Feldenkrais for Chronic Pain: Gentle Movement, Back Pain Relief & Mind-Body Healing with Beverly

Feldenkrais for Chronic Pain: Gentle Movement, Back Pain Relief & Mind-Body Healing with Beverly Beyond The Pain with Leigh Brandon

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Leigh: Pain can change the way you move, the way you think, the way you feel, and the way you live your everyday life. One of the most frustrating things about persistent pain is that even when you've tried treatments, therapies, exercises, stretches, or hands-on work, the relief can sometimes be temporary and the pain comes back again.

What if the missing piece is not simply doing more, pushing harder, or trying to fix the painful area? What if the answers lie in helping the brain and nervous system discover new movement options?

In this episode, I'm joined by Beverly, a certified Feldenkrais practitioner and founder of Pauseture. Beverly's own journey into this work began after experiencing debilitating back pain, which eventually led her to discover the Feldenkrais Method — a gentle awareness-based approach to movement education.

In this conversation, we discuss how Feldenkrais may help people living with chronic pain, why persistent pain can sometimes involve the brain and nervous system becoming stuck in a loop, and how gentle, unfamiliar movements can help interrupt old patterns. We also explore why Feldenkrais practitioners do not diagnose, treat, or cure, but instead work as movement educators — helping people shift the focus from "take my pain away" to "what do you want to be able to do again?"

For some people, that might mean returning to sport. For others, it might mean putting on their own socks, lifting a laundry basket, or moving through the day with more comfort and confidence.

If you've been living with chronic pain, recurring pain, stiffness, tension, or fear around movement, this episode may give you a very different way of thinking about your body and recovery.

Beverly, welcome to Beyond the Pain. Great to have you on the show.

Beverly: Thank you so much for having me, Leigh.

Leigh: To kick things off, can you start by sharing a little bit about your story and how you became a Feldenkrais practitioner, particularly helping people with chronic pain?

Beverly: In 2014, I was working at the Facebook Los Angeles office in an advertising sales role. It was a small office at the time, and I had a very dysregulated nervous system for a variety of reasons. A primary reason was that I have always been sensitive to sounds, and the open workspace in that particular environment was very noisy. It dysregulated my nervous system even more, which led to me being quite reactive in the workplace. Frankly, I was struggling.

I was holding in my reactivity — and we know what happens when you hold things in. It was a contributing factor to me putting my back out. On a Monday morning after a three-day holiday weekend, I went to put my pants on to go to work and my back snapped. I had had back issues in the past, but this was at a different level — to the point I thought something broke and I was broken.

I immediately went to my primary care physician, who assured me I was not broken and prescribed pain pills. The first week, I laid in the fetal position with my laptop at home, trying to work remotely in pretty excruciating pain. By weeks two and three, I knew I needed to get back to work, so I tapped into the modalities that had helped me in the past — but nothing was helping. I could not stand up vertical. The only way I could walk was bent at a 90-degree angle.

As fate would have it, at the end of the third week, I had a planned vacation to a health and wellness resort. As my sisters went off to cardio kickboxing classes, I read the course descriptions and found one that said: "Lie on the floor and make small, gentle movements to improve your movement and your posture." That sounded really good to me.

I walked at a 90-degree angle into that lesson. The instructor said, "Lie on the floor, close your eyes, and as tempting as it is, do not look at other students. I will not be demonstrating anything, and if you're confused, that's okay — just interpret my instructions to the best of your ability."

It was so unfamiliar for me. I had done yoga for years and always mimicked how a teacher demonstrated. I also have ADHD inattentive type — I didn't know it at the time — so my listening skills were not particularly strong. Doing this type of lesson was confusing and a little frustrating.

But after an hour of doing the lesson, I stood up vertical with absolutely no pain. It left me deeply curious about what could have happened. Every day that week, I returned to the class. I will say that later in the day the pain did come back — I'm not saying one lesson was a miracle cure. But it gave me relief, and each new lesson brought more. By the end of the week, I was 100%.

I went to the teacher at the end of the week and said, "Why have I never heard of this? What is it, and how do I take this home with me?" She said, "I have 24 free lessons on my website. Do those." That was my start.

Leigh: Why is the method so unknown?

Beverly: The name is tricky, and the training program to become a certified Feldenkrais practitioner is 800 hours over four years — typically structured as eight weeks spread out over the course of the year. Bringing working professionals into this modality is challenging.

Also, Moshe Feldenkrais, who developed the method, was very anti-educational systems. He felt that educated people were often just regurgitating. He did not want to give great clarity into what the method was — he wanted your nervous system to embody and learn it, rather than describe it. That's a great philosophy, but in our modern world, being able to explain to people why the method is helpful is a necessary skill. Without that clarity, it has remained limited in scope.

