Somatic Healing, ADHD & Eating Disorder Recovery

Fly to Freedom Podcast
Host: Julia Trehane
Guest: Beverly Atkins, Guild-Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner & Founder, Pauseture

Julia: Hello and welcome back to Fly to Freedom. Today's episode is for anyone who feels like they've spent years trying to think their way into recovery — trying to get it right, trying to control, manage, or fix their body — and yet still feeling disconnected, overwhelmed, or like it's just not working.

For a lot of people, especially in eating disorder recovery, the body doesn't feel like a safe place to be. It can feel noisy, unpredictable, uncomfortable — something to override rather than something to listen to.

So today we're exploring a different way in. One that isn't about pushing harder or doing recovery better, but about learning to meet the body in a more neutral, curious, and gentle way.

I'm joined today by Beverly Atkins. Beverly is a Guild-Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner and founder of Pauseture, a platform that offers short guided somatic movement lessons designed to help people reconnect with their bodies without force or performance. What I really appreciate about Beverly's work is that it's not about fixing the body or changing it. It's about awareness — about learning to pay attention in a way that feels safe rather than critical or controlling.

Beverly also brings her own lived experience into this conversation — years of yo-yo dieting, moving into extreme exercise, and later understanding how ADHD and nervous system dysregulation shaped her own relationship with food, movement, and her body.

Beverly, I am so happy to have you here. Before we go deeper, I'd love to invite you to share a little about your story in your own words.

Beverly: Thank you, Julia. I was the youngest of five daughters born within five years. My older sisters were average weight and I was overweight as a very young child. I've always said I was just born hungry — I never felt satiated. My first diet was probably when I was about ten years old.

Now knowing I had ADHD, I can look back and see what was happening. I became hyperfocused on a particular diet and did it perfectly until I made a mistake. When I made the mistake, I gained the weight back. Then I'd find another diet. This cycle went on for decades — all or nothing. All or nothing. My weight yo-yoed. And even when I was at my goal weight, I always felt like I had a fat person's body. No matter what I weighed, that was my self-image.

In my 30s, after being mostly inactive most of my life, I found running. That became my hyperfocus. Three marathons in 18 months, which led to triathlon, which led to Ironman Hawaii in 2009. Really extreme exercise — both to manage my weight and because it was genuinely helping with depression and mood. But it was a lot to manage.

Five years after Ironman, I was working at Facebook in a very high-stress environment. It was an open workspace, and now I understand that with my ADHD and noise sensitivities — combined with perimenopause — I was incredibly dysregulated. That stress, my body patterns, and the extreme exercise were all contributing factors to me putting my back out. I was unable to walk upright for three weeks. Walking at a 90-degree angle was the only way I could move.

At the end of those three weeks, I crawled into something called Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement. I had no idea what it was, but I was willing to try something described as "lie on the floor and make small, gentle movements to improve your posture and your movement."

The teacher said: "Close your eyes. Do not look at how anyone else is interpreting the movement directions — the way you interpret it is how you need to interpret it." As someone with ADHD, my listening skills weren't the best, so I found that frustrating. I'd also done yoga for most of my life, so I was conditioned to looking at a demonstration and mimicking the instructor. It was a pretty frustrating hour, with back pain in the background the entire time.

And then I stood up at the end of the hour with no pain whatsoever.

I'm not saying everyone will do one lesson and their back pain is cured. It was the right lesson on the right day, the right time, the right environment. But it left me deeply curious. What had just happened? After three weeks of physical therapy, chiropractic, every tool that had ever helped me — nothing had worked. And then this.

The teacher gave me 24 free lessons to do at home. For the next 24 days, I stopped working out and did one lesson every day before work. Before I knew the term "nervous system regulation," within those three weeks, I was sleeping better. I was focusing better. The reactivity at work that was nearly getting me fired had softened. I don't want to say I changed into a completely new person, but something profound was happening.

