Who Was Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais? His Life and Work.

Article Summary

Moshe Feldenkrais, D.Sc. (1904–1984), was an engineer, physicist, martial artist, author, and teacher who investigated how human beings learn to organize movement and action. His work grew from decades of practical experience in self-defense, judo, scientific research, self-observation, and teaching. He developed the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education in two forms: Awareness Through Movement® lessons and Functional Integration® lessons.

A Life Organized Around Learning

In 1918, at the age of fourteen, Moshe Feldenkrais left his family and began a journey from Eastern Europe to Palestine. The trip took approximately six months. He traveled with other young people, crossed borders in the unsettled period following the First World War, and arrived in 1919 with the need to support and educate himself.

That journey did not determine everything that followed, but it reveals something important about him. Feldenkrais repeatedly entered situations in which established answers were insufficient. He learned by observing what a situation required, acquiring the knowledge he needed, and testing what he understood in action.

This pattern continued through work as a laborer and cartographer, the study and teaching of self-defense, engineering and physics in Paris, research with Frédéric Joliot-Curie, judo with Jigoro Kano, wartime scientific work for the British Admiralty, and his long investigation of his own injured knees. The subjects changed, but the practical orientation remained.

Across these different fields, the same question kept returning: How does a human being learn to act more effectively?

The answer Feldenkrais developed was not a theory imposed from outside experience. It became a way of creating conditions in which a person could perceive differences, explore alternatives, and learn.

From Eastern Europe to Palestine

Moshe Pinhas Feldenkrais was born on May 6, 1904, in Slavuta, then part of the Russian Empire and now in Ukraine. His family later lived in Korets and Baranovich, in present-day Belarus. There he received part of his formal education and studied Hebrew and Zionist thought.

After reaching Palestine in 1919, Feldenkrais worked as a laborer. He later returned to school, supported himself partly by tutoring, and completed his diploma in 1925. He then worked as a cartographer for the British survey office.

Physical skill and practical problem-solving were already becoming important parts of his life. He participated in Jewish self-defense groups, learned jujitsu, and began developing methods of self-defense adapted to the circumstances in which he and others were living. In 1929, he injured his left knee while playing soccer—an injury that would continue to affect him for years.

During his recovery, his interests extended beyond the mechanical problem of the knee. In 1930 he published a Hebrew translation and adaptation of Charles Brooks’s work on Émile Coué’s system of autosuggestion, adding two chapters of his own. Those two original chapters were later published as the monograph Thinking and Doing. The following year, he published Jiu-Jitsu and Self Defence. I now publish both works, making these early examples of Feldenkrais’s thinking available to contemporary readers. They show that his interest in learning, intention, self-image, and action did not suddenly appear when he created his method. He had already begun examining how ideas and behavior influence what a person can do.

The detailed chronology of these years is documented in Mark Reese’s A Concise Biography of Moshe Feldenkrais.

Engineering, Physics, and Scientific Inquiry in Paris

Feldenkrais moved to Paris in 1930 and enrolled at the École des Travaux Publics. He completed studies in mechanical and electrical engineering and continued his scientific education at the Sorbonne.

In 1933, he began working as a research assistant to Frédéric Joliot-Curie at the Radium Institute. He later worked at the Arcueil-Cachan laboratories, where he helped build a Van de Graaff generator used in experiments involving atomic fission. He earned his doctorate in physics and continued research in magnetics and ultrasonics under Paul Langevin before the German advance forced him to leave France in 1940.

It would be easy to use his scientific credentials merely to make his later work sound authoritative. Their more important contribution was methodological. Physics trained him to examine relationships, identify the forces acting within a system, and test an explanation against observable results. Engineering required him to understand how parts function together under actual conditions.

Human action cannot be reduced to a mechanical system, and Feldenkrais did not simply transfer formulas from physics to the body. He carried forward a habit of inquiry: observe what is happening, vary the conditions, attend to the result, and revise the explanation when experience requires it.

Judo and Learning in Action

In Paris, Feldenkrais met Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo. He began studying judo intensively, earned his black belt in 1936 and his second-degree rank in 1938, and became an important figure in the early establishment of judo in France. He taught, wrote books on judo and self-defense, and helped European students understand an art that could not be learned by physical strength or imitation alone.

