The Curious Man's Podcast — Beverly Atkins

The Curious Man's Podcast — Beverly Atkins

Host: Matt Crawford
Guest: Beverly Atkins, Guild Certified Feldenkrais® Practitioner, founder of Pauseture

Introduction

Matt: What if one of the most important skills we could develop today isn't having more answers, but becoming better at asking questions? In a world filled with constant information, instant solutions, and endless distractions, curiosity can sometimes feel like a lost practice. Today's guest believes curiosity isn't just a personality trait — it's something we can cultivate through awareness, attention, and the way we experience our own bodies.

Joining me is Beverly Atkins, creator of Pauseture, an app built around the Feldenkrais Method — a movement and awareness practice designed to help people reconnect with themselves through exploration rather than correction. Beverly's journey began with a personal struggle: debilitating back pain that conventional approaches weren't resolving. A single Feldenkrais lesson changed everything, leading her to ask deeper questions about movement, awareness, and how the brain learns. That curiosity eventually led her to complete a four-year Feldenkrais certification program, develop a private practice, and create Pauseture to bring these lessons to a wider audience.

Beverly Atkins, welcome to The Curious Man's Podcast. How are you today?

Beverly: I am well, thank you so much for having me.

What is Pauseture

Matt: What is Pauseture?

Beverly: Pauseture is a mobile app that helps people cultivate curiosity about themselves through gentle, safe movement — and with that comes agency over their lives, their movements, how they think, how they feel. Very related to our conversation, and to you being the Curious Man — it's really about helping people be more curious.

Matt: There are people out there — and I might have been one of them until I started using the app — who think: I live in my body, I know what I'm capable of. How is lying on the floor, or stretching, or listening, going to change how I feel? If I have a bad shoulder, it's a bad shoulder.

Beverly: Thankfully, modern neuroscience has validated neuroplasticity — our brains can change, our nervous system can change. Moshe Feldenkrais, who developed the method behind these lessons, said in the 1940s that the lessons weren't for people with flexible bodies, but for flexible brains. Before neuroplasticity was even a validated concept, the lessons were designed to change your nervous system and your physical movement to help you move easier, more comfortably, and better.

The back injury

Matt: Where did this journey start for you?

Beverly: In 2014. I had pretty debilitating back pain and wasn't able to move. I happened into a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lesson after trying everything that had worked for me in the past. I was about three weeks into the pain, right around when acute pain can turn chronic. I did one lesson, and my back pain was gone.

I'm not saying this is a quick fix, or that one lesson fixes everything. It was the right lesson, at the right place, at the right time, for me. But it left me deeply curious, so I kept doing the lessons to keep the pain away — and so much more changed as my movement patterns changed.

What the Feldenkrais Method actually is

Matt: What is the Feldenkrais Method?

Beverly: It's a somatic movement education that retrains your nervous system to move more efficiently and comfortably. There are two modalities. You can work one-on-one with a practitioner — which I eventually became — who moves you slowly, gently, and comfortably to help you find new patterns of movement. Those are called Functional Integration lessons.

Moshe Feldenkrais developed that first, but he saw such need that he asked himself how to scale it to more people. So he developed Awareness Through Movement lessons — self-directed, so he could train a hundred people in a room at once, with each person moving themselves rather than him moving them. The lessons in the app are Awareness Through Movement: self-directed, guided by verbal cues.

Matt: What does the training process look like, to go from practicing it to teaching it?

Beverly: It's fairly consistent, though it's been modified a bit — currently a four-year training program, about 800 hours. It's spread out that long because it takes time for your own nervous system to settle before you're putting your hands on someone else — you're essentially merging your nervous system with your students'. Some programs now offer a two-year track that only certifies you to teach the Awareness Through Movement lessons, not the hands-on work.

Why the nervous system, not the muscle

Matt: I've always considered myself stiff, closed hips, never flexible. There's the old adage — pain is weakness leaving the body — and we assume tightness comes from the tendons or muscles, something you have to force through. It wasn't until this conversation, and using the app, that I really thought about the mind's role in it.

