The Feldenkrais Method is an educational system that uses movement to teach self-awareness and improve the functions of the body and mind.
The method reorganizes the connections between the brain and the body and thus improves body movement and psychological state.
After serving as chief of electronic engineering for the Israeli army in newly formed Israel from 1951 to 1953, Feldenkrais devoted the rest of his life, from the age of 50 onwards, to developing and teaching self-awareness through movement lessons.
Moshe Pinchas Feldenkrais was a Ukrainian-Israeli engineer and physicist, known as the founder of the Feldenkrais Method, a system of physical exercise that aims to improve the functioning of the human body through a technique of self-awareness through movement. Feldenkrais’s theory is that “thought, feeling, perception, and movement are closely interrelated and influence each other.”
He was born in 1904 into a Ukrainian Jewish family in the city of Slavuta (Russian Empire, now in Ukraine) and grew up in Baranovichi, Belarus. Many battles were fought there during World War I, at which time Feldenkrais celebrated his Bar Mitzvah, completed two years of high school, and learned Hebrew and Zionist philosophy. At the age of fourteen he traveled alone to Palestine, where he worked as a laborer until 1923, when he decided to resume his studies to obtain his diploma from Herzliya High School in 1925. After graduating, he worked as a cartographer for the British Survey Office and began to study self defense, including Ju-Jitsu. He suffered an injury playing football in 1929 that worsened during World War II, which led him to develop his own healing method in which, through movement, the integral functioning of people is improved. He rehabilitated himself and spent the rest of his life developing his system.
His method proposes to learn through awareness of our movements and thus be able to expand and improve the quality of our actions. It is a personal process and each one learns from their potentialities.
During the 1930s, Feldenkrais lived in France, where he earned his engineering degree and Doctor of Science in Physics from the University of Paris, where Marie Curie was one of his teachers. He worked as a research assistant to nuclear chemist and Nobel laureate Frédéric Joliot-Curie at the Radium Institute.
In September 1933 he met Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo in Paris. Feldenkrais became a close friend of Kano and corresponded with him regularly. In 1936, he earned a black belt in judo. He was a co-founding member of the Ju-Jitsu Club de France, one of the oldest judo clubs in Europe, which still exists today. Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie and Bertrand Goldschmidt took Feldenkrais judo lessons during their time together in high school.
On the eve of the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, Feldenkrais fled to Britain with a heavy water jug and a pile of radiation research material, with instructions to deliver them to the British Admiralty War Office.
Until 1946, he was a science officer with the Admiralty working on anti-submarine weaponry at Fairlie, Scotland. His work to improve sonar resulted in several patents. He also taught self-defense techniques to his fellow servicemen.
On slippery submarine decks, he re-aggravated an old soccer knee injury. Refusing an operation, he was driven to explore and intensively develop techniques of self-rehabilitation and self-awareness through self-observation, which he later developed as the method that bears his name. His discoveries led him to start sharing with others through lectures, experimental classes and individual works.
After leaving the Admiralty, Feldenkrais lived and worked in private industry in London. His self-rehabilitation allowed him to continue his judo practice. From his position in the International Judo Committee, he began to study judo scientifically, incorporating the knowledge he had acquired through self-rehabilitation. In 1949, he published the first book on his method, Body and Behavior: A Study of Anxiety, Sex, Gravitation, and Learning.
In 1951, he returned to Israel. In 1954, after heading the Electronics Department of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for several years, he settled in Tel Aviv and began teaching his method full time. In 1957, he met Mia Segal, who became his assistant and worked with him for thirty years. He also became the personal trainer of David Ben Gurion, the Prime Minister of Israel, whom he taught to stand on his head in a yoga posture.
Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, he introduced his method in Europe and North America (including a Consciousness Through Movement program for human potential trainers at the Esalen Institute in 1972). After becoming ill in the fall of 1981 he stopped teaching publicly.
The Feldenkrais Method is intended to teach a better way to move and improve quality of life, through instruction and gentle manipulation of the body.
The Feldenkrais Method is a type of alternative exercise therapy that proponents claim can repair impaired connections between the motor cortex and the body, benefiting the quality of body movement and improving well-being.
Proponents claim that the Feldenkrais Method can benefit people with a number of medical conditions, including children with autism and people with multiple sclerosis.
From the 1950s until his death in 1984, he taught continuously in Tel Aviv. Feldenkrais gained recognition in part through media accounts of his work with notables such as David Ben Gurion.
Since Feldenkrais’s death, the international Feldenkrais community has expanded to the Americas, Europe, and Australasia with activities in eighteen countries. The Feldenkrais Journal, the annual publication of the Feldenkrais Guild of North America, serves as a forum for the Feldenkrais community to discuss the method and its applications.
Moshe Feldenkraist died in 1984 leaving behind hundreds of disciples who follow his work.
Source: Jewish Personalities of All Time Facebook Group. Compiled by Raúl Voskoboinik.
