Activate your brain, revive your body, revolutionize your life!

A Quick Example
A 70-year-old woman (we’ll call her Patricia) can’t reach her shoe laces to tie them. She is told to, “Try harder. Stretch, stretch, stretch.” It doesn’t work. No matter how hard she tries, she can’t reach the laces. She is now convinced that her limitation is inevitable she is simply too old.

She doesn’t realize that she isn’t getting better because this mechanical approach is not addressing the real problem. The problem is not in her muscles—it’s in her brain. After many years of habitually moving only some of her joints, using only certain muscles and not others, Patricia literally cannot feel parts of her back and hips and legs because her brain has stopped getting the information it needs to remain aware of those parts of herself. Whole areas of her body are not “mapped” anymore in her brain. It’s as if they don’t exist for her.

Now, if the brain isn’t aware of certain muscles and joints, how can it direct and orchestrate those muscles and joints to work? It can’t! The same holds true for adults with different conditions and children with Cerebral Palsy, Autism, and other special needs.

By moving gently and slowly, with attention, and with lots of variations, and by using the remaining six Essentials of the Anat Baniel Method, Patricia helps her CEO brain connect to more parts of herself. By differentiating her perceptions and movements, remapping her body in her brain, and evolving her ability to move more flexibly, she can now reach her shoelaces easily.

As a by-product of applying the Nine Essentials, she begins thinking and feeling better too.
Through communicating with the brain, miraculous changes can occur.
===============================================================

Anat Baniel, founder of the Anat Baniel Method(sm), is the author of two highly acclaimed books, Move Into Life: The Nine Essentials for Lifelong Vitality and Kids Beyond Limits. Anat was trained as a clinical psychologist, dancer, and was a close professional associate of Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais for over a decade.

Anat’s innovative methods have helped thousands of people, both adults and children, from five days old to 90 years old, transforming their lives physically, emotionally, and intellectually.

-----------------

About Dr. Feldenkrais

Dr. Moshé Feldenkrais, a physicist, engineer and judo master was a revolutionary scientist-clinician. He was the greatest thinker in the 20th Century about how to improve movement. Dr Feldenkrais was well ahead of his time in his understanding that the brain can change itself and needs to change itself in order to improve skill and well being. He pioneered a learning system Feldenkrais exercise that uses movement and awareness of self to bring about remarkable changes in body and mind.

Born in Russia in 1904, in the 1940s he sustained a debilitating injury to one of his knees. Unable to walk and trying to recover, he realized that rather than focusing on the muscles and tendons associated with his injury, it was his brain that needed help to find new ways to organize his body so that he could walk again, despite the injury. On the path to figuring out how to re-educate his brain and change his way of moving, his method was born.

Feldenkrais understood long before it was generally accepted that the human brain can change throughout life, what is called today brain plasticity. He also understood that movement is a powerful way to communicate with the brain in order to bring about change and improvement. As he said: “Movement is life, without movement life is unthinkable.” He understood that lifelong learning and growth are not a luxury but a necessity for our health and wellbeing.

After successfully applying this approach to his own injury and fully recovering, he began to develop and teach this new methodology. His approach quickly brought about remarkable changes for his students. In his ongoing work, Dr. Feldenkrais was motivated to have people achieve their fullest potential—no matter what their condition. In his own words: “What I’m after is not flexible bodies, but flexible brains . . . what I’m really after is restoring people to their human dignity.”

More information is available at Dr. Feldenkrais at http://www.feldenkraismethod.com

http://www.anatbanielmethod.com/about-abm/about-anat-baniel

Activate your brain, revive your body, revolutionize your life!

The Nine Essentials

The Nine Essentials form the core of the Anat Baniel Method. Each of the Nine Essentials describes one of the brain’s requirements for waking up and doing its job well. That is, creating new connections and avoiding rigidity and automaticity when needing to overcome pain and limitation to thus reach new levels of physical and cognitive performance. Validated by modern science’s latest discoveries in the area of brain plasticity—the brain’s ability to change and grow new neurological pathways and connections throughout life. The Nine Essentials offer you concrete, effective, and immediate ways to easily tap into your brain’s enormous potential. With the Essentials, the brain becomes a brilliant problem solver, leading to breakthroughs in movement abilities, pain relief, and peak performance.

