The Art of Slowing Down to Ease Pain

Trail Heads with Jim Barrett — Beverly Atkins

Host: Jim Barrett
Guest: Beverly Atkins, Guild Certified Feldenkrais® Practitioner, founder of Pauseture

Introduction

Jim: Beverly Atkins discovered that the greatest breakthroughs don't always come from moving faster — they come from learning when to pause. Today's guest is the founder of Pauseture. This Guild Certified Feldenkrais teacher helps people move with greater ease, reduce pain, and improve how they function by changing the underlying movement patterns that shape everyday life. Blending years of leadership in the tech world with a deep passion for human potential, Beverly empowers people to reconnect with their bodies, rediscover resilience, and experience the freedom that comes from moving and living with greater awareness and less pain.

So, Beverly Atkins — thank you for joining me. We met in the '90s as part of a group called Survivors After Suicide. That doesn't mean we attempted suicide and survived — it means we're part of a group of people left behind by our loved ones. Someone we knew, loved, was friends with, colleagues with, a dear family member. In our case, we both lost our mom to suicide. Thank you for joining me today.

Beverly: Thank you, Jim. I'm excited to have this conversation with you.

Finding the grief group

Jim: As we both had that tragic loss earlier in our lives — for me, by the time I came to the survivor groups, it had been about 15 years since I lost my mom. I was a kid, and a therapist pointed me toward the suicide survivor groups. What initially brought you to that program? Unlike me, you hadn't gone 15 years without a structured way to process it.

Beverly: I joined the group about four weeks after my mom took her own life. She died in December 1993, and I joined the group in January. It was incredibly new and raw. That first eight weeks, I think I just sat there and cried — it was mostly a place for me to go, and I mostly listened to other people's stories. It was still too new, too raw. When those eight weeks ended, I wasn't ready to let it go, and there wasn't really a path to repeat the group if you'd joined too early. So I ended up co-facilitating the grief groups while I was still very deep in my own grief.

My grief, unlike a lot of people who treat it as taboo, became my self-image and my identity. I loved my mother so much, and I was very angry with her. I think when she made that decision, she believed my life would be better without her — that she was a burden and wanted to relieve me of it. My boyfriend at the time, who she adored, I think she pictured me living happily with him. If she'd thought she was leaving me alone, she wouldn't have done it.

So in a way, I chose to stay in the grief — chose to stay unhappy for the next eight years.

Grief as something that moves

Jim: A lot of people who come to those groups come much closer to the loss — a few weeks, a few months. You were more the exception, though some people do mourn in different ways or delay it. As a co-facilitator, working alongside a licensed marriage and family therapist specializing in grief, I noticed that when people come that soon after the loss, I'd use this image: right after we lose someone, it's like a closed fist. We can't eat, work, or live without seeing it — it's right there. Over time, hopefully, it opens. Our lives are forever changed, grief never fully vanishes, but it becomes more of a choice to visit it rather than being consumed by it. Did that resonate for you?

Beverly: I love that you used the word "choice," because I was choosing to stay closed — I felt that if I let go, she would have gotten away with what she wanted. I was determined to punish her by holding onto it.

What's fascinating is that about 15 months after she died, I'd been purposely choosing unhappiness. I wouldn't have scheduled joy, wouldn't have planned a vacation. But I was invited on a work ski trip — paid for, part of work — and I'd never snow skied before. It was so physically and mentally demanding, and actually joyful, that I remember gently interrupting my grief on that trip. Skiing was the first time I laughed, the first time I had joy. That became my passion for skiing, and it felt like allowing myself joy for the first time gave me relief from the grief.

Jim: For me, it happened when I was 12 — I was a kid. When I finally faced the grief, I realized it had manifested in self-sabotaging relationships with women, being angry about things the other person didn't even know I was upset about. Facing it meant sitting in those groups and sometimes just listening — someone else's experience, even if it wasn't identical to mine, gave me a different perspective. Maybe it was what it was like for my dad, or for a sibling.

