Feldenkrais Method

The Feldenkrais Method is a type of exercise therapy devised by Moshé Feldenkrais (1904–1984). The method is claimed to reorganize connections between the brain and body and so improve body movement and psychological state.

There is no good medical evidence that the Feldenkrais method confers any health benefits, and it is not known if it is safe or cost-effective, even though it is hard to conceive of serious risks.

The Feldenkrais Method is a type of physical therapy that proponents claim can repair impaired connections between the motor cortex and the body, so benefiting the quality of body movement and improving wellbeing. The Feldenkrais Guild of North America claims that the Feldenkrais method allows people to "rediscover [their] innate capacity for graceful, efficient movement" and that "These improvements will often generalize to enhance functioning in other aspects of [their] life". Proponents claim that the Feldenkrais Method can benefit people with a number of medical conditions, including children with autism, and people with multiple sclerosis.

In a session, a Feldenkrais practitioner directs attention to habitual movement patterns which are thought to be inefficient or strained, and attempts to teach new patterns using gentle, slow, repeated movements. Slow repetition is believed to be necessary to impart a new habit and allow it to begin to feel normal. These movements may be passive (performed by the practitioner on the recipient's body) or active (performed by the recipient). The recipient is fully clothed.

Similar to some other somatic methods, such as those started by F. Matthias Alexander, Elsa Gindler, and Gerda Alexander, the Feldenkrais Method originated in the efforts of its founder to work with his own bodily problem. In the case of Moshé Feldenkrais, it was a chronically injured knee.

Feldenkrais first injured his knee while playing soccer in British-controlled Palestine in the 1920s. He reinjured it while negotiating the slippery decks of submarines while working as a scientist at the British Naval station at Fairlie, North Ayrshire, Scotland during the Second World War. Feldenkrais was by that time a Judo teacher and had mostly completed the work toward a D.Sc. under the guidance of Nobel laureate Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Facing the prospect of a surgery that could leave him with a life-long limp, Feldenkrais decided to apply the knowledge gained from his study of physics, engineering, and martial arts to an intensive self-study of his own movement habits. When his work provided him with relief, allowing him to avoid the knee surgery, he began exploring the methods he developed on himself with a small group of people at Fairlie, including scientific colleague John Desmond Bernal and John Boyd-Orr, Nobel laureate and first president of the World Academy of Art and Science.

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