When I told her that cross-training on the exercise bike only added hip joint stiffness to my chronic shoulder pain, my Pilates instructor was incredulous. "Don't you get it?" she asked. "Your body is telling you to stretch out those aching muscles and tendons."

This made sense to me. But when Feldenkrais practitioner/physical therapist Stacy Barrows encouraged me to attend her class - which, I imagined, would be all about the stretch - I was wary. Our individual sessions were going well, but classes tend to induce peer pressure, and I worried about vigorous pulling on a still-tender area.

The class blew my mind. Virtually all we did was open and close our left hands as slowly as humanly possible. Okay, there was one other thing: imagining we were doing the same with our right hands.

It helped.

Feldenkrais, the strange, relatively obscure science-based theory put forward 55 years ago by physicist-turned-healer Moshe Feldenkrais, turns many of our cherished ideas about fitness and healing on their heads. Continue Reading…