by Richard Adelman

Is it possible to age gracefully? Can you imagine how that would look and feel? How could you do it?

Is it possible to experience yourself as creatively challenged by a changing body and not as a victim of an inevitably deteriorating body?

Is it possible to deepen and ripen, instead of shriveling up and rigidifying or collapsing as you grow older? Could you remain active in forming and growing your personal body and not just become a victim of nature?

In fact, it is possible to reorganize and renew ourselves at any age. The experience of proactively helping yourself is a powerful antidote to feelings of victimhood and desperation. When we have alternatives we feel less trapped and more optimistic.

My therapeutic approach involves you forming a friendlier relationship with your changing body, in a way that is soft and non-coercive. This includes enhancing body awareness to move more smoothly and efficiently to reduce wear-and-tear on your musculoskeletal apparatus. To make the best use of what we've got.

My methodology of somatic (body) education includes subtle hands-on work and slow, gentle, easy floorwork movements to deepen contact with how we habitually use and misuse our body. This helps to ground us in the reality of how we are living ourself bodily. Then we discover more comfortable, functional, or truthful alternatives.

The brain tells the muscles how to move the bones, and oversees this process through biofeedback networks. The Feldenkrais Method adjusts how our nervous system moves our body, increasing the accuracy and differentiation of neural transmissions. The results are smoother coordination and better balance with easier breathing, less effort, and more available energy.

Especially combined with my private Pilates lessons, this results in more physical and emotional security, including increased flexibility and less musculoskeletal pain, with the return of a lighter, brighter attitude.

Aging gracefully is a given for very few people. The rest of us require practice to embody and re-embody ourselves. This is even more challenging for people who are not accustomed to listening to their bodies, including those who have led the life of the mind, and people who have unempathetically overworked or over exercised their body.

The ritual of moving very slowly and attentively (usually while lying down) has the immediate effect of deepening self-contact. It puts us inside ourself, into our own process of how we are using ourself, how we regulate tension and effort in our body. Is our attitude unfriendly or friendly, impatient or patient, rejecting or receptive, critical or accepting, hostile or loving?

Aging gracefully is both physical and attitudinal. It involves bodily coordination and being in a state of grace: taking a patient, compassionate, loving, helpful attitude toward ourselves in our later years.

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Richard Adelman has an M.A. in Psychology and over 50 years experience in Somatic Formative Psychology and the Feldenkrais Method. He is also certified in Pilates, for which he has developed a gentle equipment-based approach especially suitable for seniors. He offers private session in Feldenkrais hands-on and movement work and Pilates instruction at his centrally-located consultorio, at your home, and at the TOSMA Saturday Market. He gives Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement classes at Salón Semilla, Mercado Sano, Mondays and Wednesdays 12-1:30. (More information about this class may be found in Lokkal's calendar.)

Richard is interested in helping you relieve pain and stress, improve your flexibility, posture, and coordination while you deepen your subjective bodily experience, learning to use yourself better in daily life.

richardadelman@gmail.com
Whatsapp: 415 197 7895
Bilingual

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