Somatics with Sara

07/06/2025

Building on my previous post on the brain's anticipatory system (aka predictive powers), this post explores how the Feldenkrais Method can help refine your brain's functioning through movement.

As a Feldenkrais practitioner working with someone with anxiety, I ask them to consider: what is this anticipatory power good for?

When does it help you, when does it serve you? When does it cause problems for you? Making this distinction both cognitively and somatically (in your felt sense) is key!

How could you begin to inhibit your anticipatory system in situations where it goes into overdrive and is not helpful?

And when can you recognize and celebrate this incredible neurological capacity within yourself?

To make this learning concrete, we explore these patterns through movement and sensation (rather than thinking).

Struggling with anxiety and overthinking? Book a 1:1 somatic movement session with me to begin working with your inherent biological intelligence 🎨✨️

07/04/2025

In 2024, esteemed neuroscientist and pyschologist Lisa Feldman Barrett published an article that was mind-blowing to me.

Barrett argues that the "fight or flight" theory is an oversimplification of how the brain actually works. Recent scientific studies using brain imaging reveal that dedicated fight-or-flight neural circuits don't exist in the brain.

Instead, the brain's primary function is to predict and prepare for future events, rather than simply reacting to threats. This predictive process, which aims to reduce uncertainty and conserve energy, is often experienced as stress, particularly when the world is unpredictable. 

These findings suggest that stress and anxiety are not simply automatic reactions, but rather consequences of the brain's predictive activity in a complex and uncertain world. 

🧠✨️Takeaway: The brain’s primary job is to reduce uncertainty in an ever changing world. Yet, our world is becoming increasingly uncertain, complex, and threatening.

Fortunately, the Feldenkrais Method specializes in helping your brain adapt to uncertainty and discover novel solutions.

Check out the offerings in my bio to begin this powerful integrative practice that supports the functioning of your brain and nervous system in an ever changing, stressful world.

05/10/2025

In somatic movement practices like the Feldenkrais Method, it's the very act of attending to your movement that begins to improve the quality of your movement.

If you pay attention to your chronic pain or illness through the lens of fear, worry, or fixing, the pain will likely get worse. Hyperviglience around your pain reinforces signals of danger to your brain.

If you pay attention to your pain through the lens of compassion, curiosity, and playfulness, then your pain sensations will likely change and dissipate.

In the Feldenkrais Method, you practice relating to your skeleton, which is the slowest moving part of your self-image.

Your skeleton is a source of support and stability that allows your brain and nervous system to orient to the world around you and respond effectively.

In other words, your skeleton provides a sense of safety that imbues your embodied experience and everything you do.

Moving slowly and focusing on your bones can calm the brain's pain pathways. This allows you to focus on ease and pleasure rather than constantly monitoring your pain sensations.

Would you like to experience a deep felt sense of safety and freedom from chronic pain? Follow the link in my bio to book a 1:1 session or sign up for a group class!

05/04/2025

Feldenkrais somatic movement is a form of somatic learning that requires presence and attentional resources.

I've found through my own experience that engaging in somatic movement while in a pain flare can be counterproductive.

Somatic learning requires a quieting of the nervous system, a shift into a parasympathetic state. If your brain is on high alert due to pain signals, then you have a lot noise in your nervous system - which makes it difficult to relax and make sensory distinctions from a place of curiosity.

It can also create a negative feedback loop, where you are intellectually searching for answers and movement patterns that will reduce your pain. This mindset often has underlying tones of worry, fear, and pressure that will cause your pain to persist.

I always bring it back to somatic learning in babies. What emotional affect does a baby have when it is playing on the floor and learning to move itself through space? The baby is in a state of curiosity and wonder...free of worry, pressure, and intellectual analysis.

If the baby is tired, hungry, or in discomfort, it is not going to be playing and learning how to crawl. It is going to be crying in order to get its biological needs met.

Interested in learning more? Sign up for my email newsletter via the link in my bio, where I share more personal reflections on the Feldenkrais Method and chronic pain.

02/22/2025

PART FOUR

In parts 1-3 of this series, I provided an overview of central sensitization and neuroplastic pain - the root cause of most chronic pain conditions. Be sure to read these parts first if you missed them.

Today, I’ll share some of the resources that have been the most empowering for me personally in unlearning my chronic pain symptoms.

1. The Feldenkrais Method™ of Somatic Education continues to support my resilience and nervous system health. The novel movements explored in Feldenkrais classes invite you into a state of curiosity, which modulates the limbic system (fear centre) and engages the prefrontal cortex (creative centre) of the brain. This brings you into a balanced nervous system state of safety and creativity. Reducing the level of fear you are experiencing and sending signals of safety to your brain is key to unlearning neuroplastic pain.

