Practical Neuroplasticity - Feldenkrais, Somatics & Learning How to Change with Nick Strauss-Klein

Can mindful movement change your life? In this episode, Feldenkrais practitioner Nick Strauss-Klein reveals how subtle body awareness and gentle movement can rewire the brain, improve posture and mobility, and support emotional resilience.

From concert pianist to somatic educator, Nick shares his healing journey and the neuroscience behind the Feldenkrais Method — a powerful approach to “practical neuroplasticity” that reconnects us to curiosity, ease, and embodied intelligence.

In this episode:

• What makes the Feldenkrais Method a form of neuroplasticity
• How movement impacts learning, creativity, and emotional regulation
• Why posture is shaped by trauma, habit, and even ancestral patterns
• Feldenkrais as a tool for modern healing in a sedentary world
• The mission behind The Feldenkrais Project and global accessibility

About Nick Strauss-Klein
 Nick is a Guild-certified Feldenkrais practitioner and founder of The Feldenkrais Project, a pioneering platform offering free guided movement practices for learners around the world.

Also available: our Spotlight episode with Nick, featuring a guided Awareness Through Movement practice.

feldenkraisproject.com

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Transcript

Speaker 1 0:04

Welcome to the Future of Wellness, exploring self-transformation and holistic healing to unlock your inner potential. Hosted by Christabel Armsten and Keith Parker.

Speaker 2 0:20

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Future of Wellness podcast. Today, we're joined by Nick Strauss-Klein. Nick is a Guild-certified Feldenkrais practitioner and founder of the Feldenkrais Project, a crowdfunded labor of love offering Feldenkrais study at no charge to thousands of monthly listeners all around the world. With over 25 years of experience, nick brings to his Feldenkrais teaching the unique background of a master of music from the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, discovering Feldenkrais while studying to be a concert pianist. Nick had lost the ability to play piano with his right hand through repetitive strain. Using the Feldenkrais method, he created improvements that were rapid and lasting, enabling him to play again. This experience ignited a fascination with how human learning and improvement processes worked. Nick currently teaches the Feldenkrais Method full-time to students pursuing all types of improvement, from chronic pain relief to enhancing athletic or creative performance. Since 2009, he's been the director of Twin Cities Feldenkrais, based in the Minneapolis-St Paul metropolitan area.

Speaker 2 1:20

Nick, thanks so much for joining us today. Well, thank you so much for having me. This is wonderful. Nick, thanks so much for joining us today. Well, thank you so much for having me. This is wonderful. So we touched a little there on your personal story. Maybe we could fill in a little bit more detail about how it is.

Speaker 3 1:33

You've become a Feldenkrais teacher and practitioner, sure sure To think about how far back you want me to go. There are some sort of childhood loves that got me where I am today, but I'll maybe go quickly through that. I was a very science-y kid, a huge fan of physics in particular, and then somehow in high school I found myself deeply, suddenly, passionately interested in the arts and I started studying to be a concert pianist. And there's a very high skill level there, obviously, and I had kind of started late so I drove myself really hard. But I got very lucky with a couple of wonderful piano teachers who were both dedicated to the link between making good music and being physically comfortable and skillful with my body at the piano, not just my fingers right. So there was an artistry, like almost a choreography in the way I was taught to play the piano and I always loved the feel of being a musician, not just the sound and the expression I got to create artistically.

Speaker 3 2:36

After I left college I took a year off for an internship teaching music in Europe and I was preparing to audition for musical grad school and I drove myself really, really hard and I no longer had the watchful eye of these two wonderful teachers and as happens when we become kind of insecure and push ourselves really, really hard. I got hurt. I got one of these repetitive strain injuries which you were mentioning and it was kind of amazing to me how little control I had over that. I couldn't practice my way out of it, I couldn't exercise my way out of it. The traditional medical system couldn't help me out of it. And finally one of my grad school piano teachers said have you tried Feldenkrais? And like everyone else, I said Felden, what Feldenkrais? And like everyone else, I said Felden, what you know. She connected me with a class and a one-to-one teacher and it was kind of revelatory. The pain diminished almost immediately. My ability to play started returning. But I just got so, so curious about how in the world I had tried so hard with, you know, effort and willpower and the energy of youth to improve, to make myself better, but I hadn't gotten anywhere. It was getting worse. And then this gentle little method where apparently I was doing almost nothing. You know, there's there's no sense of strain in the work, my finely honed skills of self-imposition. You know I will sit at this piano for five hours today. I will push myself harder than anyone else. I will be the best.

Speaker 3 4:04

We're not called on in my Feldenkrais studies and somehow the world began to change, not just my abilities at the piano, but my confidence, my sense of ease, my sense of just general wellbeing. I felt these changes even to the point that my best friends were saying I was becoming nicer right. So that really got my attention right. And at the same time as I had found Feldenkrais because I couldn't play by the time I got to graduate school I switched my studies to music pedagogy, to the study of how to teach music.

Speaker 3 4:35

I was fascinated with teaching and my Feldenkrais teachers at the time said hey, there's a chance to learn to be a Feldenkrais teacher 10 minutes from your apartment. There's only a couple in the country, in the US, at any given time. So this was an incredible coincidence. And she said you have to do this. Whether or not you plan to be a Feldenkrais teacher, you've got to study and see what happens. So I dove in and that was kind of it for me.

