Feldenkrais Shares Similarities With Yoga For The Lower Back
. . . as adjunct treatment for a lower back problem
With the ‘therapy’ world dominated as it is by the sweating bullets ethos of the gym culture (how heavy, how many, how far, how fast, how long) Feldenkrais can take some getting used to. It is subtle, small and slow with definitely no sweat. Trying out Feldenkrais is like trying out life in the slow lane.
Feldenkrais ‘accentuates the unfamiliar’ in movements of the body. The actions are small and specific and take the skeleton (and its joints) in to areas where it never usually goes in everyday physiological activity.
This unfamiliar joint range can be very useful, sometimes brilliantly useful, in scooping out (and restoring) the joints’ forgotten freedoms. Yoga does this in a more static way by holding different yoga poses whereas Feldenkraus does it through movement; waking up muscles lapsed into early retirement because they are literally never called upon to make the joints go into these closed-off territories.
Taking joints into different places also wakes up memory pathways in the brain - and fortunately the brain is quite amenable to these demands. In other words, the brain is really quite ‘plastic’ and readily takes up and make use of (again) these overlooked areas of movement.
In a similar way, as I explain in my book Body in Action (as sold in the USA and Australasia) and Keep Your Joints Young (in the UK) those seemingly awkward yoga poses restore accessory joint function - those invisible shufflings and glidings between the bones of a joint - that give it a loose floppiness or ‘elastic joint play’. Yoga does it by stretching. Feldenkrais does it by movement.
Feldenkrais goes in behind a routine, everyday movement, say bending the lower back, and comes at it from a multitude of different directions, literally from all the different hours on a clock face; from points it may never, literally never, have come-from-or-gone-to in the past.
In the case of the lower back, Feldenkrais’s discreet (sometimes quite difficult) actions are brilliantly effective at helping to restore all six degrees of freedom that each lumbar spinal segment must have in order to avoid acquiring a function fault: a blockage in spinal movement that will eventually come to pain.
I believe you need to first find the problem spinal level and winkle out lost mobility as best you can before embarking on Feldenkrais (or yoga). If you don’t, neighbouring spinal segments will fill in or compensate for absent mobility of the problem level and nothing much will change.
If you follow up spinal mobilisation with the Feldenkrais regime (the third post published here) it will immediately make use of the new freedom you’ve gained and start using it. That tiny little dimension of extra movement will make a huge difference to the overall performance of that single (problematic) spinal segment and movement will become easier - and less painful. Progressively.
Give it a try. And I seriously recommend you look in to what other areas of your body may be helped by Feldenkrais.
I am trying feldenkrais for my hips and I have felt a shift in the location of pain in my back .