I find that practicing Feldenkrais consistently unwinds tension and quiets the noise in my brain and nervous system. Feldenkrais brings my skeleton into a new organization where movement (and simply being) feels easeful and pleasurable once again. But the biggest benefit is the state of calm and receptivity it brings me into.

To make the benefits of the Feldenkrais Method more concrete…

Consistent somatic movement practice has enabled me to continue working full-time as a health system planner, complete a 4-year Feldenkrais training, build a local Feldenkrais practice, move across the country and build a new life with my partner - all while struggling with chronic pain and immune system flares and some quite terrifying medical diagnoses! Without the Feldenkrais Method as a reliable way to calm and regenerate my nervous system, I’d be in much worse shape - both physically and mentally.

2. Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) is a system of psychological techniques that retrains the brain to accurately interpret and respond to signals from the body, breaking the cycle of chronic pain. PRT is supporting me to eliminate fear-based patterns of thinking and behaving, which is the root cause of neuroplastic pain. A key aspect of PRT is attending to pain sensations through a lens of safety, rather than the fear-based lens of trying to figure out the pain and make it go away.

For more information on PRT, check out the following books and resources:
✨️ The Way Out by Alan Gordon
🧠 Unlearn Your Pain by Howard Schubiner
✨️ Pain Reprocessing Therapy website
🧠 PRT practitioner directory
✨️ Curable app
🧠 Tell Me About Your Pain podcast

If you or someone in your life struggles with chronic pain, be sure to share my four part series with them. Healing chronic pain begins with education on pain science and neuroplasticity.

It’s my deepest pleasure to share the Feldenkrais Method with people who would like to unlearn their chronic pain patterns and find more pleasure in being themselves.

I also highly recommend checking out the free resources listed above and working 1:1 with a PRT practitioner for additional support if needed.

02/17/2025

PART THREE

When it comes to healing chronic pain, it's important to understand what type of pain you are experiencing.

There are three types of chronic pain: nociceptive, neuropathic, and nociplastic (also known as neuroplastic pain or central sensitization). 

Nociception is the process by which the body senses and responds to harmful stimuli. It's a vital sensory system that helps us avoid tissue damage and survive. Pain is the subjective experience of nociception. 

1. Nociceptive pain is caused by actual tissue damage and inflammation, such as a strained muscle or sprained ankle. It typically doesn't last longer than three months after the injury or tissue damage has healed.

2. Neuropathic pain is caused by damage to the nervous system, typically resulting from spinal cord injuries or chronic disease (such as diabetes or multiple sclerosis).

3. Nociplastic or neuroplastic pain arises from altered nociception in the absence of tissue or nervous system damage. With this type of pain, the central nervous system becomes sensitized (or overly responsive) to normal or subthreshold stimuli.

This type of pain persists beyond three months (often for years) and is what most chronic pain sufferers are dealing with. Neuroplastic pain is associated with chronic pain conditions such as migraines, back pain, neck pain, fibromyalgia, and chronic fatigue syndrome. Any body pain that is widespread, inconsistent, and triggered by stress is likely neuroplastic.

🧠✨️

Chronic pain can be complex and challenging to live with. The good news is that neuroplastic pain can be cured! It is pain that is learned by the brain (through the process of central sensitization) and therefore can be unlearned.

It is also highly likely that nociceptive and neuropathic pain has a neuroplastic component to it, so significant reduction in pain is still possible.

Stay tuned for the final post in this series where I will provide an overview of resources for unlearning neuroplastic pain.

02/12/2025

PART TWO

Over the next few posts, I'll be talking about central sensitization - a phenomenon that is not well understood and the leading cause of chronic pain that has no obvious structural cause.

Central sensitization is defined as a process that makes the central nervous system more sensitive to pain and other sensory stimuli. It can cause chronic pain and other symptoms.

A person with central sensitization may perceive pain from normally non-painful stimuli (allodynia) and experience greater pain from painful stimuli (hyperalgesia). In other words, a person with central sensitization genuinely feels sensations differently and more intensely than someone without central sensitization. This enhanced response is in part due to neuroplasticity - the ability of the brain to change and adapt over time.

In chronic pain conditions, neuroplasticity actually primes the nerves to be more sensitive to stimulation, and pain signaling is not just a protective response to harmful stimuli. This means the pain is real, even if the threat is not.

Central sensitization is a condition I've struggled with for the past seven years and really intensified in 2024.

It wasn't until I discovered the work of Dr. Howard Schubiner and Alan Gordon last year that I began to understand the root cause of the chronic pain I’ve been living with for so long.