Essential 1—Movement with Attention
Movement is Life. Movement helps the brain grow and form. The brain is organized through movement. In turn, it is the brain that organizes all movement: the movement of our body, our thinking, our feelings, and our emotions. But movement alone is not enough. Automatic movement—movement done without attention—only grooves in the already existing patterns. When we bring attention to what we feel as we move, the brain immediately starts building billions of new neurological connections that usher in changes, learning and transformation.

Essential 2—The Learning Switch
The brain is either in a learning mode—the learning switch is on—or not. Healthy young children have their learning switch on and the dial turned on “high.” Their eyes are bright, their movement lithe, and they are full of energy.

Repetition, drill, and everyday stresses, as well as habitual patterns of thought, exercise, and emotions, all tend to turn the learning switch off. The same happens when a child has special challenges, or a person has suffered trauma or injury. For the brain to properly do its job, the “learning switch” needs to be on. Once on, at any age, life becomes a wonderful new adventure, filled with movement, creativity, and new possibilities.

Essential 3—Subtlety
We have all heard the expressions “no pain, no gain” and “try harder.” However, in order to overcome pain and limitation and thrive, the brain needs the exact opposite—less force. For the brain to receive new information, it needs to perceive differences. By reducing the force with which we move and think, we increase our sensitivity. With the resulting increased sensitivity, we greatly enhance our brain’s ability to perceive the finest of differences. These perceptions give the brain the new information it needs to organize successful action and become more alive and vital in both body and mind.

Essential 4—Variation
Variation is everywhere, and is more than just the spice of life. It’s a necessity for optimum health. Variation provides your brain with the richness of information it needs to create new possibilities in your movements, feelings, thoughts, and actions.
It helps increase your awareness and lifts you out of rigidity and “being stuck.” By introducing variation and playfulness into everything you do, you awaken all your senses. New ideas occur and new possibilities emerge in your life.

Essential 5—Slow
Fast, we can only do what we already know. This is how the brain works. To learn and master new skills and overcome limitation, the first thing to do is slow way down. Slow actually gets the brain’s attention and stimulates the formation of rich new neural patterns. Slow gets us out of the automatic mode in our movements, speech, thoughts, and social interactions. It lets us feel and experience life at a deeper, more profound level.

Essential 6—Enthusiasm
Enthusiasm is self-generated; it is a skill you can develop, choose to do and become good at. Enthusiasm tells your brain what is important to you, amplifying whatever that is, making it stand out, infusing it with energy to grow more. Enthusiasm is a powerful energy that lifts you up, and inspires you and others. It lights up your brain, helping to usher in changes, transforming the most mundane situation or task, adding meaning and generating delight. Enthusiasm helps make the impossible possible.

Essential 7—Flexible Goals
“Keeping your eyes on the prize” is a great way for most people to fail. Freeing yourself from the compulsion to achieve a goal in a certain way and at a certain time keeps you open-minded.

You are available to recognize opportunities you might never have noticed had you been fixed on a too rigidly set course. There is no way to know in advance the path that will lead you to achieving your goal. Know your goal and embrace all the unexpected steps, mis-steps, and re-routes. They are a rich source of valuable information for your brain to lead you to your goal. Flexible goals will reduce your anxiety, increase your creativity, resulting in greater success, vitality, and joy.

Essential 8—Imagination & Dreams
Einstein said: “Imagination is everything. It is the preview to life’s coming attractions.” Through imagination your brain figures out new possibilities before actually having to perform. When imagining, the brain grows new neural connections. Our dreams call upon us from our future. They give us our unique life path to follow and guide our brains to continue growing and developing. Your imagination and dreams give you the ability to create something that has never been there before, transcending your current limitations and leading you to develop your authentic life path.

Essential 9—Awareness
Awaring—the action of generating awareness—is to be knowledgeable about what you are doing, sensing, thinking, and experiencing at any given moment. Awaring is the opposite of automaticity and compulsion.

It is a unique human capacity that can catapult us to remarkable heights. When you are aware, you are fully alive and present. Your brain is working at its highest level, noticing subtle nuances of what is going on around and within you, revealing options and potentials, greatly accelerating learning. You are enlivened and joyful, contributing to others, becoming more enlightened, and fulfilling more and more of your human destiny.
----------------------------------------