What Movement Does to Us

When movement becomes the bridge between sensing, feeling, and cognition

A 16-year-old young gentleman enters my office with both of his parents. The height contrast between us is very distinct. All three of them are around 6 feet.

Seymore* is on the autism spectrum, with severe anxiety. He enters red in the face, sweaty, and visibly shaking.

They come for a lesson intensive, which consists of 6 lessons in 2 days for the first time.

Seymore chooses the furthest chair in my office to sit on. Folded, with his knees together and arms crossed on his chest, holding his shoulders high, breath shallow and fast, without apparent movement in his ribs, nor his belly. His pelvis glued together with a large part of his lower back, angling his spine in an arc much higher than one would expect.

Seymore is verbal but wouldn’t speak.

Mom gives him a large, brown, worn-out stuffed monkey. Seymore immediately squeezes his monkey against his center. By now a drop is rolling down the side of his cheek. He doesn’t let his very firm grip go until they leave the office.

Fast forward to lesson number 12.

Seymore enters the office alone while his parents are still getting out of the elevator in the main hall. He immediately targets my practitioner table in the middle of the room and plunges onto it. He answers my questions about how he is doing casually. I set up my props and begin connecting with him on the physical level, touching along his spine. Five minutes later Seymore is asleep while I work with him.

The organization of his body on the table has changed.

His shoulders are lower on the table.

Unnecessary muscular contractions let go as his system makes sense out of the floor being right there to support him, so he doesn’t have to.

His lower back is more mapped with a clear connection to his legs and arms. A gentle invitation to movement is recognized, and force now travels more effortlessly through his body.

He now has a lower back.

His whole body feels lighter.

Tissues have a healthy spring to them. Not mushy. Not dense.

His breath is deep with a more equal distribution of movement.

Mom reports that Seymore has stopped his aggressive behavior at home, pressing their dog’s head, and a teacher from school has called her to say that he has joined the band (Wait, what?!).

During a family gathering he initiated a conversation and actually lead a conversation with his uncle and cousins at the dinner table.

Mom also says that Seymore has had a camera which he used all the time for years, especially when out and about.

Almost like it was a layer between his eye and the outside world.

A needed layer.

Unfortunately, his camera broke a few days ago. Mom shares a conversation she had with her son right after.

Mom (expecting a tantrum): “What are you going to do now?”
Seymore: “Nothing. I will now live my life.”

All of these were unimaginable realities just a couple of months ago.

Now observable shifts.

What happened with Seymore is not as mysterious as it may first appear. It is, in many ways, a clear expression of how deeply intertwined movement, awareness, and cognitive and emotional regulation and development truly are.

What we are beginning to understand more clearly through modern neuroscience—and not just through scattered personal practices and anecdotal evidence—is that thinking does not happen separately from the body. The field of embodied cognition, shaped by thinkers like George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, proposes that our cognitive processes are grounded in bodily experience. The way we organize our posture and movement directly shapes how we perceive, interpret, and respond.

Research on attention tells a similar story. Scientists such as Michael Posner have shown that attention and executive control are trainable functions, supported by neural networks responsible for focus, inhibition, and behavioral regulation. These systems are not separate from movement—they are deeply linked to how we prepare and organize action.

In conditions like autism or ADHD, this connection becomes even more visible. Differences in attention, awareness and impulse control often appear alongside differences in bodily and motor organization and regulation. What we see in Seymore—the rigidity, the holding, the limited variability as an example—is not incidental. It is part of the same system that shapes social interaction, communication, and emotional regulation.

Long before brain imaging could visualize these connections, Moshe Feldenkrais was already working with this understanding in practice. He recognized that movement, awareness, and intention are inseparable elements of human functioning. Whether working with someone recovering from injury or navigating developmental challenges, his approach is not to fix isolated problems, but to improve the overall organization of the system, and thus its function and human potential. This work was further articulated and expanded by Anat Baniel, who clarifies the conditions under which neuroplastic change is most likely to occur.

In Seymore’s case, the goal was never to make him “relax” or behave differently. It was to create conditions in which his nervous system can discover alternatives. Through gentle, slow, varied movement with co-felt, and co-connected awareness, his system began to recognize that it no longer needed to use itself in the same way.

Over time, his shoulders can let go because the table supports him. His breath can deepen, and his ribs can be free. His spine can distribute movement instead of locking into a single pattern. These are physical changes—but they are also changes in awareness, in feeling, and in cognitive possibility.

Not imposing change from the outside, but guiding the nervous system to sense, differentiate, and reorganize from within is the core of the work I use in my practice. Central to this is the idea that awareness is not separate from action—it is embedded within it. Seymore does not learn to “act differently.” He becomes organized differently—and everything else follows.

Awareness

Awareness is not something we apply from the outside, like a layer of focus or effort. It is something we enact through the body—it is lived, sensed, and organized in action. When movement is paired with awareness, it becomes one of the most direct ways to develop greater clarity, adaptability, and control. What once feels fixed or impossible can begin to shift, opening into a range of possibilities—whether in recovery from injury, navigating developmental challenges, or simply living with more ease and responsiveness.

Applications

These principles are not limited to a single population or condition, not even to a single field of science. They show up across all human experience.

They are relevant for children navigating developmental differences, including those on the autism spectrum or with attention-related challenges. For individuals recovering from neurological events such as stroke or brain injury, where rebuilding movement is inseparable from rebuilding function. For performers—athletes, musicians, dancers—who rely on refined coordination and precise control under pressure.

They matter for those living with chronic pain, or post-injury conditions where habitual patterns of tension and restriction shape both movement and perception. And for people with neurodegenerative conditions, where maintaining variability and adaptability in the system becomes essential.

But this work is not only about addressing difficulty. It is equally for those who want to expand their capacity—to move, think, and engage with greater ease, resilience, and vitality. The same principles apply across all of these contexts: improve the organization of movement, and you influence the organization of the self.

Share Endless Possibilities

We often try to change how we think by working directly on thoughts—through effort, strategy, or discipline. But there is another way in. By changing how we move, how we sense, and how we organize action, we begin to shift the very processes that underlie thinking itself.

This article is also not to show how great the work is, or how “magical” I am. Not at all. It is an example of what becomes possible when we stop separating the body from the mind, and instead work with their inherent unity. It is to show the genius of the human brain and our innate capacity to evolve and heal through neuroplastic changes, under the right circumstances.

Seymore’s story is not an exception.

The question is no longer whether movement influences the mind, although there are still vast unexplored territories, and we are far from having all scientific explanations on the table. I am content with not understanding it all, knowing that uncertainty and wonder provide the freedom I need to move freely.

Because whether we are aware of it or not, the way we move is already shaping the way we think.

*Name changed to protect anonymity.

 

Meet actual Seymour, my skeleton buddy (pronounced SEE-mor, like “see more”).