When I went back to repeat the lessons, they weren't as powerful. I knew very early on and intuitively that it was the novelty that mattered. You know how you talk about patterns — how we undo them? When we do something on autopilot, like the same yoga class or Pilates routine we've done for decades, we begin doing the movements on autopilot. As I repeated those lessons, even after only doing them once before, I noticed I went back to autopilot. It was the novelty — the curiosity of not knowing where it was going — that fired up my brain to open to new patterns.

Julia: Five daughters — wow. Being the youngest, how did that feel growing up?

Beverly: It was challenging for me because I was different from them. Now I realize it was partly the ADHD, and there were other psychological and family dynamics at play. I didn't quite fit in with my sisters the way they fit in with each other. For a long time I believed it was because of my weight. They would wear jeans and I would wear stretchy pants — comfortable clothes. My sisters would tease me about that. I think that was partly the ADHD sensitivities. I was just always different.

My mom coddled me because she knew I was different. She was a psychiatric nurse, so she had the tools and said all the right things. But in the background, my dad is a narcissist. And I'll go deeper than I usually do — before my mom was pregnant with me, my father told her he was in love with his secretary, but that he was staying and they were going to get pregnant again because he wanted a boy. My mom was a beautiful Catholic mother and did what she was told.

During her pregnancy with me, she kind of let herself go in her words. She just ate ice cream throughout the pregnancy — because of her depression, her rejection. So I think metabolically and biologically, I was born hungry because I was fed a lot of sugar in the womb.

Julia: I imagine you were probably born with some of the sadness your mom was experiencing as well — that would have traveled through to you.

Beverly: Interestingly, I was born angry. My mom said when they handed me to her, I gave her the nastiest look — like "Who are you, lady, and what do you want?" I think the anger she was holding in for her situation was part of me at birth. I had a lot of anger as a child. Temper tantrums. It was difficult for my siblings. That anger and isolation with eating was really my identity as a child.

It took one therapist to point out the theory that my dad was angry at me because I wasn't a boy. And when my mom had me, she said: "No more. This is it." So the dynamic of unconditional love and protection from my mother versus the anger my father felt — it took a therapist to point out that my relationship with my dad was different from my siblings', because he had the mentality of a 12-year-old and was mad at me all those years. That's kind of the foundation of my life.

Julia: Thank you so much for sharing. It makes complete sense — born hungry and angry, your mom coping with all those feelings during her pregnancy, your dad without the emotional maturity to handle what he wanted versus what he got. And you, a child still learning to communicate. Of course that was going to be difficult. What a magical solution of: if I can just control my weight, everything will be okay. But of course it never is.

You mentioned that even when you hit your target weight, you still didn't feel great — because we're all sold this idea that if we can just fix this one thing, then we'll be happy. Happiness isn't ever a destination.

Beverly: No, it's a practice.

Julia: When did you become aware of the ADHD diagnosis?

Beverly: Not until two or three years ago. A close friend who late in life became a therapist — I was sharing with her how I was operating as I started to build Pauseture. My relationship with food had changed pretty dramatically because of this practice I had found. But when I put myself back into a business situation and was trying to work, I was finding myself distracted with food again. I explained this to my friend and she said, "It sounds like you have ADHD." And I dismissed it.

A family member who was dating a psychiatrist had actually suggested the same thing eight or ten years earlier. I dismissed that too — I said he was categorizing me because I kept getting up from dinner due to hip pain. I couldn't sit still because of the chronic hip pain I had before starting the method.

It wasn't until a couple of years ago that my friend brought it up again and I started doing the research. Everything suddenly made sense. I started seeing an ADHD therapist who said, "You have it — but you've found a tool that's helping you cope." Eventually I did get an official diagnosis, partly because I'd applied to be on ADHD podcasts and they said they needed a formal diagnosis. But I will say — I answered those diagnostic questions based on how I'd been for most of my life, because I genuinely believe my attention and focus have changed dramatically over the last 12 years of doing this practice.

