Trauma is not stored in the body.
What can movement actually change?

02 - Metaphor Why "the body remembers" rings so true

The sentence "trauma is stored in the body" is everywhere these days, and no wonder. It touches something real. After difficult experiences the body really does react faster than conscious thought - tension appears before we can name it, the heart speeds up for no obvious reason, certain movements suddenly seem risky. The breath gets shorter, attention narrows, and pain can bite harder on days that are already hard. All of this really happens. None of it is made up.

The trouble starts not with the observation but with the explanation that gets glued to it. Because "the body reacts differently" suddenly turns into "a memory lies written into muscle and fascia, and it has to be taken out". And that is an entirely different claim. Here we need to be precise: there is no credible evidence that autobiographical content or difficult experiences are stored in muscle or fascia independently of the brain.

A tense muscle is tense. It does not "contain" scenes from the past, just as a scratch on a record does not contain the sadness of the song.

I do not want to mock the metaphor, because it captures something important - that the body's reactions make sense, that we are not just "a head on a stick", that the past really does shape how we feel and move today. It is only worth noticing the moment when a helpful shorthand turns into a promise to extract something that can be neither measured nor verified.

03 - Mechanism Not storage but learning

There is another way to describe the same experience - less spectacular, but more useful. Earlier experiences do not so much leave a deposit in the body as change the way the whole person predicts and acts. Concretely, they can affect several things at once: how quickly we scan for possible threat; where we direct attention and how hard it is to pull it away; how we read the signals coming from inside the body; which situations and movements we begin to avoid; and finally how many options for action we notice at all.

Notice that none of these points needs the assumption of a "memory in tissue". It is enough that the organism has learned a certain way of reacting - and now repeats it, often before we have time to think. Body, brain and environment work together here, in one loop: what I feel affects how I assess the situation; how I assess the situation affects what I do; and what I do changes what I experience and what I learn next. There is no passive messenger and no boss issuing orders. There is circulation.

An interesting attempt to describe this is the 2026 paper by Kotler, Mannino, Fox and Friston, provocatively titled "The body does not keep the score". It is a theoretical article, not a study that settles the nature of difficult experiences - and that is how I treat it here. The authors propose seeing the effects of trauma not as something locked in tissue but as a loss of flexibility: a narrowing of the capacity to move fluidly between different states, a stiffening into one mode of prediction. It is one interesting frame for thinking, not the last word. But it shows well where the question is shifting: from "what is hidden inside you" to "what way of reacting has become entrenched - and can a different one be learned".

04 - Three qualities What movement can actually change

If this is about learning, not a deposit, then working through movement starts to make sense. It does not have to extract anything. What it can do is supply new experiences, from which different conclusions may be drawn than the old ones. In my practice this comes down to three qualities.

The first is choice. I can start or not. I can stop halfway. I can make the range smaller. I can change position. I can decide not to do this particular suggestion - and nobody asks me to explain myself. It sounds banal until you set it against how many of us treat our own body: as something that is supposed to carry out an instruction correctly, no discussion. The experience of real choice at a small scale can be something you have not had in a long time.

The second is variants. There is no single correct way to perform a movement. The same turn can be done faster and slower, in a smaller and a larger range, starting from the head or from the pelvis, on an inhale or on an exhale. The point is not to find "the right one" but to notice that there are several - and that each feels a little different. A healthy way of moving usually has this redundancy: many roads to the same goal. When one is blocked by pain or worry, there is another.

The third is reversibility. A movement does not have to be a leap with no way back. You can try, come back, take stock and try again - differently. This changes the character of the whole situation. When you know you can return, trying stops being a risk and becomes an experiment.

What can these three qualities do? Several things - and here I ask for patience, because some of them are well-grounded mechanisms and some are honest hypotheses, and I do not want to mix the two up.

Movement can expose quiet predictions we usually do not notice: "this will hurt", "I will lose my balance and fall", "if I give up control, something bad will happen", "I have to do this right". Very often such a prediction gets silently compared with what actually happens - I make a small, slow movement, and the forecast pain does not arrive. A mismatch opens up between expectation and outcome, and that mismatch is precisely the material from which something new can be learned.

This resembles a mechanism well described in the treatment of anxiety. Michelle Craske and colleagues showed that effective work with anxiety is not about tension "coming down" but about the predicted catastrophe failing to happen - and about a new, calmer association forming alongside the old, threatening one. Let me stress: this is an inspiring analogy for certain elements of movement work, not proof that a Feldenkrais lesson is exposure therapy. It is not. I am only pointing out that both contexts can offer a chance to check whether our predictions are still accurate.

