Neuroplasticity Through Feldenkrais

Brain Shaman — Beverly Atkins

Host: Michael Waite
Guest: Beverly Atkins, Guild Certified Feldenkrais® Practitioner, founder of Pauseture

[The episode opens with Michael singing an original song he wrote as a tribute to his own Feldenkrais journey, referencing themes of curiosity, breaking old patterns, and "finding new options." The conversation itself begins below.]

What is the Feldenkrais Method

Michael: I'm curious about your Feldenkrais story. What was the world you were in before all that, and what did Feldenkrais do for you? How did you discover it, and how did your world change afterward?

Beverly: I think I'm the fifth Feldenkrais practitioner you've interviewed. For any new listeners who haven't heard the word before I jump into my story, do you think it would be helpful for me to explain what it is, or is it better from an experiential angle, how I discovered it myself?

Michael: I think the experiential path is more valuable to start with. But maybe first a quick framing of what it is, since I've noticed sometimes when guests dive straight into their story, the word itself is unfamiliar and people aren't sure what we're talking about.

Beverly: The Feldenkrais Method is a movement practice to rewire your brain through slow, gentle, and novel movements. It helps your nervous system find new options and patterns of movement, so you're letting go of tension and finding more comfortable ways to move.

How Beverly found the method

Michael: How did you fall into it?

Beverly: I was working in a very high-stress environment, and my movement patterns, I'd had a pretty slouched posture for most of my life, although I was very athletic. In my 30s I started running, which led to triathlon, and five years later I did Ironman Hawaii. Very athletic background.

I was working in a high-stress environment, and my back went out, as it does for people. I'd had hip and back issues for years, but never to this level. When my back went out, for a few weeks I tried all the modalities I'd tried in the past. Nothing was helping. It was really debilitating and excruciating.

I happened to be on a planned vacation at a health resort that offered a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement class. It was a health and wellness resort, and I was there with my sisters, who were off doing more active things. The class was described as "lie on the floor, make slow, gentle movements to improve posture and movement." I thought, I need to improve my posture, I'll try to make my way to that class.

I was told to lie on the floor, close my eyes, and not look at how other people were interpreting the verbal cues. At the time I had undiagnosed ADHD, so I didn't have particularly strong listening skills, that was a challenge. I'd also done yoga for years, so I was used to demonstrations from a teacher. This was completely foreign, and I thought it was a little strange. Had I not been navigating the back pain, I probably would have thought it was boring and too still.

But I did the lesson for 45 minutes to an hour. I stood up, and my back pain was completely gone. That left me deeply curious what could have possibly just happened.

Michael: Did you ever get closer to the answer of what happened?

Beverly: It's taken me a four-year Feldenkrais training program, and a lot of reflection, to understand why it was the right lesson on the right day, at the right time, at the right place. I was three weeks into the pain. Often, acute pain can turn into chronic pain around the three-week mark. So the acute injury and inflammation had likely healed, but my brain was staying in a pattern of protecting me.

I'd put my back out while putting my pants on before work, after a long holiday weekend, actually right after the Fourth of July, so we're at about my 12-year anniversary of that injury. I wasn't liking my work environment, and my back just snapped as I was getting ready to go.

Three weeks later, the injury had probably healed, but I was in that period where it was my brain protecting me, not the injury itself, that was keeping me in pain. That's my theory, at least, we often don't know the exact answer. Because I had a hunched posture, the instructor saw that, there were probably a dozen people in the class, she saw what I needed was to hunch more. That's what this method does: we make sure the nervous system feels safe, find the existing pattern, and go deeper into it. So the lesson she taught was a folding lesson, going deeper into my pattern, which gave my nervous system the opportunity to release the pattern of holding, thinking it was protecting me.

The mango, and why the method resists explanation

Michael: It's an active, experiential kind of learning, so it's hard to say exactly what's going on. How would you put words on it?

Beverly: Moshe Feldenkrais was once asked what he was doing and how he was healing people, and he said it's a little bit like eating a mango, until you eat one, you can't explain what it tastes like. You just need to eat the mango. That was his way of saying it's something to be experienced, not explained.

There's real value in not explaining it. I was confused for a long time doing the lessons, and that confusion kept me curious. There is neuroscience behind why it's working, but if you think about the neuroscience while you're doing the lessons, that thinking mind distracts you from your feeling, your kinesthetic awareness, and lets the nervous system discover new patterns without you thinking about them consciously. So I hate to explain it, but I also know "just do a lesson, you'll feel better" doesn't necessarily fly either.

Self-image, masking, and judgment

Beverly: This method is all about finding your identity and your self-image, and finding awareness of what feels good for you, instead of performing with rules or constraints on how you're supposed to behave for whatever cultural context you're in, whether that's high school or a religious organization. We begin to mask and mimic and behave how we're supposed to behave. What this method often does is, for the first time, you start to sense and feel what feels good for you. It's incredibly foreign for people.

