Reset on Some of the Pain Cycle?

When I started practicing Feldenkrais, even when just a starting-up student, I was astonished at how much it helped. A friend with serious arthritis in her neck popped up after a lesson and said 'My neck hasn't felt this good in 30 years!' Affirming? Oh yeah. Perplexing? That too. I didn't fix the arthritis! So what happened? For a long time I explained this as helping her with guarding patterns that had themselves started to be part of the pain, and that's not a bad hypothesis. But what we are learning about the immune and neurological changes pain brings about—the sucking hole of ongoing misery it creates—the more I think that Feldenkrais's tricky trickery is all about getting you out of that organismic hole. Not fixing the arthritis but helping the interoceptive system—especially the pain signals—to be a little less jangled and insistent.