Move Better, Feel Better
Feldenkrais® Awareness Summit
2021
The May 2021 Summit is over. AND it was our best EVER.
The goodness is you can purchase the recordings and incredible bonus content.
Take self-care to a new level this year by putting your focus on the beautiful potential you already have. When you discover what you are capable of, you can transfer that beauty to the world around you.
Join us for a 24-hour kickoff celebration of movement! Do one hour or do a few. There is something for every body type and level of physical activity.
Around the world, around the clock, we will have 22 live Awareness Through Movement® lessons with 22 teachers PLUS, nestled into that 24 hours, will be a keynote speaker and live Q&A. It will be a groundbreaking event!
What will YOU get by being a part of this online conference?
- Tools for increasing flexibility and mobility
- Active lifestyle tips for a full life
- How to make play an integral part of life
- Focus on abilities and forget about the “dis”
- Insight into the importance of breath
- Tips to decrease effort and stress
- Approaches for managing pain
- Turn aging into a graceful, enjoyable experience
- Strategies for healing trauma
- A deeper understanding of the importance of language
- Learn to quiet your nervous system
- Explore the connection between mindful movement and spirituality
Explore the teachings of these masters…
Olena Nitefor ~ Mia Segal ~ Albert Wong ~ Natalie Goldberg ~ Zoran Kovich ~ Jeff Haller~ Carolyn Palmer~ Patrick McKowan ~ Stephen Nachmanovitch ~ Pat Ogden ~ Fariya Doctor ~ David Zemach-Bersin ~ Garet Newell
33 sessions organized into convenient themes:
Active Lifestyle ~ Original Breath ~ Healing Trauma ~ Embodied Anatomy ~ Move Your Brain! ~ Abilities: Dropping the “Dis” ~ Language Runs Deep ~ Play ~ Research
PLUS
A movement extravaganza like never before!
We are kicking off this event with an entire day (that’s right – 24 hours!) devoted to movement. This kick-off celebration will feature 22 live Awareness Through Movement® lessons with 22 different teachers from around the world. We’re also going to hear from Olena Nitefor, our keynote speaker who will help us prepare for the event. Then, we’re devoting an hour to your questions and answers.
Not prepared to pull an all-nighter? That’s okay! You don’t have to stay up for the full 24-hour event, the replays will be available so you can experience each unique lesson and the different teaching techniques all of our Feldenkrais Practitioners bring to their classes. Break up the lessons, spread them out, and transform this summit into a customized journey into your own body’s potential. It’s going to be amazing!
A movement extravaganza like never before!
We are kicking off this event with an entire day (that’s right – 24 hours!) devoted to movement. This kick-off celebration will feature 22 live Awareness Through Movement® lessons with 22 different teachers from around the world. We’re also going to hear from Olena Nitefor, our keynote speaker who will help us prepare for the event. Then, we’re devoting an hour to your questions and answers.
Not prepared to pull an all-nighter? That’s okay! You don’t have to stay up for the full 24-hour event, the replays will be available so you can experience each unique lesson and the different teaching techniques all of our Feldenkrais Practitioners bring to their classes. Break up the lessons, spread them out, and transform this summit into a customized journey into your own body’s potential. It’s going to be amazing!
As a SPECIAL BONUS for signing up for this FREE Move Better, Feel Better Summit, YOU WILL RECEIVE…
Our exclusive ebook:
2021 Move Better Inspirational Guidebook
Each expert presenter from the summit was asked if they had one incredible tip to share, what would it be. We are thrilled with the incredible tips and lifehacks they shared with us. Of course, we’ve taken all of that useful information and pulled it together for you.
Our Inspirational Guidebook is FREE just for signing up for the summit. Before you even hear each presenter speak, you’ll have their best tip for a Move Better, Feel Better approach to daily living. This e-book starts the ball rolling, it picks you up when you need it, and it runs aside you to the finish line.
What last year’s summit attendees are saying…
What a chest of treasures are being shared through this Summit.
