Page 168 - Total War on PTSD

block knife attacks. In the newly created Israel, he worked with Holocaust survivors and, after the Six-Day War, with returning soldiers.
Dr. Feldenkrais began his study of human movement by working on himself. As a young man in Palestine, he injured his knee playing soccer. After his escape to England, he aggravated his knee doing anti-submarine research for the British Navy. A physician advised him that he had a fifty percent chance of a permanently extended knee if he underwent surgery. He refused surgery but combined his studies of the then current literature on human movement, biology, evolution, psychology, human development, and learning theory with his own background in engineering, physics and Judo to discover a way that he could continue to function despite severe injuries. He created a method of dealing with human limitation and the potential for growth through the use of movement and awareness. As he put it, “What I'm after isn't flexible bodies, but flexible brains.” It is difficult to change how we think, how we feel and how we sense, but to change how we move is immediate and observable.
He called the hands-on work he developed Functional Integration lessons. Later, he realized that he could reach and teach a large number of people at once through ingenious movement explorations he called Awareness Through Movement® (ATM) lessons.
What is the Feldenkrais Method?
For many Veterans encountering it for the first time, the Feldenkrais Method seems a strange anomaly. The name is unusual and difficult to pronounce (it is pronounced Fell- den-krice – rhymes with rice) and its precepts run contrary to how Veterans have been trained for years by their drill sergeants, personal trainers and almost everyone else.
The Feldenkrais Method is a type of somatic education – a way of learning through movement and awareness. The word somatic means “of or relating to the living body.” A somatic movement is “one which is performed consciously with the intention of focusing on the internal experience of the movement rather than the external appearance or result of the movement.”
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