Olivia Cheever
Feldenkrais Method | Bones For Life | Classes & Training | Who Benefits | Olivia's Academic Career


Bones for Life®

Here’s a way literally to find a new life footing. Bone strengthening and alignment give you a springy step and ‘walking on air’ feeling. Bones For Life is billed as a program to help avoid or reverse osteoporosis, which is now epidemic in the US, but its benefits go further. We all move, but how many of us in this sedentary society do so dynamically, with real joy of movement?

Bones for LifeIn a Bones For Life class, you’ll learn safe ways to fall, jump, lift light weights, run, sit, and especially walk. The role model for efficient weight-bearing posture is African women who carry heavy loads on their heads. They maintain alignment, balance, and grace, with only five percent of the bone fractures of Western women. The Bones For Life version of this walk aligns your skeleton so that you can feel movement traveling from one end to the other, vertebra by vertebra, like dominos in a line.

The idea is to direct a vibrational force through the accurately aligned skeleton, which you accomplish by creating pressure of hands or feet against walls or floor, then checking what it feels like as the movement ripples through you. Healthy bone building only happens when we’re weight-bearing. This is why Bones For Life has proved useful to NASA in Texas, helping astronauts reverse dramatic bone loss due to the experience of zero gravity.

Until recently, bone loss was widely misunderstood as the province of the old, not the young and fit, and assumed to be irreversible. The good news is that bones can be regenerated. This has been demonstrated both by astronauts’ recovery and in a 2004 study by Bones For Life originator Ruthy Alon. After 60 hours of a Bones For Life course, 50 percent of the research sample showed bone growth.

Ruthy was one of Moshe Feldenkrais’ thirteen original students in Israel and the first US pioneer of his Method. In 1996 she carried those principles into this program.

 

 


Bones For Life Program Offerings

1-Day and 2-Day Workshops

New session dates to be announced for 2010. Learn More...

Classes

Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement and Bones For Life classes in the greater Boston area are scheduled from January 27th through March 24th, 2010. Learn More...

Certification Training

Four-Day Bones For Life Professional Certification Training in Bristol, VT.

New session dates to be announced for 2010. Learn More...

 

Serving the Boston area with classes in Brookline, Cambridge, Concord, Needham, and Watertown.
Call (781) 449-1410 or email ocheever@comcast.net.
© Copyright 2010 Olivia Cheever. All rights reserved.