I am so grateful to you Cynthia for your beautiful interviews, your gentle approach and your 'calm' when things don't necessarily go to plan.
FEATURED Master Sessions
Each day will feature a new topic and three transformational sessions with master practitioners in their fields. You’ll have 48-hour access to these sessions, in case you are unable to view them live. But if you are available that day, make sure you stop back later for the live discussion about the day’s topic.
Don’t forget, there are all of those wonderful Awareness Through Movement® lessons from the first day that you can use throughout the summit to enhance your learning and enjoyment.
Click on each day to reveal the speakers and talks.
- Personalized Schedule
-
DAY 1:
24-Hour Lessons Plus Keynote - DAY 2:
Original Breath - DAY 3:
Play - DAY 4:
Embodied Anatomy - DAY 5:
Active Lifestyle
Register for the MBFB Summit and we’ll curate a personalized schedule just for you. You’re welcome to attend everything, but with so many options, you might want help deciding what to focus on. Right now, click through the Days 1-10 tabs to get an idea of what is in store. But then, sign up so we can get that detailed, customized schedule to you.
DAY 1 Keynote
Olena Nitefor
M.Ed., GCFP
The Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education: an introduction
An introduction to the Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education, meant to help lay a foundation and conceptual background for your participation in the experiences of this Summit. You will hear about some of the underlying principles behind how Awareness Through Movement lessons work through attention to gentle movement. Movements, which can sometimes feel too insignificant to make a difference, but do. You will see a video clip of a client whose attention is guided in such a way that his pain diminishes even before a hands on Feldenkrais session is started. And you will have an opportunity to ask questions.
24 hours of Around the World ATM
Coordinators
ATM Teachers and Title
DAY 2 Original Breath
James Nestor
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
The most surprising data point I learned while researching my book is that humans are the worst breathers in the animal kingdom, and that this affliction is new in our evolution. Our ancient ancestors shared in universally straight teeth, powerful jaws, wide nasal apertures, and much more expansive airways. And yet, so many people of today have some form of airway obstruction. We’ve become a culture of snorers, chokers, wheezers, coughers, panters, and generally miserable breathers. How did this happen? What caused it? And can it be fixed? These are the questions that inspired me to spend so many years digging through ancient burial sites, medical libraries, ancient scripts, dental records, and more. It was all so hard to believe when I first discovered it, but the proof is all over the place. And, in this talk, I will tell you what I discovered and why it matters.
Patrick McKeown
MA, BBM
Functional Breathing for Functional Movement
Faulty breathing can result in lower back pain. Conversely, pain in the lower back and neck can affect the way the breathing muscles work, and tension in these areas often results in upper chest breathing by default. If your movement is impaired, either through injury, illness, or lifestyle, your breathing will suffer. Outside of such chronic conditions, poor posture is the major factor in biomechanical breathing dysfunction. Quite simply, if your breathing is abnormal, your movement will be abnormal, and vice versa.
Fariya Doctor
B.Sc., RMT, GCFP, CertBBM
How Perception Affects Function in Breathing
How we breathe is affected by many factors. Aside from a variety of doctrines describing the best way to breathe, how we see ourselves and how we perceive our interior structures will influence our health and the overall quality of our respiratory movements. This session will explore these concepts, experience them through Awareness Through Movement, and compare the Buteyko Method with the Feldenkrais Method’s approach to breathing.
DDS, MSD
Recessed Faces + Poor Breathing = Poor Body Posture
Our faces are substantially recessed from those of our ancestors, and we pay a huge price for this. As the jaws have fallen back our airways become compromised. We posture our heads forward and tip our foreheads back to open the airway. The muscles along our entire spine must compensate with symptoms often resulting. Crooked teeth often result and are intimately related to these compensations. The type of orthodontic treatment done can improve the airway or make it smaller with negative consequences.
Panel Discussion
Join host
CYNTHIA ALLEN and these experts
DAY 3 Play
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Ph.D.
