When Bones Become the Path to Believe in Yourself.
Years had passed since our last session together. Then one day, scrolling through a podcast, I heard her voice—my former client, sharing something that stopped me in my tracks.
She was talking about her experience with herself and her bones from the Feldenkrais Functional Integration lesson she had with me. I'd told her about *her* bones and how they were there to support her from the inside, holding her up in ways she'd never quite noticed before.
But here's the part that made me lean closer to the speaker: "On her drive home that day," she said, "I remember thinking to myself, *'Bonnie really believes in me.'"*
I sat there, stunned. Bones... believing. How had those two things connected in her mind?
This comment over the airwaves hit me like a gentle revelation—the kind that feels obvious once you see it, but revolutionary until you do. When she learned to *sense* her bones supporting her, she began to believe in herself. This new physical awareness she had received with the lesson awakened something deeper, something that had been there all along but forgotten.
This is exactly what I believe Dr. Feldenkrais dreamed his work could do.
Picture this:
Seventy years ago, a brilliant man had a wild idea.
What if the way we sense ourselves—really *sense* ourselves from the inside out—could change how we think?
What if feeling supported by our own bones, our own structure, could help us feel whole again? This would mean Mind and Body, not separate warring factions, but as one integrated, powerful system.
This man watched two-year-olds toddle around with complete confidence, their whole lives stretching ahead of them like an endless playground. They moved with such trust in their bodies, such faith in their ability to figure things out.
He wondered: When did we lose that? When did we stop believing in our own inner support system?
This man, Dr. Feldenkrais, had a theory:
We get stuck. Our old patterns—the way we hold our shoulders when stressed, the way we brace against uncertainty, the familiar grooves of "this is just how I am" run our lives.
These patterns don't just live in our muscles. They live in our minds. They chain us to old ways of thinking, old limitations, old stories about what's possible.
But what if you could quiet those patterns? What if, through gentle attention to how you actually move and sense yourself, you could create space for something new? Not just new movement, but new thoughts. New choices. New freedom.
As practitioners, Dr. Feldenkrais taught us to guide people back to their own inner resources. To slow down enough to actually *feel* what support means. To discover that the answer isn't out there somewhere—it's literally inside you, in the architecture of your own being.
When my client felt her bones supporting her and translated that into "Bonnie believes in me," she was experiencing exactly what Feldenkrais intended. The lesson [30 years ago!] had helped her remember what she'd always known as a child: that she was already whole, already supported, already enough.
That was Revolutionary 40 years ago… and still revolutionary now.
Maybe even more so in our world of endless external validation and digital disconnection. The idea that we might find what we're looking for not by looking harder *out there*, but by sensing more clearly *in here*—well, that's still pretty radical.
But my client's bones knew the truth. And so, perhaps, can yours.
Permit yourself to explore The Feldenkrais® Method with BonnieK.
