How the Feldenkrais Method® Achieved What Medicine Could Not for Elizabeth

Article Summary

Elizabeth’s Story Begins with a Grim Prognosis

When Elizabeth was six months old, two leading pediatric neurologists diagnosed her as having global brain damage. She had almost no voluntary movement and no control of her eyes. Her parents did not know whether she could see. According to the documentary, the doctors concluded that she would never walk, talk, or communicate.

They were describing what they believed her damaged nervous system would never be able to do. Twenty years later, the film opens with Elizabeth walking into Anat Baniel’s office with her father.

That is the central tension in this story. Medicine identified Elizabeth’s condition and projected her future from it. Moshe Feldenkrais and Anat Baniel approached her as a human being who could still have experiences, perceive differences, and learn.

Medicine could describe what was missing from Elizabeth’s brain. It could not determine everything the rest of her nervous system might learn to organize.

Accessibility note: Closed captions are not currently available in the YouTube player. The article below is a written companion to the documentary, not a complete transcript.

A Prognosis That Defined Her Future

Elizabeth’s parents noticed early that she was not developing as other infants did. They took her first to Massachusetts General Hospital and then to the University of Chicago. When she was six months old, the doctors essentially wrote her off.

The words used in a prognosis matter. A diagnosis identifies a condition. A prognosis goes further and predicts what will happen. In Elizabeth’s case, the prediction was that the abilities most of us associate with an ordinary human life would never develop.

Her parents did not accept that prediction as the final word. Their search eventually brought Elizabeth to Moshe Feldenkrais and Anat Baniel. Anat began working with her when she was approximately 13 months old and continued to work with her for many years.

This did not begin with a promise that Elizabeth would someday walk into an office wearing heels. It began with the immediate question of what she could sense and learn at that moment.

Moshe Feldenkrais Saw a Child Who Could Learn

Moshe Feldenkrais trained as a physicist and drew upon anatomy, physiology, mechanics, martial arts, and child development in creating the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education. The number of disciplines he had studied mattered less than the way he looked at Elizabeth.

He did not reduce Elizabeth to the damaged parts of her brain. He looked for the abilities available within her whole organization. A slight turn of the head, a change in the use of the eyes, or a new relationship between the ribs and pelvis could give her nervous system information it had not used before.

This is a fundamental distinction. If I try to make someone perform a movement she cannot organize, I confirm the difficulty. If I help her experience one small part of the movement clearly, comfortably, and in relationship with the rest of herself, she has something from which she can learn.

You can read more about Moshe Feldenkrais and the origins of his work.

Anat Baniel Continues the Work

Anat Baniel met Moshe Feldenkrais as a young child through her father, a scientist who regarded Feldenkrais as an extraordinary thinker. Anat later became his student and professional colleague. A trained clinical psychologist and dancer, she worked closely with him for more than a decade.

Elizabeth entered Anat’s life while Anat was still working with Moshe. On her website, Anat writes that Elizabeth became a decisive influence on her career. She watched a child with profound limitations continue to develop, one distinction and one new ability at a time.

In the documentary, Anat works with Elizabeth through gentle touch and movement. She does not impose a mechanical exercise or repeatedly drill a desired response. She helps Elizabeth feel how the different parts of an action can fit together with less effort and difficulty.

The work is quiet, but it is not passive. Elizabeth looks, senses, moves, and responds. Anat changes what she is doing according to those responses. The lesson becomes a conversation conducted largely through movement.

The Body Teaches the Brain

The documentary describes the work through a striking phrase: the body can teach the brain. This makes sense when we think about how any of us learn to move.

A baby does not learn to roll, sit, stand, and walk by receiving a verbal explanation of the correct technique. The baby moves. The movement produces sensation. One attempt feels different from another. Gradually, the nervous system distinguishes what contributes to the action and what interferes with it.

The Feldenkrais Method® uses this same learning process deliberately. Touch and movement create information. Variation makes differences perceptible. Attention allows those differences to matter. Over time, the person develops choices that were not previously available.

Here, body and brain function together as one living system. Movement changes sensation, sensation changes perception, and perception changes the next movement. Learning occurs through that continuing cycle.

A prognosis describes what professionals expect to happen. It does not necessarily reveal the full learning capacity of the person receiving it.

Elizabeth’s Abilities Continue to Develop

Elizabeth’s father recalls that each series of visits produced a perceptible change. She began walking with a walker. By the third or fourth grade, she could get around without it. It was later determined that she had been born without approximately one-third of her cerebellum, a part of the brain deeply involved in coordination, balance, and motor learning.

At 21, Elizabeth could walk in heels, run, play sports, communicate, and take care of many things for herself. She was attending college and receiving academic honors. These were the very abilities that her physicians had predicted she would never acquire.

Elizabeth also understood that her development was continuing. She did not speak of herself as finished or perfect. She spoke of returning to the work, noticing differences, and becoming able to do more.

“As long as I keep coming, I’m going to be able to do more and more.”
— Elizabeth, Healing Quest

That statement captures something important about the Feldenkrais® approach. Learning is not a single dramatic correction. It is an ongoing process in which one improvement creates the conditions for another.

What Medicine Could Not Predict

The title of this documentary is intentionally provocative. Medicine could identify Elizabeth’s neurological damage. It could describe the functions associated with the part of her brain that had not developed. What it could not do was accurately predict the extent to which Elizabeth might learn to organize the nervous system she had.

The physicians observed real limitations. The error came when those observations became a final account of her future.

Moshe Feldenkrais and Anat Baniel worked from a different premise. They did not need to know the final destination before helping Elizabeth take the next developmental step. They looked for a movement she could sense, a distinction she could perceive, and a new relationship she could begin to organize. Then they continued from there.

Elizabeth’s life challenges the assumption that neurological structure determines a fixed ceiling for human development. Her missing cerebellar tissue did not grow back. She learned to function with the nervous system she had.

Elizabeth’s Life Beyond the Documentary

The film ends with Elizabeth’s father remembering something Moshe Feldenkrais had told the family: Elizabeth would dance at her wedding. At 21, her father observed that she was already ahead of schedule.

The later account published by the Anat Baniel Method® NeuroMovement® organization reports that Elizabeth went on to receive two master’s degrees. It also reports that she did, in fact, dance at her wedding.

These details matter because they show that Elizabeth’s development did not end when the documentary cameras stopped. The small experiences of learning that began in infancy continued to accumulate into an adult life.

What Elizabeth’s Story Asks Us to Reconsider

Elizabeth’s story leaves the diagnosis intact while asking us to recognize the difference between describing a condition and defining a person.

A diagnosis may tell us something important about structure, injury, or development. It cannot always tell us what a person might learn when given time, attention, variation, intelligent touch, and the opportunity to experience herself differently.

Moshe Feldenkrais and Anat Baniel did not begin by trying to prove a theory about Elizabeth. They began with Elizabeth herself. They helped her discover one possibility and then another. The abilities that medicine said could never develop became part of her ordinary life.

That is what the Feldenkrais Method® achieved for Elizabeth. It did not replace the missing part of her brain. It helped her learn how much she could do with the brain and body she had.

Related Resources

• What Is the Feldenkrais Method®?
• About Moshe Feldenkrais
• Original Healing Quest video on YouTube