Beverly: That shift in perspective is so hard when you're stuck in grief. Grieving alongside people with a different form of grief helps you see other sides of it. In my own growth, what really helped me mature was learning to take the perspective of other people. I learned that from my co-facilitator, Susan — a remarkable marriage and family therapist and a fellow survivor. We're still friends today, and I still learn from her.

From grief to movement

Jim: Trail Heads started more recently, around 2017–2018, when a few friends and I were going through a program addressing our own struggles — relationship sabotage, addiction, whatever it was. I know you've shifted into physical activity too. Tell me about your path.

Beverly: For eight years, my identity was built around my grief and around suicide prevention volunteering. In 2001, the group I was involved with organized a 10K for suicide awareness. I was all in — I wanted to run it in honor of my mom. I was 34 and had never run a mile in my life. A few months before the race, I was on vacation with my sister, a lifelong runner, who said, "Let's get you to six miles by the end of the week." Day one, half a mile. Day two, a mile. By the end of the week, six miles. That gave me the confidence to do the 10K, and I kept running.

For the first time in eight years, my depression and sadness started softening. I attributed it to running, though I don't think it was just the running — it was getting up before work, getting out into morning sunlight instead of sleeping until the last possible minute. That's what I needed. Running led to triathlon, and in 2009, at 42, I did Ironman Hawaii.

Jim: From your first mile at 34 to an Ironman at 42 — that's an incredible arc.

Beverly: That's when I got into triathlon and fundraising through it, and I made a conscious decision to leave the suicide-prevention identity behind. That message had been "don't die — don't die like my mom." I shifted to a message about living: get outside, exercise, take care of yourself. A very different kind of role modeling.

The cost of over-exercising

Jim: How did that evolve from there?

Beverly: Honestly, the amount of time I spent exercising wasn't healthy either — I used it to manage my mood, my weight, my depression. It became its own addiction. Shortly after Ironman, at 43, I became pregnant, which slowed things down. That led to three failed pregnancies, then IVF in the eleventh hour, and grief around all of that. I wasn't exercising to the same extreme anymore, but I had two dogs who loved hiking, so hiking started around 2010, during that first failed pregnancy — with friends who'd originally been triathlon friends. My work friendships shifted the same way: instead of drinks, hiking became the connection point.

Jim: I ran a hiking group in Georgia from 2020 to the end of 2024 — Sunday mornings at sunrise, less crowded, cooler, prettier light for photos. People showed up for different reasons. Some wanted to race to the top; most of us were there for fellowship and connection with something larger than ourselves.

Beverly: My closest friendships are the ones built hiking. Processing what happened at work or in relationships is better done with a friend on a trail than over drinks — but that's often the only option our culture offers. When the LA fires hit in January 2025 and early reports said the air quality would stay bad for years, I moved to San Diego. Now my form of connection is beach walks — I see the regulars, we talk. But I miss the hiking friendships from LA. Nature as a solo walk is what I have right now, but the friendships matter as much as the hiking itself.

The back injury

Jim: Tell me about the app you've built to help with these challenges.

Beverly: Five years after Ironman, I was working in a very stressful environment and deeply dysregulated — I didn't have the label for it yet, but I was perimenopausal, dealing with the hormone fluctuations and brain fog that come with that, and really struggling at work. At 47, I put my back out. I'd had a hunched posture since childhood, reinforced by years of swimming, biking, and running. Between the job stress and the hormonal shifts, my back gave out and I was in debilitating pain.

I'd had hip pain through years of triathlon and just accepted it as part of me — massages, chiropractor, acupuncture, physical therapy. Getting to Ironman uninjured was extraordinarily expensive because I paid so many people for my self-care. I didn't understand that healing could come from within.