Speaker 3 4:57

At that point my fascination with learning was so stoked by the brilliance of the Feldenkrais method and the way that the training is not just about physics coming back to that not just about the biomechanics of being a human body, but how, the intersection of physics and the human brain, how we actually sense and regulate the carriage of the self within the forces of the universe, right. So it became this combination of physics and learning that, just on a very deep level, connected with me and and I took off from there. For a while there was a day job of music, which was kind of funny, and at night I was teaching Feldenkrais as much as I could, and then eventually I got enough Feldenkrais students that I've been full time. Now for my gosh, it's coming up on 17 years, I think.

Speaker 1 5:44

I love this expression. You just used the carriage of the self. That's a really evocative phrase. Would you say there are some core principles to the Feldenkrais method and if so, how is it that they're guiding the practice?

Speaker 3 5:56

Yeah, the core principles are sort of elusively obvious. That was the title of one of his books the Elusive, obvious right. We need to find a way to act in the world that is in harmony with how the forces of the universe work and how we learn and refine ourselves and mature right. Being able to make fine distinctions between things is the roots of learning. So at the core of the method is this sense of awareness of the physics of being human, but also in very fine detail. How does learning work?

Speaker 3 6:38

In any Feldenkrais lesson, whether we're being guided hands-on by a skilled practitioner or we're being guided verbally, in any Feldenkrais lesson, we're being constantly asked to pay attention. In the end, the real beneficiary or the linchpin of Feldenkrais study is our curiosity. Right, we are cultivating curiosity about the self. So how can we learn to sense in more detail the differences among the options we have for doing things? So the lessons present options. They cultivate curiosity, and at a very fine level. They ask us to learn to feel what it means to move and function in one way compared to another. And the amazing thing about the human nervous system is that we are wired for efficiency. When we perceive a better option, we will choose it spontaneously. So Feldenkrais is often presenting options for how to do the things we want to do orientation.

Speaker 2 7:48

you know, like music study, have to like do it and push the edge, and then this thing comes in, feldenkrais comes in and it's about doing things with ease, going in like the opposite direction. I'm wondering if how this informs the creation of Feldenkrais and if you can give some kind of context to our listeners about how this kind of arose, how this methodology arose and how this non-doing aspect is so central.

Exploring the Feldenkrais Method

Speaker 3 8:09

Yeah, it's kind of a fascinating story. So Moshe Feldenkrais was a Ukrainian Jew who found his way to Palestine around the end of World War I and in that environment he had to learn a lot about self-defense quickly and studied martial arts and then later on in his formal education he studied mechanical and electrical engineering. And along the way, with this incredible mind, the scientific mind and this very skillful development of his body, he injured a knee and got to the point with this injury where he was given a choice by a surgeon. He said you can do the surgery and it may help you, or you may never walk again, and he didn't like those odds. So he set about kind of thoroughly applying his own curiosity and we could say the scientific method is.

Speaker 3 8:58

One of the things I love to say about the work is that he had the courage to apply the scientific method to the subjective world. Right, he experimented upon himself. But as he was trained in science, you can't do that with a lot of noise or force. Right, to make very fine distinctions you have to study very, very fine sensations and details. Right, the louder the stimulus, the harder it is to discriminate details.

Speaker 3 9:22

So he worked with himself in a very, very gentle and nonviolent way, despite his background in self-defense, and he discovered a way to walk again, I believe lacking one of the ligaments of his knee lifelong, but he was very functional. So he found a way to move differently that worked through that. So that's the basics of his story of finding it. And then he along the way, as he was developing this, he was studying human development, he was studying neuropsychology, he was intuiting the basics of what has become modern neuroscience. It's one of the coolest things about becoming a Feldenkrais practitioner when I did in the early 2000s is that modern neuroscience was just proving out what Feldenkrais had intuited over 50 years prior about how the plasticity of the brain isn't just in childhood we used to believe that adult brains don't change, and it's not true at all.

Speaker 1 10:18

Feldenkrais seemed to be very ahead of his time, as you're mentioning there, creating this method of self-improvement, which today might be connected, as you just sort of spoke of, with somatics, neuroplasticity, before those terms were being sort of actively used in common parlance. Might you comment on the role of the brain and the nervous system a little bit in this practice?

Speaker 3 10:37

Yeah, I mean, I would actually in some days I would like to call the method practical neuroplasticity, right, Instead of the Feldenkrais method. It's not the most convenient last name that anyone has ever had for a way of, for a personal practice, right? So the details again of neuroplasticity is that the brain changes itself based on our experience. You know, we're always either strengthening the synaptic bonds of habit or we're building new patterns, right? We can either be in that sort of curious, wide open learning state as we encounter this next moment, or we can be sort of running our programs, running our patterns that have solved problems that have repeated in the past. Well enough that we're perfectly fine being in the realm of habit that have repeated in the past. Well enough that we're perfectly fine being in the realm of habit. But, as anyone knows, you know, a lot of habits are very good and of course, many habits are very frustrating and things that we'd like to change. So Feldenkrais offers this set of tools in the form of the lessons for actually how to change our habits, and the ingredients are always kind of similar.

Speaker 3 11:42

I talked a lot about making distinctions and fine sensations. There's a nonviolence, there's a non-self imposition. You're taught not to push hard into things, not to use willpower to approach the riddles of the lessons. If there's a movement that's cued, that is complex or outside your understanding at first, there is a patience. There's almost infinite time to wallow in the uncertainty of it, to try it many, many different ways. So in that delicate trial and error process of kindness, of self-compassion, and each of the lessons having a particular human function that they're pointing to, along the way, your nervous system starts to change.