Why some lessons land and others don't

Michael: I've done maybe 40 lessons on the app, especially the short ones, and honestly, 50 to 70% were just "okay, whatever." But then you find the gems. Why do some lessons have that effect for some people and not others?

Beverly: That's a really good question, and it's about your pattern. We are so incredibly unique. Think about it from the time we're born to the time we walk, there's a lot of variation in between. Some babies are put in jumpers, some in little crawling contraptions, some parents hold their babies constantly, some use a car seat a lot. So our walking patterns, once we begin walking, are dramatically different from each other, unlike a giraffe, which is born and walking almost immediately, so giraffes have very similar patterns to each other.

Once we start walking, some of us get injured, some are insecure, some have had trauma, and we hold those patterns in the body differently. I can speak to this from my own training, there were 40 people in my program, and almost every lesson that the majority of the group found amazing, I'd think, "huh, wasn't for me." It really demonstrated how different my patterns were from the traditional people drawn to Feldenkrais training, often former dancers, musicians, or actors, whose patterns were very different from mine.

The Paul lesson, and live versus recorded work

Beverly: I want to talk about something. After Paul taught you a lesson live on one of your episodes, you talked for ten minutes afterward. Are you okay if I paraphrase some of what you said?

Michael: Yeah, go for it. I wouldn't be able to do it justice myself right now.

Beverly: What you said stood out to me so much, because you've studied philosophy, so you had words I didn't have when I started, and honestly still don't fully have. My words when I stood up from even a profound lesson were just, "I feel good." I didn't have your language. You said something like, "I feel like I've been living my life in the corner of a spaceship wing, and now I feel like I am the whole spaceship, I'm not controlling the spaceship, I am the spaceship." Do you remember saying that?

Michael: Yeah. That was my first lesson too, a customized one, just for me. I never had that experience with the ones on the app, and I'm curious why. Maybe because it was my first time, you can't get the first time back. Or maybe it's that Paul was there, talking to me directly, and part of Feldenkrais is letting go, letting someone else temporarily take the controls. It's harder to hand the keys to someone who's recorded, who doesn't know you, isn't looking at you. Though there are instructors in the app I feel really connected to, and I can trust and let go with them, and those tend to be the more effective ones for me. The ones I don't trust, I feel myself holding on.

Beverly: Thank you for saying that. Everyone is different in what they need. You're right that in a live experience, knowing the practitioner is responding to how you're moving can be incredibly powerful. It was also, I believe, a 90-minute lesson, quite long, and long lessons can be very transformative. The classic Feldenkrais lessons are 45 minutes, Moshe Feldenkrais felt that was the attention span of the time, and he didn't want to teach longer.

When I started building an app, I approached many seasoned instructors, and a lot of them were against recordings for exactly the reason you're describing, that the live experience is sacred. Others were uncomfortable with me editing lessons shorter, feeling that confusion during longer lessons is where the biggest neuroplastic changes happen. I understand that completely.

For me, with ADHD, anything over 45 minutes and I got agitated, I wanted to be done. But I was compulsive about doing a lesson every day, and most free lessons online were an hour to ninety minutes. As I was doing them, I kept thinking, they could have edited here, the effectiveness was really in this part. That's how I started thinking about building the app. I'm not reflective of the typical population drawn to Feldenkrais, most are performers, artistic types. I worked in business, and I was self-conscious about being watched. A recorded lesson at home let me have my own self-expression without anyone looking at me.

Building for consistency, not just intensity

Beverly: For me, the lessons were incredibly nervous-system regulating. Before I knew the term, I was doing lessons before work, and before that I was showing up reactive, not getting along with colleagues, feeling a lot of frustration. When I did a lesson before work, I showed up more present, started listening better, started understanding other people's side. I realized I needed the lesson daily, similar to how someone who meditates just does it every day, but they may not have 45 minutes, maybe only 10.

When I built Pauseture, the goal was giving people a daily practice. One 45-minute-plus lesson is absolutely transformational, but I wanted something life-changing for a lifetime, not just occasionally.

Michael: I remember you said, after the Paul lesson, "I hope this stays." Did it?

Beverly: I think it stayed, but it faded over time, which is why I was glad to reignite that spark. Since we talked a month or so ago and you got the app, I've been doing it daily, and I feel calmer. Even five minutes is a reminder, my body and mind are in these patterns, and they can change. It continues throughout the day, you remember the lesson while walking, you move your arm a little differently. Similar to how five or ten minutes of daily meditation changes how you perceive and act throughout the day.

Beverly: That's exactly how I thought about building the intro lessons, like marathon training. You don't go out and run ten miles, you start with half a mile. In today's culture, attention spans are short, or people just don't have the time. I'm luring people in with 5, 10, 15 minutes, building the daily habit. We're working on notifications now, what I really want is a notification that says, "you didn't do a lesson today, notice if you're more reactive, less calm."

