Ripple Movement: Feldenkrais w/ Alex Toenniges

FREE 🌟Awareness Through Movement🌟 classes Wednesday mornings at the Etowah Library 📚 Register at hendersonpl.libcal.com 🪷

Join us for these fun, gentle mindful movement classes from Feldenkrais Method®. You’ll be guided through slow and comfortable movements aimed at discovering greater ease and range of motion. Most lessons take place comfortably lying on your back, side, or front, but you may also stand, walk, or sit in a chair. These classes help a wide range of people, from those struggling with movement and mobility to those who are fit and have more flexibility.

The instructor, Alex Toenniges, is a Guild Certified Feldenkrais® Practitioner and Awareness Through Movement® Teacher who graduated from a four-year Feldenkrais® Professional Training Program in New York City in 2019.

Registration Required: Please wear loose, comfortable clothing and bring a blanket or towel to lie on.

Want to celebrate my birthday? 🎉 Support the forest school program I've created! 🌷🪷🐛🐞

Ripple Forest School Scholarship Fund Supporting children to attend forest school in Pisgah Forest, NC!

New dates added for August! 🎉 Join us Friday mornings at the Etowah Library for Awareness Through Movement! 🪷🐞🐛🐢🦋🐌🦎

When I'm not teaching Feldenkrais, I run Ripple Forest School. We've just launched our Scholarship Fund to support more children to attend! Take a look and considering sharing and supporting.

Ripple Forest School Scholarship Fund Supporting children to attend forest school in Pisgah Forest, NC!

students and faculty, I'll be teaching a Feldenkrais for Musicians Workshop this Monday, July 8 to help you learn to move more easily and efficiently, prevent and recover from injuries, and open up your sound and creativity!

There will be another workshop again on July 26 for Brevard Music students and faculty.

These workshops are open to Brevard Music Center students and faculty only. Visit the front office for details. If you're not a student or faculty at Brevard Music Center, contact me at ripplecollectivenc.com/feldenkrais for private sessions and group classes or text me at (828) 278-8239.

What does it mean to say, “Healing developmental trauma does not make an autistic person more typical”?

If I do trauma therapy while living in an environment that is unsupportive of my autistic body’s needs, I may experience trauma. (This applies to any type of trauma therapy, including nonverbal treatments like Safe and Sound Protocol or Craniosacral therapy.)

It is important for us to reduce the symptoms of autistic trauma, but if we try to do that in a space where connection and acceptance is systematically denied from us, we will have an intensely painful experience of rejection.

Being denied connection because of our differences is a core trauma wound for most autistics. For many autistic people, our trauma blocks are protecting us from this pain we have experienced so many times before.

When we remove the protection of our trauma blocks, we must have appropriate support. Appropriate support for an autistic person requires an identity affirming approach as well as accommodations and support for disabilities.

If trauma interventions are offered to autistic people from within the medical/pathology/cure model, we are simply setting autistic people up for re-traumatization, fragmentation, and increased mental health problems.

Living on the right side of this list is not sustainable long-term for any autistic person. The symptoms of autistic trauma are a significant threat to autistic health and survival…. When autistic people seek help with trauma symptoms, it is important for care providers to know that healthy autistic people can have significant support needs. A reduction in trauma symptoms does not mean a person will become more independent.

This reality is scary for many of us because society measures our worth by our independence. Since that isn’t going to change tomorrow, refuge spaces where we can interact with other neurodivergent people and experience acceptance are essential for trauma recovery. We also need non-autistic people to help us advocate for better social supports and policies that meet us where we are.
For more clarification, check out the blog post that goes with this image https://www.traumageek.com/blog/autistic-traits-and-trauma

How does the Feldenkrais Method help you to find greater capacity to be composed in difficult times?

Moving towards emotional dignity | Dr. Jeff Haller | Feldenkrais Awareness Summit This is an excerpt with Dr. Jeff Haller from an hour long session from the Move Better, Feel Better: Feldenkrais® Awareness Summit. You can learn about this ...

"Anyone who's interested in making change in the world also has to learn how to take care of theirselves."

RADICAL SELF CARE: ANGELA DAVIS It’s Radical Self Care Week here at AFROPUNK. Let’s hear how revolutionary artists and activists take care of themselves in these chaotic times.Check out wha...

An Introduction to the Feldenkrais Method® This video was filmed during an Introduction to the Feldenkrais Method® workshop. David Zemach-Bersin explains how the Feldenkrais Method works and the effic...

