Your shoulders don’t need another stretch. They need a different question asked of them.

Shoulder pain is one of the most common complaints I hear when working with people. And one of the most misunderstood. Most approaches treat it as a tissue problem: something too tight, too weak, or too damaged, to be stretched, strengthened, or repaired.

Often, that’s only half the story.

The tissue problem is usually downstream of something else — a habit, a pattern of tension and movement your nervous system settled into long before the pain ever showed up. You can stretch or strengthen around that pattern all day. If the pattern itself never changes, the strain usually finds its way back.

Getting to Know Your Shoulders is eight weeks built around changing the pattern, not just managing the symptom.

Why I Teach This

I know this first-hand. In 2009, I tore my shoulder labrum playing tennis. I skipped surgery and tried the usual fixes — foam rolling, stretching. None of it held.

What actually changed things wasn’t fixing the injury site. It was learning to move differently.

I’ve written the full story here →

Why 8 Weeks? Why This Approach?

The shoulder isn’t a hinge. It’s the most mobile, least stable joint in your body and deeply wired into your ribs, your spine, your breathing, even your posture at a desk. Real change there doesn’t come from one great stretch or one strengthening cue. It comes from giving your nervous system enough time, and enough varied, attentive practice, to actually build a new option but not force one.

That’s not a slogan. It’s grounded in how the nervous system actually works, and it’s the same principle behind a short reading list I put together on the neuroscience of movement — why your brain can’t build a model of anything, including itself, without movement built into the process. If you want to go deeper into the science behind this series, here’s where to start:

• A Brief History of Intelligence — why movement is the reason nervous systems exist at all
• A Thousand Brains — how the brain builds any model of anything through movement
• Brainscapes — the living, changeable maps your brain builds of your own body
• How We Learn — why real change takes attention and time, not repetition

You don’t need to have read any of it to benefit from this series. But if you’re the kind of person who likes knowing why something works, it’s there!

This Series Is for You If:

• Your shoulders feel stiff, guarded, or “not quite right,” even without a diagnosis
• You’ve tried stretching or strengthening and it helped for a day, maybe less
• You’ve had a shoulder injury, surgical or not, and it never fully felt like “yours” again
• You just want more freedom and ease reaching, lifting, and moving through your day

You don’t need to be flexible, fit, or pain-free to start. You just need to show up and pay attention — the rest is the method’s job, not yours.

A Few Common Questions

Do I need to be flexible or in shape to join? No. This isn’t a fitness class, and there’s no stretching or strengthening involved. If you can lie down on the floor, sit, or stand comfortably, you can do this work.

What if I’ve never tried Feldenkrais before? Most people in this series haven’t. No experience is necessary — the lessons are verbally guided, and you’re never asked to copy anyone or hit a target.

In-person or online — which is better? Both give you the same lessons and the same attention; it’s really a question of what fits your week. The online group is kept intentionally small so it doesn’t feel like watching from the back of a large class.

What if I have to miss a class? For any reason if you are not able to make it to class, I will share an audio recording of the lesson.

About Ravi

Ravi Prabhakar is a Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner® based in Atlanta, and the co-founder of Atlanta Feldenkrais. He’s been teaching Awareness Through Movement® and Functional Integration® for 9 years, and Getting to Know Your Shoulders is his signature series, taught from both personal experience and years of working with people with shoulder issues.

Questions?

Contact Ravi Prabhakar via email (llcsavera@gmail.com) or phone 404 909 7819.