Leigh: So you went on this week-long wellness retreat, were told there were 24 free lessons online. What happened when you went back home?

Beverly: I was absolutely committed to doing those 24 lessons. Primarily, I was feeling really good — and I was committed to not having the back pain return.

Let me explain why I was so fearful about back pain. In 1993, my mother was 53 years old. She had recently been licensed as a psychologist after a career as a psychiatric nurse, and she was working at a pain care center, counseling people to learn to live with their chronic pain. She put her back out and ended up on disability. She felt enormous guilt for telling people how to live with their pain — because that was all that was being offered. The only solutions offered to her were pain pills, and she was in recovery, so she would not take them. The other alternative was back surgery, which she opted for — and it made the pain even worse. They told her, "Give it six weeks. You will feel better." Six weeks to the day after the surgery, she took her own life because she could not imagine living with that pain.

When I stood up after that first lesson with no back pain, I couldn't help but think how her outcome may have been different if she had had access to this method. The method existed in 1993, but it was a very small community. That frustrated me. I was working at Facebook at the time, and our brains were wired for scale — don't help a million people, help a billion. My frustration around this method not being available to more people led me to think: I need to figure out how to help this community reach more people. But my first order of business was doing those 24 lessons.

The lessons were abbreviated versions of full lessons — mostly 20 to 30 minutes long — and I did them every day before work. Something beyond my posture and back pain staying away started to happen. Before I even knew the term nervous system regulation, that is what was happening to me. I began sleeping better. My thinking mind said, "Oh, there are a lot of rib-opening lessons, so I'm breathing better, and because I'm breathing better, I'm sleeping better." But it was beyond that. I was going into a meditative state because I had to listen so intently to the lessons — and because of my ADHD, traditional meditation had never been accessible to me.

I began showing up to work less reactive. I wasn't having to hold in my reactivity. I was genuinely more regulated, and I could co-regulate with other people better. Instead of having conflict, I could truly put myself in their shoes and understand why they saw things differently than I did. Everything just got a little softer and a little easier — within that first 24 days.

Leigh: How did you get from finishing those 24 days to deciding to become a practitioner yourself?

Beverly: I began repeating those 24 lessons, but they weren't as magical the second time. I wasn't as regulated as I had been the first time. I knew intuitively it was the novelty of the movements that made them so powerful. So I went on a massive hunt, collecting as many lessons as I could find.

My initial thought wasn't to become a practitioner — it was to reach out to the Feldenkrais organization and help them scale. But I realized I needed to understand the method first before I could advise them on anything. I looked into the training, saw it was four years, and the next program didn't start until 2016. I applied, was accepted, and thought: when I run out of vacation days, I'll leave Facebook.

I was able to make it work because when you have a regulated nervous system, you get along with your colleagues and managers better — and somehow you end up with more flexibility. I completed the four-year training program while still working at Facebook. At the end of the training, I resigned from Facebook.

My mentor said: before you build this app idea, you need to open a private practice, because the only way to understand this method is to work with people who need it. So I completely backburnered scaling the method to everyone, slowed down, and opened a private practice. That was historically very unlike me — I had always been impulsive and fast-moving. I think doing the method had genuinely invited me to slow down.

Most of my clients were in chronic pain. The two sources I heard most often were Norman Doidge's book, "The Brain's Way of Healing," and Bessel van der Kolk's "The Body Keeps the Score." I built a full practice during the pandemic by working online when many practitioners weren't practicing, and then in person as things opened up.

Leigh: What patterns have you noticed about why pain often persists even after people have tried things like physical therapy, stretching, strengthening, or chiropractic?

Beverly: I think of persistent pain in two ways.

The first is chronic pain where the body has healed, but the brain is stuck in a loop. What needs to happen is pattern interruption — breaking the loop. Our lessons do this through confusing movements, or by moving the eyes in a different direction independently of the head. Breaking those habitual patterns up is important.

I will also say this is not an end-all be-all. Clients with newer chronic pain — a few years — responded incredibly well in a short amount of time. But clients who had lived with chronic pain for 15 or 20 years often needed support in other ways too — separate pain retraining programs, for example. Gentle movement with me combined with a pain retraining program produced good outcomes.

The second type is recurring pain — someone who gets better with treatment, feels relief, but then their nervous system returns to its old patterns. Because while the modality gave them temporary relief, the underlying patterns didn't change. What the Feldenkrais Method does is work with the nervous system to learn and adapt new patterns.

Within the method, there are two modalities. Functional Integration is hands-on, one-on-one work. As Feldenkrais practitioners, we do not diagnose, treat, or cure — we are movement educators. When a client came to me and I asked what their goal was, they often said "take my pain away." I would redirect: what movement are you limited in doing? What do you want to be able to do after this lesson? The answers ranged from "sign up for a 10K" to "put my own socks on" to "carry a laundry basket."

