About Moshe Feldenkrais

Moshe Feldenkrais (1904-1984) was a man of extensive knowledge and unique inspiration. Born in Ukraine, he moved alone to Palestine aged 14, doing construction work in the mornings for his living and studying in evening school. Discovering a great interest in Martial Arts, he found the time to practice Ju-jitsu and wrote a book on the subject that was to inspire Jigoro Kano, the founder of modern Judo, to choose him to establish the first Judo club in France, to where he moved in 1930. Feldenkrais was also a classical scientist, achieving a PhD in physics at the Sorbonne, and working as an assistant to future Nobel Prize winner Frederick Curie, son of Marie. During WW2, he escaped to England, to serve in the British Navy in a scientific capacity. While there he started to suffer from a recurrence of a knee injury suffered while playing football some years earlier. Having been informed by a surgeon in Glasgow that a corrective operation might leave him unable to bend his leg, Feldenkrais decided to take matters into his own hands.

Combining his skills as a scientist and a master of martial arts with deep research into the interaction of brain and body, he reached a profound understanding of the process by which a person learns to walk and acquire the skill of movement on the way from babyhood to maturity, and how this is involved with sensation and developing perception, thinking and self-image. Making practical use of this understanding, he not only healed himself but found he had developed a whole new system, now codified as the Feldenkrais Method.

Feldenkrais became a respected figure both in the scientific community and the world of the performing arts. In 1950 he returned to what was by then the state of Israel and started to give group classes and individual lessons. Travelling widely, he began to teach and lecture in the USA and Europe. He worked with many eminent people, among them Peter Brook, Julius “Dr.J” Erving II, Margaret Mead and Yehudi Menuhin. At the end of the 1960’s he started to train others in his method. There are now thousands of qualified Feldenkrais Method practitioners all over the world.