From
The brain’s way of healing: Stories of remarkable recoveries and discoveries
By Norman Doidge MD Scribe Books
Over the course of mastering his knee problems, writing Body and Mature Behavior, and seeing clients regularly, Feldenkrais refined the principles that formed the basis of his new method. Most of them are related to facilitating what Doidge calls the stage of neurodifferentiation, one of the key stages of neuroplastic healing.
The Feldenkrais Method principles are:
- The mind programs the functioning of the brain
- A brain cannot think without motor function
- Awareness of movement is the key to improving movement
- Differentiation – making the smallest possible sensory distinctions between movements – builds brain maps
- Differentiation is easiest to make when the stimulus is smallest
- Slowness of movement is the key to awareness, and awareness is the key to learning
- Reduce the effort whenever possible
- Errors are essential, and there is no right way to move, only better ways
- Random movements provide variation that leads to developmental breakthroughs
- Even the smallest movement in one part of the body involves the entire body
- Many movement problems, and the pain that goes with them, are caused by learned habit, not by abnormal structure