Julia: With what you know now about yourself and how you work — when you look at your child self from your adult self's eyes, what can you see clearly that you couldn't see then?

Beverly: My mom used to say, "Your brain is just different." She was a psychiatric nurse, so I was getting information from a psychological perspective that my brain was different. But what I did not get as a child — because neuroscience didn't support it in the 1970s — was that my brain could change. With intention and with trial and error.

Today a child like me might see an occupational therapist and find profound changes are possible. My mom, as a psychiatric nurse and later a psychologist, understood things from a top-down approach. What she was never introduced to was the bottom-up approach of somatics — knowing that you can change the brain through the movements of the body.

What I would say to my younger self, or what I would tell my mom to tell my younger self, is: yes, your brain is different, but it's not stuck that way. There's an opportunity to change it.

Julia: It's interesting — we're all conditioned to think of our brain and body as separate entities, but we are actually one. I don't really know why we've all been conditioned to think of them separately.

Beverly: I've been looking into that. It started in the 1600s with Descartes saying "I think, therefore I am" — and from that philosopher's belief that our thinking is what makes us, we developed entire medical systems that break us into parts. Most medical schools train us to think of people as parts. I'm listening to a physical therapy podcast where the host — a physio — says he's ashamed of how he was trained. If someone has carpal tunnel, the guidelines say work on the hand. But Moshe Feldenkrais figured out in the 1940s that a knee problem often doesn't come from the knee. It's usually something in the foot or the hip.

Unfortunately the medical system still thinks of us as parts — your psychologist talks you through the trauma, your PT works on your hip pain, and nobody is connecting the dots. Until the system is overhauled — which I don't think will happen in my lifetime — people need to take ownership and say: I am the captain of this ship. It's up to me to connect the dots.

Julia: That resonates so much. When I was a sports massage therapist, someone would come in with knee pain and it was never coming from the knee. Everything is interlinked — and that knowledge was already there, even then.

Beverly: Exactly. And so many practitioners have that intuitive awareness. They just weren't trained to act on it.

Julia: When we say "somatic," can you explain what that actually means in everyday terms?

Beverly: Somatic is basically the body — any practice that involves the body. Yoga is a form of somatic work. Many somatic programs are about noticing your body: when you're angry, where do you feel that?

I don't know of another practice quite like the Feldenkrais Method. There are people who have studied it and rebranded it under different names, but I'll explain what I know about Feldenkrais specifically.

It's a form of somatic movement education — about how you move. The method first and foremost creates conditions for learning. There are two modalities.

The first is one-on-one, typically hands-on work, called Functional Integration. The benefit of this modality is that we are co-regulating our nervous systems — it's literally a dance of two nervous systems. As a practitioner, having a regulated nervous system is essential. We are supportive of the student's existing patterns. If someone has a very hunched posture, we don't correct it and try to make them stand upright — that doesn't communicate safety to the nervous system. Instead, we take them deeper into the hunch. We communicate: you're safe. And then we begin moving them incredibly slowly, incredibly small, to explore new patterns. Once the nervous system feels safe, it can begin to explore. A student may get up from the table standing much more upright — even though all we did was support and deepen their existing pattern.

The second modality is Awareness Through Movement — historically group classes where a teacher gives verbal cues and students do self-directed movement. The first lesson I crawled into was this kind. The disadvantage in the beginning is that you may go too big and too fast, and the nervous system doesn't learn as effectively in that mode. But over time with practice, people naturally find their way to smaller and slower — and that's where the bigger changes unlock.

When I was teaching live classes, I'd often see a student going big and fast and think as a new practitioner: they don't understand this at all, I'll never see them again. And that was always the person who came up afterward and said "That was life-changing" — and came back consistently.

Julia: That's fascinating. When I first started doing somatic work it was really hard to be slow. Is that because going fast is where some people feel safe?

