Paul Moves
Welcome to
Paul Moves
an artistic and educational wellness movement bringing JKA (Jeremy Krauss Approach)
and the Feldenkrais Method to more people.
Hello! I'm Paul Pui Wo Lee, a certified Feldenkrais Practitioner and a JKA (Jeremy Krauss Approach) Practitioner and Therapist. I feel privileged to be able to help people work on a key element
that can have a huge impact on their quality of living - MOVEMENT!
I welcome you to discover the abundance of your movement potential and refine the usually overlooked "art of self-use", so you may feel freer, more masterful, tasteful, and spectacular doing what you do in your life.
Paul Pui Wo Lee
I've been a Certified Feldenkrais® Practitioner since 2015 and a JKA (Jeremy Krauss Approach) Practitioner and Therapist since 2019. I was also the rehearsal director/choreographic assistant at Of Curious Nature, in Bremen, Germany.
Upon graduating from Canada’s National Ballet School, I trained at the Rotterdam Dance Academy before dancing with IT Dansa in Barcelona and the Gothenburg Opera Ballet. Later, as a freelance dancer, I worked with choreographers in Scandinavia, Italy, and Germany and had the fortune to perform at The Barbican in London and The Kennedy Centre in Washington, D.C. with Andersson Dance's "Goldberg Variations - ternary patterns for insomnia".
As a Feldenkrais and JKA teacher, I have had the pleasure of teaching at some major dance companies:
Danish Dance Theatre, Norrdans, Skånes Dansteater, Cullberg, Das Ballett des Staatstheaters am Gärtnerplatz in Munich, Hong Kong Ballet, Tanz Theater Regensburg, Regionteater Väst,
...dance schools:
The Danish National School of Performing Arts, The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts,
The Royal Ballet School of Antwerp, The Royal Swedish Ballet School
...and cultural institutions:
Dansalliansen, Danscentrum Väst, Danscentrum Syd, The Danish Actors' Association
I also teach regular online JKA and Feldenkrais classes. Click here for the membership offers.
The Feldenkrais Method®
The Feldenkrais Method® is a method of movement education helping people learn to sense themselves more clearly to discover more intelligent and efficient ways of moving that increase their mobility and flexibility. It is certainly helpful for injury prevention and recovery, but it's true spirit is to help people continuously improve and essentially realise more of their human potential to take action in life.
Photo credit
© International Feldenkrais® Federation Archive, Bob Knighton
ATM® (Awareness Through Movement®) Lessons
An ATM® is a movement lesson held in a group setting. It offers the environment for people to slow down and gently rework the way they organise ourselves to move. The lessons are structured explorations, and everyone does only as much as they wish to at their own pace.
In the process, people learn to reduce their effort to help their brain engage their musculature differently for more efficient movement patterns, which gives them a renewed sense of balance and ease when returning to their usual activities: walking, sitting, talking, standing, moving our arms, seeing around us, etc..
In the ATM® lessons, we might explore all the possible movements of the pelvis, experience the gliding of the shoulder blades over the ribs, softening of the ribs for better turning of the head, fuller breathing of the chest cavity and abdomen for better stability over our feet, etc.
The majority of the lessons are done on the floor to relieve the nervous system of the work to maintain upright, so it can be calmer to sense differences in effort. This process of learning broadens their repertoire of movements and enhance their movement intelligence. Feldenkrais would be the opposite of the no-pain-no-gain mentality.
Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais
Founder of the Feldenkrais Method®
Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais was born May 6th, 1904, in a city called Slavuta, in what is present-day Ukraine. He left his family to move to British Mandate of Palestine in his early teens. He was an active man, and it was here that he began learning jujitsu and even trained people in unarmed combat, as they were not allowed to carry weapons in this time.
In the 1930s, Feldenkrais moved to France to study. After earning degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering there, he went on to obtain his Doctor of Science in Physics from the Sorbonne in Paris. During this time, he worked with Nobel Laureate Nicholas Joliot-Curie in his laboratory. It was in Paris where Moshé met Professor Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo. Apparently, in their first meeting, Feldenkrais decided to test his martial arts skills against Professor Kano's. After being thrown down so effortlessly by this slight professor over and over again, Feldenkrais was convinced that he had to study with him. Feldenkrais then became one of the first Europeans to earn a black belt and helped establish judo in Europe.
In the 1940s Feldenkrais moved to Britain to avoid the incoming Nazis and worked for the British Admiralty to research anti-submarine weaponry. He had suffered a serious knee injury as a young man, and it worsened during this time. After surgeons predicted only a fifty-percent chance of him regaining use of his knee after surgery, he refused the surgery and began immersing himself in a whole range of subjects, such as physiology, anatomy, etc. to understand how to help his knee. This led to the discoveries that are the foundations to his own method.
*(An anecdote from our training recounts how Feldenkrais was asked about how he dealt with problems of the neck, back, knees, feet, etc. He answered that he didn't deal with body parts - he always worked with the person.)
Feldenkrais trained thirteen students when he moved back to Tel Aviv and was presenting his method throughout North America and Europe. He was invited to the Esalen Institute in California in 1972 to teach ATM® (Awarenss Through Movement®) lessons, as part of the Human Potential Movement. In 1978, famed English theatre and film director, Peter Brook, invited Feldenkrais to work with his touring theatre troupe. These are just a few of Feldenkrais' many teaching engagements.
After the San Francisco training, and halfway through the subsequent training in Amherst, Moshé fell ill
and passed away July 1st, 1984.
Photo of Dr. Feldenkrais by: Irene Sieben
WRITINGS and PUBLICATIONS
The Feldenkrais Method®
Learning Through Movement
Edited by Staffan Elgelid and Chrish Kresge
I got to write the chapter about Feldenkrais and Dance!
https://www.handspringpublishing.com/product/the-feldenkrais-method/
Discount code: elgkresprepub
Article about Sensuality and Sexual Health for The Feldenkrais Guild® of North America (FGNA)
Blog post for The Exhale about my Feldenkrais® classes for musicians