Moving from Moshe Feldenkrais’s ideas about human potential to the power & possibilities of wholeness.
When I first discovered the Feldenkrais Method, it wasn’t through the actual movement. It was through Moshe Feldenkrais’s books. I was fascinated by the ideas he shared about what it means to live our fullest human potential.
I was captivated by his perspective on how the time and culture we’re born into shape our lives, often in ways we don’t even recognize. He challenged conventional ideas about learning, healing, and what it means to continue to mature as a human.
I could do the practices he offered in the book. But, it wasn’t until years later that I had the opportunity to experience a guided movement lessons for myself. And that experience brought a whole new dimension to what I had been exploring on my own.
I still have my hardback copy of The Elusive Obvious, which I purchased decades ago. It brings me a special kind of sensorial gratification. As I hold the book in my hands, I can feel the strength of the binding and the subtle texture beneath my fingertips. The simplicity of the solid black and white cover delights my minimalist spirit as the title begs me to delve into a koan-istic approach to moving and learning.
When I first got the book, I would often return to its dense, fibrous pages with delight. Each word would land and evoke a sense of somatic wonder.
My mind would begin to bend toward a deeper realization: this work is about so much more than movement. It’s about understanding ourselves and recognizing the ways we’ve been shaped by our experiences. And it’s about discovering what might be possible when we have more options in how we move, think, sense, and feel.
In this post, I’ll share some of my favorite passages from The Elusive Obvious and why they resonate with me, and why I think they matter even more in the second half of life.
What Is The Feldenkrais Method?
The Feldenkrais Method is a way of learning through gentle, attentive movement. It helps your nervous system rediscover easier, more efficient, and integrated ways to move. Those discoveries often ripple into how you think, feel, and engage with life.
According to the Feldenkrais Guild of North America, it’s taught in two ways.
Group Awareness Through Movement
The first is Awareness Through Movement. These are group classes that are guided by voice. Each lesson is a kind of puzzle. You’re invited to move slowly and often explore a familiar movement in a new way. There’s no “right way” to do it.
I like to think of this work in terms of function and development. Think about how most babies learn to come to sit or crawl. In the beginning, each one looks very different as they explore. Each is motivated by something different in themselves or their environment. Each with their own movement history and preferences. But once they are sitting or crawling, they look more or less the same.
A Feldenkrais-Inspired somatic movement session can look a bit like that. Everyone moving toward the same function, but the way each person finds their way there is individual. It’s their own journey.
Private Functional Integration
Functional Integration is the hands-on side of this work. Like Awareness Through Movement it’s gentle, it revolves around a function, and it’s an individual experience. But there’s often little verbal guidance. Instead, it opens the door to a preverbal experience: a direct conversation with the body itself.
I share a glimpse of what it was like to receive Functional Integration in front of my whole training class in The Fertile Darkness.
Feldenkrais has been at the heart of my work for more than twenty years, starting with my four-year professional training. It laid the foundation for the SOMA Rhythms Method, and it shapes everything I offer today. I call my work Feldenkrais-inspired because I weave it together with breathwork, meditation, and transformational coaching.
Why Learning Is At The Heart Of It
For me, learning is one of the greatest gifts of life. But for many people, “learning” has a bad reputation. It brings up memories of school, tests, and feeling like they’re not smart enough. Someone once advised not to use the word “learning” in my marketing materials, because it would turn people off.
I think learning has become a dirty word because our culture values a narrow slice of intelligence. The truth is there are many forms of intelligence. Psychologist Howard Gardner describes several kinds in his theory of multiple intelligences, first published in 1983. They include body, spatial, musical, and nature intelligence. They also include understanding others and understanding yourself. Yet school mostly rewards two types of intellect: verbal and logical.
What’s exciting is that embodiment work like the Feldenkrais Method can help several of these forms of intelligence at once. The body-kind, of course. But also your sense of space, your awareness of your own feelings, your attunement to other people, and your connection with the natural world.
Why?
Because when we become more embodied, we can better tune into ourselves, other people, and the world around us.
After three decades of working with my own childhood health challenges and with others, I know this for sure: learning is healing. And healing is only the beginning. When we really learn about ourselves, we change the way we relate to the world. When we change how we relate to the world, the world changes.
Organic learning is essential. It can also be therapeutic in essence.
—Moshe Feldenkrais, The Elusive Obvious
How We Move Shapes How We Live
How we move can bring us pain or pleasure. It can add wear and tear on our joints or support healing and repair. It can feed a sense of power, joy, and love. Or it can fuel anger and fear. In short, how we move either builds resilience, physically and emotionally, or it breaks us down.
The slow and attentive quality of Feldenkrais-inspired somatic movement can transform how we engage with ourselves. For many people, it means listening to the body’s cues to slow down, do less, and sense more. For most, that’s something new.
For others, it means moving more. Moving with more variety, more grace, and more spontaneity. Or finding more freedom within a constraint, like an injury, illness, or a long flight. And for nearly everyone, the limits of self-imposed constraints become obvious, and are released.
Movement is also our path back to understanding our body’s cues. It helps us notice when we need to move after too much stillness, and when we need to rest after too much action. When we can attune to our own rhythms, we naturally become more attuned to the rhythms of life. It can bring us more into the present moment and deeper into our experiences of life.
