If every treatment works for three days and then the pain comes right back, your body isn't broken. It's following old instructions.
If you've done the physical therapy, seen the chiropractor, stretched your way through yoga and booked the massages, and you're still stuck in the same pain, it's probably not because you didn't try hard enough. That goes for a neck that won't loosen, a low back that flares every few weeks, shoulders that live up by your ears, a jaw you clench all night, or tension headaches that keep finding you. Most of those approaches work on the end result: the tight muscle, the vertebra that keeps "going out," the shoulder that sits higher than the other. But your posture and your muscle tension are the output of what your nervous system is sensing and deciding all day long. If nothing changes on the input side, the old pattern comes right back.
The short answer
• Pain that keeps returning after hands-on treatment, whether it's your neck, back, shoulders, hips or jaw, is often a nervous system pattern, not a tissue problem. Even for low back pain, the most studied kind, the WHO says about 90% has no identifiable structural cause.
• Posture alone isn't the villain. Research doesn't show that one "correct" posture prevents pain.
• Two inputs almost nobody checks: how you breathe and how your eyes work. Both feed the system that organizes how you stand and move.
• What does help: learning to sense and change how you move. In Australia's RESTORE trial, people who did this still had large benefits three years later (The Lancet Rheumatology, 2025).
• Newer research on breathing (2025–2026 reviews from Europe, Taiwan and Iran) and eye-movement training (a 2025 trial from Turkey) points the same way, though the evidence is still early.
• The Functional Living Method™ teaches this through breath work, somatic movement and nervous system capacity building, in Branford, CT and online.
Already know you're done chasing the sore spot? Skip to how I help, or book with me here. Otherwise, read on. I'll show you why the usual approach so often stalls, and what to do instead.
How common is pain that nobody can explain?
Very. A 2025 review in the journal Pain pulled together 23 studies across Europe and found that, depending on how it's measured, somewhere between about 1 in 8 and nearly half of adults are living with chronic pain at any given time. Neck, back, shoulders, hips, jaw, headaches. It's everywhere.
Back pain is the best-studied example, so it's where the clearest numbers are. Low back pain is the leading cause of disability on the planet. The most recent global estimate, from the Global Burden of Disease study published in The Lancet Rheumatology, puts it at about 619 million people, and it's projected to reach roughly 843 million by 2050. The number that gets me is this one: the World Health Organization says at least 90% of chronic low back pain seen in primary care is "primary," meaning nobody can point to a disease or structural problem that explains it.
Back pain is just the clearest example. The same story plays out with necks, shoulders, hips and jaws. So if you've had the scans, been told everything looks "pretty normal," and you still hurt, wherever it is, you're in very large company. For most people, the answer isn't hiding in the tissue.
The WHO's first-ever guideline on chronic low back pain, released in December 2023, says something similar in its own way. It puts education that builds self-care skills and exercise at the front of the line, alongside options like spinal manipulation, massage and psychological therapies. It also lists 14 things most people shouldn't get, including back braces, traction and opioid painkillers. In other words, the global guidance is moving toward helping people understand and manage their own bodies.
Why does my pain keep coming back after PT or the chiropractor?
Bernard Bricot is a French orthopedic surgeon from Marseille who spent his career on posture. In his book Total Postural Reprogramming, he argues that most back pain care chases symptoms. Adjustments, anti-inflammatories and rehab exercises can help, but when the problem is functional rather than from a real injury, the strain keeps returning. That's why so many people end up needing more and more sessions just to stay level.
He sums it up in one line: "Resetting a vertebra is fine; knowing why a vertebra is out of alignment is better."
This isn't a knock on your PT, your chiropractor, your yoga teacher or your massage therapist. Those approaches help a lot of people, and if you have a fresh injury or symptoms that need a medical workup, that's exactly where you should start. But if you've done the work and keep circling back, it's worth asking a different question. Not "what's tight?" but "why does my body keep putting itself here?"
Is bad posture causing my pain?
