Naomi is a guild-certified Feldenkrais Practitioner (CM) and licensed physical therapist who has been teaching classes and providing individual Feldenkrais-based therapy for over 30 years. She works with children and adults of all ages, addressing a wide range of orthopedic and neurological issues.
Her practice focuses on the use of gentle somatic and movement education techniques to help individuals learn to move beyond their limitations to achieve their functional and health-related goals. Naomi’s clients experience relief of pain and tension; improve in balance, posture and mobility; speed recovery from injury – while reconnecting with their innate capacity for ease, enjoyment and confidence in everyday activity.
Naomi currently offers individual sessions and group classes in the Feldenkrais Method®. She also brings the benefit of her extensive background in physical therapy, as a teacher of modern dance and a range of other mind-body practices to her teaching.
I believe the unity of mind and body is an objective reality. They are not just parts somehow related to each other, but as inseparable whole while functioning. A brain without a body could not think…
-Moshe Feldenkrais
Naomi received her Master of Science in Physical Therapy from Columbia University in 1986 and became certified in Feldenkrais in 1993. She also holds an MA in Dance and Dance from New York University. She started her private Feldenkrais and physical therapy practice in Northern California in 1993.
For over 10 years, she taught Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement® classes at the College of Marin, and served as Feldenkrais specialist at Star Academy, a leading school for children with learning differences in Marin. She simultaneously served as Feldenkrais specialist at Healthwell Physical Therapy in San Francisco, and further provided inservices and workshops in the Feldenkrais Method in numerous school, clinic and community settings in the bay area.
Additional influential training includes craniosacral therapy (Upledger Institute), Eutony (with Joyce Riveros), and Feldenkrais for children (with Anat Baniel and Sheryl Field). Naomi is also a longtime student of qigong, yoga and meditation, and continues her lifelong involvement in dance — all of which inform her practice.
Movement is Life. Life is a process. Improve the quality of the process and you improve the quality of life itself.
-Moshe Feldenkrais
Clients often seek out Naomi’s work after failing to find success with other therapeutic approaches. Rather than focusing on isolated symptoms, Feldenkrais engages the entire mind-body system to address underlying factors that may be contributing to or perpetuating an injury or limitation. These may include unconscious patterns of compensation or protection which have long out-lived their usefulness. By approaching problems in this larger way, Naomi guides her clients to discover previously unexplored pathways to improvement and the possibility for more far-reaching, organic change.
With Feldenkrais providing the framework for a truly whole-person approach, Naomi has helped individuals from 3 months to 101 years, for such diverse issues as:
-Chronic and acute pain
-Tension and anxiety
-Posture, balance and problems of aging
-Accident, sports, and work-related injuries
-Post-surgical rehabilitation
-Arthritis and osteoporosis
-Lyme disease and chronic fatigue
-Stroke, MS, Parkinson’s
-Dancer’s and musician’s injuries
-Children’s developmental issues, learning differences, posture and scoliosis