Speaker 3 12:25

Right, we plastically start to approximate more and more a simpler way of functioning, a simpler way of moving our bodies through the movements that are being described, which are always in some way related to actual human action. Right, we get on the ground, we move very slowly, we move out of gravity. So the habits are more malleable, right, Not not falling over our balance is one of the biggest habits. So we do a lot of Feldenkrais work lying on mats, because it makes us more malleable. But then when you stand up again, it's like. It's like you've got this new sense of yourself in the world to explore as you go into your day after a Feldenkrais lesson, there is a palpable feeling of a different carriage of self, we said earlier, but also a different openness, a different mind state about the novelty of the moment and your ability to be present in it.

Speaker 2 13:16

Rocking onto that specific thing you said about being on the ground and working with gravity in a different way, can we get into the nuts and bolts of how the practice actually looks like firsthand for somebody experiencing it? You know some people might be wondering okay, so there's movement, it's somatics, you mean like yoga or Pilates or Alexander technique. What makes Feldenkrais Feldenkrais? What's the experience like and why does it work?

Speaker 3 13:39

So again, we're harnessing curiosity. So the cues alternate between guided movement and guided attention. Okay, so usually you'll lie down on the floor. You'll make sure that you're very comfortable. The way that you are supported by the floor is not meant to be performative or exactly symmetrical. You're encouraged to make yourself truly comfortable and then you're asked to first do what's called a body scan, where you just take a few minutes to open your mind to the language of sensations, right, usually we're. We spend so much of our conscious time talking to ourselves about our experience, right, and we build in this little bit of transition time where it's actually more of the raw sensory perceptions, it's the raw data of experience. So we tend to get you oriented to yourself at that point, which also it gives you a distinction in time. Then you've got a sense. Okay, here's how I was before we went into the movement explorations, right, and then there'll be some position or particular movement that you're doing. I think you said you guys are going to have a spotlight episode to model a Feldenkrais lesson In that one.

Speaker 3 14:43

I'll just talk about it a little bit to illustrate this. You'll be lying on your side, you'll have some head support so that your head can be very comfortable and you'll extend one arm to the ceiling, just sort of laying it or setting it up, plumb in gravity in a very, very relaxed way. You make the finest little movements in any lesson, but in this one you'll move your arm just a little bit off of that plumb line to get a chance to learn to feel when the skeletal support gives way to muscular support in this lesson. So if our bodies lean right, if you're sitting now or standing now and you just lean over to one side a little bit, you'll start to feel muscular contractions on the other side of your body if you pay close enough attention.

Speaker 3 15:30

We do this all day long. We're sort of like an upside down pendulum and in this particular lesson that I'm talking about, we're looking for a way to illustrate, through that neurological analogy of your arm standing in space, what it actually feels like to correct for your balance at a very fine level. And having done that a few times and in a few different ways, you start to become more skillful at it, meaning you start to use less muscular contraction to accomplish what you need to accomplish. So there's an efficiency and effectiveness element always about this work. What happens in that is it feels really good Again because our nervous systems are wired for efficiency. When you start to move more easily, it starts to feel very, very pleasant.

Speaker 1 16:13

Who's coming to do this work? Who's showing up to sessions? Is this about showing up with a postural misalignment, a physical discomfort in the body? What about people who have an agenda that might be more emotionally based or might be an issue or theme based? Is the work is relevant for that? Or how does this working with the physicality intersect, in your experience, with people's emotional management and states?

Speaker 3 16:39

Thank you. That's a really, really important question because it is so easy in all somatic work to be hung up on the soma, the body right. So, amazingly, the way that the nervous system works and it sort of is as obvious as can be once you think about it for a moment is that the same nervous system is regulating and controlling, running our physical body and our emotional state, our thinking, mind, our ability to sense. It's all part of the same nervous system, part of the same self. So yes, in fact, a lot of people do find in Feldenkrais and some even come to Feldenkrais amazing emotional relief and inspiration for creativity. They feel clearer, they feel safer, they feel more confident in themselves and the emotional life can calm down and become one of joy and freedom, more and more.

Speaker 3 17:31

Now I should say that the average Feldenkrais student shows up motivated by the most basic thing in the world pain right. The bread and butter student will show up to Feldenkrais because they're in pain. That's why I showed up, that's why so many people do so. A lot of what we're doing at first is helping people learn that they have agency in their unpleasant experiences. But that wisdom extends past the physical unpleasantness. Right, extends past physical pain. You can start to learn as you study this work that if you re-regulate your nervous system in Feldenkrais lessons, you can re-regulate your emotional state at that time too. There are some practitioners who've done very, very beautiful work with Feldenkrais for victims of trauma.

Speaker 1 18:17

That was going to be my next question. If somebody was listening to this say they hadn't experienced Feldenkrais, they had a particular trauma they wanted to work through. They experienced with something like that and has worked with it through the body system and how that's unfolded. That's beautiful. It's beautiful.

Spirituality in Feldenkrais

Speaker 3 18:51

Yeah, when our mental life is disturbed, it can be so hard to just sit quietly with that pain right. A lot of times I can actually give a little example from myself in that era I described, when I was sort of falling apart, as a concert pianist and I thought that was the only future I had. I was very depressed at the time and there were a lot of people who were telling me you know, you should try meditation, right, and I did, and for a lot of young people and for a lot of people in general, for me at that time it did not work right. Getting really quiet and still with myself was was kind of a nightmare at that time. Right, it was sort of the last thing I wanted.

