Public Workshop with Andrew Gibbons: Anti-Fragile Walking—The Art of Your Head Held High

In this workshop you will refine your walking through an understanding of the carriage of the head. People who want to enjoy and pursue walking, hiking, cycling, climbing stairs, and standing without pain will especially benefit from this workshop.

(The conversation of this workshop will expand on the previous Anti-Fragile Walking workshop in Seattle 2016. Come again if you understand the value of compound interest!)

As a participant in the workshop you will: 

• Use the carriage of the head to measure your quality of gait.
• Engage in selected Awareness Through Movement® lessons to help you sense the patterns of walking with greater accuracy and comfort.  
• Improve the arrival of your head over the new leg in walking, so that it is more smoothly timed, stable, and weightless. 
• Sense how to organize your spine in the direction of stability, not across it.
• Distinguish between “keeping” your balance and restoring it. 
• Integrate the use of the eyes for ease, perception and safety in walking. 

Andrew will be giving private lessons in Seattle (Kirkland) in the afternoons of August 13-17. To reserve a session, contact Andrew directly: andrew@bodyofknowleddge, 347-460-9359 (textable). 

About Anti-Fragile Walking:

The secrets of healthy walking are hidden in plain sight. Most of us walk with deeply grooved habits, repeating the moments that lead to pain and stiffness. If we study these moments, we can create a new stability and integrity in our walk. With practice, we can clarify and ennoble an action we’ve done unconsciously our entire lives. Our walking can become a path to health—it can be our zen, our gym, and our joy.

In this approach, you'll raise your walking from an unconscious habit to an informed practice. You’ll emerge with a clearer perspective on how walking works and the art of transferring your weight elegantly from leg to leg. You’ll learn what, why and how to practice with greater specificity. 

The Anti-Fragile model focuses on three crucial moments in the walking step. These moments will be our laboratory to test our skeletal support, muscular efficiency, and balance. 

As a participant in these workshops, you will learn: 

• How walking is learned, and how learning is walked.
• Why your soft tissue cannot survive a disorganized skeleton.
• To see and sense the shearing forces that poor walking creates, and learn how to move better by choice.
• The key relationships in the foot, ankle and knee that every good walk maintains.
• “Do-anywhere” practices that help you tune your walking balance and maintain it throughout the day.
• How to use your observational skills so you can improve by observing other people and yourself.
• Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement® practices that deepen your self-image and skill. 

What is the Feldenkrais Method®?

The Feldenkrais Method gives a compass to those lost in the woods of prescriptive exercise. You’ll enter the space of learning, not performance.

By employing intelligent strategies like slowing down and examining the details of sensation, accuracy and movement, you’ll lift the veil of unconscious habits and compensations. 

The method offers significant advantages over the monotony of prescriptive exercises:  it builds safety, a refinement of the kinaesthetic sense of movement and balance, and helps foster the dignity of choice.

About Andrew:

"Andrew is a rising star in the Feldenkrais world. He is deeply experienced, committed to learning and to the clear expression of his functional understanding." —Jeff Haller, Feldenkrais Trainer

Andrew Gibbons is a Guild Certified Feldenkrais Teacher in New York City who has spent many years uncovering the moments in walking that tell us the most about our posture and self-organization. In his private practice, he helps the humans of New York learn to organize themselves better for the second half of their life than they did for the first. He has been a Feldenkrais Teacher since 2003, and is on the staff of Jeff Haller’s Feldenkrais Training Academy and IOPS Academy. Andrew is also an accomplished classical pianist who has taught Feldenkrais to world class musicians, professional athletes, medical professionals and as an ergonomic consultant for The New York Times. More about Andrew: www.bodyofknowledge.me.

Cost includes 10% nonrefundable deposit.