Who was Moshe Feldenkrais?
Moshe Feldenkrais, (1904-1984) was a distinguished scientist and engineer whose career included work at the Curie Institute in Paris in the 1930's. He was also one of the first Westerners to receive a black belt in Judo and became a respected instructor. It was, however in the new field of somatic education that Feldenkrais achieved his greatest success.
He was born in what is now the Ukraine and at the age of 14 left to travel to Palestine where he continued his education while working as a labourer. He had always been fascinated by medicine but gained a bursary to study electrical and mechanical engineering in Paris.
An injury to his knee in his youth threatened him with severe disability. Despite being given little hope of ever walking normally, Feldenkrais refused surgery, and instead applied his extensive knowledge of anatomy, physiology, psychology and engineering, as well as his mastery of martial arts, to healing his own knee. A person who had travelled across continents walking much of the way was not likely to accept such a prognosis!
During the process he realised the vital importance of working with the whole body and indeed the whole self in order to achieve lasting, radical change. He developed his insights into what became the Feldenkrais Method ®, and developed ways of teaching it equally effectively for individuals and groups. His pioneering work continues to influence disciplines such as child development, physical medicine, gerontology, the performing arts, education and psychology.
Dr. Feldenkrais authored a number of seminal books on movement, learning, human consciousness and somatic experience. He taught in Israel and many countries in Europe through the 1960s and 1970s and in North America through the 1970s and 1980s. He trained his first group of teachers in Tel Aviv in the early 1970s. This was followed by two groups in the USA – one group in San Francisco, California and another in Amherst, Massachusetts.
In his life Dr. Feldenkrais worked with all kinds of people with an enormous range of learning needs -from many infants with Cerebral Palsy to leading performers such as the violinist, the late Yehudi Menuhin. He taught over a number of years for the dramatist Peter Brook and his Theatre Bouffes du Nord. He was a collaborator with thinkers such as anthropologist Margaret Mead, neuroscientist Karl Pribram and explorers of the psychophysical Jean Houston and Robert Masters.The breadth, vitality and precision of Dr. Feldenkrais’ work has seen it applied in diverse fields including neurology, psychology, performing arts, sports and rehabilitation.