For the same reason movement may reduce automatic avoidance. If I have long been skirting a certain movement because I "know" it will be unpleasant, I never check whether that is still true. Slow, carefully dosed exploration of that movement can be a way of updating that knowledge. It can also widen the repertoire of available actions where only one or two rigid strategies remain, and support the sense that I have a say in what I do with myself in a given moment.

That last point deserves backing, because it belongs to the best-established observations in the psychology of stress. The classic and still current work of Maier and Seligman shows that the heaviest burden is not the difficult situation itself but its uncontrollability - and that a sense of control genuinely protects. This is indirect support for the hypothesis that experiencing choice and agency in movement may matter. Indirect - meaning it is not direct evidence that Feldenkrais works, only a reason why the emphasis on choice seems sensible.

Finally, movement can train the flexible shifting of attention - between what is happening in the body, the task itself and the surroundings - and change the relationship with arousal. Not in the sense of removing it, but of discovering that a racing heart or effort does not have to mean something bad is happening, and that it is possible to act with some discomfort present.

One thing I will not say, because it would not be honest: that more freedom in movement automatically translates into more freedom in emotional life. It is a tempting thought, and possibly partly true. But it has not been demonstrated, and I treat it as an open question, not a promise.

05 - In practice What this practice looks like

In case all of this sounds abstract - a first lesson usually surprises people with how little "happens" on the outside. Much of the time you lie down or sit. The movements tend to be small and slow. There is no need to imitate the teacher or watch how others do it. There is no single ideal form to aim for. More important than how far the movement reaches is noticing differences - that this way feels slightly different from that way. You can rest between attempts, change position, and simply pass on some of the suggestions. I do not correct the body against one template. Rather, I ask questions and create conditions in which each person discovers something for themselves.

Change, when it comes, rarely looks like catharsis. More often it is quiet. Someone notices that the tension in their shoulder has not gone away at all - but that with the same tension they can now do more than one thing, and that in itself is a relief. For someone else, discovering that a movement may be interrupted turns out to matter more than reaching full range; "I did not have to finish it" stays with them longer than the exercise itself. And sometimes someone chooses a position different from the rest of the group - and the most important thing in that lesson is that their decision is respected without comment.

A held breath that comes back on its own when the instruction becomes clearer. A movement that used to signal risk, explored piece by piece until it stops predicting what it used to predict. These are the "events". Small ones. And usually enough.

06 - Evidence What we know and what we don't

It is worth saying plainly where we stand with the research, because I want you to believe me for better reasons than that I sound good.

Research on the Feldenkrais Method shows some promising results - the strongest concern balance, and there are also signals of improvement in pain, functioning and body awareness. At the same time the results are mixed, and many studies have small groups and methodological limitations. The 2024 review by Martin and colleagues, devoted precisely to this method in psychological and psychiatric contexts, states clearly that the direct application of Feldenkrais in psychiatry is poorly studied and needs more rigorous work.

And one thing I am not going to dress up: in the reviews I used and the available databases I did not find a good-quality randomised trial evaluating Feldenkrais as an intervention for PTSD. Which means nobody can honestly present this method as a treatment for difficult experiences. Feldenkrais can be an educational, supportive practice - a way of learning movement and attention. It is not a substitute for psychotherapy or for treatment aimed at difficult experiences. If you are facing something heavy, well-chosen therapy comes first, and movement can be something alongside it, not instead of it.

07 - Invitation A little more room

Let's go back to the woman turning her head. Nothing "came out" of her. She recovered no memory and had to tell no story. What she got instead was one thing she had not had in that movement before: a choice. And out of it - a little more room.

That is how I understand the point of this work. It is not there to pull the past out of you. It is there to give you more options in the present.

If you catch yourself doing everyday movements with more effort than the situation requires; if you often try to control your body; if you avoid certain movements because of pain or uncertainty; or if you would simply like to get back some curiosity and more options than the one "correct" way - this is a practice that may interest you. Not because it promises to remove anything, but because it lets you experiment with new ways of moving, sensing and responding.

The easiest way to find out is to try. If you feel like it, put on one of the lessons in the library - a short, gentle one is a good place to start - and see what it is like to move without hurry, without one correct form, and with the right to stop at any moment.