About Tatiana

I was born and grew up in Russia, in a family with deep land stewardship roots. My mother used to grow and wildcraft a variety of plants to make home remedies, and she instilled in me a passion for using the healing powers of nature at a very early age. However, it took me a long time to make this passion my profession. I studied science at university and earned a master’s degree in applied physics. Yet the Soviet economy happened to collapse at almost exactly the same time, which made it nearly impossible to get a job in that field. I went back to school and obtained an advanced degree in interdisciplinary studies, with concentrations in business management and psychology. It helped me land a well-paying job with a large industrial corporation in Moscow. However, as the years went by, I felt more and more dissatisfied with my “successful” career as economic manager. It gave me no food for the soul — only financial security, which was important but not enough.

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One day in 2008 I happened upon a magazine article about an Israeli scientist and Judo master, Moshe Feldenkrais, and his unique approach to helping people heal from dysfunctional and harmful patterns of movement, sensation, thought, and emotion. As described in that article, the Feldenkrais Method had an almost miraculous quality: it enabled people with severe disabilities, often deemed “incurable” by conventional medicine, to restore maximum function and live life to the fullest by simply becoming aware of the way they move. And it was completely non-invasive, using only gentle touch and directed attention as the instruments of healing. 

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I was enthralled. I have always had a strong aversion to invasive treatments (which was the major reason why I chose not to go to medical school); but this model of “organic healing” was music to my ears. At the same time, I was a bit disappointed that the article failed to convey the actual experience of “doing Feldenkrais.” However, its author seemed to think it just could not be done. “It’s like chocolate,” he observed. “How would you explain chocolate to someone who hasn’t experienced it?”

 

As I read this, a light bulb went off in my head. I decided that I must obtain a first-hand experience of this healing process from someone who had learned it from Feldenkrais himself. I located some of the people who had participated in Feldenkrais’s earliest teacher trainings, back in the 1970s, and was especially inspired by the current work of Anat Baniel. She met Feldenkrais for the first time at age five when he came to her parents’ home to teach his movement classes, and would eventually become one of his closest collaborators. After his death in 1984, Anat Baniel continued expanding his model of movement awareness therapy, bridging it with cutting-edge developments in neuroscience. She has achieved extraordinary results working with children with special needs. I was so impressed by her work that I signed up for her professional training program in California.

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Meeting Anat Baniel was a turning point in my life. A brilliant teacher, she opened for me an entirely new perspective on the functioning of the human body-mind system and the healing potential of movement awareness. 

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It took me four years to accomplish all levels of professional training in the Anat Baniel Method, and I have been running my own practice in Canada since 2011. 

 

I started by offering individually tailored functional rehabilitation programs based on the Anat Baniel Method. My clients included kids with any kind of brain damage causing developmental delay, and adults suffering from chronic pain, neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s or MS, and various limitations with no clear diagnosis. I learned so much from each client! Even though most of my clients experienced substantial functional gains, which they failed to achieve through mainstream interventions such as physical therapy, some of them enjoyed rapid and continuous improvements, while others would hit a plateau in their progress and their old, dysfunctional patterns would never disappear completely.

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Searching for ways to help them overcome this “stuckness,” I pursued a number of other trainings, but mostly studied extensively by myself to obtain a deeper understanding of how the human nervous system works and how its functioning is manifested through a person’s motor, sensory, emotional, and cognitive patterns.

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In recent years, I have worked predominantly with people who could not overcome their pain and functional limitations after going through conventional treatments and rehabilitation.