Body Awareness as Healing Therapy: The Case of Nora [Paperback]

Moshe Feldenkrais (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1883319080 | ISBN-13: 978-1883319083 | Publication Date: December 20, 1993 | Edition: 2

Body Awareness as Healing Therapy: The Case of Nora is Moshe Feldenkrais' classic study of his work with Nora, a woman who has suffered a severe stroke and lost her neuromuscular coordination, including the ability to read and write. Feldenkrais uses rational and intuitive approaches to help his student relearn basic motor skills. One can observe here the groundwork of Feldenkrais' extraordinary insights which became known as the Feldenkrais Method. We follow his detailed descriptions of the trial and error process which led him to see the ingredients that were needed to help Nora reshape her attention, perception, imagination and cognition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...a rare gem. This book has inspired my students and me for over a decade with its intimate revelations detailing how Feldenkrais went about solving the problems of his case. It is of interest to medical practitioners who work directly with the body, as well as educators and psychotherapists."
-Don Hanlon Johnson, author of Body, Spirit and Democracy

"...an important literary and scientific achievement that reveals Feldenkrais' bold and original insights about learning and the brain. Nora's story is an inspiring account of the nervous system's ability to heal from trauma and the remarkable human capacity to learn."
-Mark Reese, so-author of Relaxercise

About the Author

Moshe Feldenkrais, D.Sc., is the founder of what is today called the Feldenkrais Method. As a result of suffering debilitating injuries Feldenkrais began an intense exploration into the relationship between bodily movement and healing, feeling, thinking, and learning. In the process of healing himself, Feldenkrais made revolutionary discoveries, culminating in the development of the method that now bears his name. There are two aspects to his method: an individual manipulatory technique of neuromotor education called Functional Integration and a group technique called Awareness Through Movement. His unique and subtle approach to facilitating human change and to improving functioning is spelled out in a number of influential books, including: Awareness Through Movement, Body and Mature Behavior, and The Elusive Obvious. Dr. Feldenkrais was also the author of a number of books about Judo and one of the first Europeans to hold a black belt in the art. Today there are nearly four thousand Feldenkrais Method Practitioners around the globe. His insights contributed to the development of the new field of somatic education and continue to influence disciplines such as the arts, education, psychology, child development, physical and occupational therapy, sports enhancement, and gerontology.

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Frog Books; 2 edition (December 20, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1883319080
• ISBN-13: 978-1883319083
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.2 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #601,824 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #68 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Disorders & Diseases > Strokes

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Learning - reformed!, April 5, 2001

By 

Gabor Renner "The teacher teaches what he nee... (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Body Awareness as Healing Therapy: The Case of Nora (Paperback)

The great educator, Professor Moshe Feldenkrais, describes his work in "An Adventure in the Jungle of the Brain" (Abenteuer im Dschungel des Gehirns) as this book is titled in German. And it is an adventure. A sixty year old business women wakes up one morning and cannot understand what has happend to her world. She discovers that she can neither read, get out of bed properly, cannot differenciate between her left and right slippers, bangs into the wall instead of passing through the bathroom door nor can she speak when she wants to express her irritation. Feldenkrais describes in detail all the steps he takes to discover how he can facilitate her brain to reajust and regenerate her capabilities to cope with the world again. He discribes his investigations, the mistakes and successes. This book is really a description on how we learn to learn and how we need to embrase our mistakes for only due to them we develope the facilities to learn. Gábor, Feldenkrais Movement Educator

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tiny book huge treasure, December 5, 2003

By 

Eli Guy "Feldenkrais practitioner plus" (jerusalem) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Body Awareness as Healing Therapy: The Case of Nora (Paperback)

"The Case of Nora" is titled, or subtitled, in some languages "A Journey in the Jungle of the Brain". In fact, this book, modest in its dimensions, allows us to take a tiny little but invaluable journey into Feldenkrais' brain, so to say. For anyone interested in how this unusual man was thinking, it is a rare pearl among the Master's books. The text is so condensed that if you want to highlight key sentences you better get yourself a couple of markers, because you are going to highlight almost everything. Poor me, trying to review it: those of you who have read my other reviews of Moshe's books know that I try to reflect the uniqueness of each book mainly by quoting. Thus I hope my reader can get a substatial hint of what the book is about. But here - two thirds of the text are worthy of quotation in a review, so were to begin? Alas, I have already wasted too much space in this foreword... I hurry to the (Hebrew) text. The following will be almost as good as quoting (while translating), but of course I hope you will go to the origin. Moshe's own text is soooo beautiful.

