Moshe Feldenkrais

“GENIUS, OF THE magnitude possessed by Moshe Feldenkrais, defies categorisation: what, after all, was he?  He could function at the highest level in nuclear physics, as a martial artist, as an inventor, as a developer of top-secret counterespionage projects, and as one of the most prescient observers of neuroscience.  But the role for which he would have wished to be remembered was his bringing all these backgrounds together to become one of the most important forces in holistic healing, who fused insights from Eastern thought and Western science in a whole new way.  Now, finally, the great integrative genius and master of turning scientific insights into practical ways to help people has found, in Mark Reese, the biographer he deserves.  Moshe Feldenkrais: A Life in Movement, Volume One, is a fastidiously researched, exciting, profoundly insightful story, that goes deep inside the mind of the swashbuckling, theatrical, brilliant integrator, as he lived through many of the greatest intellectual, political, and scientific events of the 20th century, met and worked with many of the most creative scientists and clinicians, and who in his struggle to overcome his own major injury, pioneered a unique way of teaching people to learn how to learn, and to change their brains, by increasing awareness of whatever they did, providing the foundation for a gentle but powerful approach to alleviating human suffering. “Norman Doidge MD, Author of The Brain That Changes Itself and The Brain’s Way of Healing

“FELDENKRAIS’S PERCEPTIVENESS seemed to defy the limits of our ordinary senses.  Feldenkrais could touch a persons’s head and feel patterns of muscular contractions in regions remote from where his hands were placed, such as the spine, chest, and pelvis, all the way to the feet; by touching an pressing on the feet, he could feel reactions all the way up to the head….

The principles that belong to Feldenkrais’s method cut across distinctions between war and peace, competition and cooperation, and accurately reflect natures’s under-lying order.  Such generality, understood as foundational for complexity, is the hallmark of lasting contributions to human knowledge and capabilities. Moshe Feldenkrais A Life in Movement  MARK REESE / VOLUME ONE