Judo gave Feldenkrais a practical setting for studying balance, timing, orientation, intention, and adaptability. A technique depends upon sensing the relationship between yourself, another person, gravity, and the ground. Applying more force does not necessarily improve the action. An effective response requires sensitivity to the situation and the ability to change organization at the appropriate moment.

These ideas later appeared throughout his educational work, although an Awareness Through Movement lesson does not look like martial arts practice. A student is not learning a judo technique. The deeper connection lies in learning how action is organized and how another possibility becomes available.

For readers interested in this part of his development, the Better Judo series shows Feldenkrais examining the difference between performing a technique mechanically and acquiring the organization of a skilled action.

Wartime Work in England

Feldenkrais escaped from France to Britain in 1940 as German forces approached Paris. From 1940 to 1945, he worked as a scientific officer for the British Admiralty and conducted antisubmarine research in Scotland. He also taught judo and self-defense and published Practical Unarmed Combat and Judo in 1942.

The recurring problems with his knees became increasingly consequential during this period. The old soccer injury had never ceased to matter, and the demands of his escape from France and his work on submarine decks aggravated the problem. Surgery offered uncertain prospects. Feldenkrais began investigating how he was using himself and how changes in the organization of his movement affected pain, stability, and function.

He drew upon what he knew, but he also had to discover what he did not know. He studied anatomy, physiology, nervous-system function, child development, psychology, and other approaches to human learning. He explored small movements because forceful movement was painful. He observed relationships among the feet, legs, pelvis, eyes, and the rest of himself. He paid attention to what happened when an action was varied rather than repeated in the usual way.

The knee problem did not hand Feldenkrais a method; it gave him a question he could no longer treat as theoretical.

Feldenkrais later described important parts of his knee experience in The Elusive Obvious. The significance of the account is not that he found a single corrective exercise. He learned that familiar action can conceal how it is organized and that another organization may become possible when meaningful differences can be sensed.

During the Admiralty years, Feldenkrais also gave lectures about his developing ideas, taught experimental classes, and worked individually with colleagues. The International Feldenkrais Federation identifies Britain in the 1940s as the period in which he began developing the work that became the Feldenkrais Method and wrote his first major book on the subject, Body and Mature Behavior. See the IFF’s account of the method and its founder.

From Personal Investigation to an Educational Method

After leaving the Admiralty in 1946, Feldenkrais remained in London for several years. He worked as an inventor and consultant, continued studying judo, and developed his thinking about human action. In 1949 he published Body and Mature Behavior, in which he examined posture, anxiety, learning, and the relationship between nervous-system development and action. His final judo book, Higher Judo: Groundwork, appeared in 1952.

The work that emerged cannot be explained by adding physics, judo, psychology, and an injured knee together as though they were ingredients in a formula. Feldenkrais was pursuing a problem that crossed the boundaries among them. A person acts as a whole. Movement, sensation, thought, emotion, intention, prior experience, and environment participate in every action, even when attention is directed to only one painful or difficult part.

Habit is necessary; without it, ordinary life would be impossible. A difficulty arises when one familiar organization has become the only available organization. A person may want to act differently yet continue reproducing the same pattern because its component relationships remain outside awareness.

Feldenkrais therefore did not construct a system of ideal movements for students to copy. His lessons create conditions in which a learner can slow an action down, reduce unnecessary effort, notice distinctions, and explore variations. Learning occurs through the learner’s experience. The teacher structures the situation without prescribing one universal answer.

This is one reason Feldenkrais distinguished education from treatment. He worked with people who had pain, injuries, neurological difficulties, and highly developed performance skills, but his central concern was how each person could learn. The immediate subject might be walking, turning, speaking, playing an instrument, or recovering an ability. The lesson addressed the organization of the person acting.

Two Forms of the Work

Feldenkrais developed two complementary ways of creating these learning conditions.

Awareness Through Movement Lessons

In an Awareness Through Movement lesson, a teacher uses spoken directions to guide a group or individual through a structured sequence of movement explorations. The movements are generally slow and comfortable. Students compare sensations, investigate relationships, rest, and notice what changes.