Beverly: Exactly. It's where your nervous system is today. If going slow feels corrective — like shame, like "I'm doing it wrong" — your nervous system is not in a condition to learn. You need to go at the pace and speed that communicates: this is something I'm safe doing. Big and fast may be what your nervous system needs today. That's why I put a 2x speed option in the app.

For me, when I began, the traditional lessons were 45 minutes or longer with 10-minute body scans at the start. I'd be anxious and agitated just lying there. I'd fast-forward to get to the movement. That was my gateway in. And it's valid. Over time, you can find the slower pace — and that's where the bigger changes happen.

Julia: I was really surprised when I started using your app that it was only audio. And you said earlier that in your first class you had to close your eyes and not compare yourself to anyone else.

Beverly: Yes. And we have had subscribers cancel because they say they need video. I understand that — I would have said the same thing. But what I would offer is: "You're not an audio learner yet." With practice, you can create the neural pathways to become comfortable with audio. I think this is a big reason these lessons helped my ADHD. I was forced to listen — not just to the verbal cues, but to how I was feeling. That started showing up in conversations with other people. I began to slow down and truly listen for the first time.

Without curiosity, you can't change your brain. And without mistakes, there's no learning. Neuroscience validates this today: if you do something perfectly the first time, no learning occurs. So there's no right way to do a lesson. We live in such a performative society — and for perfectionists and people who've been performing their whole lives, this is a significant shift.

Julia: You mentioned something important — that this practice isn't about loving your body.

Beverly: It's simply about giving it attention. I hated my body — whether I was at the top or the bottom of my weight range, it was my enemy. This practice was not about loving my body. It was about noticing: when I push through my foot that way, it's easier to lift my pelvis. When I push it the other way, it's harder. Just finding how everything is connected — no judgment, no "that's bad, I have a bad foot." Just noticing and developing awareness.

We're not asking you to love your body. We're asking you simply to notice it.

Julia: And that shift — from criticism to noticing, to awareness, to curiosity — does lead on to acceptance.

Beverly: What's fascinating is that I believe my brain was wired for self-criticism, which made me critical of other people too. Over time, I've developed a curiosity about others. Even when our values don't align, I find myself thinking: that's interesting, I wonder what in their history led them there. And when we begin to let go of judgment of others, things just soften. We co-regulate better — whether or not they share our beliefs.

I've had so much shame around the anger I had as a child, the mean things I said to people. But through this practice I came to understand: my brain was predicting danger. I was on autopilot because our nervous systems are designed to be on autopilot — it takes a lot of energy to have awareness. When you interrupt that autopilot gently, you can make new choices. I've been able to forgive myself for how I used to be. They were simply patterns. And now that I have awareness, some accountability comes with it. Now that I can pause, I can make different choices.

Julia: That's where you've stepped into your power — out of autopilot, into awareness, into choice.

Beverly: Exactly.

Julia: This has been an amazing conversation. Where can people find you?

Beverly: Our website is pauseture.com — P-A-U-S-E-T-U-R-E — and the Pauseture app is in both Google Play and the Apple App Store. We have a seven-day free trial and a 21-lesson series to help people get started. The lessons are short. You can explore the app for a week and see if it's supportive of where you are right now — and it may not be. Your nervous system may need something more active or more restful. If it's not right for you now, you can note it and come back in six months. There's no shame in that. That's just where you are today.

Julia: I truly believe things come up when they're ready to be healed. If you're drawn to trying the app, then it's the right time. If you're not, that's okay too — it's time for something else.

Beverly: Exactly. I have friends with recurring back pain who aren't ready yet. But over time they come around and say: "Why didn't I try this sooner?" And I tell them: you needed a few more rounds of back pain before you were ready to explore a new way to move.

Julia: It's been fantastic talking to you. I'll put all the details in the show notes. Thank you for being such an amazing guest — it's been a really lovely conversation.

Beverly: I've really enjoyed chatting with you. And thank you so much to the listeners for tuning in. I hope this episode was helpful.