Our Little Dips explore a theme of Feldenkrais learning, then illustrate it with one or more lessons. They always include at least one free lesson. Little Dips are first published in our newsletter.
When we’re living with persistent pain, what does it mean when we feel better after a Feldenkrais lesson?
And what does it mean when the pain returns?
Below, Feldenkrais Trainer David Zemach-Bersin speaks powerfully to these questions.
A note from Nick
As my family and I prepare to celebrate the Jewish New Year this week, Rosh Hashanah’s themes of return and renewal inspired me to share a personal story.
This summer I had the chance to reconnect with David Zemach-Bersin, who led the Feldenkrais trainings I participated in from 2001-2006. I called him up to ask his advice because I was recovering more slowly than I wanted to from a serious neck injury. It had been debilitatingly painful for over a month, and I remembered that he is very interested in how a healthy cervical arch (the curve of the neck spine) is an incredible gift for how we feel and function.
David gave me some “back to basics” advice, and a little tough love: first I needed to listen to what my body was telling me, and stop re-injuring myself. No running or otherwise compressing myself while I was healing.
For Feldenkrais study, he recommended something he taught me almost 25 years ago at the beginning of my professional training: first and foremost I should improve the organization of my pelvis and my spine, in order to support my whole body’s healthy function, as opposed to “targeting” and trying to “fix” one hurting part. Then, once I felt I was functioning better as a whole, he advised delicately exploring a new series of his lessons that focus the neck. I’ve transcribed below a brief talk from that series which deeply inspired me as I recovered.
Recovering took methodical, patient, near-daily Feldenkrais study – along with some osteopathic and medical support – but I’m happy to say I’m feeling good now!
The Feldenkrais Project featured FREE lessons below trace this “back to basics” approach to persistent pain.
- These lessons are designed to organize your hips, pelvis, spine, and neck. Healthy function of the axis is essential to reducing or eliminating any type of chronic pain.
- The last featured lesson is a new Patrons-only lesson I created out of my own healing process. It expands on ingredients of the free lessons above it.
Head over to FeldenkraisAccess.com to explore all of David’s offerings. (This is not an affiliate link; just sharing great Feldenkrais as widely as possible.)
OK, let’s turn this post over to one of my first Feldenkrais teachers!
– Nick Strauss-Klein
On Chronic Pain
From Secrets of a Healthy Neck, by David Zemach-Bersin. David’s team is finalizing this series; we’ll link it here when it’s ready. [UPDATE: It’s ready! And at my request, David was kind enough to offer readers of the Feldenkrais Project’s newsletter a 35% discount on Secrets of a Healthy Neck. Use the code FELDENKRAISPROJECT at checkout for this series at his website, Feldenkrais Access, before February 14, 2026].
Transcribed, lightly edited, and shared with David’s permission.
I’d like to speak for just a moment to those of you who have any sort of chronic discomfort – which is, I believe, most of us. It may be neck pain or discomfort, or discomfort in your lower back, your shoulders, your hip joints…anything that is chronic and persists and affects you at an emotional level, so that you feel you’re not quite what you feel you should be.
No single Feldenkrais lesson is a one-off fix for chronic pain. Maybe it does happen sometimes, and glory be when it does! Often lessons are experienced as a great relief – engaging and interesting at many different levels. But then, in a matter of days, the discomfort returns. Our old habits of being and feeling return.
“If you felt better, that means you have the capacity to feel better all the time.”
If a lesson gave you relief, that tells us a lot of things. If you felt better, that means you have the capacity to feel better all the time. It means you have the capacity to heal, the capacity to improve, the capacity to have a better organization and a more pleasant life.
So then what if – instead of waiting days or a week before I do another lesson, instead of waiting until I again feel this nagging discomfort, or “oh, something’s not quite right” – what if I do the next lesson before I feel discomfort? If I do another lesson that day, or the next day, then I can interrupt this entire fundamental underlying process that maybe has been going on for years or decades.
One of the beautiful things about doing lessons is that the conditions are created for you to feel that you have agency, that you are moving yourself toward the learning. It’s not a structure being imposed on you, telling you you need to do this or that in order to improve. This was one of my attractions to Moshe’s work: nothing was being demanded of me. Every moment I was choosing.
And that’s a beautiful thing! It may be extremely advantageous to you, to your quality of being, to your quality of life, to your corporal self, to choose to do lessons more often, and thus create more distance between yourself and those habits, distance between yourself and the ways that you are linked neurologically in time to those old, painful ways.
Featured Free Lessons
Listener favorites from The Feldenkrais Project for organizing the pelvis and spine.
Can be enjoyed in sequence or independently.
Spinal Support and a Powerful Pelvis (35m)
It’s lesson #1 at The Feldenkrais Project for a reason: healthy function requires good organization of the hips and spine
Legs as Free as a Baby’s (1h)
Improve adult life by heading back to the crib, and rediscover simple pleasures of hips and spine
Relaxing Your Neck and Jaw (39m)
Integrate your pelvis, spine, and neck in this lesson inspired by David Zemach-Bersin’s Liberate Your Mouth and Jaw series
Your Navigational Pelvis (1h)
This particular version of the pelvic clock was like a revelation to me
– Erzhi
Patron Lesson:
Your Navigational Sternum and Pelvis (34m)
Enjoy Your Navigational Pelvis above first, then expand on your learning. Sense your sternum in action with self-touch and a clarified image of a compass rose. Relax into riddles that integrate your sternum with familiar movements of Your Navigational Pelvis. Enjoy how this new suppleness of your chest improves your neck and spine, the function of your hips, and your relationship with the internal and external world.