Feldenkrais: Awareness and Integration Through Movement

• In Event: Intervention and Programming

Abstract

The Feldenkrais Method was created by Moshe Feldenkrais, an Israeli physicist and mechanical engineer, when he was functionally impaired due to a painful injury to both knees while playing soccer. He reasoned that his impairment might have more to do with adaptations he had adopted because of the injury than to the injury itself. In exploring basic motor functions, Feldenkrais became convinced that learning is the principal element in our development and that, if we understood the process of learning, we could alter habitual patterns and restore function. The Feldenkrais Method is not verbal/intellectual learning, but direct experiential involvement through the body — called somatic education. Feldenkrais believed that real transformation occurs when both body and psyche are changed simultaneously. If a non-integral approach is attempted involving psyche or body separately, the modification will last until the individual has lost the awareness of it and habitual norms will return. In applying these ideas, Feldenkrais achieved changes in the brains of people by refusing to accept the idea of age dependent neuroplasticity dominant at the time.

Author

• Wayne Korbl, University of West Georgia