Bricot's big idea is that you don't really "decide" how to stand. Your brain organizes it for you, constantly, based on information coming in from a handful of sensors. In his model the main ones are:
• Your feet. How weight lands on the soles tells your brain where you are in space.
• Your eyes. Bricot ranks them near the top of the list. Your head follows your eyes, and your neck, shoulders and spine follow your head. If your eyes don't work together evenly, he argues, the whole body can tilt or rotate to keep your gaze level.
• Your jaw, swallowing and breathing. Bricot groups these into one system. Clenching, bite habits and how you breathe can pull your head forward and change how your chest sits over your pelvis.
• Your skin. He even describes old scars as a possible source of skewed signals.
When one of those inputs is off, he argues, the body compensates with small tilts and twists through the shoulders, pelvis and spine. You can stretch a muscle that's part of that compensation and it'll feel better for a day or two. Then your brain, still working from the same information, quietly rebuilds the pattern.
Why I pay so much attention to breath and eyes
These are the two inputs almost nobody checks, and they're running every second you're awake. Most people I work with have never been asked how they breathe or where their eyes go when they move. Yet the way you breathe shapes how your ribs, neck and jaw move, and it sets the tone for your whole nervous system. Your eyes lead your head, and your head leads the rest of you.
So we work with both directly. Breath work through the Oxygen Advantage® method teaches you to breathe lighter, slower and through your nose, which changes how much your neck and shoulders have to work. In the movement lessons, we use the eyes on purpose: turning your head while your eyes stay still, or letting your eyes lead a movement and noticing how far you go. People are often surprised that something this small changes how their neck or back feels.
The research is starting to catch up here, too:
• Breath. A 2025 review in Clinical Rehabilitation pooled 20 studies (814 people) and found that adding slow, deep breathing to other care reduced spinal pain. A review from Taiwan, published for 2026 in the Journal of Back and Musculoskeletal Rehabilitation, looked at 17 trials of breathing exercises for chronic low back pain and found less pain, better function and less fear of movement. A 2026 review from Iran in PLOS One, covering 36 studies, found the biggest gains were in disability. All three say the same thing honestly: the results are promising, but the studies are small and the certainty is low.
• Eyes. A 2025 randomized trial from Turkey, published in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, gave 57 people with chronic neck pain either eye-movement (oculomotor) exercises, touch-based sensory training or nothing for four weeks. Both training groups had less pain and disability, and the eye exercises reduced pain more than the touch training. It's one small trial, but it fits what I see.
Here's where I want to be straight with you. Bricot's work is well known in European posturology, but it isn't mainstream medicine, and some of his specific claims haven't been tested the way I'd want. The research on posture itself is humbling, too. A 2020 umbrella review led by researchers in Australia (Swain and colleagues) pulled together 41 systematic reviews and found no consensus that particular spinal postures cause low back pain.
So I'm not going to tell you your slouch is the villain. What I take from Bricot is the bigger point: how you hold and move yourself is organized by your nervous system, based on what it senses and what it expects. That part lines up with where pain research has been heading.
What does the research say actually helps chronic pain?
One of the most important trials in this area came out of Australia. It's called RESTORE. Researchers followed 492 adults with long-term, disabling low back pain across 20 physiotherapy clinics. One group got usual care. The others got up to seven sessions of an approach called cognitive functional therapy, which helps people make sense of their pain, notice the protective, guarded ways they've started moving, and gradually move with more confidence.
The first results, in The Lancet in 2023, showed those people did much better than usual care. Then in August 2025, The Lancet Rheumatology published the three-year follow-up: the improvements in pain and function had largely held. The lead researcher called it the first large, high-quality look at how long these benefits last. Seven sessions, three years later. That's the part that should get your attention if you've been paying for weekly visits for years.
That's not The Functional Living Method™, and I won't pretend it is. But it backs up something I see every week. When people start sensing their own bodies differently, they start moving differently. And that can change things that years of passive treatment didn't.
What is The Functional Living Method™?
