Moshé Feldenkrais was born in 1904 to a Jewish family living in the Ukraine. Shortly after the end of the First World War, at the age of fourteen, he emigrated to Palestine, then under the British Mandate. He worked there as a laborer on building sites and as a surveyor until he was able to go to Paris to study at the Sorbonne; first engineering, later physics. At the outset of the Second World War, he was working with Nobel Prize-winner Frederic Joliot-Curie. He was also an avid athlete. While he was in Paris he became intensely involved in Judo; he was one of the founders of the Judo Club of France. His sports interests contributed another vital element to his development of his method. Playing soccer as a young man, he damaged he damaged one of his knees. This was a manageable irritation until several years later when he tore ligaments in the other knee as well. At that time surgery didn't offer a very promising solution. This pushed him into the investigation that eventually led him to abandon his career in physics in favor of a much less clear path. Perhaps Feldenkrais was made bolder by his contact, through Judo, with a culturally different sense of what might be possible. He certainly achieved an astonishing synthesis of western physics and eastern martial arts. His ideas were cultivated by studies with other movement pioneers of that time (notably Alexander). Moshé's wife was a pediatrician, and exposed him to the developmental movement patterns of children and the work of Piaget on the developmental patterns of learning itself.
Returning to Tel Aviv in the 1950's, Feldenkrais left physics and began teaching what he had learned about movement. He worked with people in all walks of life, and his home was increasingly a point of pilgrimage for people from across Europe who looked to him for help with everything from recovery from stroke or other injury, to management of MS or cerebral palsy. He began training students to be practitioners themselves, first in Israel and then in the United States. Although he died in 1984, such training continues in dozens of countries, on almost every continent; there are currently about four thousand practitioners of the Method that bears Moshé's name.
The Feldenkrais Method® is a gentle, powerful way of self- and other-discovery — so gentle you might not at first believe how powerful it is. The Method uses movement to awaken more of the dormant potential of the brain and to heighten awareness, grace, all-around competence, sensitivity, and pleasure. Many dancers, actors (Rene Russo,) athletes, and musicians (Yo-Yo Ma) rely on it for performance enhancement. Physical therapists use it to teach patients new possibilities for easy, integrated movement that often dissolve chronic pain. The idea is that "movement is the first language of the brain," the primary way we explore the world and discover/develop ourselves from the very beginning. Because our most powerful period of learning and discovery is also our period of greatest dependency and vulnerability, our most fundamental emotions and self-image are woven into our individual movement patterns. If our movement is restricted, inefficient, fear- and habit-bound, or reckless and self-hurting, so are we. When our movement is released, and our awareness of movement refined, so are we. Because our muscular habit patterns are actually held in the brain, which retains astonishing plasticity throughout life and reconizes a good thing, learning and change can happen very fast if you know how to "speak" directly to the brain in its natural, wordless language. That's what an eccentric genius named Moshé Feldenkrais figured out.
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