Learning about central sensitization through the lens of Pain Reprocessing Therapy has helped me turn a corner in reducing my symptoms and healing the root cause of my widespread chronic pain: fear.

I’ll be sharing more about Pain Reprocessing Therapy in part four of this series.

For a more in-depth, scientific explanation of central sensitization, check out the review article “Central sensitization, chronic pain, and other symptoms: Better understanding, better management” in the Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine April 2023.
https://www.ccjm.org/content/90/4/245

02/11/2025

PART ONE

Over the years, various medical professionals have “diagnosed” me with a multitude of conditions based on my chronic pain symptoms:
- Generalized anxiety
- Interstitial cystitis (bladder / pelvic pain)
- Sinusitis
- Tension headaches
- Migraines
- Trigeminal neuralgia
- Tendonitis
- Thoracic outlet syndrome
- Sciatica
- Piriformis syndrome
- Fibromyalgia
- Lupus (autoimmone condition)

Yet, there is no structural cause that explains these chronic pain conditions. I’ve never had serious injuries, tissue damage, or nerve damage - and all my CT scans and MRIs are perfectly normal. There is no physical reason for the pain to persist.

Medical professionals are trained to diagnose and treat disorders and diseases. But the unfortunate reality is that most medical practice is out-of-date, doesn’t fully comprehend the latest findings in neuroscience research, and largely ignores the psychological and social elements in the biopsychosocial model of pain.

I believe many of the diagnoses I received are incorrect and ignorant to the root cause and underlying mechanisms that create chronic pain. Trauma and nervous system dysregulation definitely play a role, but most chronic pain is simply caused by the brain being in a state of high alert.

High levels of stress and fear cause the brain to interpret normal sensations as dangerous and produce pain as a self-protective response. In other words, chronic pain is learned by the brain and nervous system.

Unfortunately, all these medical diagnoses reinforced the belief that I was broken and created even more fear about my health - which is the very ingredient that makes chronic pain worse!

Stay tuned for my next post, where I will share more about my story and what I have learned about the root cause of chronic pain.

01/20/2025

Check out this beautiful short video about the Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education and why you should try it out!

If you find yourself saying, Felden-what? Just remember, Feldenkrais rhymes with paradise ☺️

Dive deeper with this free event : https://feldenkrais-education.com/en/12weeks/© Feldenkrais EducationWriting : Mattis Appelqvist, Nikos Appelqvist, Yvo Men...

12/02/2024

Curious about somatic movement? Check out this scientifically reviewed article on the Feldenkrais Method and its benefits! https://positivepsychology.com/feldenkrais-method/

Here are some key takeaways from the article:

Dr. Moshe "Feldenkrais recognized the brain’s ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn — what neuroscience now refers to as “neuroplasticity” (Doidge, 2015; Paparo, 2022).

Significant changes can occur in the brain and the nervous system in response to learning, movement, and repetition (Kabat-Zinn, 2019).

The Feldenkrais Method potentially changes the brain’s structure through movement and guided attention, benefiting physical and mental habits and learning more efficient ways of approaching tasks."..

"The Feldenkrais Method has received considerable support from research and has been applied in several areas involving mental and physical health, including eating disorders, sleep disturbances, performance in arts and sports, and managing chronic pain.

While more research is needed to increase our understanding of the efficacy and application of this approach, findings suggest that many clients will benefit from improved awareness of mind and body and how they interact."

The Feldenkrais Method has received considerable research support.

11/22/2024

Struggling with pain and discomfort in your lower body? Try this mini somatic movement lesson to unwind tension in your lower back, hips, knees, and ankles.

These movements will also help prepare the joints of your legs for dynamic movement, so it's a great warm-up prior to activity.

Let me know what you experienced in the comments! 🦵👣

This mini Feldenkrais lesson will help prepare the joints of your legs for action and dynamic movement. It can also help unwind tension experienced in the lo...

07/24/2024

Novelty for the nervous system 🌊🐚

I explored the breathtaking shorelines of the Saugeen Peninsula for the first time this summer, the traditional territory of the Chippewas of Nawash and Saugeen First Nations.

The "flowerpots" and "grottos" in photos 6-8 are made of dolomite, shaped by centuries of wind, rain, waves, and ice.

I love how nature connection shifts us into a state of awe. Somatic movement works in the similar way, guiding us to relate to our body (our nature) with curiosity and delight. Novel sensation is always available to us, if we are willing to slow down and open the doors of perception 🐌💎

I can teach you how to cultivate an inner state of awe through somatic movement. Send me a message to learn more!