The Functional Living Method™ is a somatic education program that retrains how your nervous system senses and organizes movement, breath and stress. It's not a treatment, and I'm not fixing you. You're learning to feel what you're actually doing, so you can change it yourself. The movement side is rooted in the Feldenkrais Method and Hanna Somatics, and it's built on three pillars:
• I · Breathe. Functional breath work through the Oxygen Advantage® method. How you breathe sets the tone for your whole nervous system, and it shapes how your ribs, neck and jaw move. More on how breath steers your nervous system.
• II · Move. Slow, small, attention-heavy movement lessons. The goal is to notice differences, not to push through reps. This is how your brain updates its map of your body. Here's how somatic movement differs from yoga.
• III · Nervous System Capacity Building. Growing your capacity to shift states, so you're not stuck braced and guarded all the time. I call this State Flexibility™. Why your nervous system isn't broken, just stuck.
Here's the math that changed how I think about all of this. There are 168 hours in a week. If you see a practitioner for one of them, you spend the other 167 living in your own habits: how you stand at the counter, how you hold your breath when you're stressed, how you clench through a long drive. The person who can change those 167 hours is you. My job is to teach you how.
I'll be honest about the evidence on somatic methods. It's still young. A 2024 review done by Cochrane Australia for the Australian government called the evidence on Feldenkrais very uncertain, mostly because the studies are small and different from each other. Newer trials are starting to fill in the picture. A small 2025 randomized trial in BMC Geriatrics found that older women with chronic low back pain who added Feldenkrais lessons to dynamic neuromuscular stabilization (DNS) exercises had less pain, less fear of movement and better lower-back mobility than women who did DNS alone. I'd rather tell you all of that up front than oversell it. What I can tell you is what I see: people who've been everywhere finally start to feel what their body is doing, and that's usually when things start to move.
Try it now: a 60-second eye and breath reset
Here's a small taste of how this works. Sit somewhere comfortable and go slowly.
1. Turn your head to the right. Notice how far you go and how it feels. Come back to center.
2. Fix your eyes on one spot straight ahead. Keeping them there, turn just your head a little to the right and back. Five times, slow and small.
3. Now turn your head and eyes together to the right again. Notice anything different?
4. Close your mouth and take five slow, light breaths through your nose. Notice what your shoulders do.
Many people find they turn a little farther with less effort, without stretching anything. That's your nervous system updating its map in real time. It's one tiny piece of what we do together. Stop if anything hurts, and go gently.
How I help people who've tried everything
If you've been through the rounds of treatment, you don't need another person to fix you. You need someone to help you find the pattern and give you the tools to change it. Here's how that works with me.
1. We find your pattern
Your first session is mostly observation, not correction. I look at how you stand, where your weight sits in your feet, how you breathe at rest and under a little challenge, where your eyes lead when you turn, and how your jaw, neck and ribs move together. Then we connect it to what you're feeling. Most people have never had anyone look at these things together, and it's often the first time their pain starts to make sense.
2. We change the input
From there, we work on the pieces that keep rebuilding the pattern. Breath work through the Oxygen Advantage® method to take load off your neck, shoulders and jaw. Somatic movement lessons, including eye-led movements, so your brain can feel and reorganize how you move. And nervous system capacity building, so your body doesn't default to bracing every time you're stressed or tired.
3. You take it with you
Every session ends with short practices that fit into a real day: at your desk, in the car, before bed. The goal is to change the other 167 hours of your week, not just the one you spend with me. My job is to make you need me less.
What you won't get
No cracking, no forcing, no hour-long stretching routines, and no being told your body is broken. The work is gentle, slow and done with you, not to you.
Optional: add one real client quote here (with their permission). A short line about what changed for them is the strongest trust signal on the page.
Ready to find your pattern?
I work in person at 211 Montowese St in Branford, Connecticut, with clients from New Haven and all along the shoreline, from Guilford and Madison to Old Saybrook. If you're farther away, we work over Zoom anywhere in the world. It translates well to a screen, because you're the one doing the moving. Book your sessions here or learn more about the method.
Is this for you?
