There is an essential origin story, often misinterpreted, for understanding Moshe and the development of his ideas.
Have you heard this one?
It involves the knee that he injured playing soccer in his mid-twenties and his eventual realization of how mistaken ideas about rehabilitation were.
His knee was badly injured. And he was incapacitated for several months. To get around, he resorted to hopping and limping on one leg to avoid the hurt knee.
But one day he slipped and hurt the other leg.
He went to bed that night thinking that he might be bedridden and in a world of trouble. Both f his kneew were now hurt. He might not be able to walk at all.
How would he work?
How would he get to school?
But when he woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, he could stand on his previously injured leg.
That is, he could put his body weight on the leg that had been sprained. And he could walk on it. The trauma to his good knee seemed to make the injured leg more functional.
It didn't make any sense.
Moshe wrote many years later:
"For fear of ridicule, I spoke to nobody and remained unsure of what had happened. I was convinced there was something mentally wrong with me, as the healing of the knee in hours was unthinkable, and yet the mishap to the good knee had improved the sick one."
More than a decade later, Moshe came across the work of the Russian neurophysiologist Alexander A. Speransky. He began to understand that learning and rehabilitation were not just muscular processes.
Speransky provided evidence that the nervous system itself could change—and could do so independently of the muscles and joints. Feldenkrais used this idea repeatedly when learning Judo, teaching others to do Judo, and eventually creating the sessions often called Awareness Through Movement.
By the way, someone else was working with a similar phenomenon around this time: Milton H. Erickson.
People would come to Erickson with paralysis in certain parts of the body—paralysis with no known physical cause. He would teach them, through hypnotic and somatic means, to move the paralysis to different parts of the body. Like Feldenkrais, he showed that the nervous system has profound, often untapped potential to influence physical function and healing.
I realize that might be a bit too weird for some folks. That's ok.
But I’ll share more about this in the future.