To every emotional state corresponds a personal conditioned pattern of muscular contraction without which it has no existence.
—Moshe Feldenkrais, The Elusive Obvious
How We Engage With Ourselves & Others
Long before my Feldenkrais training, I was meditating. What drew me to the method was that it felt like meditation in motion. Both practices offer a direct way to understand how we engage with life. I write more about where the two met for me in The Day I Realized the Body Is the Mind.
One thing that I know for sure: Feldenkrais-inspired somatic movement helps us practice non-judgment while sharpening our discernment. We grow our capacity to trust our sensations, tune into what feels right for us, and enjoy the delicious subtleties of each engagement with life. As our judgment softens and discernment grows, we become more curious about life. That curiosity softens our edges.
Then, before we know it, our relationships change. We can’t help but be more attuned to others when we’re more attuned to ourselves.
Psychotherapist Richard Erskine describes attunement as sensing another person’s rhythm and experience so fully that it creates a felt sense of connection between two people.
Here's the rub. We first learn to attune to others very early in life, before we have words. We learn this through our earliest caregivers. For many of us, those early days held missed moments of connection with little repair afterward. If that’s true for you, then please know that this capacity can still grow. Somatic practices can help you feel safer in your own skin, so you can turn down the biological noise and tune into others without feeling overwhelmed or shutting down. I explore this more in The Invisible Thread.
How Does Somatic Movement Help You Change?
Feldenkrais-inspired somatic movement helps you to explore and play in a similar way that you did as a child. It breeds curiosity and nourishes compassion.
Before I started meditating and exploring somatic movement, I often found myself doing things I didn't want to do, just out of habit. Even if I wanted to change, I couldn't figure out how to make it stick. In my twenties, a big part of "personal development" was a destructive game called find what’s wrong with yourself and fix it. Over and over again.
That approach did more harm than good in two ways. First, growth felt like a constant struggle. Frankly, I am sure that my belief at the time was "if it isn't hard, it isn't worth it"...or some crap like that. Second, it kept me searching for what wasn’t working. YUCK! And underneath all of it was the belief that I was somehow broken. OUCH!
After several years of meditation and somatic explorations, something big shifted. I was no longer chasing the fix. I started celebrating what was working. I even began honoring those pesky “bad habits” as a type of inner wisdom. They had helped me survive, or freed my attention for other things.
More than that, I started to see myself as whole, not broken.
I’m not exactly sure when that change happened. I imagine it was gradual. But one thing is certain: it was profound.
when your attention and awareness are improved, in a few moments, your judgment will be better...
—Moshe Feldenkrais, The Elusive Obvious
It’s Never Too Late To Learn
I find this especially hopeful for those of us in the second half of life. Our culture tells us our bodies are in decline. But the Feldenkrais Method is built on the idea that the nervous system can keep learning, at any age.
Moshe Feldenkrais also spoke about health as the ability to live our avowed and unavowed dreams. I write about that idea in When Forgotten Dreams Start Coming True. For me, that’s the essence of this work and why it’s so much more than movement. It helps us come home to ourselves, so we can live the lives we came here for.
So here’s my invitation. The next time you reach for your mug or a loved one, slow it down by half. Notice what moves, and what doesn’t. Get curious. That’s where the learning begins.
Key Takeaways: Feldenkrais is More Than Movement
The Feldenkrais Method is a way of learning through movement. Gentle, attentive movement gives your nervous system new options, and those can ripple into how you think, feel, and act.
How we move shapes how we live. Movement can build resilience, physically and emotionally, or wear us down.
Embodiment grows many kinds of intelligence. Body awareness, self-awareness, and attunement to others can all develop together.
Change doesn’t have to mean fixing yourself. Seeing your habits as inner wisdom, and yourself as whole, makes growth feel lighter.
You can keep learning at any age. The nervous system stays capable of discovering new ways to move and live no matter how old you are.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Feldenkrais Method
What is the Feldenkrais Method?
The Feldenkrais Method is a way of learning through gentle, attentive movement. It was developed by Moshe Feldenkrais. It taps into the power of neuroplasticity. It’s taught as group Awareness Through Movement classes and one-on-one Functional Integration sessions.
What are the benefits of the Feldenkrais Method?
People often report moving with more ease, comfort, and freedom. Many also notice enhanced body awareness, less self-judgment, and more curiosity. Because movement, thinking, sensing, and feeling are all intertwined, those changes can ripple into how you respond to stress and relate to others.
Is the Feldenkrais Method good for older adults?
Yes. Lessons are gentle and adaptable, and you honor your own comfort. The method is built on the idea that the nervous system keeps learning throughout life. Many people in midlife and beyond find it helps them move with more ease and confidence.
What does Feldenkrais-Inspired mean?
Feldenkrais-inspired means the work is rooted in the principles of the Feldenkrais Method but isn’t a formal Feldenkrais lesson. In my work I draw on my four-year Feldenkrais Training, two decades of my work as a Feldenkrais Practitioner and weave it together with breathwork, meditation, and transformational coaching. The movement stays gentle, slow, and anchored in a function.
________
Originally published: September 2018
Last updated: November 2026
Ethos: The Body As A Guide