The Art of Is
We can learn to cultivate genuine and spontaneous interactions that respect the complexity of living systems. Every act of our ordinary life reflects our capacity to create, improvise, and co-evolve with others. Health, welfare, our relationship to the biological ecology in which we live, are all implicated in these simple acts of creativity.
Paul Pui Wo Lee
Feldenkrais = Methodical Play = Ready to (Dance)!
If the concept of play could speak, it might utter, “Hm… what if?” This inviting attitude can help unglue us from our habitual right-wrong judgment so that the world around pops out as just options, and we can experience fun and safety in a more sophisticated lattice of possibilities. How can playing be a practical way to train a resourceful nervous system and mindset to evolve into everyday artists, and we can have fun with our “biological marketing?” And how would play give insight to the educational role of drag queens, and the connection between movement, sensuality, and empowerment?
Joe Webster
Permission to be Playful
From an evolutionary perspective, play is an integral part of the learning process, it’s something that we see again and again in nature documentaries. Why then do we consider our own learning to be only effective when we are regimented, strict, disciplined? Can we learn to get back in contact with our inner playfulness, and find a way to put life back into the learning process?
Panel Discussion
Join co-host
LAVINIA PLONKA and these experts
DAY 4 Embodied Anatomy
John Sharkey
MSc Clinical Anatomist/Exercise Physiologist
Site Specific Fascia Tuning Pegs – Fascia anatomy informing Feldenkrais inspired conscious Movement.
Consciousness is a fundamental aspect of all matter. Clinical Anatomist John Sharkey believes that understanding the hierarchy of specific fascia condensations will allow you to facilitate informed, local to global, conversations; resulting in immediately perceived therapeutic outcomes for you and your clients. Movement can be nutritious, while bringing awareness to local fascia dampening influences can encourage a new level of consciousness informed motion. Embracing collective behavior within a complex system of self-organization can lead to greater self-reference for restorative movement patterning.
Roger Russell
MA, PT
The Weber-Fechner-Henneman Movement Optimization Cycle: Practicing smart instead of practicing hard.
Training practices emphasize increasing effort to improve strength and aerobic condition as the foundation of health. By the same token, it is assumed that improving coordination operates on the same principle of effort and repetitive practice. On the contrary, the neurology of the W-F-H Cycle clearly explains why doing exactly the opposite and reducing effort will always improve coordination. I will show how this neuro-muscular cycle is the foundation of the Feldenkrais Method; whereby our brains and our wisdom are the keys to refining coordination with astonishing ease.
Carol A. Montgomery
PT, MSPT, GCFP
The Anatomy of Foot Pain and Foot Health
There’s nothing like foot pain to change how we move and invoke the feeling that “something’s not quite right, and what if this doesn’t get better.” The slow and insidious onset of foot pain erodes our balance and the loss of confidence to step over things on the floor. Before we know it, our enjoyment in moving and walking slip away. And gradually, we find ourselves disengaging from activities we love.
Come, listen in, and discover why conventional treatment approaches may relieve foot pain, but do they lead to foot health? Experience the nervous system’s secret principles that give us the power and a ladder to rise up, access our untapped and internal resources, and transform foot pain experience into foot health.
Panel Discussion
Join host
CYNTHIA ALLEN and these experts
DAY 5 Active Lifestyle
Lea Kaufman
Creator of LK Movimiento Inteligente, Feldenkrais Assistant Trainer
Four Stages to Connect to Consciousness
It became inevitable for us, these days, to assume Responsibility and begin to look inward in order to create an outside world made of Consciousness and wellbeing. You aspire to Consciousness? Well, the good news is that Consciousness wants you too, and needs you, in order to gain understanding of itself, and allow, during the process, your most powerful self to emerge.
To do so, we first must understand what we are talking about when we use the term Consciousness, understand how we function, and then, use a reliable, practical, and modern way of embodying it in our lives.
In this talk, we will see how to use our body as a bridge to Consciousness in a 4-phase process that will allow us to live that connection.
Daniel Gelblum
Improving Yoga, Meditation and other movement adventures
How can Feldenkrais make life and yoga better? Daniel Gelblum will share his interesting history that includes connections to Yoga and Moshe Feldenkrais. He’ll tell you how he wove that into his practice.