Speaker 3 19:33

But when I started studying feldenkrais, an interesting thing happened. I got what some people had described to me as some of the benefits of meditation, but it was like I had something to do, right, I had this concrete physical movement and attention task that was very, very interesting and intricate and constantly changing throughout these sessions. I would find, as I experienced this, that a lot of the insecurities and anxieties would just dramatically calm down during these lessons. I can't say that I've had a lot of one-to-one students come into my practice looking directly for emotional support, but I've had many, many talk about realizing that they're receiving it In the online teaching that I do at the Feldenkrais Project. Yeah, I've been stunned by emails and comments on the website about people who are directly using the work to support their creative efforts and to support their emotional wellness.

Speaker 2 20:33

To give a personal anecdote, I actually had a really wonderful emotional release or engagement with stuck emotion in myself doing a Feldenkrais lesson. And what it did is it unlocked certain movement patterns that were connected, certain emotional patterns, and it was really quite easeful and effortless. And I really appreciate the potential for the integrative nature of Feldenkrais to take that emotional piece connected to the body so effortlessly and to actually repattern those things in a really seamless way. So I think there's a lot of potency for Feldenkrais regarding emotions but, like you're saying, maybe it's not the normal way that people are finding it or thinking about it.

Speaker 2 21:14

But to kind of spread a little further than where Christabel went, because she was on the same wavelength as me, we hear about the holistic triad of body, mind and spirit. So I'm wondering about going beyond even emotions and we talk about the psyche and psychological aspects of how this can change things. Is there room for or an integration or a consideration of spirit in the Feldenkrais method or community? Or that can be personal to you or something that's specific to the community, I don't know, but I'm putting that other word out there.

Speaker 3 21:43

Yeah, spirit is a big one, so not in any religious way. Right, if you'll entertain the concept of spirituality without religion, I think Moshe Feldenkrais would be quite comfortable speaking with us about that. He came from a religious background and in fact there's a Feldenkrais practitioner who's written a wonderful little book on the Hasidic Jewish roots of the Feldenkrais method, because some of the nature of inquiry and study comes so nicely out of that sort of traditional Jewish study pattern. But he himself, I have to say I'm not too aware of him talking about spirituality as it relates to this In myself, in colleagues and friends I've talked to, in Feldenkrais study. Yeah, it's a very rich supporter of a spiritual life because it grounds us in the present moment. Right, that's the thing about changing any aspect of self. You know body, mind or spirit self. You know body, mind or spirit. If we're not able to fully connect with the here and now, then there's always this aspect of a narration. You know how our personal story, how our history, is affecting us. But there is an immediacy and quite a lot of beauty in being here right now in a spiritual practice or in a, a meditation practice or in a somatic or Feldenkrais practice, and I have personally found that that overlap is really quite amazing.

Speaker 3 23:10

Going back to the story of attempting meditation at age 21, it took a few decades and a global pandemic, but back in 2020, something I'm not sure what it was inspired me to sit my butt down on the cushion again and really, really give meditation a go and I developed out of it a quite profound practice for the first time in my life which at this point, I don't miss very often in any given day.

Speaker 3 23:36

I mean, I don't skip very often on any given day, so it's a regular practice. I mean I don't skip very often on any given day, so it's a regular practice and I was struck as it developed and I continue to just be in awe of it now by how often the mental states that I find myself in after meditation and after a Feldenkrais lesson resemble each other and how there is this sort of sense of openness or pleasure in the moment, no matter what's happening, even if a kid comes in and distracts me or there's a difficulty in the kitchen that I out of Pelman Christ lessons and my meditation practice. For me, the same way, if I'm in any given day, I'm going to do at least one of them. It's sort of a personal practice, right. If I don't get to both that happens sometimes but I'm going to practice with at least one of them.

Speaker 2 24:47

A brief pause to thank you for listening to this episode. If you're looking to take the next step in your transformation, find out how we can support you with our popular energy healing training, one-to-one private sessions, free resources and more. Visit energyfielddynamicscom to learn more thread amongst all of the people that we've spoken to on this podcast, when we talk about what's most important, what is the central focus of the work when it really comes down to it, when you boil it down and it's not these esoteric things, it's not these philosophical or idealistic things. If you don't work at the present moment, if the foundation of everything isn't just being able to be here, now in life, as it presents itself, then what are you working with? How are you discovering anything? How are you having any kind of inquiry or engagement with what this experience may be? And so I appreciate that, and that's great.

Speaker 3 25:51

In the end, it's all just kind of performative, right. If we're not present, we're somehow running a script and we might even be running our own script, right, but it's not actually being here now, and so we need these wake-up calls, these reminders, to bring us back to it. I remember talking about this at some point in a workshop I was teaching. A student asked about the sort of emotional, spiritual aspects of Feldenkrais study, and in that situation too, I didn't know exactly what to say, except I started narrating, as I was teaching, all of the things that I find myself noticing, right.

Speaker 3 26:32

So I'm talking to you right now and I'm, you know, not an experienced podcast interviewee and I find, oh, my sense of my feet on the floor is a little bit rigid.

Speaker 3 26:36

If I could just soften a toe a little bit. Oh, my belly gets a little bit short, oh, my neck is craned a little bit, and I just go into these very fine details and through Feldenkrais study I've gained the capacity to notice myself in this kind of detail and carry on a conversation and even interact with people, and that is a gift from Feldenkrais that I wouldn't have known how to get anywhere else, that I can have the details of the somatics that are creating a state, that pull me out of the present because of their tightness or their discomfort or the anxiety that they imply, the sort of physics, sort of the biomechanics of anxiety. When I feel that stuff, it stands out to me. I've studied myself enough in these lessons that I stand out to myself when something is working too hard or something is striving or craving or just not willing to simply be here. And it's been a profound gift, you know, not just for my health and wellness but for my relationships right for being able to be authentic with people.

