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The Feldenkrais Method in the Treatment of Eating Disorders
By Abigail Natenshon, MA, LCSW

The FELDENKRAIS METHOD, a movement technique connecting mind and body, encourages listening mindfully to our inner selves, our sensations, and emotions, even while challenging ourselves to take action in the world. Seeking to create whole and emotionally functional human beings, the method relies on attention and awareness, differentiation and integration to teach people to move beyond dysfunctional habitual patterns and thinking that limits and distorts self-image, and that inhibits authentic self expression and clarity of thought. In so doing, the potential for effective problem-solving and improved daily functioning is expanded.
By optimizing our skeletal structure and function in movement within our own gravitational field, we create and recreate who we are, facilitating empowerment and an esteemed sense of well-being and optimistic possibility.
The Feldenkrais method teaches us how to learn, offering individuals the opportunity to take responsibility for their own learning.
Accessing the brain uniquely, experientially, the method provides a novel, potent and pure form of learning that adults may not have experienced since infancy, or ever before.
Through organizing the nervous system, we learn to become aware of ourselves in ways that have not yet been available to us. Obese individuals who typically abhor bodily movement and who frequently experience human touch to be painful as a result of swelling in the tissues, in doing this work can experience a graceful, astonishing feather-lightness and freedom from constraints in their function that is for many a wholly unique and liberating experience.
With improvements in physical movements, come improvements in our lives emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. Through the potency of the connection between mind and the body, as a person upgrades his or her physical structure and function, so it goes with brain function, structure, chemical composition and mood. Posture manifests the internal dialogue, even while creating it. Muscles hold our tensions, as well as mood, so much so that a person may not be able to elicit or let go of emotions fully unless the posture parallels the change.
Experiencing physical differences and change can also become the basis for metaphorical learning, giving people access to emotional options, opportunities and possibilities as well.
Lastly, the Method is about self-improvement and it is for everyone. It applies to any person who rolls out of bed in the morning, who gets up out of a chair, who swings a golf club, or breathes. A person needs not be in pain to benefit from the work.
In Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais’ words, “ The aim of the work is to make the impossible possible, the possible easy, and the easy elegant.”

Feldenkrais and its connection to psychotherapy
The Method shares an immense affinity in language, ideas, and concepts to those of clinical psychotherapy.
The Feldenkrais method is about learning and change. So is psychotherapy.
The body is understood to be a system which functions best with all parts articulated and integrated.
The therapist starts where patient is, going with the system, reinforcing strengths.
The work achieves structurally, tangibly, and palpably what cognitive treatment strives to achieve through talk and thought alone. The Method goes beyond providing the patient opportunity; it “delivers” opportunity… behaviorally, experientially. This is a concept that deserves further exploration in formal research.
Psychotherapy relies on the same self-awareness, differentiation and re-integration to achieve wholeness and optimize change in the realm of feeling and emotion. It parallels the main task in eating disorder treatment of integrating the anorexic self with the healthy self. The anorexic seeks an integration, or association, of mind and body in an eating disordered world where women in particular spend most of their time dissociating mind and body (refusing to look at the scale.)
By accessing the patient’s core, or center, we affect sensing, thinking and perception.
Feldenkrais defines maturity as emotional flexibility, a wonderful definition in my view. Flexibility is a concept that is antithetical to the very existence of an eating disorder.
Though the method adheres to the language of psychotherapy, one of the most unique and invaluable aspects of this work is that it bypasses the NEED for the language of traditional talk therapy. Language is limiting.
With psychotherapy, too frequently the patient’s “story,” the old “tapes,” gets told and retold and retold again. The uniqueness of the Feldenkrais Method is in the novelty of changing the ending with limitless possibilities.
In the realm of pure emotion, a person generally cannot hold onto feelings of optimism because humans do not exist in a static state. The self-help process represents a continuing process of autonomous shifting out of old habits and into useful new ones in creating and recreating an image of achievement.
Many people seek bodily solutions to express what they feel. Feelings are typically too abstract for young people who need a rootedness in the concrete.
The Feldenkrais method has been proven to be particularly effective with victims of eating disorders in facilitating self-awareness on a deep and profound level, offering increased options for making changes, solving problems, and integrating mind and body. Research results from studies that have tested the efficacy of using the Feldenkrais Method as an adjunct to traditional eating disorder treatment can be found on the Internet in an abstract translated into English from German in Entrez-PubMed called The Therapeutic Effects of the Feldenkrais Method "Awareness Through Movement" in Patients with Eating Disorders by Laumer U, Bauer M, Fichter M, Milz H University at Regensburg.

