A Guide to Better Movement: The Science and Practice of Moving With More Skill and Less Pain

Graded exposure is the progressive introduction of threatening movements or other stimuli, in the right dosage and timing, which causes the nervous system to become less threatened by the movements. In other words, if you painlessly perform a movement that used to hurt, your nervous system will find that movement less threatening in the future.

thoughts, perceptions and emotions for what they are — constructions of the brain as opposed to external realities.144 Metacognition implies not just awareness of what goes on in our heads, but also a nonjudgmental attitude. It is the difference between wise self-knowledge and neurotic self-consciousness. Applying this skill in the context of movem

it may be that practicing control of movement could help with control of emotion.

If you move quickly, your repertoire will be limited to “feedforward” movements that are well practiced or habitual. Slow movement is required if you want to move in novel or unpracticed ways. To use the skiing down the mountain analogy, if your priority is to get down the mountain as fast as possible, you will always select the deepest, most well-

Moshe Feldenkrais claimed there is no such thing as an isolated emotion, thought, movement or sensation. Each mental output will always involve elements of the other three, so every thought has an associated movement, sensation and emotion; every emotion has a related movement, sensation, and thought, and so on.

Fortunately, because the different body parts work as a team, you can change the way a painful area moves and feels by moving a non-painful area. For example, if your shoulder hurts, it is probably best not to start with a lesson about shoulder circles.

the downward movement of the diaphragm creates intra-abdominal pressure, which is an essential aspect of spinal stability. This lesson is a way to explore and recover ways of moving the diaphragm and ribs that you may have habitually neglected. This can affect the coordination and strength of the entire trunk.

And pain makes movement that might be fun or playful turn into an unpleasant chore. Thus, the presence of pain creates a poor learning environment. Pain leads to perception of threat, which may lead to undesirable protective mechanisms like increased stiffness, decreased flexibility, decreased strength, and altered coordination patterns.

skill development is characterized not by adding new muscle contractions, but taking away the unnecessary ones. In the context of everyday emotional life, inhibition allows you to make measured responses to stressful events. When a car cuts you off in traffic, there is a flash of excitement in the muscles and heart rate, but the spread of excitemen