The Feldenkrais Method® : Awareness Through Movement® and Functional Integration®
The Feldenkrais Method® is a unique body-centered learning process achieved through gentle, interesting movement sequences that simulate the exploratory learning natural to infants.
As infants, we encounter our world through our senses. We lift and turn our heads in response to sights and sounds. We learn to use our hands to grasp and pull. We experiment with gravity as we learn to balance, first on our hands and knees, and then on our feet. As we explore our environment, we learn to discern small differences in taste, color, temperature, texture and sound. In our first months of life, we develop many of the movement and coordination skills that we will use throughout life.
Often, for a variety of reasons, we don’t learn these skills as well as we could. We learn to walk, for example, well enough to meet our current needs, and then we move on to tackling our next goal. Most adults have not fully realized their potential in terms of coordinated movement, sensory acuity or orientation to their environment.
With the Feldenkrais Method® , you have the opportunity to explore this early learning once again, more fully, and to fill in any missing pieces. Students learn to move more gracefully, more easily, and to become more flexible and refined.
Through Awareness Through Movement® (ATM) and Functional Integration (FI), as we discover new movement potential within ourselves, we also discover new insight — new ways of thinking, feeling and responding to our world. Dr. Feldenkrais said, “What I am after isn’t flexible bodies, but flexible brains. What I’m after is to restore each person to their human dignity.” He had a profound belief in our limitless ability to learn and improve, coupled with a deep respect for the individual. Although Dr. Feldenkrais used movement as a teaching tool, his primary goal was to teach people how to learn —“learning to learn,” as he called it.
Who was Dr. Moshé Feldenkrais?
Dr. Feldenkrais (1904-1984) was born in the Ukraine to orthodox Jewish parents. As a youth, he walked to Palestine and worked as a laborer before obtaining his high school diploma in 1925. Following graduation, he worked as a cartographer for the British survey office and studied martial arts. While playing soccer, he badly injured his knee, and his efforts to heal himself from that injury later inspired the development of his method.
During the 1930s, he lived in France and earned a Doctor of Science degree in engineering at the Sorbonne, where Marie Curie was among his teachers. During this time, he worked as a research assistant in the lab of nuclear chemist and Nobel Prize laureate Frederic Joliot-Curie. He studied for many years with Jigoro Kano, the creator of Judo, and became a judo master (he earned two black belts), wrote several books on the subject, and was a co-founding member of the Jiu Jitsu Club de France, one of the oldest Judo clubs in Europe; it still exists today.
As the Germans approached Paris in 1940, Feldenkrais fled to England, where he became a science officer in the Admiralty War Office and worked on developing guidance systems for anti submarine-weaponry. His work on improving sonar led to several patents, and he taught self-defense techniques to his fellow servicemen. In an effort to regain function after his early soccer injuries, Feldenkrais studied anatomy, physiology, neurology and developmental learning. He also delved deeply into the exploration and development of self-rehabilitation and self-observation techniques; all would help form the beginnings of his method.
Feldenkrais stayed in London after the war and continued to develop his ideas. In 1949, he published the first book on the Feldenkrais Method, Body and Mature Behavior: A Study of Anxiety, Sex, Gravitation and Learning, and two years later, returned to the newly formed Israel and settled in Tel Aviv. He began to teach his method full-time in 1954; three years later, he gave lessons to David Ben-Gurion, the Israeli Prime Minister, enabling him to stand on his head in a yoga pose. He continued to see private students for Functional Integration sessions, and to teach Awareness Through Movement® classes for decades in Israel.
From the 1960s through the 1980s, Feldenkrais presented his method in Europe and North America, and began to train teachers so they could, in turn, present the method to others. He first came to the United States in the 1970’s to teach at Esalen Institute in California, and subsequently offered professional training programs in San Francisco and Amherst, MA.
Feldenkrais was a brilliant scholar and athlete with a formidable creative intellect. He authored eight books and trained many people in his method. Today, there are 2,000+ practitioners of the Feldenkrais Method worldwide.
The lessons are designed to improve ability, to expand the boundaries of the possible, to turn the impossible into the possible, the difficult into the easy and the easy into the pleasant.
Moshe Feldenkrais