What is Feldenkrais?

Most movement offers want to improve something by practising, repeating, strengthening. Feldenkrais takes a different path: through very small, consciously perceived movements, your nervous system itself discovers new, easier ways of moving. Not through effort, but through attention.

This sounds unfamiliar at first — most people expect movement to be something you train. Feldenkrais starts with learning instead: the body changes when the nervous system recognises a new possibility, not when an old movement pattern is repeated with force.

The method was developed by Moshe Feldenkrais (1904–1984), a physicist and judoka who took his own knee injuries as a starting point to investigate how closely movement, perception and learning are connected.

For decades the method has been passed on worldwide in recognised, multi-year training programmes — my own training follows this standard.

Health is often understood as the absence of illness. But many people who are medically considered cured still do not really return to their lives.

A different, more helpful thought: health is the ability to lose your balance — through illness, through a diagnosis, through a life crisis — and to find a way back to your own equilibrium. Not the absence of upheaval, but the ability to deal with it. This is exactly where Feldenkrais begins: not with the question “What is missing?” but with the question “What can I still sense right now, and how do I find a way from there?”

This is also the question that occupies me as a scientist: why does something change when you only perceive consciously, without training?

That is precisely what I investigate in my research — currently among others with people with Parkinson's, where this principle can achieve a great deal. Embodiment reaches deeper than thinking alone: the nervous system learns through experience, not through insight.