Aches and pains, sports injuries; mind willing but body rebelling? Consider the Feldenkrais Method for enabling an active lifestyle through the normal aging process. Moshe Feldenkrais' classic book "Awareness Through Movement" explores how it is possible to reprogram the sensory motor system. It is a method which enables your body to function more freely and efficiently in day-to-day activities as well as active sports.

As we age, inefficient and dysfunctional muscular patterns tend to be become more habitual. These patterns are essentially unconscious and often the source of so called "old age aches and pains." Feldenkrais declares that "improvement in action and movement will appear only after a prior change in the brain and nervous system has occurred."

Thus, "a drastic change in the motor system will have parallel effects on thinking and feeling". If movement is the basis of awareness, then muscle memory shifting is possible when being aware while moving. At the most basic level just sitting and breathing is a form of movement.

Invigorated wholeness is facilitated through slow, easy and pleasant "lessons" which work when your mind is fully engaged in the experience of the muscular movements.

Thus, easy and pleasant habitual movements are substituted for inefficient and often painful habitual movements. Any muscular effort that does not create movement is unnecessary and over time, debilitating muscular movement. Feldenkrais offers a number of simple "lessons" in the third part of this remarkable text. He suggests doing one lesson every night before going to sleep and that "within a week you will find a considerable improvement in all functions essential to life."