Beverly: Exactly. There's a whole culture built around the belief that stretching creates flexibility and mobility. Moshe Feldenkrais discovered that what we're actually after is helping the nervous system feel safe enough to find new options. The nervous system can't learn unless it feels safe — so when you stretch and strain beyond your comfortable capacity, it actually holds on tighter. It keeps you in your safe zone and resists a bigger range.

So what he found was: create safety for the nervous system, and it becomes playful, curious, able to learn. But when you're focused on doing it "correctly," or feeling shame about your own stiffness, or trying to force or correct something, the nervous system shuts the door on learning. First and foremost, the method creates a condition of safety and cultivates curiosity so you can find new movement options.

Matt: What's the difference between yoga and the Feldenkrais Method?

Beverly: Yoga takes many forms, so it's hard to generalize, but traditionally it's about holding a precise pose. The Feldenkrais Method is about functional movement. Feldenkrais was a martial artist, and his question was: how do you move in any direction, at any moment? You're safest as a human when you're ready to move — the enemy can't get you if you're prepared to go any direction. Holding a pose isn't actually functional in that sense.

There's research showing yoga practitioners develop a higher pain threshold — that was my experience too, doing a demanding style of yoga, the same difficult poses over and over. What these lessons do instead is treat pain as a signal to change something, not something to tough out. A little discomfort is an invitation to get curious: how do I find comfort before this becomes a real problem?

Positions and the floor

Matt: Let's talk about the positions used in the app.

Beverly: We've prioritized lying on the floor, front and center in the app. The benefit is that you give your weight over to gravity. We fight gravity all day, using muscles to coordinate standing and movement — but when you let go and give your weight to the floor, you can start reducing the unnecessary muscular effort you're spending fighting gravity.

That said, the method has lessons in every orientation. In the app you can filter for a seated lesson if you're at work or in an airport, or a standing lesson. There are thousands of Feldenkrais lessons total; we currently have 365 in the app and want to keep growing that. But to get started, lying on the floor is the optimal way in, because you can sense and feel what's actually happening without fighting gravity at the same time.

Matt: I go to the gym six days a week, I'm relatively fit, but I've worked construction for thirty years — I'm in constant pain, shoulder, hip, ankle. Lying on the floor, using the weight of your own limb across your body, and the way the instructors speak to you — it's almost ASMR. Very calming.

Beverly: It's not just about doing the movement — there's benefit in that, but it's really about the questions it puts in your brain. Instead of just "lift your arm," over time you start asking: where is my elbow in space as I lift it? What happens if I shift my eyes left as I do it? Does lifting my left arm feel different than my right? It's not just the movement, it's the attention you bring to how you do it. Instead of "I have a sore arm, it hurts," it becomes curiosity: what feels a little better? That's what lets the nervous system adapt and find a more efficient way to move — so later, reaching for a cup out of a cabinet, your nervous system has already adopted the more efficient pattern without you thinking about it.

Functional and performance lessons

Matt: I recently read about retirees injuring themselves playing pickleball, and I noticed the app has a performance category — cycling, skiing, pickleball, swimming. What prompted that?

Beverly: The basis of the method is functional movement — walking, reaching, turning. So framing the app around "why do I make time for this, how does this fit my life" mattered to me. I play pickleball myself, and I notice people on the court stretching furiously, saying "I keep getting injured, so I've got to stretch more." What they actually need is more coordination, stability, and easier reaching — not more stretching. That's why the performance categories exist: to make it concrete how this fits into someone's actual life.

Lesson length

Matt: Your longest lesson is around 30 minutes, shortest around four. What led to that range?

