James Murray spent twelve years as a competitive bodybuilder in South Africa, and in all that time his hamstrings never once got sore. Scoliosis since he was young, a back "as tough as a drum," couldn't draw his knees to his chest. He gave himself two years to fix his body and get back to the gym. That was twenty-five years ago.
He tried Pilates first — got certified, got good at it, body didn't change. Two years of Gyrotonic after that, still couldn't find his own sit bones. Then a Feldenkrais practitioner working the same gym floor sat behind him, put her hands on his stomach, and told him to push his belly out. Nobody had ever told him that. He took a Feldenkrais class not long after — forty-five minutes on the floor — and came out of it with inches of length behind each knee that a decade of stretching never gave him. He spent the next four years training to become a practitioner himself.
James Murray is a Feldenkrais practitioner now, and he wrote a book on incorporating the ideas — "Cure Sleep Apnea by Moving Out of Your Own Way" — making the case that obstructive sleep apnea isn't a slack-tongue problem, it's a head-position problem, and the fix is the same as everything else in his world: change the self-image, and the body follows.
This one starts with the life of Moshe Feldenkrais himself — fleeing pogroms, a teenage walk across Asia to the Adriatic, a physics PhD in Paris, and a friendship with the man who invented judo that ends with Feldenkrais bringing the sport to the West. From there we get into what the method actually claims, straight from Feldenkrais's own book "Body and Mature Behavior": posture isn't a position, it's a decision your brain keeps making without telling you, and you don't fix it by stretching or strengthening, you fix it with awareness. We get into Awareness Through Movement and Functional Integration, why his own glutes and hamstrings wouldn't grow for over a decade, what a frightened rabbit has to do with it, and why the quality of a movement matters more than its range.
The idea I keep coming back to: movement generates awareness. Not the other way around.
Thanks for watching.
📚 James's books:
Cure Sleep Apnea by Moving Out of Your Own Way
https://a.co/d/0fSHpCq1
Back Out: Cure lower back pain by doing 1 thinghttps://a.co/d/00gu6ZuY
🧠 Learn more about the Feldenkrais Method
https://feldenkrais.com/
More Quality Values:
Playlist — https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcDYjJATsN-Nn0Fs5HLuIq5EIzDcA9tgg
All episodes — https://jacobconlanshields.com/pages/podcast/
Spotify — https://open.spotify.com/show/5xzOcAP2agwcVVAdu7vztc
Chapters:
0:00 Cold open: highlights
1:46 James Murray joins, spelling out Feldenkrais
2:54 The plan for this episode3:14 Moshe Feldenkrais's early life: pogroms, a walk to the Adriatic, Palestine
4:20 The Sorbonne, a physics PhD, and meeting the inventor of judo
6:45 What the Feldenkrais Method actually is
7:19 Self-image and the shoulder that won't come down
9:45 The lost-hat story: movement generates awareness
11:53 Awareness Through Movement vs. Functional Integration
14:24 What good posture actually is: "independent from gravitation"
19:13 Why "stretching" isn't doing what people think
21:12 His assessment protocol and the myth of symmetry
24:20 The book he wrote on curing his own sleep apnea
31:05 Homeostasis, and the nervous system in balance
38:36 His story: twelve years of bodybuilding, scoliosis, a body stuck in place
40:54 Pilates and Gyrotonic first, then a Feldenkrais class
51:24 Why the problem is in the brain, not the muscle
54:12 Anxiety as a learned fear of falling
1:05:57 Good days, bad days: the self-image is plastic
1:11:07 Head position, gravity, and why you can't sleep
1:14:51 The frozen rabbit and the glutes that won't grow
1:20:13 Where to start if you want to try this
#QualityValues #FeldenkraisMethod #SomaticMovement #SleepApnea
