Feldenkrais®

Recent Feldenkrais® Articles

Feldenkrais Method - Inside Awareness, Re-Shaping Experience

By Renee Lindstrom

Friday, January 08, 2010 Active Learning through direct experience can be received as a concept or it can be an integration through the actual felt qualities of the human sensing abilities. As ...

Frequently Asked Questions About Feldenkrais®

What a Feldenkrais® session is like:

In a Functional Integration lesson you typically lie on a low, padded table wearing loose, comfortable clothing.  The practitioner uses gentle touch to explore your habitual patterns of organization and movement, and to suggest easier and more functional ways of being.

Each lesson is adapted to your specific needs; there is no set sequence or number of lessons.

History of Feldenkrais®

The Feldenkrais® Method was developed by Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais, an Israeli physicist and engineer, and an active athlete and martial artist.  Finding himself unable to walk when an old knee injury flared up, Feldenkrais wouldn’t accept his doctor’s recommendation for surgery. The injury hadn’t crippled him when it occurred, he reasoned, so perhaps his current disability stemmed not from the injury itself but from something he had done in response to the injury.  Perhaps he had adapted in some way that made it worse. And if that were the case, perhaps he could learn to adapt differently, and reduce his pain and limitation.  Feldenkrais began to explore the way he used his knees, initially with small, gentle movements because anything more was painful. He turned his trained analytical mind to the question of how we function as human beings, educating himself in anatomy, neurology, and related subjects, bringing his experience with judo and other forms of movement to bear as well.

He taught himself to walk again, without pain.  He also developed a revolutionary understanding of how human beings learn and function that became the basis for the Feldenkrais® Method. He first articulated this understanding in Body and Mature Behavior, and later through other writing and teaching.  His book, Awareness Through Movement, provides a good introduction to his thinking.  Feldenkrais devoted himself increasingly to his work with movement, teaching classes in what would later be called Awareness Through Movement, as well as working individually with people (called Functional Integration). This eventually became his full time work. He began to train practitioners in 1969, with a small training group in Tel Aviv. He taught two trainings in the United States — in San Francisco (1975-77), and in Amherst, Massachusetts (1980-83). At his death in 1984, he had trained approximately 300 practitioners, the majority of them in the United States.

Alternate Names