The directions do not describe a performance that must look the same for everyone. They organize an inquiry that each student carries out through personal experience.

Learn more about Awareness Through Movement lessons

Functional Integration Lessons

In a Functional Integration lesson, the practitioner works individually with a student, usually using gentle touch and movement as the principal means of communication. The practitioner may support weight, clarify a relationship, or offer the experience of an action being organized differently.

The individual format allows the lesson to respond directly to the student’s present organization and interests. It serves the same educational purpose as the group form: creating conditions in which differences can be perceived and new possibilities learned.

Learn more about Functional Integration lessons

Teaching in Israel

Feldenkrais returned to Israel in 1951 and directed the Israeli Army Department of Electronics until 1953. Around 1954, he began making his living entirely through teaching his method in Tel Aviv.

By approximately 1955, his Awareness Through Movement classes were established in a studio on Alexander Yanai Street. The hundreds of lessons recorded there reveal the breadth of his inquiry. A lesson might begin with the movement of the eyes, the contact of the feet with the floor, the relationship between the ribs and pelvis, or the organization of getting up. The local movement provided a way of studying the action of the whole person.

He also gave individual Functional Integration lessons. In 1957 he began working with Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, whose well-known headstand photograph drew public attention to Feldenkrais’s work. Feldenkrais continued teaching in Israel while presenting his ideas in Europe and North America and publishing books for a wider audience.

The International Feldenkrais Federation preserves recordings, photographs, lectures, and other historical materials through the IFF Archive.

Training Practitioners

For many years, Feldenkrais taught the work himself and had only a small circle of close students. He eventually undertook the demanding task of teaching other people to practice it.

His first practitioner training took place in Tel Aviv from 1969 to 1971 with twelve students. He then taught a training of approximately sixty-five students in San Francisco over four summers from 1975 to 1978. In 1980, he began a much larger program of approximately 235 students in Amherst, Massachusetts. Illness prevented him from teaching the final two summers personally, and members of his experienced group continued the program.

These trainings did more than multiply a set of techniques. Feldenkrais had to help students develop observation, touch, reasoning, and the capacity to create learning situations without reducing the work to formulas. That challenge remains part of practitioner education today.

The Feldenkrais Guild of North America’s biographical overview identifies the three trainings and estimates that Feldenkrais trained approximately 300 practitioners during his lifetime.

The Legacy of Moshe Feldenkrais

Feldenkrais became ill in 1981 and stopped teaching publicly. He died on July 1, 1984. He left books, lectures, recorded lessons, films, practitioner trainings, and a community of students who continued studying and teaching the work.

His legacy cannot be reduced to a claim that people move better after doing particular exercises. Feldenkrais offered a practical way to investigate human action. He showed how much of what feels fixed may be learned, how habit can conceal alternatives, and how carefully structured experience can make new choices perceptible.

His lasting contribution was a disciplined way of creating conditions in which people could learn from their own experience.

This idea applies to a person recovering an ability, refining a sophisticated skill, or becoming curious about an ordinary action that has never before required attention. The movements in a lesson are important because they make relationships available to sensation. The larger subject is how a person learns.

At fourteen, Moshe Feldenkrais entered a journey for which he could not have possessed a complete map. Much of his later life followed the same pattern at a more sophisticated level: enter the problem, observe carefully, acquire what is needed, test what you understand, and remain willing to discover another possibility.

Explore the Work of Moshe Feldenkrais

Selected Books

Feldenkrais wrote about human development, self-image, posture, anxiety, learning, individual casework, and the martial arts. These selected books show different parts of that range.

On Better Judo

The Better Judo article allow readers to see Feldenkrais thinking about learning before the method had taken its mature public form. His subject is judo, but his questions concern the difference between imitating the appearance of a technique and acquiring the organization that makes skilled performance possible.

Read the Better Judo series introduction

Historical Image Gallery

Sources and Further Reading

• Mark Reese, “A Concise Biography of Moshe Feldenkrais”, Feldenkrais Guild of North America.
• International Feldenkrais Federation, “Feldenkrais Method & Moshé Feldenkrais”.
• International Feldenkrais Federation, IFF Archive of the Feldenkrais Method.