Speaker 1 27:46

You're voicing something so important there, nick, that we come across many times in the people that we work with clients, trainees. There's so many parallels with what you're sharing. Keith pointed out many of the practitioners we've spoken to talk of this. You know central thread of presence, right, and you can forget the rest of the practice. If you're not present with the current moment, then the work's not going to be able to happen.

Speaker 1 28:07

And the other parallel that you mentioned that really stood out to me is this curiosity of self, because more and more we're finding that as we're working with people, with the field dynamics, with energy healing, as our modality is that introducing people to this idea of just getting still, getting quiet and getting really, really curious about what's happening in the moment. As you said, while you're speaking, while you're triggered, while you're not so triggered, you know what's going on with the soma, what's going on with the psychology, what mind patterns are playing out. And just to take that sort of parallel a step further, we have language that we use Nalishashumna central channel right for this sort of central axis of the body, and I know that in Feldenkrais method there's a real emphasis on the central axis as well, and I'd love to check in with you from your perspective as practitioner, as to why the central axis is so important from the perspective of Feldenkrais' work.

Speaker 3 29:03

Yeah, feldenkrais taught that that relationship between the head and spine and pelvis is the most important one. And so why is it so important? Because it's more generative of our action than we think and because it's the place where, if we're not meeting gravity efficiently and effectively, we are so compromised by parasitic efforts. Right, if your axis is not online with gravity generally, or returning to being online with gravity quickly. Whenever you go out of line with gravity, there develops such an incredible muscular contraction to keep you safe and stable, right. So, to be free, we need to be clear in the head, spine and tail with gravity and then to function in any given way and I know I'm speaking very biomechanics right now, but to twist or turn, to fold or arch, to side bend, any of that if you're not integrated in your head, spine and tail, then there becomes shearing forces. Right, they're in the body. We develop these places that you take more movement and these places that are rigorous or rigid and don't take any of the movement. And where do we get hurt? We get hurt in the places we're able to move, but where is the problem? The problem is in the places that we're more rigorous, right. The thing that we would like to unlock is something about.

Speaker 3 30:20

Often in our culture it's the pelvis not moving. We all know that really well. Right, we are very hung up in the west about free pelvises, but there can be all sorts of other things because of how our chairs are designed, because of what we do with our time, because of computers and phones. There's all sorts of things about how we carry our head and how we use our spine that can be compromised too. So, yeah, we it is the first thing that I work with with any one-to-one student is I'm looking at them and listening to them and eventually, when I'm touching them, I'm thinking how is this axis organized? What is the? What is the pattern of head, spine and tail that this person has found as a solution in their lives, a solution to gravity and to help them do all the things they want to do, and what are the ways in which I can facilitate them discovering an easier use of their head, spine and tail?

Speaker 2 31:10

I appreciate you talking there about the vertical axis and the top and the bottom and the importance of that organization and synchrony. What about left right? Because the body obviously is symmetrically oriented left and right, how would you talk about or discuss left-right symmetry, the striving for symmetry or the lack thereof, from a Feldenkrais perspective?

Speaker 3 31:34

Beautiful, yeah, the striving for symmetry. It's an amazing thing, so that there's there's a human brain thing about it and a cultural thing I want to reference. The human brain thing is that when we are newly asymmetrical in a way that's not familiar to us already, it really stands out right. As soon as you get quiet at all, or even if you're busy and something feels really different on one side of your body, you'll tend to latch onto that. The brain's attention is called to those unfamiliar asymmetries, for sure. And then the cultural thing. I think it comes out of the arts that we've gotten this sense of the beauty of symmetry right. So we've all gotten an idea about how symmetrical we should be.

Speaker 3 32:14

The truth of the matter is that the body and the brain are not perfectly symmetrical. Right, we know there are different things on different sides. Some of those differences are extremely concrete. You know there are three lobes of the lung on the right and there's two lobes of the lung on the left. The organs have their own position left and right. The dominance of your handedness, of course, is one thing, but all throughout your body there's a dominant eye, there's a dominant leg, there's all sorts of things.

Speaker 3 32:39

So we have developed ways to function successfully with all sorts of asymmetries and yet I find the average, especially beginning Feldenkrais student is really hung up on the ways that they are.

Speaker 3 32:51

They feel that their asymmetries make them insufficient right and they'll target them. They'll almost be like. I want to work on this thing so that this side is more like this side, right, and we have to find a way to meet them in that request and that, that, I think, limited view of themselves and educate them so that they realize what they're, what they're not. They're not trying to create some kind of perfect symmetry, but they're trying to create a way that they can function and feel the way that they want to Right, which doesn't have to include a perfect symmetry. So I actually have a fair number of lessons on my website that are, and the one that I'm sharing with your podcast it's actually about asymmetry. It's about actually creating something quite different on one side of the body than the other, or noticing something quite different on one side of the body or the other, because it is so sticky neurologically, because it will generate curiosity and keep you paying attention to yourself If we either create an asymmetry or we tune you into a natural asymmetry.

Speaker 1 33:53

This brings me, Nick, to this question of the breath. How is the breath involved in this practice? Because we're looking so closely at the minutiae of the detailing, the information that our curiosity is revealing and, as part of that, the animation force other than consciousness which maybe we'll come to is, of course, the breath. So how does the breath play a role in following Christ?