The research, and what's coming

Beverly: I don't have research behind this yet specifically for Feldenkrais, but meditation research shows five minutes a day for 30 days reduces depression, anxiety, even inflammation for new meditators. With our own testers, 90% of people who did 21 lessons in 21 days felt significantly or somewhat better than they did 21 days prior. It's compounding interest. My hope is people get curious enough that when they have free time on a Sunday, they start exploring the 45-minute lessons too, because that's when the bigger changes happen.

Microdosing, and psychedelics as a parallel

Michael: It's like other neuroplastic events, microdosing psilocybin instead of a heroic dose, a couple laps around the block instead of a ten-day pilgrimage, five minutes of meditation instead of a ten-day Vipassana retreat. These longer, bigger experiences will obviously produce more change, but there's real value in the small doses too.

Beverly: I've never thought about it in that term, microdosing Feldenkrais, but I love that framing. What I'm hearing is you had stories, a narrative you were attached to and wounded by. The psychedelic experience, through neuroplasticity, let you see other versions of the story than the one you were attached to.

To answer your earlier question, why have a daily practice if you're not getting the massive hit from a 90-minute lesson, I primarily do lessons 30 minutes or less, but I've practiced for 12 years, missing maybe only a few dozen days. I do it daily because it's what my nervous system needs. Moshe Feldenkrais said he was after flexible brains, not flexible bodies, in the 1940s, decades before neuroplasticity was validated in the 1990s. He designed the lessons, over time and consistent practice, to do what psychedelics are doing.

Beverly's own transformation

Beverly: I was a judgmental, angry, confrontational person from a young age, without intending to be. I was at risk of losing my job, they documented things I'd said to colleagues and told me the behavior had to change. So I masked completely, "what do you need, how can I help," just to keep my job. Holding in that anger, I believe, contributed to my back going out on a Monday morning after a holiday weekend. My back essentially said, I don't want to go back there, here's your excuse to stay home.

I continued the lessons purely to keep the back pain away. I was fine going back to masking and pretending I liked a job I was pretty unhappy in. But as I kept doing the lessons, first I started sleeping better, I'd had insomnia my whole life. A lot of the lessons open the ribs, which opens the lungs, which helps you breathe and sleep better. But it's also that the rewiring of the brain, per current neuroscience, doesn't happen during the movement itself, it happens during rest, which is why Feldenkrais lessons include so many pauses, and ultimately during sleep.

Within three weeks, in conversations with people, I started thinking differently, not pretending they were right, but actually seeing their point of view. Before, I was very "I'm right, you're wrong." It started happening naturally, figuring out how to meet people in the middle instead of needing to be right.

When I left my job and opened a private Feldenkrais practice, I did the four-year training while working full time. Working one-on-one with people, some with very different values and beliefs than mine, people I might once have judged or not wanted to work with, but because you're literally merging nervous systems with someone hands-on, it shifted my understanding. People are the way they are because our brains are wired for prediction, it's no one's fault, their brain arrived there for a variety of reasons. Instead of judging, I got curious.

Two modalities

Beverly: There are two modalities in the method. Functional Integration is hands-on, one-on-one work, which is especially powerful if you have a very active nervous system that has a hard time settling down, since the power of the method comes from going slower and smaller, and people initially always want to go bigger and faster. Moshe Feldenkrais developed a huge following wanting this kind of help, but it wasn't scalable, so he adapted it into Awareness Through Movement, group lessons where a teacher gives verbal cues and people move themselves. Those are the two modalities.

Stillness, speed, and different nervous systems

Michael: What is it about slowness or stillness that creates these kinds of shifts?

Beverly: Neuroscience supports that stillness is when the brain gets a chance to catch up and rewire. But Feldenkrais isn't fundamentally about stillness, that's actually why I'm drawn to it, sitting still with my busy ADHD brain would never have worked for me. The question comes up often: if I can meditate, why do Feldenkrais? I had a client with back pain who was a meditation teacher, and I suggested he do recorded lessons at home between our sessions, he said he just preferred to meditate, and that's fine.

Moshe Feldenkrais was a martial artist, and he wanted people able to move safely in any direction at any time, that's the goal of the lessons collectively. As for why slow rather than fast: his earliest lessons, the Alexander Yanai lessons, taught to soldiers returning from war, were big, fast, and physical, because he knew those soldiers couldn't sit still, they needed to be active. That's a great entry point for some people, and it was for me too.

But the neuroscience supports that slower movement lets the nervous system feel safe enough to learn, and lets it detect finer sensory feedback, is it one millimeter this way or that way, exploring the tiny variations that are right for that particular nervous system. Going slow is what lets the nervous system both feel safe and register that feedback.

