This article is part of the Legacy Feldenkrais Books Archive.

Intro

Body and Mature Behavior is one of Moshe Feldenkrais’s earliest and most intellectually ambitious works. First published in 1949, it lays the scientific and philosophical foundations that would later become the Feldenkrais Method®.

In this groundbreaking book, Feldenkrais explores the deep relationship between posture, movement, emotion, and behavior. Drawing on physics, neurology, psychology, and evolutionary theory, he proposes that many human difficulties—both physical and emotional—arise from dysfunctional patterns of muscular organization and learned habits of action.

Rather than treating the body and mind as separate systems, Feldenkrais presents them as a unified functional whole. Through this lens, movement becomes not just mechanical activity but a window into learning, development, maturity, and the organization of the self.

About the Book

In Body and Mature Behavior, Moshe Feldenkrais investigates how human beings develop patterns of movement, posture, and emotional response through learning and experience.

His central thesis is that posture and behavior are inseparable. The way we organize our bodies against gravity reflects our emotional states, our developmental history, and our learned responses to the world.

Feldenkrais argues that anxiety, social conditioning, and cultural attitudes can interfere with natural motor organization. These influences often produce chronic muscular tensions, rigid movement habits, and inefficient posture patterns that affect both physical health and emotional well-being.

By understanding how these patterns arise, Feldenkrais suggests that humans can reorganize their movement and restore more efficient, balanced functioning. This perspective would later become the theoretical foundation for Awareness Through Movement® and Functional Integration®.

The book combines scientific analysis with philosophical insight, offering a multidisciplinary exploration of how the nervous system, muscular system, and psychological life form a single integrated process.

Key Ideas in the Book

The Unity of Body and Mind
Feldenkrais challenges the traditional separation between mental and physical processes, showing that posture, movement, emotion, and thought form an integrated whole.

Posture as Expression of Personality
Our habitual posture reflects our emotional history and behavioral patterns. Chronic tension or collapse often mirrors deeper psychological states.

Gravity and Human Organization
Human movement evolved in relationship to gravity. Efficient posture relies on coordinated anti-gravity mechanisms throughout the body.

Anxiety and Muscular Inhibition
Emotional stress can inhibit extensor muscles and disturb normal postural organization, producing chronic tension and inefficient movement.

Learning and Neuromuscular Development
Human maturity develops through learning. Movement patterns, habits, and coordination evolve through experience and can be improved through conscious awareness.

Self-Regulation Through Awareness
By becoming aware of habitual movement patterns, individuals can reorganize their neuromuscular functioning and restore more natural efficiency.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Degeneration and Ignorance

Some Pertinent Facts

Fatigue

Adaptation and Correlation

Learning – The Uniqueness of Man

Conditioned Reflexes and Habits

The Antigravity Mechanisms

Erect Posture and Action

Sensation and Vestibular Apparatus

The Body Pattern of Anxiety

Motility and Adjustment

“Measuring” Posture

The Sixth Sense

Normal Gravitation Adjustment

Tonic Adjustment

Body and Emotions

Muscular Habit and the Sexual Act

Localisation of Functions and Maturity

Summary and Review

Conclusions

Index

Acknowledgments

Glossary

Excerpt

From Chapter 12: “Measuring” Posture

Emotions are essentially subjective, and only those who experience them have any idea of the comparative intensity of such experiences. However, there are somatic changes that give an indirect observable account of such reactions. This is particularly so in the case of anxiety states where the extensor inhibition is most marked.

Chronic anxiety, inhibiting the antigravity muscles, does in fact lead to attitudes with the extensors lacking normal tonus. In such cases, the subject will frequently revert to conscious control of the unpleasant sensation in the pit of the stomach. Through the intimate relation of vestibular excitation with the cardiac and diaphragmatic regions, holding the breath and flexor contraction subdue these disagreeable reactions.

In cases of long standing, these patterns integrate into the reflex pattern of erect carriage and standing is maintained with superfluous muscular tension.

Closing Reflection

Body and Mature Behavior remains one of the most intellectually profound works in the field of somatics. Written decades before neuroscience began validating the deep integration of movement, perception, and emotion, Feldenkrais anticipated many modern insights into embodied cognition.

For practitioners and students of the Feldenkrais Method®, this book reveals the theoretical roots of the work. For readers interested in human development, posture, and the science of learning, it offers a thoughtful exploration of how movement shapes the way we experience ourselves and the world.

Feldenkrais invites us to reconsider the body not as a mechanical object but as a living system of learning, adaptation, and self-organization.

Related Reading

About Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais
What is the Feldenkrais Method®
Research on the Feldenkrais Method®
Other books by Moshe Feldenkrais