Beverly: We may have a handful up to 45 minutes, but I had a hard requirement: nothing longer than that. Moshe Feldenkrais designed lessons around 45 minutes because he believed that was people's attention span — decades ago. When I discovered the method, I loved doing lessons before work, because before I knew the term "nervous system regulation," I noticed I was showing up less reactive, less irritable, lighter, more curious about my colleagues. A daily practice mattered enormously to me.

But I'd lie there thinking, I don't really have time for this — the lessons I had access to ran 45 minutes to an hour and a half. I started manually editing them in my head: they could cut that, that part's smart, someone needs to shorten this to 15 minutes so I can actually do it daily. The experiment for me became: can we make these shorter, to support consistency over one long lesson a week?

A complement to physical therapy

Matt: Some people might say, if I'm in pain, I need a physical therapist — how do I address something I don't understand on my own?

Beverly: I see this as a strong complement to PT, not a replacement. The method doesn't build strength — sometimes a muscle imbalance genuinely needs PT-style strengthening work. But physical therapists have told me that most of their clients don't have kinesthetic awareness of their own bodies. If a PT says "move your foot a little to the left" during a squat, the client moves it because they were told to — not because they felt it. With this method, you start to sense on your own: my foot should be a bit further left, that's more comfortable, more functional. You start to develop your own kinesthetic awareness, which PTs have told me makes their exercises land better — the client actually feels the movement instead of just performing it.

Matt: What speaks to me is that everything stems from a question — it's exploratory, which empowers the person to solve their own issue rather than have it done to them.

Beverly: You've nailed the philosophy. In today's culture, people want the answer — they resist audio lessons because they think of themselves as visual learners who need to see the movement demonstrated. But there's a real difference between mimicking a movement and sitting with the question of what actually feels better. It's an uphill climb, because everyone wants to know "why am I doing this" instead of sitting with "what feels right for me."

Matt: Everything's compressed to two minutes now — if it's longer, people move on. Unfortunate, but that's where we are.

Beverly: That's exactly why I wanted this conversation. I see a real lack of curiosity about how much this can benefit people, and the benefits are enormous. What I've learned from our tester program is that people who commit to the first 21 lessons often start without much curiosity at all — but curiosity isn't a fixed trait, it's something you can cultivate. And once you cultivate it, you discover you have more options. More options in life means more agency over your whole life.

Best time of day

Matt: Is there a better time to do this — morning, before bed, around a workout?

Beverly: People who do lessons regularly before sleep tend to sleep better, because of that brain activity. Personally, I do mine first thing in the morning, because it sets the rhythm for my day — similar to why people who meditate tend to do it in the morning, so they're responsive instead of running on autopilot. When I'm onboarding people, I tell them: pick a time you can actually be consistent with. That's the real answer — the best time is whichever one you'll stick to.

From idea to app

Matt: When did the idea for an app take shape?

Beverly: I knew how many people dealt with back pain, and I'd seen how effective this was for mine within three weeks. My first thought was: somebody needs to build a back pain app — not me, just somebody. As I went through training, that shifted: this is really a functional movement app — the pickleball app, the running app, the swimming app. Then once I actually started building lessons, I saw the deeper need: helping people regulate their nervous system. So I prioritized the lessons in the app around giving people a pause during their day, a way to shift out of fight-or-flight and the automatic patterns tied to it — not just changing movement patterns, but behavior patterns.

Matt: Does building this into an app risk straying from the spirit of the method, versus one-on-one or in-person classes? There's no two-way communication with an app.

Beverly: There's a real benefit to live classes and full-length lessons, and I don't want to discount that. But I also see the importance of daily consistency. In my training program, there were people who understood the method more deeply than I did — former professional dancers who could do the difficult lessons more beautifully. But at the end of my four-year training, during a hands-on lesson, my trainer told me I was the most changed person she'd ever trained. She'd been doing this since she was 18 and was nearly 70 herself. She wasn't just talking about my movement patterns — she meant my maturity as a person, my listening skills.

