Learn to improve the movement function of a dynamic, lively, pleasurable, healthy walk.
This 5 day workshop will include an indoor Movement Laboratory of simple yet sophisticated movement strategies that effect beneficial long-term change in movement, strength, posture, flexibility
and sense of well-being. It will also include walking in nature with the use of Walking Poles, leading you to
adopt natural walking for health and pleasure in your daily life.
What you do today will be easier to do tomorrow.
What you don't do today will be more difficult tomorrow.
Everyone knows that Walking equals Health. Quality walking is both a measure and indication of fitness, and a lever for enhanced, free and easy walking. To find quality walking, we go beyond popular suggestions, fashions and opinions and look for the model of objective criteria in nature itself. Primal man’s way of walking and running was a primary survival requirement. Any concession in the efficiency of this basic pattern was life threatening. Any fault meant risk, and as we are here today means that primal walking has been sifted by natural selection to perfection. Our model for quality walking is derived from evolutionary movement coordination. Improving elements of the complex formula of the primal model is bound to improve walking quality in civilized man.
Formula Elements of the Pre-Cultural Walking
Coordination: Ultimate commitment to harmonious cooperation between all body parts. In dynamic movement, arms, legs, spine, pelvis and head are constantly changing proportions with each fraction of movement in time and space. Adjusting this coordination is not in the domain of cognitive thinking. The exclusive contribution of the WFL program is in its strategies to engage the organic subconscious to correct itself.
Propulsion: The alternating shift of weight from one leg to the other in walking
undulates
rhythmically in a forward backward wave pattern, smoothly in-curving and out-curving. This
generates propulsion.
Impact: Each walking step is loading the body with an impact of one’s own weight, striking onto the ground, which is producing a rebounding elastic force upward. This force outsmarts gravity and allows for auto-locomotion.
Alignment: The skeleton is incessantly re-organizing itself in a streamlined alignment, which allows for consistent transmission of the two way force; the body mass bearing down, as well as the springy reaction up, streaming from end to end, without loss, deviation, or compression, in a domino-effect quality.
Pace: The walking pace is consistent, avoiding any fragmentation or clash with inertia, smoothing out confrontations with variant surfaces.
How would you subjectively identify a natural walk in your own experience?
When you are not imposing an authoritative standard on your body, but rather reveal to it its primal potential for natural walking, you will sense the ease and spontaneity of movement, as well as feeling the pleasure of moving. Trusting that your body is willing to move of its own free choice, the urge to move becomes something you love to do and will love to do again tomorrow.
How can natural walking be re-learned in an Autonomous Process
and be harnessed to support your greater sense of personal ecology?
There is no pill for posture, you have to do it yourself.
Designed to take care of individual functional failures, the program creates a learning environment where a "safety first" approach allows participants to gradually practice dynamic patterns of movement. A variety of strategies are used to mitigate damage to vulnerable joints and to develop a reliable axis of posture while performing dynamic anti-gravity movements.
The program also introduces selective corrections to counter productive habits, which the body does not know how to create by itself. All changes are tested and confirmed in actual movement within harmonious correspondence between all body parts.
Walk for Life makes use of 2 essential props:
The Wrap, 7 meters of fabric used to bind, bolster and support a reliable axis of posture while
walking. The wrap avoids deviation of the force in dynamic, anti-gravity, stamina-building movements..
Walking Poles, used not only as support for equilibrium, but also to revive the arm’s primal
function, like the front legs of quarupeds, of producing an impact of pressure on the ground, gaining the counter force which thrusts the shoulder blade backward to the spine, restoring flexibility in the most stiff and non negotiable area of the upper back. The poles also increase vitality in walking, as the non-habitual
interaction of the arms with the ground, through extension with the poles, works to empower the ballistic
factor of propulsion.
In our learning laboratory and while walking in nature we will:
* Organize all parts of the body to accept an anatomically correct disposition of the hip joints,
so the mobilizing force can transmit through the joints without upsetting their safety.
* Train to protect the lumbar vertebrae at the moment of impact in walking, when most of the
body mass is focused on one foot.
* Post the head on top of the spine, in the most sensible disposition, from which the neck can
turn the periscope of senses in any direction with the same ease.
* Put a spring in your step to guarantee the spontaneous shock-absorbing task of the knees
for smooth, free walking.
* Challenge subconscious resourcefulness to the commitment of maintaining stable vertical posture, in order to prevent falls, as well as building confidence in training to fall without injury, inspiring biological optimism.
* Explore a variety of self-mobilization patterns to encourage a combinatory approach toward adjusting organic complex coordination and optimal moving efficiency.
* Facial expression is part of the complex walking pattern. The expression you put on your face, while engaging in demanding tasks that involve your total body, is the expression that will strongly tend to be registered and adopted by you as a habit.
Ruthy Alon, Creator of the Bones for Life® Program
Ruthy Alon, a senior trainer in the Feldenkrais Method®, has applied her experience
of teaching the Feldenkrais Method® for more than 40 years to the challenge of
finding a way to regenerate the vitality of bone tissue. She has taught Bones
For Life® and Bones for Life Chairs: Developing Weight-Bearing Posture in Sitting classes all over the world and currently trains and certifies practitioners to
ensure the dissemination of her material to the larger public. She is the author of
Mindful Spontaneity, creator of the video Movement Nature Meant and Mindful
Eating: The Inner Game of Chewing.
Feldenkrais Method/® is a registered service mark of the Feldenkrais Guild® of North America.
Other Walk For Life Programs:
Walk For Life Part I: September 25 -29, 2013
Feldenkrais Institute of New York,
134 West 26th Street, NY, NY 10001
For program information contact: feldenkraisinstitute.com or 212-727-1014
Walk For Part 1: October 25-29, 2013 San Diego, California
Contact 800-765-1907. www.feldenkraisresources.com
Walk For Life Part II: November 1-5, Oakland, San Francisco Bay Area, CA.
Feldenkrais Resources Training Institute (FRTI)
Contact 510-540-7600, www.FRTIBerkeley.com
