Maggy first became interested in the work of Moshe Feldenkrais in 1986, after many years studying movement, particularly Tai Chi, and Martha Graham-based dance. She was fortunate to join the first British Feldenkrais Professional Training Programme in 1987, and to experience the individual training styles of many of Moshe’s original team of trainers, including Chava Shelhav, Myriam Pfeffer, Ruthy Alon, Jerry Karzen, and Yochanan Rywerant, plus one of his closest collaborators, Anat Baniel, all presided over by Russell Delman.
Maggy began teaching Awareness Through Movement herself in 1989, graduated in 1990, and she has been teaching Feldenkrais Functional Integration, and Feldenkrais-based voice work, both privately, and in colleges, universities and adult education centres in the UK and abroad, ever since. She is still involved in UK training programmes as an experienced practitioner, giving individual lessons to trainee teachers for Garet Newell’s Sussex-based training programmes. Since 2020 she has been building an international student community online, regularly collaborating with David Zemach-Bersin for Feldenkrais® Access, and Frederick Schjang for Feldenkrais Festivals. Maggy currently has three courses available to purchase from Feldenkrais® Access – for more information about these courses and how to purchase them you can email her via the contact page (and she hopes to have the full details and purchasing information posted on this website very soon!).
Maggy has been singing professionally in the popular music field since 1983, and teaching voice and singing to a wide variety of students, including both professional and trainee actors, since 1988. She loves music of all kinds, but she gets the greatest pleasure from singing jazz, and from vocal improvisation.
Since qualifying, Maggy’s ongoing project has been to develop a comprehensive awareness-based voice and singing teaching system, using the Feldenkrais approach. To this end she has researched and incorporated many science-based voice training strategies into her teaching practice. Feldenkrais Potent Voice is the culmination of her years of teaching experience, her ongoing research, and the development and expansion of her own vocal performance abilities.
Maggy’s current focus is to support individuals in their self-maturing process; to enable the achievement of a confident authenticity in self-expression, and a “mindful spontaneity” in action. People who achieve this state are often referred to as having ‘charisma, and a powerful personal ‘presence’. To that end she is crafting a series of strategies designed to enable her students to develop the potency of their ‘inner voice’. By developing effective processes for her student-clients to steadily undo the self-constricting habits of thought that are holding them back from experiencing true wellbeing, Maggy feels that she is carrying out Moshe’s stated purpose of enabling people to achieve true health, and thus be able to ‘realize both their avowed and their unavowed dreams’:
“The most common feature of people who achieve indescribable and superb performance is the hours of daily practise they all undertake throughout their lives. Hours of repetitive practice is hard work; hours of practicing awareness in movement or action remain the most absorbing and interesting time in our lives. The feeling of being alive relates to the awareness of growing to be oneself.”
The Elusive Obvious, Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais (1981)
Maggy’s ongoing project is to encourage a self-healing, self-developing, self-maturing ability that will continue to benefit all of her collaborators for the rest of their lives, in exactly the way that she continues to benefit from her own personal Feldenkrais practice.
A Testimonial…
Where else can you find help with organising your body that is both intuitive and deeply intelligent? As a connoisseur of the Feldenkrais Method® I have identified Maggy Burrowes as one of the foremost UK practitioners.
Dr. Michael Roth – M.D., Author, and Feldenkrais teacher.