Early in my practice, I learned not to ask "how's your pain?" when a client returned. When you look for pain, you find it. I shifted to: how's your movement? What activities have you been able to do? Thinking in the positive gets the brain out of the hyperloop of focusing on pain. Once you are in three weeks of that kind of pain, it's genuinely hard to think beyond it. But orienting toward function rather than pain makes a real difference.

Leigh: You mentioned two modalities. Can you clarify?

Beverly: Functional Integration is one-on-one and typically hands-on. The core benefit is that we move the student slower and smaller than they ever would on their own — we are all programmed to go fast and big. I think of it as a dance of the nervous system. I need to be in a very calm, slow, easy state, moving them in ways much smaller and slower than they would ever choose.

In my practice over time, I often gave clients self-directed movement within the hands-on session, because I believe the learning is more transformative when you are moving yourself with attention. That mirrors the second modality — Awareness Through Movement — which is traditionally group classes where the teacher gives verbal cues and the student self-directs.

The disadvantage of self-directed movement is that we tend to go bigger and faster on our own. But that's okay in the beginning. I taught live classes at a public library, and the students going really big and really fast were often the ones who came up after and said "that was life-changing" — and kept coming back. You need to do what your nervous system needs today. But over time, students find that going slower and smaller is where the real change happens. Current neuroplastic science backs this up: slowness, smallness, and focused attention are when the brain fires up for new neural pathways.

Also fascinating from neuroscience: you actually need to make mistakes in order for the nervous system to learn. If you demonstrate and someone mimics perfectly, the nervous system learns nothing. It's in the confusion and the wrong attempts where learning happens — which is completely counterintuitive to our culture of getting it right.

Leigh: How do habitual movement patterns contribute to ongoing pain, and why are they so difficult for people to recognize?

Beverly: We're all operating on autopilot. If we had to consciously think about how we walked or how we moved, it would be mentally fatiguing. So we operate on autopilot — and for whatever reason, from a past injury or a long-held posture, those patterns become fixed.

For me, I was tall and always wanted to make myself smaller. I had a hunched posture from a very young age. That posture led to inefficient breathing. When I put my back out putting on my pants, it wasn't the pants that did it — it was decades of that forward pattern finally catching up.

The habitual patterns are difficult to interrupt because we are designed to work on autopilot. And it is not the pain that's inevitable with age — it is those decades of movement patterns eventually catching up. It's the muscle imbalances from habitual patterns that wear out joints over time.

I had a client who put her back out unloading the dishwasher. She had simply stopped bending to the bottom shelf. We worked functionally — not on the dishwasher, but on the patterns that had made that movement unavailable to her. Opening up new patterns so that bending over and reaching was available again. Because if you limit bending over, that limits where you're going long term.

Leigh: The Feldenkrais Method was developed decades before modern neuroscience confirmed many of its principles. What does current neuroplasticity research help explain about why these lessons help people retrain movement patterns and reduce pain?

Beverly: The neuroscience now backs up the importance of novelty for firing up new neural pathways. I think that's why Moshe Feldenkrais intuitively created so many lessons — he knew you needed novelty. He said in the 1950s that he was not after flexible bodies, he was after flexible brains. He knew we were after changing the brain, not the body. Modern neuroscience didn't really validate the concept of neuroplasticity until the 1990s, so the research has been catching up to what he observed decades earlier.

The other thing neuroscience supports is slowing down. You have to slow movement down for your brain to detect differences and continue building neural pathways. And repetition matters — but it's not mindless repetition. It's repetition with variation. You do the movement one millimeter in one direction, then vary it a millimeter the other way. When you explore with curiosity and find the more efficient way, the neural pathways light up. You can't erase old neural pathways — you can build new ones and strengthen them with repetition. The old pattern will always be there. But you can build a new option.

I often told my clients: you're going to toggle between your old pattern and your new one. When you catch yourself in the old pattern, don't be corrective. Don't self-blame. But when you notice it, experiment with the new one. Also, if we were to fix people completely and suddenly, the musculoskeletal system wouldn't have the capacity to support that new pattern long term. You're building the tiny supporting muscles gradually. Toggling is not failure — it's the process.

Neuroscience also tells us that reducing effort gives you more sensory sensitivity. And crucially, rest is important. The neural pathways are not built during the movement. They are built in the rest afterward — and in the sleep that night. Students would often tell me after a lesson that it was the best night's sleep they'd had in a long time. When you are learning new movement patterns, it takes enormous energy for the brain to build those pathways, and sleep is when they get embedded. That's why rest is built into every lesson.

Leigh: What does a mistake look like or feel like in this context?

Beverly: You know when you're no longer making the mistake. Moshe Feldenkrais said he was trying to make the impossible possible, the possible easy, and the easy elegant. You know when it clicks.

