Sabine Schmid Blackaby

About me

I have been involved with the Feldenkrais Method® for nearly thirty years and continue to be fascinated by what the Method offers and what I continue to discover through it, including about myself. When I first encountered the Feldenkrais Method® I was immediately intrigued by its scope and the blend of movement, psychology and learning.

 

Working as a Kindergarten teacher (Reception class) in Switzerland at that time, I observed daily how movement helps children learn and underlies and supports all their other emerging skills.

Growing up in Switzerland we had ample opportunity to move and play outdoors. Our time was spent skipping, jumping, running, practicing roly-polies, cartwheels, handstands etc. We also learned to cycle, swim and roller blade from an early age. In the winter we would often go ice skating or sledging down the small hill behind our house. Through all these activities I developed an early love for movement. However, when later in secondary school I was introduced to athletics, I was puzzled by the competitive element it brought to physical activity and it lessened my fondness for movement to some extent. I kept thinking, aren't we supposed to have fun while moving? Nevertheless, I still cycled, swam and took dance lessons in my free time. In my early twenties I also started to explore various other somatic approaches such as yoga, Eutonie, Medau-Rhythmic and more modern forms of dance. It was during these pursuits that I attended my first Feldenkrais class and felt instantly at home. I recognised the qualities of playfulness, ease of motion and experiential learning that are such an integral part of Feldenkrais lessons and which reminded me of my childhood joy of moving.

I decided to enroll in my original Feldenkrais training in Italy, becoming a practitioner in 1997. In 2006 I completed a Feldenkrais mentoring course in Amsterdam, which now supports my work with students taking part in a Feldenkrais training or my work with newly qualified practitioners. In 2011 I took part in Chava Shelhav’s Child’Space® training in Amsterdam where I deepened my understanding of how to apply the principles of the Feldenkrais Method to working with babies, children and their parents. I later assisted in subsequent Child’Space® trainings and became an Assistant Trainer in the Feldenkrais Method® in 2020. I find being part of a training and the teaching team very stimulating and I like exchanging ideas with colleagues and considering the training curriculum and how to best teach it to the trainees.

 

During my original training and later work, especially with babies, I developed a deeper appreciation of how intrinsic movement is to our sense of embodiment and self-awareness. It is this aspect of personal discovery and growth through movement that I have come to value most in the Feldenkrais Method and that I like to weave into my work with people.

 

For my own professional development I continue to attend Advanced Trainings with senior Feldenkrais Trainers and I am involved in various study groups. From time to time I exchange Individual Feldenkrais lessons with colleagues to remind myself of the impact a lesson can have and to foster my own development.