Moshe Feldenkrais NLP of the Body

Moshe Feldenkrais has become recognized as one of the most important recent innovators in the fields of bodywork, physical therapy and healing. Feldenkrais’ fame, and the primary arena for his genius, came from his work with people with difficult physical handicaps, such as cerebral palsy, stroke, spinal injury, scoliosis, etc. His remarkable success rate in the rehabilitation of people with serious physical problems and “miracle” cures with those unreachable by standard Western medical treatments brought him an international reputation. Feldenkrais codified his discoveries about working with the body into a group of techniques called “Functional Integration” and “Awareness Through Movement.” Yet, while these techniques are very effective, they are the product of his genius rather than the source of it. It was Feldenkrais’ ability to innovate within the basic parameters of his work that allowed him to evolve his method and determine the unique but fundamental needs of each of his individual patients. The modeling tools of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) provide a way to gain insight into the mental processes that guided Feldenkrais’ gifted hands. By exploring the ways people organize their sensory experience into specific strategies we can create an explicit map of how Feldenkrais determined what to do in addition to the maps of what he decided to do.