From a talk given in response to a question during the second year of the New York VIII Feldenkrais Professional Training Program

Transcribed and Edited by Morgan McKenzie Kauffman

It is your ability to turn towards your own sensation that brings another to sense themselves. It is your ability to feel and know yourself in your wholeness, that enables the other person to feel their wholeness and to act in a more integrated way.  

A common idea in Western thought production is that knowledge derives from the cutting of things into fragments or pieces. Of course, cutting things into parts can lead to a certain kind of useful knowing, but it’s a different way of thinking than the one I find most useful to us as Feldenkrais Practitioners. It is tempting to think that by “segmentalizing” the self into this muscle or that muscle and focusing on individual parts, we will understand what needs to be fixed or what is relevant to know about a person in order to help them. But in fact, “segm...

I recently posted a clip of a short, spontaneous FI demonstration filmed during an advanced training that I taught in England, in September 2019. It was graciously recorded by Feldenkrais Trainer, Raz Ori. In this particular clip, ‘The Teleceptors Organize the Head and Neck,’ the student sits on the table while I stand to work with her. For some of the lesson, her head rests against my chest. This is an extremely versatile and effective approach which allows the practitioner to move freely with a dynamic stability while at the same time being connected to another person in such a way that they feel themselves to be weightless. However, it presents some obvious challenges which I’d like to discuss.

First, I’d like to explain that the participants in this workshop were experienced Practitioners, with the exception of some fourth-year students from the London training program. They understood that we would not be focusing on individual FI skills, but instead on a more general approach of...

by David Zemach-Bersin

During the third year of the San Francisco training program, Margaret Mead visited us for most of a week. At the time, she was considered the pre-eminent cultural anthropologist of North America (and a very public intellectual). Friends had introduced Moshe and Mead, and as she became familiar with both Functional Integration and Awareness Through Movement, she became an advocate for him and his ideas. Some months later in an article, Mead wrote,

"Feldenkrais' method is the most sophisticated and effective method I have seen for the prevention and reversal of deterioration of function. We're condemning millions of people to a deteriorated old age that's not necessary."