A healthy infant learns motor skills through a prolonged period of exploration that leads to increasingly efficient movement. The healthy infant's motor development is dictated both by the child's changing body structure in relation to its environment and brain maturation. Unfortunately, some children do not experience this natural developmental progression. The Feldenkrais method directly assists neurological learning by providing appropriate somato-sensory information from the practitioner's hands-on manipulation to the child's nervous system. Helping the child refine his muscular activity results in dramatic improvements in motor learning and brain function.

For example, children with cerebral palsy (CP) have brain injuries that limit their ability to move normally. CP children encounter delays in attaining milestones such as good head control, rolling over, sitting, and walking. Older CP children are often spastic, have poor motor coordination, and may be severely restricted in their movement, requiring the use of orthoses and adaptive equipment, surgery, or drugs. Their symptoms severely impair the quality of life for both the CP child and family. Other children may experience motor delays and disturbances without brain dysfunction. For example, infants and children who suffer physical trauma or disease undergo long periods of limited movement. They too may experience developmental difficulties as their bodies grow since the brain does not receive sufficient sensory information to rewire for optimal motor function.

In the Feldenkrais Method, directed somatosensory information is provided to the child's nervous system in a methodical way that allows the nervous system to synthesize and organize the information to produce coordinated movements. A key feature of successful implementation of the Feldenkrais Method is that the practitioner is engaged in a constant two-way somatosensory dialogue with the infant or child. The practitioner first supplies ordered somatosensory information allowing sufficient time for the child's brain to absorb and integrate the somatosensory information. When the child acts in response to this stimulation, attention, curiosity, and motivation are engaged for the purposes of exploring additional possible movements. By providing information to the nervous system, rather than externally imposing various positions and postures, the child's innate ability to explore and learn is engaged and the child has an opportunity to learn, resulting in significant improvements in function and acquisition of skill.

It is our experience that it is possible to create and apply strategies to achieve rapid improvement for children with mild to moderate CP using the exploratory learning approach of the Feldenkrais method. Usually, this leads to much better motor function than would have been possible otherwise.