Imagine facing any new challenge, one you might rather sidestep if you were being honest. Still, you have a pretty good sense you can roll with it. After all, our evolution and survival have depended on adaptability. We all aspire to be more malleable and creative in our physical being, thinking, and behavior – at the best of times and also at the worst.
Now picture standing on the safe side of a paddock gate. On the other side stands Frank, a very big horse. We bought him thinking it would be fun to work with him, but we didn’t realize, until we got him home, that he is almost always in a very bad mood but especially when he sees us. His shoulders tower above our head, his hooves seem as big as dinner plates, and when he’s in one of his moods, he resembles nothing so much as a fire-breathing locomotive. So we will not be putting ourselves on his side of the fence just yet. A better choice would be learning to work with him on the safe side of the fence for the time being.
Tiny Movements, Big Change
This is a slice of real life faced by horse trainer Alexandra Kurland and Muna Clough, one of her students. Kurland has developed positive-reinforcement training methods that, in many ways, mirror the principles of the Feldenkrais Method®. As Moshe Feldenkrais did, Kurland, too, emphasizes that an effective way to address even the biggest challenges is, apparently paradoxically, to begin with loops of the smallest possible movements. These are weight shifts so subtle they’re barely more than a thought, followed by reversing the pattern and returning to rest.
Using these methods, Clough has succeeded, remarkably quickly with Kurland’s guidance, in persuading Frank to set aside his locomotive-like tendencies and transform himself into a model partner. He is thriving, thanks to the precision built into the training methodology. In fact, Clough has learned that she must dot every “i” and cross every “t,” especially when it comes to the meticulous practice of initiating movement. Frank accepts few or no shortcuts, as he apparently appreciates that consistent attention to the same small, foundational principles is an essential ingredient that helps him change.
These same principles apply to both horses and humans. Frank’s progress serves as a vivid illustration of the core ideas behind the Feldenkrais Method. Lasting change arises from refined attention to detail, small shifts, and consistent practice. Just as Frank requires clarity and precision to move differently, so too do we. The body-mind, whether human or horse, learns best not through force or exercise of will, but through awareness. While it’s not possible to be sure what caused Frank’s initial scary behavior, it’s a fair bet that his prior owners did not take the care necessary to help Frank stay comfortable and co-exist harmoniously in our world.
Harsh handling, use of coercive equipment, or the dominance-and-punishment mindset still prevalent in many traditional practices has no place in how we treat others and ourselves. Too often, in the horse world and the wider world too, learners are pushed and prodded to produce immediate results, as though obedience were the end in itself. Harm can go unnoticed, when the tools feel familiar and the goals seem reasonable.
Fight, Flight, Etc.
Undue pressure has consequences. The learner adapts by coping. The nervous system can seize up into defensive hypervigilance, overreaction, numbness, or shutdown – the familiar fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or flop. Threat and perceived trauma trigger survival pathways. When those become locked in, pain, both physical and emotional, inevitably follows.
The nervous system can falter in less-drastic ways. We can be misled by ideas that seem helpful but that ultimately misdirect what we do with our attention. Or, we may dissociate. Or our nervous systems may be intruded on by “ghost problems that shape us without us realizing,” as Claire Dederer, author of “Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma,” has said. She describes the unseen, often-unacknowledged emotional or historical forces that influence our behavior and worldview.
When the nervous system is triggered in any of these various ways, pain can move in as a long-term resident. Not only as a direct response to injury or danger, but as an ongoing reflection of the system’s struggle to regulate itself.
Pain’s Persistent Tenancy
Uta Maeda, a clinical psychologist specializing in pain management, recently likened chronic pain to a “destructive, obnoxious roommate that’s always interfering in your daily life . . . but [whom] you cannot evict.” As Jennifer Kahn reports in the New York Times, pain often lingers without clear cause or relief, baffling both sufferers and doctors. In the U.S. alone, nearly 100 million people live with chronic pain, roughly one-third of the population. Worldwide, estimates reach into the billions.
Even so, pain research has long been neglected. Treatments remain limited and often rely on drugs like gabapentin, anti-inflammatories, anti-spasmodics, or opioids. These can cause disorienting side effects, and they typically mask symptoms rather than address root causes. Meanwhile, millions continue to live lives diminished by persistent pain and limited options.
Kahn, herself a chronic pain sufferer, poignantly writes, “it’s hard not to wish for a real fix: one in which I’m magically returned to the body that, for years, simply worked. A body that I don’t constantly have to think about. And though the prospect of a new era of pain treatment has me hopeful, it’s also still excruciatingly out of reach.”