Speaker 3 34:46

no-transcript about the importance of getting oxygen is that the moment that there's a change that will allow more breath, our brain will tend to select for that. Right so if the ribs release, if the back improves in some little way, if there's a little more volume available in the abdomen, we will fill that space with breath and it feels really good, right so in the study we will leverage the pleasure of that and the sensation of that and steer people towards breathing more and more freely. There are there's lots of different Feldenkrais specific uh, ways that we play with the breath. I'm not sure we'll get into those right now, but there's um, I think on my website alone I've got seven or eight different versions of games of breathing that we play in Feldenkrais study.

Speaker 2 35:38

Well, speaking of, you might grab onto one of these here. Um, the method has certain idiosyncratic phrases, such as the self-hug, paradoxical breathing and the floor clock. Would you share a favorite phrase and tell us what it means?

Speaker 3 35:51

Oh my gosh a favorite phrase from Feldenkrais, so an idiosyncratic Feldenkrais phrase. My gosh, so you're kind of mentioning lesson titles that are sort of greatest hits. It's not as I guess it's not as short as as one of those things. You know, I, I just I would really want to say something about. You know, our brain's curiosity-based ability to, to change and improve itself and our body's behavior. You know that if, if we're going to use a phrase very, very key to Feldenkrais, it would have something to do with curiosity and neuroplasticity.

Speaker 1 36:24

You've mentioned spirituality earlier. I'm going to bring in another big word consciousness. Is there a Feldenkrais perspective on consciousness and, if so, is it in alignment perhaps with your own? Do you have your own sort of thoughts and informing? I know you mentioned there you're in more recent years of spiritual studies, but I'd be really fascinated to hear how you feel that consciousness informs movement and learning.

Speaker 3 36:49

I think that being able to attend to what you're actually feeling and sidestep the cultural and historical programming that we've all gotten is the direction I would go to talk about consciousness and Feldenkrais study.

Speaker 3 37:05

I'm again I'm struck by how clearly I feel my own ability to notice, to be.

Speaker 3 37:12

You know, in, I think, zen meditation there's the concept of the witness right To just be there, noticing thoughts arise, noticing sensations arise, being present for whatever's coming. I think that it's remarkable in Feldenkrais study how quickly we can get to that point by attending to these little details of somatics. Right, when we have a guiding of our conscious awareness around the body, around the experience and sometimes even one of my favorite things that shows up in lessons is sort of extending beyond the limits of the skin right, we can sense, when we're sensing ourselves, that we're also aware of the space around us. Right, consciousness of the self is not limited to the physical boundary of the self. But you can do a Feldenkrais lesson and maybe work with one side of the body for a while and you might discover that your sense of the warmth or the light in the room on that side of you seems different. So there's this perceptual shift in consciousness, as there are what seem to be more somatic shifts being generated.

Speaker 2 38:22

So there are two main components to practice. There's the awareness through movement and then there's functional integration. Can you tell us the difference between the two?

Speaker 3 38:31

Yeah, so awareness through movement is the group class or it can be taught verbally, via reading a book even, but it's much easier when you're listening to a recording or you have a live teacher in the room speaking. So that's verbally directed Feldenkrais, where every student is responsible for sensing and moving their own bodies. And then in functional integration lessons it's done hands-on, one-to-one, fully clothed, with a non-invasive touch, and a practitioner listens through their hands to the movements that the body can easily make and sort of follows around for towards unlocking easier function by helping the student feel what it is that they do well and how to spread that skill into areas of human function that maybe they're less familiar with. So there's always this kind of joining in with one-to-one Feldenkrais, where we're meeting the student exactly where they are and then we're seeing what adjacent options are available that this person might find are easier, are more comfortable, are safer, are more conducive to healing. So that's the one-to-one work.

Speaker 1 39:42

What is it, Nick, in that assisted version, that latter version there? What is it that you're sensing as practitioner, looking for or noticing?

Speaker 3 39:50

Oh, it's the most beautiful practice. It's one of my times where I get to have a lesson for myself too. Actually giving people Feldenkrais lessons is this remarkable sense of getting so quiet in myself that I'm not sharing any of my nervous systems. Static with them, right? So my first responsibility is to get myself in such a beautiful state that if I touch them, they're not picking up static for me, that I can listen very carefully to them and they're listening to my nervous system, and it's almost like a dance.

Speaker 3 40:21

It's an interplay between two nervous systems.

Speaker 3 40:24

So you know, for example, if I were sitting at the head of the Feldenkrais table and I had my hands holding a student's head, I would be listening, for where is the most neutral position, where they feel the most supported they can possibly feel?

Speaker 3 40:40

So I would be thinking about the inclination of the head, the angle of the head, and I'd be feeling with my attention down through their neck and into their back, the angle of the head, and I'd be feeling with my attention down through their neck and into their back, even down to their pelvis, just listening to the whole length of the body through the holding of the head and also listening and watching for their breath and using the ease of their breath as a guide to me to know that I'm handling them in a way that is nourishing.

Speaker 3 41:06

Once I find that kind of neutral state, once we're connected in that way, then I'll start to play towards some functional improvement that they have requested or that I have noticed would be helpful for them. So in that example of holding the head, of course all day long we use our heads to orient our eyes and our ears. It's a fundamental organizing factor of the body and I'll think about where do they like to have it habitually and are there options beyond that that would feel really good or be more functional in gravity or give them relief that I can steer them towards?