As a Yoga teacher and a therapist working with people suffering from Parkinson’s disease, MS, posture issues, etc., Daniel Gelblum introduced the Feldenkrais method and was impressed with how Yoga students and clients improved gently and powerfully.
He went further and developed his own Yoga style based on Awareness Through Movement, which opens the door to bringing the Feldenkrais Method into the lives of a wider audience. It can also help individuals cope with all life throws at them.
Prepare to experience a mini-lesson that’s designed to demonstrate how the benefits of Yoga can be embodied with Feldenkrais, without any injuries, and with multiple, profound benefits.
Lisa Hueske
Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner®
Building a Movement Practice for Dancers, Athletes, Aspiring Movers
Using the Feldenkrais Method for maintenance, preparation, improving skills, injury prevention, injury recovery, increasing resilience, expanding movement vocabulary, and the creative process.
Stewart Hamblin
The Fit Sit Revolution
As we age, how we move matters. The choices we make can make all the difference between a full and independent life or decades of misery. Gravity can be our friend, or it can be our enemy. The good news is that we all have the ability to change and improve our movement, provided we know-how. The Fit Sit program, based upon the Feldenkrais Method, is a chair-based series of lessons designed to keep your spines strong and flexible, and available for movement.
Panel Discussion
Join host
CYNTHIA ALLEN and these experts
- DAY 6:
Language Runs Deep - DAY 7:
Abilities - Dropping the Dis - DAY 8:
Healing Trauma - DAY 9:
Move your Brain! - DAY 10:
Research
Click through Days 6 - 10 here
DAY 6 Language Runs Deep
Natalie Goldberg
Three Simple Lines
The true test of a haiku is not five/seven/five syllables but a three-line poem that upon hearing one creates a small sensation of space, which Allen Ginsberg said, “Is nothing less than god.” Feldenkrais, too, is about sensing the space inside you. Haiku evokes the simplest of human experience. In an Awareness through Movement class, we feel the minute connection of mind with body. In this workshop, we will explore the path of haiku and its congruency with the bare attention, pure awareness, beyond logic of the path of Feldenkrais practice.
Zoran Kovich
MSc, CFT
Words and Experience in Awareness Through Movement
Awareness Through Movement® offers us an opportunity to witness vividly the threads of experience that constitute the fabric of who we are as animate, embodied, feeling, thinking, beings. Whilst Awareness Through Movement is vocally directed, the perpetual invitation is to think/perceive/distinguish in terms of patterns of sensations divorced from the abstracted, fixity of words. Learning this ability enables us to tap into hidden resources, think originally, and create different ways of enacting what we already know — a quintessential trait for flourishing in an ever-changing body, life, and world.
Bernadette Pleasant
Movement and Sound to Nourish the Weary Soul
Racial, political, and personal stressors impact our mind and body. Now more than ever, the need to use movement as a resource for healing.
Panel Discussion
Join host
LAVINIA PLONKA and these experts
DAY 7 Abilities – Dropping the Dis
Paul Linden
PhD
Even martial arts/somatics practitioners grow old
After 51 years of somatic practice, what can I say that will help? I recently turned 75, and I’ve had Parkinson’s for 18 years. This is the first time I’ve grown old, but I believe the practice has made a real difference. Intentional movement, an open body, and the somatic integration of power and love are the keys. This interview will include a couple of basic exercises to give you experience of this.
Jacki Katzman
GCFP®, MBA, Boston Healing Tao Associate Teacher, Usui Reiki Practitioner - Level 3
Nate Hansen
Program Director ASPNC, CARSS 1, NRP
Awareness Through Movement®: Adaptive Athlete Edition
When coronavirus created havoc for Adaptive Sports Partners of the North County (ASPNC), Nate Hansen, the ASPNC programming director, accepted Jacki Katzman’s, GCFP, offer to teach online ATM classes for diversely-abled athletes. Adaptive athletes are naturals for the Feldenkrais Method®: they are curious, creative, and open to new ways to excel. Three seasons into the program, Jacki and Nate share what they’ve learned about adapting ATM lessons for athletes of multiple abilities, and how they are building skills and community through Awareness Through Movement®.
