People Building

The Feldenkrais Method and NLP

By Gemma Bailey · · 1 Comment

Backache made life miserable for Kate Burt, and no amount of yoga or massage eased the pain. Could she harness the power of suggestion to find a cure?

It was midway through a bout of over-enthusiastic floor-mopping that it first happened. I’d ignored the nagging ache blooming at the base of my spine and, then, suddenly – pouf: a sensation of something deep inside going awry; not a click, not a snap, just a hard-to-pinpoint signal that something’s gone quite wrong.

It’s hardly an unusual story – backache affects a startling 28.3 million Brits – but what I didn’t know then was that, five years later, despite vast outlay and fruitless dabbles with everything anyone ever told me might work, I’d still be feeling the effects of that Saturday morning.

I mentioned this casually to an American woman I interviewed for a completely unrelated article I was writing last year. The piece was on NLP, neuro-linguistic programming. NLP gave me the willies, but, stuck at a three-day NLP conference in Orlando, I took advantage.

Dr Ron and Dr Edie Perry turned out to be a husband-and-wife “bodywork” team, and part of the NLP entourage. Though trained as chiropractors, they specialised in something called the Feldenkrais Method, developed in the Seventies by an Israeli physicist, Moshe Feldenkrais, who, I discover, was a big influence on Bandler. NLP’s co-creator was impressed with the thinking behind Feldenkrais’s approach to treating a stroke patient with paralysis afflicting one side of his body.

The story sounded like a Biblical miracle, but – if true – there was logic in it: rather than using physiotherapy to coax the stiffened arm that was clutched across the patient’s chest back down to his side, Feldenkrais instead did the opposite: nudging the arm upwards. He figured the patient’s limb had frozen en route to the side of the brain in which the stroke had occurred, a natural reflex, and so simply helped the patient to complete that movement. On having done so, the arm then effortlessly dropped to his side. I don’t know what to make of the story, but am willing to give almost anything a go.

Instead of employing the chiropractic techniques they were trained in, the Perrys focus on reprogramming the subconscious to heal the body. It sounded suspiciously crystal-bashing. While I lie – surprisingly – face up, Dr Edie stands at my feet, Dr Ron at my head, and they both speak with soothing, positive words (distressing “negative” phrases such as “Ooh, that feels tight” or “This might hurt” are banned). They gently pull my skin – on my legs, feet and arms as well as my back – in such a way that it will, they say, communicate the necessary changes to my unconscious mind. After 20 minutes or so, I’m asked to stand up. As I step off the bench I feel like I’ve moved from a ship to dry land, and nearly fall over. It’s an extraordinary sensation – like everything has suddenly been aligned. The pain, too, has gone. I bend over effortlessly. No “ouf”.

By Kate Burt
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Written by Gemma Bailey

Gemma Bailey (M. NLP, D. Hyp, Certified Trainer of NLP & Hypnotherapy) is the founder of People Building, and the co-founder of NLP4Kids. Gemma uses her extraordinary NLP & hypnosis expertise to continually provide the People Building community with valuable scripts, audios, newsletters, articles and videos!