About Feldenkrais
Moshe Feldenkrais
Moshe lived an extraordinary, and extraordinarily full, life.
Born in 1904 in what is now Ukraine, as a very young man he walked to Palestine and (literally, with his hands) helped to build Israel. Moving to France in 1930 he obtained his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in engineering and physics and then worked in the laboratory of Nobel-prize-winning Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Moshe fled to England when the Nazis occupied France, and worked in anti-submarine research at Fairlie in Scotland. In 1951 he returned to Israel to lead the Israel defence forces Department of Electronics.
And alongside all of this, he was continually fascinated by movement, and in how humans organise their movement. In Palestine he developed a system of self-defence for unarmed youths; he worked on himself, to help him to recover from a knee injury; in Paris he was selected to learn and promote Judo in the West by Jigoro Kano himself (the founder of Judo). He met and corresponded with scientific colleagues and with the leading somatic educators of his day – Heinrich Jacoby, Else Grindler, Ida Rolf, FM Alexander.
From the 1930’s onwards, he worked to systemise his research, both practically and intellectually, in several books. He refined this into what is now called the Feldenkrais Method. It takes two forms,
- Awareness Through Movement – group lessons where students are verbally guided through progressive movement sequences, and
- Functional Integration, one-to-one, hands-on sessions.