Speaker 2 41:44

I find that really interesting. There was about 50% of what you just described would be just like down the central pipeline of craniosacral biodynamics and it's really interesting because there's just a lot of parallels. There are a lot of different things but certain things very parallel. And then that fundamental of finding neutrality, like you said, no static I like that phrase, which is something that we do a whole lot with people, because that's the hallmark of doing quality healing work with people, regardless of modality, is being able to find neutrality in yourself, stillness, groundedness and not bringing your stuff basically to the exchange and having that neutral space available for the person to experience themselves with support, neutral space available for the person to experience themselves with support. In terms of integrating Feldenkrais with other modalities, is there such a thing? Is there any that you find other practitioners you're aware of or yourself integrating other methodology within Feldenkrais and or something that gets attached to it like a before or an after kind of thing?

Speaker 3 42:45

Yeah well, feldenkrais teaches us that we have such an agency in regulating ourselves, no matter what we are doing right. So there's no limit to what we can integrate it with. You know, if you're looking for specific modalities that are closer to our work, I hear from a lot of practitioners of Tai Chi a nice connection. Certainly, alexander technique would be a kind of cousin modality, but you can bring the kind of Feldenkrais awareness and thinking and problem solving to anything. Importance of very, very vigorous exercise to keep the hormonal levels and the sense of activity and youth being as available as possible for as long as possible, which sounded lovely. So I taught myself in my early 40s to sprint like I had never sprinted before. Boy, did I use a lot of Feldenkrais method when I was running as fast as I possibly could, and just to make life more interesting because I live next to a wonderful wilderness area. I did this as I possibly could and just to make life more interesting because I live next to a wonderful wilderness area.

Speaker 3 43:49

I did this as I've always done running. For the last 15 years or so I did this barefoot style on natural terrain. So there's quite an element of possible risk there. Awareness is everything. So, as I was trying to train myself to do this safely because I'm not interested in getting hurt I was paying very, very careful do this safely, because I'm not interested in getting hurt. I was paying very, very careful attention, at slower speeds at first, to what is it like to pull myself, to push myself down this natural pathway with ruts and roots and everything else, to think about how am I going to do this safely.

Speaker 3 44:24

And it was amazing, as I learned the full stride, the full thrust of sprinting as fast as I could, I was constantly feeling little twinges as I would accelerate right. So you get a little bit faster, you start to notice something is creating some resistance. The 20-year-old Nick at that point would push right through. The 40-year-old Nick said I want to feel good tomorrow and I've got four kids and a wife and a job and I need to be able to do that, to be with them. So I, um, instead of, instead of pushing right through that moment, I would slow down, I would pay attention, I would play, play with my mechanics, I would think about how my head, spine and tail were relating to get back to Christabel's question and then I would accelerate again and through trial and error and not overcome, overcoming my means, not blasting through the little warnings my body would give me. I eventually got to the point where I felt very safe sprinting, and it's a practice that I keep up to this day, about once every 10 days or so.

Speaker 1 45:19

You mentioned children there and family, nick, and it just, it just triggered a thought in me, thought in me. I wonder if you've noticed, if you've had opportunity as practitioners to notice, or if this is in the Feldenkrais methodology, around patterns, inherited postural and bodily patterns between generations, and how that can play out or how people might want to approach that aspect of practice.

Speaker 3 45:41

Absolutely so, there are. You know. There are some structural similarities between generations often. But the more important thing is our mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are the way that they call it, the empathy machine inside of our brains. You create in yourself some approximation of what you are witnessing. It's how we can relate to each other.

The Future of Feldenkrais Method

Speaker 3 46:02

So a great example I have a mother-daughter in my one-to-one studio right now and it's very fun to see how they play off of each other and how the daughter has grown. And the mother is in her 70s and the daughter is in her 40s. So these aren't particularly young people and so they have different versions of some of the same patterns and they're absolutely different humans with different learning styles. Same patterns and they're absolutely different humans with different learning styles. But it is really fun to think about what the mirror neurons create in those patterns between generations.

Speaker 3 46:35

And I think about it much more broadly, about, you know, the information that we're giving each other in our world as we just watch each other move. I mean you can stand on any given street corner in any given city and see a lot of very unhealthy movement patterns right and people who are suffering, and if we're all seeing that, and then you know, we have the sedentary life and a lot of other bits of the modern world that are not so good for learning healthy function. We're just constantly reinforcing this sort of this image of being human. That, I think, isn't full. That is a limited repertoire of being human that shows up a lot because of, because of how we bounce off of each other, how we witness each other.

Speaker 2 47:18

You know, I just want to go back to that previous thing you were sharing about the sprinting, because I literally did the same thing when I turned the corner of 40, I think I was looking at, just you know, a couple of years ago when I was looking at exercise practices that I thought were interesting and I said to myself I should be able to sprint full speed, like what's that? Like to sprint, I mean absolutely to a 10, you know, and I tested it out a little bit and I was surprised that getting past somewhere around 80% really started to push the carriage of my body. Things were starting to get like whoa, this could get dangerous very fast to actually get to 10. And I just can't help but share that. I literally have done the same thing and think it's actually a really interesting practice and fun.

Speaker 3 48:03

Yeah, it's wonderful to use ourselves vigorously. There's a kind of myth around the Feldenkrais community because so much of the work is so slow that you know that Feldenkrais the insult I've heard is floor fish. Right, that we're just learning how to roll around on the floor, right, we're not studying Feldenkrais to learn to be good at Feldenkrais, we're studying Feldenkrais to learn to be good at life, right, and these principles are absolutely transferable to any of life's activities. And that wasn't, that's not just being wise with a method. That was his point. The man was not trying to make us good at some esoteric personal practice. He wanted us to live effective, satisfying, fulfilling lives.

Speaker 1 48:46

That dovetails beautifully, nick, and, as you know, the title of this podcast is the Future of Wellness, and I wondered where you see the future of Feldenkrais method in the context of modern wellness and somatic practices.

