Transcript: How Feldenkrais Can Support Desire, Pleasure, and Pain Relief

Better Sex Podcast, Episode 432 Host: Jessa Zimmerman, MA Guest: Beverly Atkins, Guild-Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner and founder of Pauseture

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This transcript has been lightly edited for readability. Filler words and false starts have been removed. Better Sex is hosted by Jessa Zimmerman at jessazimmerman.com.

Welcome

Jessa: Beverly, thank you so much for joining me, and for reaching out to me to get on the show.

Beverly: Thank you for having me.

Jessa: So I want to understand your history with Feldenkrais, but also, what is it? Maybe you could define it first, or talk about it a little bit, and then share your story about coming to this work.

What the Feldenkrais Method Is

Beverly: Sure. The Feldenkrais Method is a movement practice that helps to reorganize your nervous system and your brain for more efficient movement patterns. Most people are attracted to the method for physical pain, and often they'll come to it after they've tried everything. It is my mission and my hope that people will try it earlier in life, or when aches and pains start, so they don't have to get into such a bad situation.

Beverly's Story: Debilitating Back Pain

Beverly: I came across the method 12 years ago. I was 47 years old at the time, and I had debilitating back pain. I had recurring back pain and hip pain going back to high school, frankly. I started seeing a chiropractor in high school, and it was something I managed through appointments. My self-care consisted of booking massages. I thought self-care meant spending money to have somebody care for your body.

And 12 years ago, when I put my back out, three weeks in, everything I had tried before was not only not helping, but making it worse. Three weeks in is often when acute pain and inflammation can turn into chronic pain, because your nervous system's holding and thinking it's protecting you. There is a way out of it, but it's not through stretching or efforting or trying harder.

So three weeks in, I literally crawled my way into a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lesson. I was at a resort where I was unable to do the typical fitness classes because of the back pain, and the lesson was described as "lie on the floor, make slow, gentle movements to improve your posture and your movement." And I thought, "You know what? There's not much else I can do. I'm going to try this class."

Jessa: So it was totally random that you were at a place and this class was there right when you needed it? Or divine intervention, right? Serendipity.

Beverly: That's exactly right. It's interesting, because my friend who referred me to this resort said, "You have to go, because every time I go, I connect with somebody. Life-changing things happen there." It was a trip I planned with two of my sisters and my niece, and when we planned it months and months in advance, the plan was that we'd be doing the fitness classes and hiking and massages. Fun sister time. And I'm literally crawling around. We had to take a bus from San Diego to Tecate, Mexico, and I was on the bus with every bump just crying, in so much pain. The first day we were there, my sisters went off to the fitness classes, and I could only walk at a 90-degree angle, so I made my way into the class.

The First Lesson

Beverly: The instructor, a very non-verbal person who used very few words, just said, "Lie on the floor, close your eyes, and don't be tempted to open your eyes and look at how other people are interpreting my verbal cues. Just do what you think you need to do, because what you hear is what your body needs to do. And always stay safe. If anything feels uncomfortable, just rest or visualize the movement."

My listening skills at that time in my life were not particularly strong, and I was so used to yoga and looking at how to do a movement that I didn't know how I felt. I had no idea. I had been in performance mode, trying to do things correctly, and I had a very hypervigilant personality. At the time I would have called it a personality. I would now say it was my nervous system. I was a little frustrated and confused in the class, thinking, "I don't know if I'm doing this right." I really wanted to open my eyes, but I didn't. And at the end of the 45 minutes, I stood up completely upright, not at a 90-degree angle, and I didn't have any pain.

I just thought, "What just happened to me?" I went to the teacher, inquiring, and she said, "Just keep doing the lessons." She gave me no information. Teachers in the method tend to do that, because the way the method was originally taught by Moshe Feldenkrais, he didn't want his students to regurgitate what they were told. He wanted people to really embody it and have their nervous system find what feels good for them. So she didn't really explain what happened, and I was just curious. I thought, "How is this possible?" Then she gave me 24 abbreviated lessons to do when I got home, and I was committed to improving my posture and not having the back pain come back.