Anne-Elizabeth Straub
LCSW
What Disability and Feldenkrais Have Taught Me
Lavinia Plonka and Anne-Elizabeth Straub were classmates during professional training in the Feldenkrais Method®. Their life paths and experiences diverged but each used what she learned to develop a practice carrying her “own fingerprint”.
During today’s conversation, Lavinia will ask Anne-Elizabeth how her experiences as a person with a chronic illness and disability, Feldenkrais lessons, and training have influenced each other and her current practice in psychotherapy and clinical social work.
Panel Discussion
Join host
LAVINIA PLONKA and these experts
DAY 8 Healing Trauma
Albert Wong
PhD
Healing Trauma: From Fragmentation to Embodiment
Trauma can stay with us long after a threat is gone. Trauma can fragment the continuity of our experience and embed itself into our bodies and our minds. Even after years of talk therapy and medication, the effects of trauma sometimes still linger. In this presentation, Dr. Albert Wong will share how to heal trauma from a somatic perspective, including tools we can use with our clients, ourselves, and those we love.
Pat Ogden
PhD, Founder Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
Early in her career as a psychotherapist, Pat Ogden noticed that posture and movement had a tremendous amount to do with recovery from trauma and growth in the emotional realm. She trained in yoga and with Ida Rolf in Structural Integration. Tune in as Pat reveals her collaboration with Hakomi founder, Ron Kurtz and the unfolding science around emotions and the felt body that molded her thinking, therapy practice and the founding of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy.
Molly Tipping
BA(Dance), Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner
Trauma and Its Effects on Posture, Balance, and Self-Expression
Traumatic events affect our self-expression, self-assertion, and recuperative abilities (self-care). But they also leave their mark on our posture and can interfere with our balance, and proprioception (sense of body in space).
In this talk I will share how The Feldenkrais Method® can support individuals recovering from recent traumatic events, as well as help individuals move beyond the constraints of past trauma.
I will also include somatic explorations to help make clear how you can find more embodied and functional ways to find your way through trauma.
Panel Discussion
Join host
CYNTHIA ALLEN and these experts
DAY 9 Move Your Brain!
Cynthia Benjamin
CEO
Jennifer Lee
GCFP, Senior MT Instructor
MOVING Together for Memory Loss
Do you know someone affected by memory loss? Do you wonder how to support people living with cognitive decline?
MOVING Together (MT) is an online, live-streaming, group movement program designed for people living with memory loss and their caregivers. Capitalizing on recent discoveries in neuroscience, integrative health and behavioral psychology, MT effectively targets multiple domains including muscle memory through functional movement, stress reduction through mindful self-awareness, and emotional well-being through social connection and music.
Join us to experience the MT program, learn about the MT principles and supporting research, and discover how to become an MT instructor!
Dan Clurman
Aging with Grace: Combining the Feldenkrais Method® and Somatic Inquiry
Physical habits that no longer serve us well as we age can be changed through simple, yet profound, Feldenkrais movement lessons. Far from requiring strenuous effort, the method uses gentle movements to develop greater ease, comfort, and harmony throughout the body. This session will demonstrate how these movement patterns can enhance connections between parts of the body so that actions become more coordinated and efficient over time. Going further, we’ll apply somatic inquiry: asking questions and directly sensing inner resources to address specific needs. When paired with the Feldenkrais Method®, this experiential exploration can help us discover and use the body’s natural abilities to promote well-being.
Jill Van Note
PCC, GCFP
Living the Good Life: Health, Wellness and Feldenkrais
What constitutes a good life?
We know that proper hydration, nutrition, exercise, sleep, connecting with others, and mindfulness are key components of living and aging well.
Then, if we know, why don’t we practice these things consistently?
How does self-compassion, adaptation, and resilience come into play as we age?