Interview with Feldenkrais™ Practitioner Alex Toenniges Meet musician and friend, Alex Toenniges. Alex is a somatic practitioner, nature connection mentor, community-builder, social change-maker, facilitator, vi...

"Dr. Norman Doidge, while talking about his new book, The Brain's Way of Healing, tells the story of Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais, the creation of the Feldenkrais Method, and its contribution to the concept of neuroplasticity of the brain---the idea that the brain is not, in fact, hardwired, but is plastic and changes in structure with use regardless of our age."

Dr Norman Doidge, Interview excerpt on Moshe Feldenkrais Dr. Norman Doidge, while talking about his new book, The Brain's Way of Healing, tells the story of Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais, the creation of the Feldenkrais M...

"It is shown that a short, non-intrusive sensorimotor intervention can have short-term effects on spontaneous cortical activity in functionally related brain regions and increased resting state activity in higher-order motor areas supports the hypothesis that the global intervention engages action-related neural processes."

[PDF] Feldenkrais . Physicist , Black belt and Healer : Healing serious brain problems through mental awareness of movement . Chapter in ' The Brains Way of Healing ; Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity ' |... It is shown that a short, non-intrusive sensorimotor intervention can have short-term effects on spontaneous cortical activity in functionally related brain regions and increased resting state activity in higher-order motor areas supports the hypothesis that the global intervention engages action-re...

"Using this more nuanced understanding of how our brains work, scientists and practitioners have learned how to use neuroplastic therapies to address many common conditions and to offer hope where prospects for healing were long denied."

The Brain’s Way of Healing In his first book, The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge introduced readers to the most important change in our understanding of the brain since the beginning of modern science: the discovery that the brain can change its own structure and function in response to mental experience—the pheno...

"“If neuroplasticity is now accepted in neuroscience, why are these clinical approaches that make use of it not more widely available and mainstream?” It is a pertinent observation—if they work so well, why do they still have an air of quackery more than the conviction of hard science?"

No miracle, just our brain To start talking about the end of a book is usually considered a spoiler. However, the afterword in the paperback edition of Norman Doidge's book The Brain's Way of Healing brings authenticity to Doidge's collection of real-life stories of recovery from brain injury. In the afterword, he addresses t...

"When Moshe Feldenkrais was fourteen, after years of Jews being attacked in anti-Semitic Russian pogroms, he set out alone to walk from Belarus to Palestine."

"She will dance at her wedding": Healing the girl born without part of her brain The origin of Moshe Feldenkrais' therapeutic method reads more like a spy thriller than a neuroscience textbook

"The Feldenkrais method focuses not only on the economy and grace and efficiency of movement...but it has also proven to reduce the arthritic aches and pains. My patients and I report reducing our pain medications by half, an increase in muscle tone and improved mood." - Normund Wong, MD, Neuroscientist, Geriatrics & Psychiatry

Becoming Optimistic About Movement At Any Age - An Interview with David Zemach Bersin This month Seth Dellinger interviews David Zemach-Bersin about how we can develop a new relationship with our own movement ability at any age, and how we can...

Visit ripplecollectivenc.com/feldenkrais to learn more about movement sessions with Alex Toenniges or join us for free Awareness Through Movement classes Wednesday mornings at the Etowah Library

“Genius, of the magnitude possessed by Moshe Feldenkrais, defies categorization… He could function at the highest level in nuclear physics, as a martial artist, as an inventor, as a developer of top-secret counterespionage projects, and as one of the most prescient observers of neuroscience.” - Norman Doidge, MD

A Life in Movement The definitive biography of Moshe Feldenkrais

"Feldenkrais® lessons are not like traditional exercise or therapy. They offer a new way of learning about how you move, and how you move through life."

For Healthy Aging Growing older doesn’t have to mean that we give up on having quality of life. “I’m just getting old.” “Nah, I don’t do that anymore.” “I’m so afraid I might fall.” Do you catch yourself making any of those statements? Wouldn't you rather be like the legendary cellist Pablo Casals...

"Let the days of endless and mindless repetition, of learning by imitation and dogma, of relying on one skill to compensate for another be over. . . It’s time to learn and develop from within, and you can find your own way with the use of the Feldenkrais Method!"

For Performers Are you an instrumentalist? Are you a singer, dancer, or performing artist? All three? As an instrumentalist: Are you interested in improving your hand-eye coordination while playing? Are you longing for a deeper connection between your self and your instrument? Are you recovering from a repetitive....