Sleep, Calm, and Down-Regulating

Beverly: For 24 days, I did these lessons, and before I even knew I had a nervous system to be regulated, within those three weeks, I started sleeping better for the first time in my life. I had lifelong insomnia. And again, I was curious: after a lifetime of insomnia, how is it possible I'm sleeping better?

There are a lot of rib-opening lessons, so I assumed, "Oh, I'm opening my ribs, so I'm breathing deeper, and because I'm breathing deeper, I can sleep better." But it's more than that. I was always on overdrive and achievement-oriented, and for the first time in my life, I was down-regulating and finding some calm before my day even began, with these lessons.

The Nervous System, Autopilot, and Movement

Jessa: All right, now I have so many questions. You're referring to your nervous system, and then these movements and exercises. How does this all go together? Maybe you could speak to the role of our nervous system and how our body moves and feels, and why we can get to it through movement.

Beverly: Our nervous systems are designed to be on autopilot so that you can walk without thinking about how you're walking. But things can interrupt the greatest efficiency of movement. Your nervous system wants homeostasis. It wants to go back to what it knows and what feels familiar. Otherwise, if you're thinking about how you're moving and sensing and feeling, that can interrupt your day of thinking about other things. So these lessons were designed to interrupt that autopilot and nudge it...

Jessa: Oh, because the autopilot at this point is not helpful, right? It's not relaxed or efficient or ergonomic.

Beverly: That's exactly right. You want to be on autopilot so you're not drained from thinking about things, but when your autopilot has adapted to inefficient movement patterns...

Most of our culture of stretching, physical therapy, chiropractic, and most wellness practices are corrective. So, "Let's snap you this way, let's fix this, let's pull your shoulders back, let's use muscular effort to fix what's wrong." This method is about slowing down, noticing how you feel, and exploring your movement patterns to notice the difference between what's familiar, because your nervous system and the autopilot love familiar.

Jessa: Right. And the brain is wired for that.

Beverly: Interestingly enough, these lessons were designed in the 1940s by Moshe Feldenkrais. He said he was after flexible brains, not flexible bodies. And the word neuroplasticity was not validated until the 1980s and 1990s, so he was about 40 years ahead of his time in knowing that if you slow down and you support your patterns, whatever your pattern is for your unique nervous system, you go deeper into the pattern instead of correcting it. And when you go deeper into what feels good for you, that opens up choice in how you move. So it's a very gentle interruption of your movement patterns. It's not necessarily a quick fix, but over time, with practice, you can reorganize your nervous system.

Nervous System Regulation or Pain Relief?

Jessa: Okay. And I guess, are the goals equal? Regulate your nervous system, and move efficiently and well so you're not in pain? Is there an emphasis on one or the other, and the other one's just a benefit?

Beverly: That's a great question. I personally feel, from what I learned through my private practice... I found these lessons in 2014. In 2016, I started a four-year training program because it was so life-changing for me, and I was wondering, why am I focusing better? Why am I connecting with others? Prior to doing these lessons, I had to be right about everything, as long as I could state my opinion and convince everybody how right I was. I just started showing up in conversation and in relationships with more curiosity, and that curiosity really started with neutral attention on, "Yeah, this is the way I move and it's comfortable for me, but huh, is there a different way to move?" The lessons are a bit like a puzzle sometimes. The longer lessons are a bit of a puzzle, so that you start to get curious and ask, "Is there actually a different way to do this?"

So, to answer your question about whether there's a priority of one or the other, what I find really interesting from my private practice, when I was working one-on-one with people, is that when we're achievement-oriented, "I want to fix this pain, I want to fix this pain," or "I want to improve my sex life, I'm going to improve my desire," when we get too ambitious in any goal orientation, to me, you stay in that efforting and trying and achievement. So the lessons really are about being present in the lesson without being goal-oriented.

Jessa: In which case, I guess you can get surprised by what shows up, and what the biggest shift is for any particular person. Is it the pain? Is it the nervous system? Is it the relatedness? The gifts are probably different for everybody, or the balance of gifts, right?

Beverly: That's exactly right. And when I did my first lesson, I thought, "Why does nobody know about this?" I thought, "They need to build a back pain app, because so many people have back pain, and we need to get this out into the world." When I signed up for my training, it was because I wanted to learn this so I could create a back pain app. That was my original goal. When I went through the four-year training and then opened a private practice, I realized it's way more than back pain.

