as students, not patients. This is meant to be an educational modality, not a medical treatment. Paradoxically, when you focus on learning, healing seems to happen on its own.
Awareness Through Movement and Functional Integration are registered service marks of the Feldenkrais Guild of North America.
Bones for Life®
Here’s a way literally to find a new life footing. Bone strengthening and alignment give you a springy step and ‘walking on air’ feeling. Bones For Life is billed as a program to help avoid or reverse osteoporosis, which is now epidemic in the US, but its benefits go further. We all move, but how many of us in this sedentary society do so dynamically, with real joy of movement?
In a Bones For Life class, you’ll learn safe ways to fall, jump, lift light weights, run, sit, and especially walk. The role model for efficient weight-bearing posture is African women who carry heavy loads on their heads. They maintain alignment, balance, and grace, with only five percent of the bone fractures of Western women. The Bones For Life version of this walk aligns your skeleton so that you can feel movement traveling from one end to the other, vertebra by vertebra, like dominos in a line.
The idea is to direct a vibrational force through the accurately aligned skeleton, which you accomplish by creating pressure of hands or feet against walls or floor, then checking what it feels like as the movement ripples through you. Healthy bone building only happens when we’re weight-bearing. This is why Bones For Life has proved useful to NASA in Texas, helping astronauts reverse dramatic bone loss due to the experience of zero gravity.
Until recently, bone loss was widely misunderstood as the province of the old, not the young and fit, and assumed to be irreversible. The good news is that bones can be regenerated. This has been demonstrated both by astronauts’ recovery and in a 2004 study by Bones For Life originator Ruthy Alon. After 60 hours of a Bones For Life course, 50 percent of the research sample showed bone growth.
Ruthy was one of Moshe Feldenkrais’ thirteen original students in Israel and the first US pioneer of his Method. In 1996 she carried those principles into this program.
Change Your Brain, Reduce Your Pain and Lower Stress: A Program to Empower Yourself!
Wednesdays, April 25 – June 13, 5:45-7:15 pm
Use the on-line registration or contact Olivia at or 781-449-1410 or 617-413-5680