When my back went out, I couldn't walk upright for three weeks, and it was terrifying — because of my mother. I've simplified the story over the years: she had back pain, was offered pills or surgery, chose surgery since she was in recovery and wouldn't take pills, and six weeks to the day after that surgery — which was supposed to relieve the pain but made it worse — she took her own life. She was 53. So when I couldn't walk for three weeks at 47, I couldn't help but think I was heading down the same path.

I had a vacation already planned at a health and wellness resort — the kind of place with workouts every hour, rowing, kickboxing, dance classes, a full sheet of fitness options on arrival. Exactly the kind of vacation I'd choose, because I was over-exercising. I couldn't stand up straight, and among all the class descriptions I saw one for Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement.

Discovering Feldenkrais

Beverly: I'll disclaim the "and then my back pain was gone" part the way it sounds, like an infomercial — it was the right lesson, on the right day, at the right time, in the right environment. I was on vacation, the stress of my life was gone. I was three weeks into the pain, which is around when acute pain and inflammation can turn chronic — so physically, I'd actually healed, but my nervous system was still in protection mode. Partly, I think, because of the fear tied to my mother. My brain had decided this was permanent.

If I'd done that lesson in week one, it probably wouldn't have worked — I still had inflammation. By week three, I was ready. The teacher, who became a mentor, told me later that when she saw my hunched posture and heard what was going on, she chose a lesson that leaned into that pattern rather than correcting it — that's how the method works. It's not corrective; it meets you where you are.

I want to be clear: usually one lesson doesn't resolve someone's pain. It was the right place at the right time. But what mattered more than the pain relief was the curiosity it sparked. That curiosity is the real mechanism — not doing lessons to get through a specific fix, but staying present and curious.

Within a few weeks of continuing the lessons, the conflicts I'd been having at work started softening — because those conflicts had come from needing to be right. I think I was building new neural connections just from noticing how my foot hit the ground, and I started seeing things from different perspectives, the same way you described seeing grief through other people's eyes in group. I was observing my own body without judgment, just with curiosity — and that curiosity extended outward. I stopped needing to protect my version of the story, needing to be right. That part of my personality started to shift.

It's similar to what people describe discovering in meditation — clearing the mind, carrying equanimity through the day. My ADHD brain could never find that quiet on its own. I was always overachieving, doing too much. These lessons are audio-only, no video demonstration, so you have to quiet the shopping list, the disagreement with a colleague or sibling or spouse — everything gets left at the door because it's just you and the instructor's voice. Lose focus, and you get lost. By the end of a lesson, my brain was quieted the way it is after meditation.

Building Pauseture

Beverly: I was working at Facebook at the time, and the mentality there is: don't build something for 10 people or a hundred — if you're building something, build it for a billion. When my back pain relieved, I thought, everybody has back pain, everybody needs this, it needs to be accessible.

But I didn't fully understand yet why I was changing. Before calling the Feldenkrais Guild about investing in technology, I decided I should learn the method myself first. I started a four-year training program, eight weeks a year. I assumed I'd run out of vacation days at Facebook and eventually have to resign — but because I was more regulated and easier to work with, I was given the flexibility to manage it while keeping my job.

Just before COVID, I resigned to open a private practice, because my mentor told me: until you work with people one-on-one, don't build an app — you don't understand the method yet. I spent about four years in private practice. Then I returned to my original idea: packaging lessons to make them accessible, and more importantly, affordable, for people who might be desperate and in pain.

My original idea had been essentially a pain-relief app — because I'd simplified my mother's death down to "back pain led to suicide." It's much more complex than that. She carried guilt for not being present as a parent for years. She'd had two failed marriages, and the last one left her deeply in debt — rather than filing bankruptcy, she absorbed her ex's debt and was still paying it off monthly. She'd always wanted a PhD, finally earned one, and then had a much younger boss with an Ivy League PhD who made her feel less-than. She was working at a pain care center, in a job she hated, telling people in pain that they needed to learn to live with it — when her real passion, after being a psychiatric nurse, was working with severely mentally ill people, especially those with schizophrenia.