The most important kind of learning is that in which quantity becomes a new quality... Often we even don't notice this kind of learning... As if without purpose... and suddenly a new form of activity emerges as if out of nowhere... Repeating and learning by rote, preaching, reward and punishment are of no use...
While waiting [some days or weeks] I thought about her [his client] a great deal, as I always do with my clients... I have no stereotype technique... Is is contrary to the principles of my theory... I gradually explore all the body functions. Structure and function are tightly connected... I imagine the nervous systems involved. I imagine a part of the body sending a stream of liquids, sometimes electrical sometimes chemical. After many transformations it ends in muscular action which results in an observable action. When my imaginary picture of the flow is stuck in one point... I ask myself: is it diffusion? Soft obstacle? Deviation? Loss of swing? Break in the continuity? Or perhaps one of the transformations was disabled?

Try to put on your shoes in every impossible way and you will be surprised to find out how unlikely is a success by chance is... How wonderful and complex is our usual way of action.... Have you asked yourselves why relaxation and reducing tension were needed prior to this kind of instruction? What is simple and well known is not always easy to understand...

In the enabling the adult's learning process it is crucial to guess the age into which the client regressed. Growth means order. It is impossible to reverse this natural order. Had I not learned to perceive minute changes I would not have been able to endure the endless repetitions required in instruction.

Spacial Orientation is an abstract concept and as such I can not treat it. I don't know how to correct the function "Spacial Orientation" but I do know how to help a person distinguish between right and left.

As long as people [who were unable to perform a certain action for many years] are not able to do it at home at their own initiative they do not feel that they have "recovered". Recovery is the reversal to the exact state to the state of functioning which satisfied her before the trauma. But life is a process, indeed - a process which can not be reversed. Improvement, unlike recovery, is knowledge acquired by us and which allows us freedom of choice, the main and special privilege of 'homo sapiens'.

THIS, I THINK, CAN GIVE YOU a hint of the nature of this book. Sometimes when reading his books it seems to me that Moshe was so overloaded with multidimensional thinking, that he had a sense of needing to compromise painfully in order to unfold his ideas on the flat dimension of a written text. In this unique book he seems to opt for a practical solution of the dilemma: he presents an introspection of a completed process, and sort of recaptures his own deliberation in retrospect.
Here he is very personal and honest. For anyone interested in his method, either as a student or as a practitioner, the specialty of the book is the "tour of the backstage" here presented. It is an excellent remedy against the illusion that there might be a handbook, or a guide, to the Feldenkrais Method. Rather, what we can try to follow is an orientation, a way of thinking, an attitude. And (have I already mentioned it?) a glimpse into the subtle issues of the "workshop" - hints about what was going on behind the "magic" of the Master's effectiveness. Surely - much of it is indeed magic, but it was magic conceived by careful, untiring and perceptive deliberation.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Infants hear in the womb, seeing comes two weeks after birth, April 2, 2011

By 

T. Patrick Killough "All about Patrick" (Black Mountain, NC United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Body Awareness as Healing Therapy: The Case of Nora (Paperback)

Over a period of many months of hands-on treatment in Israel, Doctor of Physics Moshe Pinhas Feldenkrais taught a Swiss woman in her 60s whom he calls Nora to read and write. Over 55 years previously, Nora's parents and teachers had lifted her into the world of books and writing. But three years before coming to Feldenkrais, Nora had had a mild stroke. Her body was left tense, her educated speech was slightly slurred and she could no longer read and write.

Nora made two trips to Israel to take treatment from Feldenkrais. In BODY AWARENESS AS HEALING THERAPY - THE CASE OF NORA, Feldenkrais documents step by steps his hunches, false starts, lucky guesses and insights from others that he applied to teach his often depressed pupil to read and write once more. He learned that in most important ways Nora's eyesight functioned well, though one eye was notably stronger than the other. He reasoned that he would have to go back to the stage in Nora's life when as a young girl she had first mastered the lost skills.

This proved a long, long psychic and therepeutic journey. But it worked. Feldenkrais reasoned that we come to reading only after mastering talking and learning to talk ourselves via the talk of others. He taught Nora to hold a straw (later a pencil, later a pen) in her mouth to focus her eyes on the printed page. To some extent that worked, but her focus initially was not on the top line upper left. And even as she improved, she did not remember to turn the pages she had completed. Later he decided to make Nora's learning even child-friendly and relaxed: he substituted picture books with light text for 100% texts.

He and she working together re-integrated the shattered "functionality" of her stroke-shattered unity of will power, muscles, fingers, thumbs, eyes and general body awareness. Moshe Feldenkrais shares with us his thinking processes, a latter-day Sherlock Holmes of health. Before we young humans see, we hear. Before we control our index fingers we suck mother's milk. Neither we nor Moshe Feldenkrais can reverse the natural order of learning. For infants hearing begins in the womb, seeing comes two weeks after birth. At one point Moshe told a student observing Nora in her re-learning jorney: "Do we not read with our mouths?" (Ch. 5).

If this book had an index, I think I would rate it FIVE STARS * * * * *. Why doesn't the next editor render this defect in THE CASE OF NORA?

-OOO-