That change didn't come from the training program itself. It came from a daily practice. Nobody offers a live lesson seven days a week — most teachers teach once a week. A live class, in person or online, is a great complement to a daily practice, but true, profound change doesn't come from a weekend workshop or an eight-week program. It happens incrementally, day by day.

Matt: How many certified instructors are there? I'm on Staten Island — smallest of the five boroughs — and there isn't a single one here. I'd have to go into New Jersey for an in-person lesson.

Beverly: It's a real access problem. There are more than 10,000 practitioners globally, and a lot of them are concentrated in cities — New York City itself has a good number. But most cities have none. A lot of the trainers, including Alan Questel, who you spoke with — one of the top trainers in the world, and we're lucky to have his lessons in the app — do most of their training in Europe, where the programs fill more easily. Training programs in the U.S. are becoming rarer.

That access gap is a huge part of why I built Pauseture — I think of it as filling the funnel, getting people to dip a toe into the method through shorter lessons. For anyone who falls in love with it and wants to go deeper, there are live and longer-form options. But especially in the U.S., my focus is getting more people curious about the method at all, whether that becomes a daily practice on its own or a doorway into something deeper.

Staying audio-only

Matt: Any thought of a Peloton-style model, with you on screen?

Beverly: No — it stays audio. I'm not in the app myself; I bring in different teachers. We won't add video of someone looking at the camera, because that's not how the learning happens. It's the listening that creates the change, and neuroscience backs this up — watching something takes an enormous amount of mental processing and bandwidth. Turn off the visual cues, and the nervous system has more room to actually learn.

Matt: On my first lesson, I closed my eyes without even being told to — I think because I knew I'd be talking to you about it, so I was more tuned in than usual.

Beverly: That's common, though I'm not prescriptive about it in my private practice — some people aren't comfortable closing their eyes yet, because it doesn't feel safe to them until their nervous system trusts the setting. But turning off visual input generally helps kinesthetic awareness and the brain's ability to learn.

Choosing instructors and sound quality

Matt: How did you choose the instructors in the app?

Beverly: I sampled different teachers and reached out to the top people in the field. Some weren't interested in working with me, because editing the lessons down can feel like it takes away from the integrity of the method. I looked for teachers who could clearly guide someone without being seen.

One real misstep I made early on: I wanted a pristine sound environment, because I'm personally very noise-sensitive. I didn't know until a couple of years ago that I'd had undiagnosed ADHD my whole life, along with misophonia — an extreme sensitivity to repetitive sounds. Even live classes, even my own training, were difficult for me because of ambient noise. So my first requirement with teachers was: sit at a good mic, in a controlled environment, let's record clean audio.

It wasn't until I talked with Alan Questel that this shifted — he had a couple hundred lessons already recorded from live classes and asked if I could just work with those instead. What we found was that the "imperfect," live-recorded lessons were actually a better experience, because when Alan is in a room with a couple dozen people, his cues adapt and become clearer in response to what he's seeing. Those lessons are longer and recorded in real environments — but for me personally, sound quality still matters enormously for regulating my own nervous system.

Matt: No one downloading a movement app is hoping for background noise.

Beverly: Exactly. Sometimes I say my misophonia is a superpower — the noise might not bother someone else, but a quiet environment is probably better for their nervous system whether they're consciously aware of it or not.

Where the name came from

Matt: Where did the name Pauseture come from?

Beverly: I wanted something with "movement" in it, since the method is fundamentally about movement rewiring the brain — but nothing landed. I wanted a nod to Moshe Feldenkrais without using his name directly, since that felt off to build a brand around. He coined the word "acture" — meaning the readiness to move in any direction at any time — but it wasn't available to trademark. I played with that, and landed on the idea that what we're really doing is pausing, slowing down. So "Pauseture" isn't about posture in the rigid, stand-up-straight sense — that's not what we believe helps people move better. It's about the pause.

Where to find it

Matt: How does someone get started?

Beverly: Go to pauseture.com, or search "Pauseture" directly in the App Store or Google Play.