What do you need to truly thrive and live your good life?
Join us as we explore these questions and how Awareness through Movement® as a consistent practice supports graceful living and aging.
Linda Flanders
RUNNING…for an Elected Leadership Position
If you feel you have something to offer in a leadership position, how can the Feldenkrais Method® help you? Can we take some of the basic principles of the Method and apply them to other areas we think are unrelated? Are they really unrelated? Learn how some basic principles can be applied to running a campaign, how to challenge your brain to do more, not less, as you age and how the Method can help you recover more quickly.
Panel Discussion
Join host
LAVINIA PLONKA and these experts
DAY 10 Research
Tim Sobie
PT, Ph.D. , Feldenkrais Practitioner
Reframing Body Schema in Chronic Pain through Feldenkrais as an Augmented Reality – Evidence from Low Back Pain Research
Chronic back problems continue to be a leading cause for disability in all of medicine and for seeking other alternative therapies. The Feldenkrais Method® is one approach that seeks to clarify new functional interrelationships towards an improved neuroplasticity-based change in the cognitive construct of one’s own background body schema; with shared understanding that improved body perception and augmented sensory discrimination via movement are more closely associated with recovery from chronic pain – especially LBP – as compared to usual muscular training.
As a test of comparative efficacy, An RCT study design was Implemented to compare a Feldenkrais Method® based body schema / sensory augmentation /movement approach to the more common standard of outpatient PT practice, i.e. Motor Control Exercises with Core Stabilization.
Carolyn F. Palmer
Ph.D., GCFP, Child'Space Practitioner
Putting Feldenkrais to the Test with Older Adults
This session discusses what supports positive development in later years, and an application of those concepts in a published study of the Moving Forward Feldenkrais Method lesson series for older adults (Palmer, 2017).
Older adults who participated in FM lessons improved their balance while reaching and reported improved experience in everyday activities. High quality Feldenkrais research is emerging, and it is labor-intensive, requiring funding and institutional connections. Feldenkrais professionals and clientele benefit from following, funding, and sharing high quality research demonstrating the Feldenkrais Method’s effectiveness.
Helga Bost
Feldenkrais Practitioner
Discovering the Unexpected – fascinating research for spinal cord injury
My Feldenkrais work with spinal cord injured people has led me into a fascinating 30-year research process I have documented with more than 400 hours of videos that show how perception and movement can re-emerge where it was partially or completely lost. ”People can see and understand it” (Carl Ginsburg): Evolutionary central pattern movements (rhythmic crawling, walking…) are initiated without descending information from the cortex. The trains of movement (possibly along Myofascial Trains) are so strong that people learn to decode them. This leaves traces in the body maps of the brain (neural plasticity). A new self-image can develop.
Panel Discussion
Join host
CYNTHIA ALLEN and these experts
We can all use a little “more” in our lives….
Our Wish for You: 2021 Move Better
Who doesn’t want a little more? More movement, more enjoyment, more peace, and serenity. The trick is that “a little” can be the key to more – a lot more.
Diving deep into who you are begins with an introduction to yourself and the willingness to accept and embrace. That’s where the journey begins, and where it goes from there is up to you.
Through the Feldenkrais Method, you constantly get that magnificent re-introduction to self that prompts new learning, expanded understanding, and unlimited growth. Come see what it’s all about.
This summit is sponsored by:
Host
Cynthia Allen launched the first Feldenkrais® Awareness Summit in 2018. She is the creator of the online Your Learning Body program, a published researcher on the effects of the Bones for Life® approach in the elderly and co-creator of Integral Human Gait™ theory. She sees clients in Cincinnati, Ohio, at Future Life Now, LLC.
Co-Host
Lavinia Plonka is a Feldenkrais Method® Assistant Trainer and Emotional Body® instructor. Lavinia’s many books and audio programs have introduced thousands of people to Awareness Through Movement®. She is a faculty member of The Shift Network, has a private practice in Asheville, North Carolina, and teaches workshops both online and internationally.
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