Building Pauseture

Beverly: So I've since created an app to make the lessons affordable and accessible, because this method has been kind of gatekept, really available to privileged people. I was at a very expensive health and wellness resort when I came across it, and my mission has always been to make it accessible to more people. There are hundreds of free lessons online, because teachers will teach a live lesson and record it to the internet, but those lessons are usually 45 minutes to an hour. My goal was to make the sound engineering quiet, because for me, nervous system regulation goes hand in hand with a quiet environment. And I wanted shorter lessons, because I believe that a consistent daily practice, as opposed to a once-a-week or once-a-month practice, is really important.

Jessa: You were ahead of your time wanting to do an app four years ago. And now, having just developed my own app, I can see the technology has changed so that somebody with this knowledge and insight can actually make an app, which is really cool.

Beverly: Yes. The technologies have definitely changed and are making it cheaper and more affordable to do it.

Jessa: More attainable. You don't have to be a coder or a tech person or spend $100,000 to do it anymore, which is great.

Beverly: Exactly.

A 21-Lesson Test Program, and Surprising Results

Beverly: To answer the question about which it is, what's interesting is that we recently ran a test program in the app for nervous system regulation. I've been very nervous about promising this as a pain relief app, because pain is complex, and if I don't see the person moving, I don't know what's right for them. There is a right lesson for them, but until we improve our technology and we scan them walking and can say, "Okay, for your movement patterns, this is the right lesson for you," I don't want to promise that.

So I recruited about 300 testers from an online nervous system regulation group, and I did not position the app for any other benefit than nervous system regulation. I made no promises about anything else. People would apply for the program. Nobody shared anything about pain. We have a 21-lesson series, which is what I wanted to test: if they do these short-form lessons over 21 days, will they feel more regulated? And 85% of the people who completed the 21 lessons reported feeling better. Then I started getting emails about surprising benefits for longstanding pain. It's what motivates me every single day to have more conversations about this app.

There's one example, and she's given me permission to share her information. This woman had SI joint pain since pregnancy, and she was one year postpartum and not able to walk more than 15 minutes at a time because of the SI joint pain. On the 18th lesson, which is our Pelvic Clock lesson, her pain was completely gone. She told me, "And then I went for a three-hour walk and I'm..." I'd advise maybe starting with 30 minutes and then building up, because otherwise that can create a whole new set of problems. But those are the types of emails I started to get, and the person doing it wasn't doing it to relieve the pain. She just wanted to regulate her nervous system and sleep better, and she also reported back that she is sleeping better than she has in 10 years.

Desire, Intimacy, and the Nervous System

Jessa: Wow. All right. How does this relate, potentially, to sex and intimacy?

Beverly: I noticed for myself, when I started doing the lessons, I was 47, perimenopausal, single, not in a relationship at the time. At that point, I hadn't been informed about hormone replacement yet, and I just thought, "No need to date. This is just going to be the rest of my life. I'm super focused on my career. I'm going to do great things in my career." I was working in ad sales at the time. As I started to do these lessons, even before I got on hormone replacement, I started to feel more awake. And then, talking to other colleagues or people in my training, and in the more conversations I've had, I heard similar stories of it waking up desire. It really starts, again, without being achievement-oriented. It's about getting curious about what feels good for you. And when you find what feels good for you in your own body, it awakens desire for intimacy.

Jessa: Yeah. And I'm sure there's a correlation, too, with the nervous system, right? If you're in fight or flight, or activated, versus safe, that's probably a barrier to desire, and maybe arousal also.

Beverly: That's exactly right. And I think in our current culture, so many of us are go, go, go, go, go, and we are not light switches. We can't just say, "Okay, I'm going to be achievement-oriented for almost all of the day, and now I'm going to flip a switch and be able to sleep, or flip a switch and have desire for intimacy." We just don't operate that way.

For me, my practice was in the morning. I did the lessons before work because I worked in a very stimulating environment, and as I was navigating perimenopause, I was reactive in the workplace. I was having challenges at work. I really needed the lessons to show up to work more calm and to connect with my colleagues better, and that was my reason for doing them. I was time-constrained, so I wasn't even doing the lessons in the evening, but that set the regulation for the day. That then opened up regulation, and desire for things other than work, later in the day, even though I was doing the lessons earlier in the day.