Designing for different nervous systems

Michael: How do you design lessons with ADHD in mind specifically?

Beverly: Every lesson can help anybody, but for someone who feels agitated and wants to move faster, the first 21 lessons in the app are short, so people can adapt gradually. It was important to let people speed lessons up to 1.5x or 2x if that's where their nervous system is that day. Interestingly, with my ADHD brain, I couldn't even imagine someone wanting to go slower than 1x. But we have subscribers with serious chronic conditions, one emailed saying the lessons were exactly what she needed, but the voices were too fast for her. So a few weeks ago we added .75x and .9x speeds too.

Podcasts, speed, and length

Michael: I speed up podcasts too, 2x or 3x whenever I can.

Beverly: Same, I'm a two-time speeder, and when I listen to myself at regular speed I think I sound painfully slow. For a while I tried to talk faster to compensate, then decided, this is just me.

Beverly: To your earlier point about podcast length, I've been on several podcasts recently, and at 30 minutes it's kind of like I have to be in pitch mode, just the facts, this is developing. It's a much richer experience when we can actually dialogue.

Different voices for different people

Beverly: Right now we have 11 teachers in the app, and I hope to eventually have far more, because different voices resonate with different people. One person told me he can't do male voices, he has to skip those lessons, because of issues with his father, a male voice doesn't feel safe for him. I told him that's completely fine, filter for the women teachers. Others love the male teachers specifically. We have 365 lessons, out of over a thousand Feldenkrais lessons that exist, and my long-term goal is a hundred teachers and a thousand lessons, because different teachers resonate with different people.

Performing versus being liked

Beverly: We can't be performative trying to be liked, because the moment you become that version of yourself, someone else won't like you. As a podcast host, some people will like you and some won't, and you can't change based on that feedback. When I first learned I have ADHD, I also learned about rejection sensitivity dysphoria, rejection really hurts. The first podcast I was ever on, the first YouTube comment said my vocal fry was going to hurt me later in life, and I thought I had to take voice lessons, almost didn't reach out for more podcasts. But I had to realize some people will like what I have to share, and some won't. That's also part of why I don't teach lessons in the app myself, my goal was bringing the best teachers to subscribers, not centering myself.

Interoception and drinking

Beverly: These lessons improve interoception, noticing how you actually feel. It sounds like you came to that on your own. What I find is, if you're leaving an environment with a lot of rules, of course you want to break them. But once you're actually in touch with how you feel, you realize you don't feel good, and the marketing says this is fun, but it isn't, actually, fun to feel this way.

Maturity and growth

Beverly: I think it's your curiosity, staying curious is what allows change to keep happening, and it's not just change, it's growth and maturity. I was pretty immature for a 47-year-old when I came across these lessons. The maturation I experienced from being able to see other people's sides really opened my curiosity, and I think that's how we stay young and keep growing instead of getting stuck. For people with physical pain who think "I'm just getting old, pain is inevitable," being curious about why, and what needs to change, is a real growth opportunity.

ADHD, years later

Michael: Has your ADHD changed at all since starting Feldenkrais?

Beverly: Completely, yes. I still have ADHD, I'm still distractible, probably my biggest issue now is sound sensitivity. But it's significantly better. I recently saw a post in a Facebook ADHD group from a 70-year-old woman warning that ADHD gets worse with age if you don't stay on top of it. That hasn't been my experience. I'm not cured, but I would not have been able to sit for this conversation with you 12 years ago, I would have been waiting for my turn to talk, not really listening. That's the change from doing these lessons.

Designing technology without adding noise

Beverly: I tried to make the app as simple as possible. It's a tool, you open a lesson, set it down, and just listen, you're not looking at the screen. I feel very comfortable saying it's not adding to smartphone clutter. The harder part for me is social media marketing, because honestly I don't want people spending more time on their phones, I want them lying on the floor listening to how they feel. But you have to meet people where they are, so I hired an agency to handle that side, since I don't want to spend my own time on social media.

The best teachers we have in the app aren't active on social media at all, they're deep thinkers who are actually embodying the work rather than performing it, which is exactly why they're hard to find otherwise. That's a big part of why I built Pauseture, to keep attracting teachers like that.

I've structured the app as monthly or annual, not an expensive upfront program, because I don't want people paying for something they never use. My goal isn't to get people's money, it's to help people feel better and bring the best teachers in the world to more people.

Closing

Michael: Thank you for reaching out and sharing your app with me. I hope to keep using it, try all the lessons eventually. Thanks for today, we talked longer than planned, but that's always nice for me, I hope it was okay for you. Let's continue the conversation some other time.

Beverly: Thank you, I so appreciate your time, and that you've been open to speaking with so many practitioners, and for your curiosity around the method and helping bring it to your listeners. Thank you so much for the conversation.