Blending Yoga & Feldenkrais: FALL 2025

Starting in the 1930’s, Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais began to develop a somatic form of neuromuscular re-education. Feldenkrais developed two practical approaches for exploring early developmental movements, as well as more advanced complex actions.

1) Functional Integration - manually directed, hands on, private lessons. Learn more about 1:1 the Feldenkrais approach here.

2) Awareness Through Movement - verbally guided mindful movement classes done in a group setting.

Both approaches are described as “lessons”, as they involve beneficial learning processes for the brain and body. In guided Awareness Through Movement classes you study your potential to act, and how you refine your self organization to make any movement. Feldenkrais is not stretching or straining, it is learning. The method uses gentle mindful movement and directed attention to help people learn new and more effective ways to move and be in the world.

Both practices emphasize listening to your body, respecting its limits, and unlocking its potential. These two methods use movement as a means of learning through the nervous system. In Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, the phrase Chitta Vritti Nirodha often translated as “stilling the waves of the mind” is described as the ultimate goal of yoga. Similarly, Moshe Feldenkrais frequently remarked that his aim was not simply to create flexible bodies, but rather flexible minds.

While the two methods share many similarities, they differ in their approaches, each offering a unique pathway to self-discovery. A seasoned yogi may find that Feldenkrais deepens their internal awareness, while a Feldenkrais practitioner might uncover greater strength and vitality through the practice of yoga.

While most yoga practices place significant emphasis on alignment and the external shape of a pose, the Feldenkrais Method takes a fundamentally different approach. Rather than aiming to hold positions or push the body toward the edge of flexibility, Feldenkrais focuses on the internal experience of movement specifically, the coordination, quality, and efficiency of how one moves.

In a typical Feldenkrais lesson, there are no prescribed shapes or postures to achieve. Instead, practitioners engage in gentle, mindful movement sequences based on developmental patterns, the kinds of movements we naturally explored as infants when learning to roll, reach, crawl, or walk. These movements are performed slowly, within a comfortable range, and always without strain.

This deliberate gentleness is essential to Feldenkrais. By staying within a pain-free, non-threatening range of motion, the nervous system remains in a state where it can safely observe, adapt, and reorganize. This is key to the method’s focus on neuroplasticity: learning new, more efficient ways of moving through direct sensory experience.

While yoga often encourages the body to fit into specific postures, the Feldenkrais more specifically invites you to investigate how movement occurs and how it might be done with less effort. Instead of striving toward an external goal or ideal form, Feldenkrais emphasizes the process of learning and self-discovery. This shift from outcome to experience fosters deeper internal awareness and sustainable improvement in how we move and feel.

In this specific series and all of the Blending of Yoga & Feldenkrais classes, Sarah blends these two forms together. Each class is an original, innovative creation of Sarah’s teaching. She blends a more traditional gentle yoga practice with the novel Feldenkrais® awareness practices, joint-specific training, self-massage, breathing, and a compassionate, non-competitive atmosphere. The pace is slow and accessible to all levels, inviting curiosity and personal exploration.

Feldenkrais and Yoga help improve balance and prevent falls by retraining your body's response to potential imbalances.

Fear can be a major culprit behind falls. Fear can make us tense up and hold our breath, limiting movement and increasing fall risk. The lessons are gentle movement explorations that promote a healthy breathing and a calm nervous system.

Balance also relies on feeling your body's position in space. Feldenkrais explorations refine your body awareness and proprioception, helping you detect, respond, and adapt to potential imbalances more wisely. Focusing on coordinated movement patterns, the lessons train your body and mind to respond more effectively to unsteady situations.

Through subtle changes in how we relate to the present moment, memories, and future possibilities, the Feldenkrais Method can support anxiety management. Often, anxiety is tied to uncertainty about what lies ahead. Consequently, it can create a cycle of tension that affects both body and mind. Past experiences and imagined outcomes can trigger stress responses, often showing up physically as a clenched jaw, tight neck and shoulders, lower back pain, or shallow breathing. 

Through Awareness Through Movement (ATM) lessons, Feldenkrais encourages small, gentle, and comfortable movements. These are designed not to force change but to invite ease and awareness. This approach works from the body upward—a sensory-based, bottom-up process—rather than relying solely on mental strategies to change our state. As we tune in to subtle physical sensations, we strengthen our ability to understand and respond to what’s happening internally—this is known as interoception. The more accurately we sense our internal state, the more effectively we can choose how to respond. 

Feldenkrais also supports self-regulation. With consistent practice, the lessons help build a sense of internal stability, confidence, and adaptability. By fostering a state of calm and vigilant awareness, they prepare the nervous system to respond effectively to stress and challenges. 

Dr. Feldenkrais described this shift as creating a tabula rasa, or blank slate—a return to a neutral, open state from which new patterns of movement and thought can emerge. Although life events are often beyond our control, Feldenkrais equips us to face them with increased resilience, adaptability, and insight. 

Yes! It’s not uncommon for students to feel taller and to stand more upright (with less effort) after a Feldenkrais session. Most all humans “hold” the body with a specific tone in the muscles. Over time this muscular tone habituates and becomes our “posture”, for better or worse. Using guided awareness and small movements in Feldenkrais lessons, the body can shed its unnecessary muscular tone, so that the skeleton can then find its more optimal place to be.

“Although we each have a fantastic skeleton and musculature designed to give us flexible support and hold us upright against the pull of gravity, we frequently develop postural habits that challenge our skeletal structure's effectiveness and cause muscular tension inflammation, and a gradual deterioration of our joints.” - Feldenkrais Trainer David Zemach- Bersin

With awareness, specificity, and practice, Feldenkrais lessons can give you the ability to free the muscles of the neck, shoulders, spine, and pelvis. As one moves towards more freedom of the muscles, one also moves towards a more easy, elegant, and upright posture supported by the strength of the skeleton.

Our aim in Feldenkrais is not a perfect posture, but a place of less tension and conflict in the body where our posture is fluid, not rigid. Everyone’s posture, or how they “use” themselves, isn’t always optimal. With the help of the Feldenkrais method, your postural habits can improve to make everyday movements more enjoyable and easy.