About Abigail H. Natenshon
Abigail H. Natenshon, MA LCSW, GCFP has been a psychotherapist in private practice specializing in the treatment of eating disordered individuals and their families for the past 37 years; co-founder and director of Eating Disorder Specialists of Illinois; A Clinic without Walls, and author of When Your Child Has an Eating Disorder: A Step-by-Step Workbook for Parents and Other Caregivers (Jossey Bass, San Francisco, October, 1999). Visit her web sites at www.treatingeatingdisorders.com www.empoweredparents.com. Contact Abigail at http://www.empoweredparents.com/contact

The views and opinions expressed in this article are strictly those of the author and are presented without editing. The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of EDReferral.com, and no official endorsement by EDReferral.com of the opinions expressed herein should be inferred.
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	By optimizing our skeletal structure and function in movement within our own gravitational field, we create and recreate who we are, facilitating empowerment and an esteemed sense of well-being and optimistic possibility.
	The Feldenkrais method teaches us how to learn, offering individuals the opportunity to take responsibility for their own learning.
	Accessing the brain uniquely, experientially, the method provides a novel, potent and pure form of learning that adults may not have experienced since infancy, or ever before.
	Through organizing the nervous system, we learn to become aware of ourselves in ways that have not yet been available to us. Obese individuals who typically abhor bodily movement and who frequently experience human touch to be painful as a result of swelling in the tissues, in doing this work can experience a graceful, astonishing feather-lightness and freedom from constraints in their function that is for many a wholly unique and liberating experience.
	With improvements in physical movements, come improvements in our lives emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. Through the potency of the connection between mind and the body, as a person upgrades his or her physical structure and function, so it goes with brain function, structure, chemical composition and mood. Posture manifests the internal dialogue, even while creating it. Muscles hold our tensions, as well as mood, so much so that a person may not be able to elicit or let go of emotions fully unless the posture parallels the change.
	Experiencing physical differences and change can also become the basis for metaphorical learning, giving people access to emotional options, opportunities and possibilities as well.
	Lastly, the Method is about self-improvement and it is for everyone. It applies to any person who rolls out of bed in the morning, who gets up out of a chair, who swings a golf club, or breathes. A person needs not be in pain to benefit from the work.

	The Feldenkrais method is about learning and change. So is psychotherapy.
	The body is understood to be a system which functions best with all parts articulated and integrated.
	The therapist starts where patient is, going with the system, reinforcing strengths.
	The work achieves structurally, tangibly, and palpably what cognitive treatment strives to achieve through talk and thought alone. The Method goes beyond providing the patient opportunity; it “delivers” opportunity… behaviorally, experientially. This is a concept that deserves further exploration in formal research.
	Psychotherapy relies on the same self-awareness, differentiation and re-integration to achieve wholeness and optimize change in the realm of feeling and emotion. It parallels the main task in eating disorder treatment of integrating the anorexic self with the healthy self. The anorexic seeks an integration, or association, of mind and body in an eating disordered world where women in particular spend most of their time dissociating mind and body (refusing to look at the scale.)
	By accessing the patient’s core, or center, we affect sensing, thinking and perception.
	Feldenkrais defines maturity as emotional flexibility, a wonderful definition in my view. Flexibility is a concept that is antithetical to the very existence of an eating disorder.
	Though the method adheres to the language of psychotherapy, one of the most unique and invaluable aspects of this work is that it bypasses the NEED for the language of traditional talk therapy. Language is limiting.
	With psychotherapy, too frequently the patient’s “story,” the old “tapes,” gets told and retold and retold again. The uniqueness of the Feldenkrais Method is in the novelty of changing the ending with limitless possibilities.
	In the realm of pure emotion, a person generally cannot hold onto feelings of optimism because humans do not exist in a static state. The self-help process represents a continuing process of autonomous shifting out of old habits and into useful new ones in creating and recreating an image of achievement.
	Many people seek bodily solutions to express what they feel. Feelings are typically too abstract for young people who need a rootedness in the concrete.