The “new era” she refers to may emerge from recent advances in neuroscience. While that “real, out-of-reach fix” seems largely centered around the search for better drugs, scientists have made real progress in uncovering the biological and neurological roots of pain. Researchers now believe that chronic pain is not just a symptom, but its own condition, an expression of dysfunction within the body’s pain-signalling system. In other words, chronic pain is the nervous system’s disordered response, one that persists long after the original cause may have passed.
Restoration in the Quiet Moments
This understanding of neuro-disorder places the chronic-pain phenomenon within the Feldenkrais domain. A key tool in the Feldenkrais Method, and one shared by Alexandra Kurland’s approach in the horse context, is the practice of initiating movement and then reversing that movement back into rest. It’s a way of inviting change not through force or will, but through gentle attention to the smallest beginnings of motion.
This may sound deceptively simple, but it’s a truly profound intervention. Where science may stall in search of a cure, change may begin in the body-mind, not as a fix, but as a felt shift, however subtle, toward movement. For a nervous system fractured or frozen by trauma or aversive conditioning, the path of return begins at the edge of action: sensing the threshold, reversing to stillness, and pausing deeply. In that pause lies a powerful micro-moment, in which breath may soften, muscle tone recalibrate, and weight quietly redistribute.
Restoration begins to emerge through a process that may appear almost still, barely perceptible from the outside. And yet, this is how the body’s deep guarding or unavailability, operating beneath conscious awareness, can begin to dissolve. The work is not cognitive. It is a negotiation at the level of the nervous system, where adaptability returns not as a decision, but as a recovered capacity.
Blind Spots and Breakthroughs
It’s not just pain that begins to ease. Blind spots can be revealed. Recently I was caught by surprise when preparing one of the most basic Awareness Through Movement® lessons, one I’ve enjoyed countless times over my 33 years of Feldenkrais experience. This time, though, following the strict protocols for initiating movement, I was astonished to discover a pivotal moment in the sequence that I simply didn’t know how to do.
I have always managed to move in some fashion from one part of the lesson to the next. I thought I knew how. But focusing on the initiation of movement and no more, I realized I had been unconsciously skipping over this specific moment all those years. That gap had never registered, until now. And now: blankness. This was thrillingly unsettling! Where to next? The ramifications are still unfolding, but the feeling is simply extraordinary.
Breakthroughs like this can help anyone – those recuperating from injury or surgery, or searching for ways to accommodate aging or ordinary wear-and-tear.
Experiences that uncover the previously invisible are more than just interesting discoveries. They show that adaptability isn’t to be forced, but that it can be persuaded to emerge in the alignment of attention, sensation, tiny scope, timing, and rest.
Saying Yes Again
Adaptability, then, begins with sensation at the edge of movement. Stepping across that edge – venturing through that gate – calls for a “give,” a “bendability” woven through body, mind, and behavior. Physically, it means balancing subtle adjustments that keep movement stable yet dynamic. Emotionally, it’s staying responsive rather than reactive under stress or uncertainty. Behaviorally, it’s shifting perspective when new information shows that standard habits and practices no longer serve. In short, adaptability is the capacity to respond fluidly to life’s changing demands.
As noted, adaptability can be disrupted by distraction or injury, diverted by misleading ideas, or compromised by more-extreme stressors. But through practicing the barest beginnings of movement – the thought, the slightest shift, the release of effort, and the return to rest – less-optimal patterns may begin to reveal themselves and, over time, reshape themselves. This is a method, not a miracle. It’s patient, embodied work, and it yields tangible, lasting results.
Crucially, it restores an essential ingredient in meaningful transformation: capacity. Not the false binary between suffering and compliance, but the quiet reclamation of the capacity to move, to feel, and to respond effectively.
This is what adaptability looks like. It’s not just surviving change. It’s growing through it, one felt shift at a time. We meet the world at the gateway of movement, where the new becomes possible through presence.
It’s there, in that quiet space, that the nervous system learns to say yes again.
Anita loves cats. This could be because she, too, has had nine (or at least six) lives. She’s been dancing since she could walk, she was an advertising producer, she earned a third-degree black belt in Yoshinkai Aikido, she is a drummer with the Afrique Aya Dance Company, she is a practicing attorney, and she offers Awareness Through Movement® lessons to the public and to students of horse-and-handler teacher Alexandra Kurland. Anita graduated from the Delman-Questel Bronxville (NY) Feldenkrais® training in 1998.
Contact her at [email protected]