Two Masters
and A Nerd

The Masters: Moti Nativ and Jeff Haller
The Nerd: Roger Russell.


Together, we will make clear why and how Moshe’s method will remain: 

• Compelling

• Wise

• Effective

• Efficient

• Fascinating

• Relevant

In 1930, Moshe Feldenkrais had his eye on a target, an idea and a practical solution to a problem that remains to this day invisible, even to most experts.

His idea is partially visible in his book Jiu Jitsu and Self Defense, published in 1930. At that time, he was helping to build—and fighting to defend—his new homeland in Tel Aviv. In that book he invented, out of necessity, a simple, unarmed self-defense system for the Jewish Hagana (defense) underground.


Twenty years and five books later, he had worked out the core principles of something much wider; a perpetually original system of self-education that is now called the Feldenkrais Method. In turn, he invented for himself a new career. He became the first Feldenkrais teacher!

Throughout his dramatic life, starting with his journey from Baranovichi in Russia, across Europe, to Palestine; then earning his way to Paris, where Judo, engineering and physics awaited him, only to escape in 1940 just steps ahead of the German Army, carrying a suitcase full of secret nuclear research documents, Feldenkrais was adept in creating opportunities for himself.


He studied physics and Gurdjieff, engineering and Judo, neurology, evolution and yoga, mathematics and psychology, the Talmudic and Chassidic traditions. A wide-ranging, supple mind.

How did he pull this off?

Beginning with his studies of how untrained people react to being attacked in the late 1920s he accomplished something extraordinary. By 1950 he had transformed his thinking!


Moving from useful violence for protecting his community he produced a much wider contribution, something that is distinct, compelling, wise, fundamentally effective, efficient, new, and fascinating; where there are no losers, peaceful to the highest degree.

The result of his untamed curiosity is an astonishing body of work; hundreds of group lessons of Awareness through Movement and the creative improvisation of individual Functional Integration lessons.

How did he find the unseen opportunity that enables people to recognize their own pathway towards fulfilling that feeling of “something missing in my life”?
How did he build something that seems unstructured, where the lines of thinking seem to go in every direction from where ever we are standing, but all leading to a natural kind of logic? How did he integrate action and thought, organic and academic learning into his method?

In this upcoming online series, Moti Nativ, Jeff Haller and Roger Russell will follow the tracks of his thinking between 1930 and 1950 in six publications. His secret? Showing us how to take something familiar, something we believe we know well, and make it into something new, easy an aesthetically pleasing.