Then her own back went out, and she told me she felt guilty for having told her patients to live with pain like that — "you can't live with this kind of pain." When she died, she left me her ATM card and told me to withdraw whatever cash was there: $1,600, against tens of thousands in debt. She'd paid a man $5,000 — nearly everything she had — to write a business plan for a theater project using drama therapy to help people with mental illness. He took the money and never delivered anything. Her hope was crushed.

People have told me I should change Pauseture's business model — charge thousands upfront, the way other somatic programs do, because people in pain will pay for hope. I don't think it was the back pain alone that led to my mother's death. It was that she lost hope, and she didn't have agency over her own health. She'd worked at an eating disorders clinic, but her idea of health was a Weight Watchers or Lean Cuisine frozen meal. She wasn't eating well, wasn't getting sunlight, wasn't taking care of herself.

When I first came across Feldenkrais, I thought I was building a back-pain-relief product. Over time — understanding the method more deeply, understanding how it had transformed my own life, and seeing it work with one-on-one clients — I realized it isn't a movement exercise. It's a tool that gives people agency over their own lives.

I'd been eating exactly like my mother — calorie-budgeted, Diet Coke, frozen meals. As I started noticing how I actually felt after eating certain things, I made better choices naturally. I noticed how alcohol made me feel and cut back. I stopped needing massages, acupuncture, chiropractic care — because I'd found agency over my own health.

That's what I've built, and what I want people to be able to explore. I don't want to charge $3,000 upfront the way this method sometimes has been sold — other people have taken these lessons, rebranded them, and charged a lot of money while overpromising. I want it to be affordable, because I don't want people investing in hope. I want them investing in showing up for themselves.

Performance versus authenticity

Jim: How does being "on" — at work, with certain friends — affect our relationships?

Beverly: I think what you're asking is whether we're performative with other people. Moshe Feldenkrais talked about self-image — how we mask ourselves to fit into a relationship or into society. From a young age we want to fit in: what's everyone wearing, what's cool. In yoga, for example, you watch the teacher and try to mimic the "perfect" pose so you fit in, so you're doing it right.

These lessons slow you down until you notice what actually feels good to you, and you start to find your own self-image. Then you show up differently in relationships, because performing for someone isn't authentic — it's often overcompensation. When you're grounded and aware of how you feel, you show up more present. I had ADHD, and when people spoke, I wasn't really listening — I was waiting for my turn to talk. Slowing down builds a kind of self-confidence from the inside out, one that doesn't need performance. You can actually listen and hear people. They feel seen, and that draws them toward true connection — which, honestly, can be disruptive to relationships that were built on performance. When something suddenly becomes real and authentic, it can shake things up. But you get true connection when you can slow down and listen.

The research

Jim: Tell me about the research behind this.

Beverly: Moshe Feldenkrais developed the method in the 1940s and taught it in the U.S. through the '70s and '80s. He used to say, "I'm not after flexible bodies, I'm after flexible brains" — describing the rewiring that happens in the brain when you slow down and, instead of pure repetition, practice repetition with variation. In exercise, you do reps. In these lessons, small movements with novelty — because novelty is what fires the brain up. Repeat the same lesson and you go back to autopilot; something new keeps the brain engaged.

He was talking about changing people's brains before the term "neuroplasticity" was validated in the neuroscience community, in the 1990s — after he'd already died. Late in his life he was frustrated, trying urgently to train more people, because he knew what he was teaching worked even though the science hadn't caught up yet.

In 1949, he wrote a book called Body and Mature Behavior, describing how anxiety creates tension in the body, and that tension creates more anxiety — a feedback loop. Today, people like Gabor Maté and Bessel van der Kolk talk about trauma being held in the body; Feldenkrais articulated something similar decades earlier, more mechanically, though he never used the word "trauma" himself — his whole life had been shaped by trauma, so asking him if he had trauma would have been like asking a fish if it lives in water.