In my training I would be very frustrated — "This is not possible. My body will not do this." And then you keep varying and exploring, and suddenly you're sitting upright thinking, "How did that even happen?" The mistakes aren't a specific feeling. You just know when you have a breakthrough.

Neuroscience also tells us that a playful mindset helps with brain wiring. If you are too goal-oriented, the learning is harder. When I did lessons to achieve a specific outcome, I never enjoyed them. But when I did them purely for the pleasure and the process, the surprise effects — improved movement, pain reduction — would just emerge.

I fell in love with the method because those first 24 lessons had no titles and no descriptions. They were just numbered. It was a mystery. I got lost in the process without knowing whether something was "a back pain lesson" or "a knee pain lesson." In our culture — especially now with AI — we just want the answer. But as children, we learned math by struggling with it, not by looking at the answer in the back. It doesn't have to be an unpleasant struggle. It can be playful. And sometimes the most profound change comes from the mystery of not knowing what you're working toward.

Leigh: So for someone currently in pain, what would be a simple and realistic way for them to begin exploring Awareness Through Movement to start improving comfort and mobility?

Beverly: Start with your own curiosity.

When a client was in a lot of pain and significant movement wasn't available, I would often begin by placing my hand on their ribs and asking them to breathe in and let their ribs expand, then release. When you create a little gentle tension from the inside and release it, that begins to move the intercostal muscles that are often holding very tight. Moving one set of ribs creates a ripple effect through other areas.

Something else that was consistently effective in my practice: if a client had shoulder pain, I would gently push their shoulder into the table — increasing the tension slightly, then releasing it. That combination of pressure and release often gave them significant relief. You can try this yourself — if you're lying in bed with an area of pain, very gently push that area into the surface and then release. Not ambitiously, not with effort. Just a small, gentle increase in pressure and let it go.

If you want to explore the lessons more formally, in the US you can search for practitioners and live classes at feldenkrais.com. You can do that globally — just search online for a Feldenkrais practitioner in your region.

And I have built an app called Pauseture — a play on Moshe Feldenkrais's concept of "acture," which was about the ability to move in any direction from any position. We have 365 lessons because novelty is so important and I wanted to make the lessons affordable and accessible. My mother was financially constrained and did not have access to resources outside what insurance offered. She was trapped. That's my why for building this — to help people like her.

The app is filterable by function: what do you want to improve? You can filter by orientation, by duration, by area of focus. We also have a guided 21-lesson starter series, and then a second 21-lesson series at 20 to 30 minutes where bigger reorganization happens.

I'll also say: at the end of my training, my trainer — who has trained thousands of people — told me I was the most changed person she had ever seen over a four-year period. It was not because of the training itself. It was because I was the most consistent person with doing the lessons. Consistency is more important than duration. Five minutes daily will serve you better than an occasional hour. The focus is not on pain relief. It's on safely and comfortably adapting your nervous system to find new patterns of movement. Pain relief is often the outcome — but it's not the target.

Leigh: Do you have anything for athletes?

Beverly: Yes. You can filter by athletic performance — improve your running, your swimming, your racket sports. We have pickleball, tennis, surfing, martial arts.

For me, I did Ironman Hawaii at 42 with almost no kinesthetic awareness. I didn't really know how to swim. My swim time today at 59 is significantly better than it was then — because I now understand rotation and how much power comes from the pelvis. Before, I was swimming with all arms.

We also have lessons by musical instrument, because musicians frequently experience repetitive strain, and the Feldenkrais community has long had a strong presence in the musician space.

Leigh: What's next for you, Beverly?

Beverly: Continuing to have conversations like this one. There are so many people out there who assume that pain with age is inevitable — and I want to help people understand that it isn't. We are on autopilot because that's how our nervous systems are designed. We didn't do anything wrong. But sometimes we need to interrupt those patterns and help the nervous system find new options.

The Pauseture app continues to evolve. We take every user's feedback and constantly iterate — adding new series, adding new lessons, improving the product so it's helpful for people both in pain and in performance.

Leigh: Where can people find you?

Beverly: Pauseture — P-A-U-S-E-T-U-R-E — dot com. That's our website, and it will tell you more about the app. We're in both the iOS and Google Play app stores. And if people want to find a Feldenkrais practitioner to complement the app lessons, you can search for a local practitioner online.

Leigh: Beverly, I've really enjoyed this discussion. I knew a little about Feldenkrais before, but I feel like you've really filled me in on what it does, how it works, and who it can help. Thank you so much.

Beverly: Thank you for the opportunity. I truly appreciate it.

Thanks for listening to Beyond the Pain. If this episode resonated, please follow the show, leave a review, or share it with someone who's been struggling. Pain is not permanent. Until next time, stay open, stay strong, and keep moving beyond the pain.

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