“What I’m after isn’t flexible bodies, but flexible brains.
What I’m after is to restore each person to their human dignity. ”
- Moshe Feldenkrais (1904 - 1984)
© International Feldenkrais® Federation. Produced by Marcela Bretschneider. All rights reserved.
About The Method
To explain the Feldenkrais Method ® in further detail, let's use a metaphor of the functioning of a smart phone.
Imagine you are using a smart phone. You have used the phone for sometimes and it is about to run out of battery. The phone automatically switch to "battery saving mode", and some background functions of the phone were blocked. Now the phone is recharged, but you couldn't find the button to switch off the "battery saving mode". How could we resume the full functioning of the phone? What if our "Mind programming" and "Body programming" also work in a similar fashion?
We all adopt patterns of physical and psychological behavior. These embodied habits, or "Mind/Body programming", created through our personal history, culture, injuries etc, when became outmoded, hinders how we can react best concerning of the present moment or situation. Hence, We live and act in a less efficient way, impeding our performance or creating unnecessary physical and psychological limitations.
The method explores the biological, mechanical and cultural aspects of movement, posture and learning, and how unawared habitual patterns can constrain us to a small portion of our potential.
Based on sound principles of physics, neurology, physiology and more, the Feldenkrais Method (R) uses awareness as corner stone and employs strategies systemically in the process of organic learning, movement and sensing to expand our natural learning ability, and free us from our habitual patterns and allow new patterns of thinking, moving, feeling to emerge.
About Moshe Feldenkrais (1904 - 1984)
© International Feldenkrais® Federation Archive.
Moshe Feldenkrais (Doctor of Science, Sorbonne) was an engineer, physicist, inventor, martial artist and student of human development. He had brought his insight in life experience, achievement in physics, study in martial arts and knowledge in body-mind medicine and unconscious into his method.
Born as a jew in the time of 1900s, Moshe was put to face life and death situations, including getaway from antisemitism of Russian Empire in his young age, dealing with attacks by the Arabs after he walked from Belarus of Russian Empire to Palestine, and also escape from the Nazi invasion of France, while he was working with the Nobel Prize laureates Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie on making nuclear power possible but had to keep the secrets out of the hands of Nazi.
In need of survival he has invented and taught self defense technique and wrote Jiu-Jitsu and Self-Defense in Hebrew back in Palestine. The book became the first self-defense manual used to train the armed forces of the fledgling Jewish state. Feldenkrias' discovery and the philosophy of working with the natural protective reflex of oneself to make a self defense move easy and highly efficient, has impressed Kano Jigoro, the founder of Judo, who preferred and trained Feldenkrais to popularize Judo in Europe. He was one of the first few black belts in Europe and co-founded the Judo Club of France.
Not only on nuclear physics and martial arts but he also studied his own bodily experiences and how mind-body connection works. He discovered his old soccer knee injury, a seemingly physical-originated problem, could become worst during time of mental stress which changes how a person moves. From his interests in neuroscience and the unconscious, including the study of work from Sigmund Freud andÉmile Coué, he find out that it is not only the injury of the structure itself, but also the way of using the structure could alter the pain and function of the body. Hence, he developed ways to learn new non-habitual movement patterns to minimize pain and discomfort, and recovered from his own meniscal injury where at the time surgery would only give him a stiff leg for the rest of his life, despite the 50/50 chance of success. He had worked with chronic pain, neurological and developmental conditions with his own discovery where organic learning can result in "miraculous" improvement, or "healing", in different people.
As a scientist, he had contributed in nuclear physics when worked closely with Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie and built the accelerator for unleashing nuclear power from uranium. It was the time Albert Einstein wrote to U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt to warned the possibility of nuclear bomb production. He had also met the greats in his times: Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and Werner Heisenberg. But instead of continuing as a scientist, he pursued the path of his wonderful discovery in healing and spent the rest of his life refining his method. His insights contributed to the development of the new field of somatic education, and continue to influence disciplines such as physical medicine, gerontology, the arts, education and psychology.