Matt: And the website?

Beverly: Pauseture.com has research — on the Feldenkrais Method itself, and related topics, like the research on stretching, or on how changing movement patterns affects ADHD. There are blog posts about how the method has benefited me personally, and a podcast section featuring conversations like this one, meant to be one central resource. Sometimes a listener will want more after an episode, and I always tell people: don't stop at one conversation. Just like reading one book on a topic doesn't mean you know everything about it, listening to one conversation shouldn't close the door — go find another one that asks different questions.

The podcast section covers a wide range — pain is the obvious one, but also eating disorders, and how developing the ability to sense how you feel changes behavior patterns well beyond movement. The applications go pretty far and wide.

Personal impact

Matt: Beyond the pain relief, how has this changed your life over the past decade-plus?

Beverly: It didn't take 12 years for the changes to show up — within a handful of months. I had undiagnosed ADHD, and I used to think interrupting people in conversation was a character flaw, not a symptom — I saw myself as simply an impatient person who couldn't wait for someone to finish talking. A few months into daily lessons, people started telling me I seemed different, more present in conversations. Being more present let me connect with people differently.

I used to think I was smarter than everyone else and always needed to prove I was right. As I got curious about my own movement and patterns, I got curious about other people too — I started noticing that I might not be right after all, because I'd just become more curious in general.

There's also research showing people with ADHD commonly have forward head posture and postural sway — I had a pretty hunched posture myself, and a distinct gait that coworkers used to recognize from a floor away, especially on stairs. I didn't realize that posture was tied to the whole nervous system, not just the spine. Improving those patterns frees up cognitive load — when you're not spending energy fighting gravity or catching your balance, that capacity goes toward connecting with people and seeing things from other perspectives. Things I'd always assumed were personality flaws turned out to just be patterns I could change.

Matt: My daughter is a speech pathologist and recently found out she has ADHD — she'll sometimes say "sorry, my ADHD is making me say this," and I've told her that's just her being rude. I owe her an apology. And I've been called a silverback gorilla at work, because I walk hunched over like I'm always racing to the next thing — I'm literally leaning back and dropping my shoulders as you talk.

Beverly: Don't think of it as work, because "work" implies correction, and correction doesn't teach the nervous system anything. Get curious instead — play with the movement, notice your choices. Even with an ADHD diagnosis, you can catch the pattern in the moment: I'm really about to interrupt right now, but instead, notice how my feet are touching the floor. It looks like you're not listening, paying attention to yourself instead — but people with ADHD often focus better while doing something else, like fidgeting. So instead of interrupting, I check in with my own body, then come back to the person more present, because now I have a choice. Blaming it on ADHD treats it as fixed. It's actually a pattern that can change.

Matt: My daughter also works at a center doing PT and OT with children — I keep thinking about how much this could help kids at different developmental stages.

Beverly: I'd love to see more PTs embrace this as a complementary tool. I found the method at 47, so I know how much neuroplastic change is still possible late in life — imagine what's possible starting with a young child. That's a big part of why conversations like this matter to me: helping people see this as a tool worth using earlier in life, not just after decades of compensating patterns.

Closing

Matt: Beverly Atkins, thank you for this work, and for sharing it with us today. Curiosity is the whole point — you never know where a conversation is going to lead. Don't sit on something that's helped you in silence — talk about it. Maybe it's not for everyone, but sharing opens the door for someone else.

Beverly: I really appreciate you saying that, and thank you for the opportunity to have this conversation. I'm grateful, Matt.

Matt: Beverly Atkins, Pauseture — thank you so much, and please don't be a stranger. You're always welcome back.

Beverly: Thank you. And keep doing the lessons, and keep getting curious about how you can move a little more comfortably. Those little aches and pains — I promise it's not age. They're just patterns, and with consistency, you can change them.

Matt: I'll keep you posted.

Beverly: Awesome. Thank you, Matt.