The Pelvis and the Pelvic Clock

Jessa: So out of the 21 lessons, is there one that's really focused on the pelvis, or is that woven throughout the whole 21 days? I'm curious, because I don't know how many exercises really focus on the pelvis. What do you find happens, or is related to what's going on in our pelvis?

Beverly: The reason we've built the 21 lessons the way we have: the first lesson is simply rolling your head. Just lying on the floor and rolling your head. There's a lot of talk now about vagus nerve stimulation, and for many people, just lying on the floor, letting go of muscular tension, and rolling your head will shift you into a rest-and-digest, safe, comfortable mode. So that's the first lesson. The next lesson is crossing one leg over the other and tilting your legs as you roll your head, together and then in opposite directions.

The sneaky thing we do in this method is that we're directing your limbs to move in that lesson, and we may not even mention the pelvis, but we're sneaking it in. For a lot of people who have habitual chronic tension in their pelvis, when I had clients with very tight pelvises lying on my table, if I put my hands on their pelvis and said, "Let's start rocking and rolling and twisting this," they're going to brace and they're going to tighten even more. So we sneak in the pelvic movements by asking you to move your limbs, and it's the same in the audio lessons. If we go too soon to the pelvis, the bracing continues.

The magic, classic lesson in the Feldenkrais Method is the Pelvic Clock lesson, and it solves almost all pain: neck pain, jaw pain, shoulders. But it's incredibly nuanced. If that's the first lesson you do, you're probably going to over-tighten, and you're going to work too hard, and it's not going to be a helpful lesson. That's why we build up to it. The 21 lessons are five to 18 minutes, so that was my big experiment: can we shorten the lessons to invite consistency, and can there still be a payoff? The Pelvic Clock lesson in the app is 11 minutes long, but it is leading up, and the nervous system is learning for the 18 lessons prior to that lesson.

Jessa: I don't know if you've got an actual answer or just your own theory, but why is the pelvis so important? I get that it's in the middle of our body, but why is this the seat of everything, that this could relieve all pain? How does that get blocked, and why is it so important to work with it?

Beverly: Our biggest muscles are supporting and around your pelvis. For many people, we over-effort with our arms and other limbs, and getting the power of your pelvis really gives you mobility through everything else. So even if you have carpal tunnel in your hands, getting mobility in the pelvis can help with that, because you're tapping into the biggest muscles.

Now, why does the pelvis get overly tight? For many reasons. For some people it's injury. For some people, from infancy their parents put them in contraptions, and instead of crawling, which gives you a mobile pelvis, if a child skips a lot of the crawling phase and goes straight to walking, from a very young age they may not have a mobile pelvis. Or often trauma. If you are in danger, your nervous system is going to tighten your flexor muscles, which are around your pelvis. Whether you're fighting, fleeing, or freezing, whichever one your nervous system chooses, the first thing that happens is those flexor muscles tighten. And then the nervous system says, "Hey, tightening my pelvis, tightening these muscles keeps me safe, so we're going to keep them there." For a lot of people, that's why they have a tightened pelvis. Also, with our culture of fitness regimens, there's that tight core, tight, tight, tight, and there's a lot of over-tightening in the pelvis that you may not even be aware of.

Jessa: You may actually be proud of it, right? And that becomes the autopilot, right? You're all braced or tense or tight.

Beverly: Exactly. So these lessons invite in the softening. I'm not saying having a tight core is bad, but you want options. At times you want to be tight, and at times you want to find the softness in the belly so that you can gently tilt your pelvis. If you have a job where you're sitting all day, finding that tilting of the pelvis, forward and back, side to side, as opposed to just staying fixed for eight hours, finding that pelvic movement. But again, you can't say, "Relax your pelvis." You can't do it through your brain.

Jessa: You can't command it. You can't say, "Hey, pelvis, relax."

Beverly: Right. It's going to tighten more.

Jessa: Yeah. So you have to go in a kind of sneaky way to trick it into releasing that holding.