Speaker 3 48:58

That's a great question. I'll tell you something that maybe some colleagues wouldn't want me to say. Feldenkrais has a problem. We have basically a marketing problem. But the work is so good that, despite how hard it is to talk about and market, here we are 70 years later. We're not growing the way we should be growing. Given the value of the work and given how accessible it is and, like I said, it's practical tools for neuroplasticity, given even popular science these days, this method should be taking off through the roof right. So where's the future of the method going? I don't know If I can shill for my website a little bit. I've spent so much time on this exact problem that I'd love to tell you about it.

Speaker 3 49:42

The Feldenkrais Project you know it's just feldenkraisprojectcom. I designed it because I was frustrated that again, 70 years after he invented the work, we're still pretty niche. And most of the time when I say Feldenkrais study, so the financial one is obvious and it's a donor supported, freely offered website. All the primary material is free. It's over 50 Feldenkrais lessons. So the financial thing can't be an excuse not to study. The clarity of presentation. Feldenkrais can be kind of obtuse because, again, it's so slow, it's so counter-cultural. It's so hard you know this in all the things that you have studied, both of you how hard it is to get people to slow down, to pay attention to their inner life, to pay attention to their own experience. So how do we teach lessons in such a way that the teacher is engaging enough to keep the newcomer's attention but not imposing, still sticking to that all-important goal of letting the development be self-generative in the student. It really is a self-education method. We're trying to help people learn how to teach themselves from their actual experience, to have agency, to be able to change whatever they want to about themselves. So I worked very, very hard and this is that early interest in pedagogy I told you about to teach in a way that was in plain English, that was direct, that would connect very well with people.

Speaker 3 51:20

I hope that I've done a good job on the website and then just organizing all the material so that people can sort of follow their own learning path through the website. There's a getting oriented series of 10 lessons and those are the shorter ones, like 20 to 40 minutes, that I want everyone to do, and the rest of the website is mostly a typical Feldenkrais class and again, I'm always publishing live recorded classes. I feel very passionately about that because I want that dynamic situation where there are actual students on the ground, where people are actually changing and learning in front of me and where the listeners can hear in my voice the excitement of witnessing improvement and change in people. So I'm making a play to make Feldenkrais bigger than it's been historically. In that way, there's other people doing beautiful work in the world. Right now.

Speaker 3 52:11

I'm fascinated with an app called the Feldenkrais First app, which is by my colleagues Jeff Haller and Andrew Gibbons. That's my personal go-to right now. So some of it has to do with technology. An answer to your question of where we're going next is that we're really trying to use modern technology to make the work more accessible, and both my program and that program do a really good job with that. And we need to get more people into trainings and I'm working on my website to spread the word whenever there are Feldenkrais trainings and I'm thinking about how I can even more directly support students entering training. So that's my play at the problem that I said we have in Feldenkrais.

Speaker 2 52:52

Well, we certainly will be putting the link to your site on the show notes and that is how we got linked up or connected for this episode. It's because the site is exemplary of not only the clarity that you're describing but also the accessibility for the general public. So, on that end, definitely big recommendation coming from us for people to check that out who want to experience this work in a way that leaves them to learn with a lot of options, with ease. In terms of coming to a close here on the conversation, what does the future hold for you? Just, we'd like to check in sometimes and just ask what's on the horizon for you. Projects, ambitions, intentions could be work could be personal. Just you know what's going on with you future-wise at the moment.

Speaker 3 53:44

Cool. Thank you. I have a lot of irons in the fire at the Feldenkrais project right now. I'm kind of relentlessly interested in self-improvement I think that's being a Feldenkrais practitioner and I've applied that sense to the website. So we're developing a way to have on-site journaling. People often leave public comments on lessons. There's a beautiful user discussion about some of the resources on the website or all of them really Um, and I'd like people to be able to reflect in writing, um on the lesson pages themselves.

Speaker 3 54:15

So that's a technical challenge right now. Um, I'm looking at, as I said, trying to do something a little bit more direct in terms of supporting the future of the method. I'm not able to say much about that right now, but I'm exploring some partnerships. So we're a mission-based business on the mission of spreading the benefits of Feldenkrais as widely as possible. But I'd like to do a direct partnership with one or two nonprofits that are actually supporting Feldenkrais study and Feldenkrais students and through that, maybe eventually some kind of scholarship fund I don't know.

Speaker 3 54:49

So that's brewing right now too. And then I've got a couple of really fun content plans that I'd like to develop over time. Not too much to say about those now, but one of them has to do with a frequent request I get, which is for more short lessons. I'm not a huge fan of very short Feldenkrais because it is a process that unfolds over time, but I think I have finally found a way to start to publish more and more, maybe half hour lessons as opposed to the full hour long public class recordings. So we'll see where we go, but yeah, a lot going on there.

Speaker 1 55:24

Thank you, nick, for sharing those intentions and thank you for all the service work that you're doing. It's quite clear from the way you're speaking about the modality and your intentions for yourself, professionally and personally. You're very committed to that service work and the Feldenkrais Project. There seemed to be something to be very much applauded, and we're thrilled to be able to share the message on the podcast today. Well, thank you, it's wonderful to be able to share the message on the podcast today.

Speaker 3 55:47

Well, thank you, it's wonderful to be with you. Thank you for the wonderful questions.

Speaker 1 55:55

Thanks for being a part of the future of wellness. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review. It helps us reach more people and to make great episodes like this one. Learn more about field dynamics and why we think the future of wellness matters. Check us out at energyfielddynamicscom. See you next time.