Feldenkrais Resources

I have taken several workshops here and recently took one from Carol Kress. While all the practioners/​leaders have been good Carol is heads above. She presents the material in a completely ‘self-​less’ manner with no filtering, prejudice or agenda. It is pure Moshe Feldenkrais. Her method allows one to take away whatever they want/​feel/​experience without feeling guided. This approach fosters a sense of deep personal experience. I have been practicing Feldenkrais for years and she is one of the best!

My back PT told me about this place, which offers regular classes, workshops, and training programs. I did a 1-​day workshop for Awareness Through Movement and found it very helpful. Feldenkrais is good stuff for the spine, and it’s great that this center is here locally. Carol Kress is who ran the workshop and who my PT told me about, so I can’t speak for all the practitioners there. As for the neighborhood and condition of the building, I didn’t think they were as bad as other reviewers. I did not feel threatened, or icky, or anything of the sort. This is a resource center, in west Berkeley, not a posh treatment spa in Marin. The fees for classes and workshops are quite reasonable, and they do sliding scale low cost clinics too.

Great local resource for feldenkrais books, CDs etc. I’ve also received Functional Integration lessons here from a variety of great practitioners. Not a fabulous neighborhood but safe enough for a walk from the car to the building.

This school has a low-​fee Feldenkrais clinic, which is a very nice feature. The building is very spacious, and parking is free. They have a bookstore.
They have Awareness Through Movement classes and public workshops.
Now for the downsides: The faculty is mixed — some are really fabulous teachers, and others have no business teaching.
Trying to get things done is kind of slow, and there seems to be a lot of bureaucracy and lack of willingness to pay for upkeep. For instance, their sound system wasn’t working (the volume would go up to jarring volumes and down so that you couldn’t hear it), and they really dragged on fixing it (one of their students, an MIT grad, offered to replace it for them at cost, but they cut corners and just replaced one part, which didn’t fix the problem). Eventually, this student fixed the problem, lucky for all the tuition-​paying students who could hear the classes without problem.
It’s in an icky neighborhood (drug dealers, homeless people), the home-​owners who live nearby get very peeved if you park in front of their homes, they don’t vacuum or clean their carpet often enough, and they have a recurring problem with ants. UPDATE 2008: The building changed ownership since I went to school there, so it may be cleaner now.