What People Report About Intimacy

Jessa: Is there anything else that you've heard from people you've worked with, whether it was respondents to your experiment or your own clients, that talked about any sort of intimate or sexual changes after this work?

Beverly: It's interesting, because with actual testers and subscribers, as I'm sure you're aware, people are very private with that.

Jessa: Yes.

Beverly: They're not going to send me an email and say, "Oh my God, I had the best sex." But when we were very early on testing the app, I did it with friends and family, and in confidence, friends and family told me it was helping with intimacy. What's interesting is I think men really love the lessons in the app. The people among my friends and family who were doing it were partners or husbands and wives, and I was getting that feedback from them.

Since the app launched, and very early on we had more technical glitches than I would've liked, but I think we've worked almost all of them out now, I thought, "Gosh, do we have more male subscribers than female?" because every time I got an email, it was from a man, about how much he was liking the app. I think part of that is that men don't have a place to go for a movement practice. Women have yoga and Pilates, and men don't want to get a yoga mat and go to a class. So men have really enjoyed using the app, and I've gotten subtle references: "I'm loving this app, and my wife is loving that I'm loving this app."

Jessa: Great, for both.

Beverly: Yes. And I actually have one colleague, we're in the very early stages, who is at a major university, and she is working to put together a 30-day study of specific lessons from the app to measure whether it improves sexual desire.

Jessa: Or even pleasure, conceivably, right?

Beverly: Yes.

Jessa: Interesting.

Where to Find Pauseture

Jessa: All right. So where do people go? What is the app called? We keep referring to the app, and we haven't named it yet. Where do people go for more information? How do they find it?

Beverly: The app is called Pauseture, because we're inviting you to take a pause every day, and without being corrective, you can improve your posture. If you go to pauseture.com, on the website we have supporting research. This isn't a woo-woo kind of method. It is supported by evidence-based science, and we have a lot of research on there to support the science. From the website, you can link to either the Google Play Store or the App Store, or you can go straight to Google Play or the Apple App Store and search for Pauseture or search for Feldenkrais. The app will come up.

We have a seven-day free trial, but what we have found with the seven-day free trial is that people rush through the 21-lesson series because they want to get the most out of those seven days. I really want people to explore the lessons unambitiously, because unlike everything else in life, these lessons work better if you're unambitious and take your time with them. So I've created a redemption code in both the Apple App Store and Google Play: SEX30. If you put in that redemption code, you can have a 30-day free trial, so you can explore the app at your leisure without paying anything.

What to Do After the 21 Lessons

Jessa: Okay. And just a follow-up question: do people just keep doing the 21 lessons, 21 days, over and over again, or what do people do after that?

Beverly: Please, please do not do it that way.

Jessa: Okay. Well, I'm glad I asked that, because that's probably what I would've done.

Beverly: Yes. There are 365 lessons in the app, because neuroscience research supports that it's the novelty that matters. You can definitely revisit lessons and get re-primed with your favorite lessons, and definitely go back to the Pelvic Clock lesson once you've done it. But when you explore lessons you've never done, that's when the brain fires up for change. We did not launch the app until we had 365 lessons.

What I would encourage is the 21-lesson intro, which is five to 18 minutes long, and then after that we have 21 More Lessons, which are 20 to 30 minutes, and they definitely unlock even deeper changes because they're more of the full lessons, as opposed to just nervous system regulating. The next 21 lessons are more about musculoskeletal reorganization.

Jessa: Okay. And are you going to keep adding lessons? Someone should be doing a new one all the time, or at some point do you start to recycle, as a user?

Beverly: You can definitely revisit lessons, and if you haven't done one for a while, it's going to feel like it's new. I do not teach in the app. Right now we have 11 teachers in the app and 365 lessons, and we will be adding more teachers and more lessons. There are thousands of these lessons, because Moshe Feldenkrais knew it was the novelty that mattered to rewire brains. So we will keep adding teachers and lessons over time.

Jessa: Great. Well, thank you so much for coming and talking about this.

Beverly: Thank you. I appreciate talking to you.

Better Sex is hosted by Jessa Zimmerman. Listen to this episode on her episode page. Learn more about Pauseture at pauseture.com.