Magic

A nuclear physicist wrecked his knee, was told surgery was the answer, decided the odds were not good enough, and worked out how to walk again by thinking about it.

Moshe Feldenkrais was born in Russia in 1904 and took a doctorate in physics at the Sorbonne. He worked for years in the French nuclear research programme alongside Joliot-Curie. He was also, and this matters enormously for what follows, a serious martial artist: he studied with Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo, and in 1936 became one of the first Europeans to hold a black belt in it.

Then, in the 1940s, he sustained a debilitating knee injury.

The scenes between are imagined: a man who has spent his life in two disciplines that both depend on precision, one of the mind and one of the body, sitting with a leg that will not work and a surgical option he does not trust. What is on the record is the conclusion he came to, and it was not a physical one.

He decided the problem was not only in his knee. It was in how his brain was organising his body.

That reframe is the beginning of an entire tradition. If walking is a pattern the nervous system runs, and the pattern was built around a joint that now works differently, then the useful intervention might not be on the joint at all. It might be on the pattern. Teach the nervous system a different organisation and the same damaged knee might carry you fine.

He retrained himself, recovered enough to resume judo, and did it without surgery.

Out of that came a method, developed from the late 1940s, in two forms: a group class format built around slow guided movement explorations, and a hands-on individual practice. He spent the rest of his life on it and left behind hundreds of lessons. He died in 1984.

I want to draw out what is genuinely radical here, because it is easy to miss under the gentleness.

Almost everything else in this volume treats the body as a structure to be loaded. Get stronger, produce more force, condition the tissue, build the capacity. Eleven seasons of that, and it is largely correct.

This season starts from the opposite end. It treats the body as something being operated, and asks whether the operating instructions are any good. On this view a great deal of pain and limitation is not damage but organisation: habits of movement and holding that were sensible once, became automatic, and are now producing a problem that no amount of strengthening will fix because strength was never the missing thing.

That is a real and serious idea, and it was arrived at independently by several people in roughly the same decades, which is usually a sign that something is there.

It also has an obvious failure mode, which is that it can be extended to explain anything. If all pain is patterning, then no pain requires a scan, and that is a dangerous place to end up. I will come back to it.

But start with the sympathetic version, because it is well founded. Feldenkrais was a physicist and a black belt. He understood force and he understood technique. When a man with that background concludes that the answer to his knee is in how he is organising himself rather than in what has been damaged, that deserves a hearing.

He was not the only one. Within the same period, two other people were arriving at versions of the same claim from completely different directions.

Next episode: learned, not broken.