Our Services
Feldenkrais/Individuals/Groups/Trainings
Donna’s services include individual hands-on sessions called Functional Integration® along with Awareness Through Movement® group classes. Advanced training is provided for Feldenkrais Practitioners.
The lessons benefit professional athletes, dancers, musicians, and actors, but also anyone experiencing pain, learning difficulties, special needs, reduced mobility, or reduced range of motion.
The lessons provide value to people from all walks of life. This method improves comfort, coordination and flexibility, self-awareness, improvement of self-image, and brings us greater clarity and vitality in our lives.
Everyone interested in improving themselves and enhancing their lives will benefit from these services.
Donna works with infants to the elderly. She works with people recovering from illness, injury, and pain.
Donna works with performing athletes, actors, children, pregnant women, the elderly, and people suffering from neurological conditions such as Cerebral Palsy, Parkinson’s, MS, stroke recovery, and beyond.
She offers lectures and courses for healthcare institutions, spas, and businesses — locally and abroad.
Individual Feldenkrais Functional Integration Lessons
Functional Integration® (FI) is a hands-on approach for individuals who need more individualized attention. It is neither medical nor therapeutic in its philosophy however people diagnosed with medical conditions improve with this learning-based approach.
Benefits are achieved by enhancing the efficiency, coordination, and grace of an individual’s functional movement. Lessons are created with the student lying on a comfortable work table, standing or sitting. The practitioner gently touches and comfortably moves the student in a wide variety of ways to facilitate awareness, learning, and vitality.
Gradually the student is led to organize new movement patterns through both conscious and subconscious learning.
“When I stood up after my fist session with Donna, I experienced tremendous relief from the back pain caused by a recent automobile accident. For the first time in weeks I could walk and be comfortable. No longer afraid to move.”
— Angie McShane, Fitness Coach
“I suffered with chronic pain for several years, after just a few sessions with Donna, the pain was nearly gone. It was amazing. I was able bend down to the floor and turn to the right and left freely. Her touch was so gentle, I didn’t think anything was happening. But when I got up I felt completely different.”
— Colette Justine, Educator
“After just a couple of sessions with Donna, my confidence returned. I felt stable on my feet. I fell off my bike and injured my knee. I didn’t think I’d ever fully recover. I am so grateful to be riding my bike again.”
— Jane Byre, Medical Technician
Awareness Through Movement Classes
Awareness Through Movement® (ATM) is verbally directed, practiced by groups and individuals. Engaging in this form of pleasurable mindful movement training may be done with a practitioner or while listening to recorded audio lessons.
You can find our recorded lessons available for purchase here.
This method highly motivates people. It is enjoyable, novel, and instantly gratifying.
ATM lessons are easy-to-do, including slow and active movements. By activating the brain in unique ways, sensory attention, motor learning, perception, and thinking, you develop awareness so that outstanding performance is achieved for each individual.
A typical lesson combines numerous movements, which are elegantly organized around a functional activity.
Examples of such functional activities include breathing, childlike rolling, crawling, sitting up to standing, jumping, walking, and running.
Movements related to sports, such as swinging a tennis racket or golf club, throwing a ball, swimming, dancing, and gymnastics are addressed as well.
Experiments in movement-based imagery and visualization that pertain to perception, cognition, and other aspects of motor function are included in each lesson.
Throughout the lessons, students learn to integrate their new skills into their self-image, affecting all parts of their lives. Everyone becomes more capable in sports, daily activities, and social situations.
“This class was a wonderful mix of doing, watching, and discussing. I felt stretched (in a very positive way) and free to explore what I didn’t know as well as what I thought I knew. Donna’s guidance is always honest and thorough, and always delivered in a supportive, loving way, even when she is explaining why we misunderstood or misrepresented something. She provides the best kind of learning environment.”
— Donna Thal, PhD (Feldenkrais Practitioner, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, SDSU)
“Donna’s presence, humanity, her calmness and great clarity is her teaching. Her communication gives me trust in myself, she embodies what she teaches.”
— Andrea Melita Thiem
“The clarity of Donna's explanations and how she makes explicit the function of what we have been working on is so useful.”
— Maria Grazia Sguera (Feldenkrais Practitioner)
“It was moving to observe how she connects to others. Donna immediately intuits what the person needs most in a certain moment…. she knows immediately how to establish connection, a look, silence, a pause… a small touch… but it’s already profound communication, being completely at the other’s service, donating without judgement, a being there without forgetting about herself.”
— Gabriella Icardi (Feldenkrais Practitioner)
A Short History of Dr. Moshé Feldenkrais and Feldenkrais Southern California Movement Institute
“What I’m after isn’t flexible bodies, but flexible brains. What I’m after is to restore each person to their human dignity.”
The Feldenkrais Method was originated by Moshé Feldenkrais, D.Sc., a pioneer in movement science and the innovator of therapeutic and educational approaches. Feldenkrais was born in Russia in 1904 and emigrated to Palestine at the age of 14.
As a young man he was an excellent athlete and self-taught in jujitsu. While attending night school preparing to study physics he was a surveyor and tutored problem students. He had an early interest in hypnosis and translated Emile Coué’s book on autosuggestion into Hebrew.
Feldenkrais earned his doctorate in physics at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he assisted Nobel Prize Laureate Frederic Joliot-Curie at the Curie Institute. During his university years he met Kano, the originator of judo. Feldenkrais studied judo intensively and became a well-known judo teacher.
During World War II, Feldenkrais fled to England where he worked in antisubmarine research, trained paratroopers in self-defense techniques, and authored books on judo. On slippery submarine decks, he aggravated an old soccer injury to his knees and began many years of extended work on himself.
His self-research led to discoveries about movement re-education and to the development of his methods of Awareness Through Movement® and Functional Integration®.
In Tel Aviv between 1969 and 1972, Feldenkrais trained his first, small group of practitioners. From 1975 to 1978 he completed the training of a second group of practitioners, this time in the U.S.
Feldenkrais authored six books on his methods. In addition, his main body of work is preserved in thousands of hours of audio and videotapes, and transcripts. Feldenkrais’ vast educational system was the result of 40 remarkably productive and creative years during which he focused on the sensory-motor aspects that underlie human action and experience.
Among his closest American students was Mark Reese, who studied with Feldenkrais over a period of nearly 10 years, both in the U.S. and in Israel.
Feldenkrais died in 1984, leaving a small group of highly trained practitioners who have continued to teach his methods worldwide.
Feldenkrais Southern California Movement Institute was originally founded in 1982 by Mark Reese and Donna Ray. The name of the Institute at that time was Reese Movement Institute. Mark and Donna for more than twenty years worked as a team to train Feldenkrais Practitioners in the United States and Europe. Together they trained more than a thousand Feldenkrais Practitioners.
Mark Reese, Ph.D., was one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Feldenkrais Method®. He was a graduate of the first U.S. Feldenkrais® training program and studied with Moshé Feldenkrais from 1975 -1984 in San Francisco, Amherst and Tel-Aviv.
Mark published extensively on the Feldenkrais Method® and related health issues and is co-author of Relaxercise: The Easy New Way to Health and Fitness.
At the time of Mark’s passing on June 23rd, 2006 Mark was working on a biography of Moshé Feldenkrais. Subsequently, “A Life of Movement” was published in 2015 and is available to purchase.
Contact us.
If you’re interested in Feldenkrais lessons and want to know more or want to schedule a consultation, please reach out to us! We will respond as quickly as possible.
You can also call us at
(760) 310-3456
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