The New York Times Discovers The Feldenkrais Method

Article Summary

In 2017, New York Times health columnist Jane Brody explored the Feldenkrais Method® after years of skepticism and discovered an unexpectedly effective approach to chronic pain. Her experience introduced millions of readers to a movement method that has quietly helped people improve posture, coordination, and comfort for decades. This article revisits Brody’s observations through the perspective of a Feldenkrais practitioner, explaining why awareness, efficient movement, and learning—not force or stretching—can produce profound and lasting change.

For decades, the Feldenkrais Method had built a strong reputation among physical therapists, dancers, musicians, athletes, and movement educators. Yet despite its influence within those professions, relatively few people outside those circles knew much about it.

Then, in October 2017, something remarkable happened.

Jane E. Brody—one of America’s most respected health journalists—published an article in The New York Times describing her experience with the Feldenkrais Method after years of skepticism. For many practitioners, it was a milestone. One of the country’s most influential voices on personal health had finally discovered what thousands of students had already experienced for themselves.

Her article wasn’t simply a review of a movement lesson. It was a thoughtful account of how changing the way we move can change the way we feel.

Jane Brody’s Experience

Brody opens her article with an observation that will sound familiar to many Feldenkrais students:

“After two hourlong sessions focused first on body awareness and then on movement retraining… I understood what it meant to experience an incredible lightness of being… I felt like I was walking on air.”

She also admitted something refreshingly honest:

“I had long refrained from writing about this method… I thought it was some sort of New Age gobbledygook with no scientific basis. Boy, was I wrong!”

That sentence resonated with many of us.

The Feldenkrais Method is often misunderstood because its lessons appear deceptively simple. The movements are slow. There is no strenuous stretching or strengthening. Students are encouraged to pay attention rather than push harder.

Yet beneath that simplicity lies a sophisticated process of learning.

What Jane Brody Discovered About Chronic Pain

One of the most important insights in Brody’s article is that chronic pain is not always the result of damaged tissues. Sometimes it is the result of habitual ways of moving that create unnecessary effort.

She describes realizing that when she walked, sat, and even cooked with greater ease and awareness, her pain diminished. She also noticed that many of her habitual patterns involved using small muscles for jobs better suited to larger ones.

This is a central principle of the Feldenkrais Method.

When movement becomes organized more efficiently, the body often requires less effort to accomplish the same task. Reduced effort frequently means reduced muscular tension, less fatigue, and greater comfort.

The goal is not simply to relieve pain. It is to improve the quality of the way you move.

The Feldenkrais Perspective

As a Feldenkrais practitioner, I have found that many people arrive believing they need stronger muscles, greater flexibility, or better posture.

Often they need something different. They need a clearer awareness of how they are organizing themselves.

Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais famously said: “If you know what you are doing, you can do what you want.”

That statement captures the essence of the Method.

Awareness precedes improvement.

Without awareness, we repeat familiar habits—even when those habits contribute to discomfort. With awareness comes the opportunity to discover easier, more efficient alternatives.

Rather than prescribing a single “correct” posture, the Feldenkrais Method helps each person learn to sense unnecessary effort and discover more comfortable options.

Awareness Through Movement® and Functional Integration®

Brody experienced both forms of the Feldenkrais Method.

She attended an Awareness Through Movement class, where students explore carefully designed movement sequences that improve body awareness and coordination.

She also experienced Functional Integration, an individual hands-on lesson in which a practitioner uses gentle touch and movement to help students discover new possibilities for organization and ease.

Although these approaches look very different, they share the same objective:

To improve the brain’s organization of movement.

This is one reason students often report unexpected improvements. As movement becomes more coordinated, changes frequently appear throughout the body rather than in just one painful area.

Movement, Learning, and Neuroplasticity

One of the most forward-looking observations in Brody’s article concerns the brain.

She notes that the ultimate goal of Feldenkrais lessons is to establish new neural pathways that support easier, more effective movement, and that later neuroscience confirmed the brain’s remarkable capacity to reorganize itself through experience.

Dr. Feldenkrais developed his Method decades before the term neuroplasticity became widely known.

Through careful observation and experimentation, he recognized something profound: When people experience new ways of moving, they also develop new ways of sensing, thinking, and acting. Movement becomes a pathway for learning.

Why the Feldenkrais Method Continues to Grow

Nearly a decade after Jane Brody’s article appeared, the reasons it resonated remain the same.

People are increasingly looking for approaches that do more than temporarily reduce symptoms. They want to understand how they move, why discomfort develops, and how they can participate in their own improvement.

The Feldenkrais Method offers exactly that opportunity.

It is not based on force, repetition, or correction. It is based on curiosity.

And sometimes, as Jane Brody discovered after only two sessions, that curiosity can leave you feeling like you’re walking on air.

Editor’s Note

If you’re new to the Feldenkrais Method, I encourage you to read Jane E. Brody’s original New York Times article, Trying the Feldenkrais Method for Chronic Pain. It remains a clear introduction to the Method written for a general audience and helped bring well-deserved attention to Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais’s work.