Last Saturday, during a Feldenkrais group session, I asked participants if they felt a difference between one part of the body and the other after doing some gentle, non-habitual movements.
And then I added:
"It's not necessarily a difference in your muscles that you feel, it's a difference in your brain and nervous system."
That can seem a little odd to folks (myself included at times), because what we often feel during and after a session are differences in our muscles and movement. And that's great—especially if it helps us get out of pain, improve balance, or do any of the things we turn to somatics for. However, the key discovery of Moshe was this: you can use movement to change the brain. And those changes in turn affect how you move, sense, and act.
You are a complex, dynamic, living system—always adapting.
How It Works (In Broad Strokes)
Let me give you a non-Feldenkrais example first:
If you’ve ever learned to drive a stick shift, you know how awkward it feels at first—coordinating clutch, gas, and gears. The car stalls. The clutch makes that awful grinding sound. But with practice, it becomes smooth. To drive well, your body and muscles changed—YES—but more importantly, your brain figured it out. It created new patterns of coordination and action.
Feldenkrais also creates new patterns of coordination and action—but through everyday movements: how you sit, turn, reach, walk, and breathe. Even small actions like how your eyes move or your jaw relaxes while you move are part of the process. These are coordination patterns your brain can refine and improve.
Thanks to Moshe and his work, when I see people walking down the street, I see hundreds of different ways of walking. Some people walk more on the right side, some on the left. Some touch down at the front of the foot, others in the middle or the heel. Some breathe mainly into their chest, others into their stomach. Many barely breathe at all. Some swing their shoulders freely, others seem to have a frozen pelvis. Some move parts of their spine; others keep them stiff.
The differences you can see in others—and feel in yourself—are nearly limitless.
But again, these differences are not exactly in the muscles or in the brain.
They're in the relationship between the various parts of you. A dynamic loop of sensation, movement, and awareness. And this system—your system—is vastly more open to change than most people realize. This is the heart of the Feldenkrais approach: when you change how the brain senses and organizes movement, the body changes too. And as the body changes, it sends new information back to the brain. It’s a two-way street—a living, responsive loop.
That’s why even small, gentle movements can lead to surprising improvements in how you move, feel, and function.
I hope that I am making some sense here.
If not, let me know. - Ryan