He also didn't believe in diagnosis — he believed in opportunity. In Body and Mature Behavior, he argued that people spend too much time on "why" — why do I have this tension, why do I feel this way — and not enough on "how": how do I feel better. He wasn't interested in why you had tension. He wanted to relieve it, through slow, gentle movement that gets your muscles working together — because for most people, the small muscles are overworking and the big muscles are underused. The lessons even out the tone across your whole nervous system so you move more freely. His theory was that when movement becomes more comfortable, depression and anxiety recede. At the time, it was all theory. Modern neuroscience backs up essentially all of it now.

What a daily pause looks like

Jim: It sounds like this started as an exploration of why your mom did what she did, and in that process you found relief for yourself — and now you're taking ideas that have existed since the 1940s and turning them into something that could help millions, maybe billions, of people. If someone listening wanted to take a daily pause, what would that look like?

Beverly: You don't need to download the app or do a formal lesson to start. Just lie on the floor and give your weight to gravity — really let go. With clients on my table, I'd often see so much unnecessary muscular tension getting in the way of their own movement. I'd offer the image: imagine you're hot candle wax, all your tissue melting into the floor, letting your skeleton emerge. In this method, when you learn to rely on your skeleton instead of your muscles, you can release that unnecessary effort. Then just gently roll your head side to side — not to the end of the range, not into a stretch — and notice whether your state shifts.

Looking ahead

Jim: What do you see for the future of Pauseture?

Beverly: I want to keep bringing in more Feldenkrais teachers, because different voices resonate with different people. I didn't want to launch until we had 365 lessons, because novelty matters — there's nothing like a fresh lesson where you don't know what to expect. I've focused the core lessons on nervous system regulation to start, but there are thousands of Feldenkrais lessons that are more active and more physical, and I want to keep expanding into those.

What motivates me isn't downloads — it's the emails. Someone who had chemo 13 years ago and says the last 21 days gave them the most mobility they've had since. That's what excites me. Sometimes I don't know how to talk about this without sounding like a snake oil salesman — it's not for everyone — but I've tried to build it so more people can access it and stop working so hard to feel better.

It's funny — I see ads for $700 vibration mats: lie on it for 20 minutes and feel better. People buy it, lie on it, and say it worked. I'd challenge people to lie on the floor for 20 minutes for free and see what happens — you'll feel better and save $700.

Where to find Pauseture

Beverly: Pauseture.com — the word "pause" plus "ture." We've just published a set of blog posts on different topics, and at pauseture.com/research there's the research supporting the method's efficacy. Or go straight to Google Play or the Apple App Store. It's a seven-day free trial — you can do the 21-lesson intro series in that window to see if it's right for you, without paying anything. I want to be clear that downloading the app won't make you feel better on its own — showing up consistently is where the change happens.

Lightning round

Coffee or tea? Coffee — though I drink tea while talking so my voice doesn't dry out, unless I'm on a podcast.
Sunrise or sunset? Sunset — I live on the West Coast, so sunrise is hard to catch.
Mountains or the beach? Mountains, even though I live on the beach.
A book everyone should read: Body and Mature Behavior by Moshe Feldenkrais. No audiobook yet, which is hard for me with ADHD, but I've made it through recently and it's remarkable.
Someone who has inspired you: Taylor Swift, right now — her resilience, and how rejection seems to make her stronger.
A word that defines peace: Stillness.
A trail you're hoping to explore: Getting back to Westridge in Los Angeles — my favorite.

Closing

Jim: Beverly Atkins, thank you for joining me today and for turning a shared loss into something that helps other people ease their pain, physical and emotional. I love what you're doing with Pauseture. Thank you, and best of luck.

Beverly: Thank you — I appreciate you, and I appreciate you lying on the floor and giving it a try.