"Scientific studies increasingly bear out this view, showing that movement-based embodied practices like the Feldenkrais Method increase grey-matter density, decrease stress, and boost quality of life."

For Movement Difficulties Everyone can benefit from improved awareness of how they move. For no group of people is this more true than those who live with neurological movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease and MS. If you have been diagnosed with a movement disorder, it’s time to become a movement expert – and the...

"Moshe Feldenkrais was a martial artist who studied athletes and noticed that elite movers perform difficult tasks with a minimum of muscular effort. He developed the Feldenkrais Method® to help people emulate this efficiency in their daily life and exercise."

For Athletes   Whether you are a pro athlete or weekend warrior, you can make your performance better and less physically stressful by moving with greater efficiency. Moshe Feldenkrais was a martial artist who studied athletes and noticed that elite movers perform difficult tasks with a minimum of muscular effo...

Contact me about private lessons or join us for free classes Wednesday mornings at the Etowah Library! 🌺

More info at ripplecollectivenc.com/feldenkrais

"The huge variety of Awareness Through Movement lessons (there are over 1000!) offer new ways of approaching your relationship to your embodiment practice."

Mindfulness Movement Practices Health is the ability to realize our avowed and unavowed dreams. - Moshe Feldenkrais Whether you are solo kayaking on a pristine lake, bowing onto the mat to spar, perfecting your Garudasana or finding your ideal meditation posture, the Feldenkrais Method can support and improve your practice. Moshe...

"With its emphasis on learning, the Feldenkrais Method® offers a gentle, comfortable way of shifting your pain by exploring your movement patterns... Pain will begin to dissolve. You’ll discover greater range of motion and ease of movement."

For Illness or Injury Relief could be as simple as changing how you move. Are you finding that once simple movements – bending, getting in and out of the car, turning to back out of the driveway - are becoming uncomfortable? Does your lower back nag you? Have you sustained an injury that left you with constant discomfo...

"Neuroplasticity...develops from a growing understanding that the human brain...is in fact capable of much more significant self-repair and healing. Not only that, but much of the healing...can be stimulated by conscious habits of thought and action, by teaching the brain to “rewire itself”."

Norman Doidge: the man teaching us to change our minds Do you believe you can think yourself well, changing the very structure of your brain over time through rigorous training? Norman Doidge does…

"Feldenkrais Method can be so effective at working with physical difficulties, that it is unfortunately often reduced to a kind of movement therapy. Still, there is another level of learning that is both deeper and more subtle."

Embodied Meditation and Feldenkrais Method - An Article By Russel Delman Two of the greatest gifts in my life have been my meditation practice of more than 50 years and the transformative learning with Moshe Feldenkrais that began in 1975. It would be difficult to exaggerate my gratitude for these gifts. They have worked together, always congruently, yet in similar and d...

Why We Need Feldenkrais to Create New Cultures

Many of us (and many who came before us) are engaged in a process of finding a new way to live and creating new(/old) cultures and paradigms. One of the crucial things that needs to happen for these new paradigms to work is for us to continuously engage in the process of unlearning. If we create new cultures without systematically investigating ourselves and our conditioning, we create a paradigm that may look quite different but has many of the same problems as this one.

What is the best tool I know for unlearning? Feldenkrais. Through Feldenkrais we learn to inhibit our habits. We learn to inhibit the compulsory excitation in the brain in a way that allows us to think and act in new ways rather than perpetuate our habits and conditioning. We see that we don't have to do things the way we've always done them. We start to be able to clearly see and question our underlying beliefs and assumptions. Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lessons give us a structure and framework to test reality, to experiment with our beliefs, and to find out what is objectively true for each of us as individuals (ontogenetic) and what is true for humans as a species (phylogenetic).

Originally posted as "Why We Need Feldenkrais to Build a New Culture" on 5/30/2018 by Alex Toenniges

Why We Need Feldenkrais to Build a New Culture One of the things I, along with my Colin Kirts and many others, are beginning to notice is that we, as humans living in civilization, are living in a way that is violating our own nature, creating...

My teacher Rich Goldsand with Buzzfeed showing an experience with the Feldenkrais Method

We Tried To Rewire Our Brains Once you change the direction, amount of effort, or the spacial orientation, the brain has to fire differently.Credits: https://www.buzzfeed.com/bfmp/videos/...