It might be if:
• You've done the rounds of PT, chiropractic, massage or yoga and the relief lasts days, not months
• Your pain moves around: neck one month, low back the next, then a hip or shoulder
• You clench your jaw, hold your breath when you concentrate, or get tension headaches
• You've been told your imaging is "normal" or "not that bad," but you still hurt
• You're tired of being someone's project and want to understand your own body
• You're an athlete, a physician or a high achiever who's used to pushing through, and that's stopped working (why athletes keep getting hurt)
Please see a doctor first if you have a new injury, numbness or weakness that's getting worse, changes in bladder or bowel control, unexplained weight loss, fever with back pain, or pain after a fall or accident. Somatic education works alongside medical care. It doesn't replace it.
Frequently asked questions
Is The Functional Living Method™ only for back pain?
No. People come to Nicole with neck and shoulder tension, low back pain, tight hips, jaw clenching, tension headaches and old injuries that never fully settled. What they share is a pattern that keeps coming back after treatment. The work focuses on how your nervous system organizes breath, eyes and movement, which affects your whole body, not one spot.
Why does my pain keep coming back after physical therapy or chiropractic?
Often because the treatment changed the result, like a tight muscle or a stuck joint, without changing the pattern that created it. Your nervous system keeps organizing your body the way it's used to, so the same strain builds back up.
Is bad posture the cause of my back pain?
Probably not on its own. A 2020 umbrella review of 41 systematic reviews found no consensus that specific spinal postures cause low back pain. How your nervous system senses and organizes movement seems to matter more than any one "correct" posture.
Can the way I breathe or use my eyes affect my neck and back pain?
It can play a part. Posturologists like Bernard Bricot see the eyes and the jaw-and-breathing system as key inputs the brain uses to organize posture. Recent reviews (2025–2026) found breathing exercises reduced back and spinal pain, and a 2025 trial found eye-movement exercises reduced chronic neck pain, though the evidence is still low certainty. The Functional Living Method™ works with both through breath work and eye-led movement lessons.
What is somatic education, and is it the same as physical therapy?
No. Physical therapy is a licensed healthcare treatment. Somatic education is learning based. You build awareness of how you breathe and move so you can change your own habits. Many people do both.
Do I need to be flexible or fit to start The Functional Living Method™?
Not at all. The movements are small and slow on purpose. They're about attention, not effort.
Where can I find somatic movement and breath work near Branford, CT?
Nicole Tavernier teaches The Functional Living Method™ in person at 211 Montowese St in Branford, Connecticut, serving New Haven and the Connecticut shoreline.
Can I do The Functional Living Method™ online?
Yes. Nicole works with clients over Zoom anywhere in the world.
Ready to try something different?
If you've spent years chasing the sore spot, try something different: learn how your own body is organized, and change it from the inside.
Here's what to do next:
1. Try the 60-second reset tomorrow morning and notice what changes.
2. If you feel even a small shift, imagine what we could find in a full session.
3. Book your sessions in Branford or on Zoom here, read more about The Functional Living Method™, or email me at nicole@tantienim.com with your questions.
About the author
Nicole Tavernier is the founder of The Functional Living Method™ and a Somatic Educator, Oxygen Advantage® Advanced Instructor and Human Movement Specialist (Brookbush Institute). Her somatic movement work is rooted in the Feldenkrais Method and Hanna Somatics. She works in person in Branford, Connecticut, and online with clients worldwide. Nicole is an educator, not a medical provider.
Sources and further reading
• World Health Organization. WHO releases guidelines on chronic low back pain (7 December 2023). who.int
• World Health Organization. Low back pain fact sheet. who.int
• GBD 2021 Low Back Pain Collaborators (Ferreira ML et al.). Global, regional, and national burden of low back pain, 1990–2020. The Lancet Rheumatology, 2023;5(6):e316–e329. PubMed
• Rometsch C, Martin A, Junne F, Cosci F. Chronic pain in European adult populations: a systematic review of prevalence and associated clinical features. Pain, 2025;166(4). IASP summary
• Swain CTV, Pan F, Owen PJ, Schmidt H, Belavy DL. No consensus on causality of spine postures or physical exposure and low back pain: a systematic review of systematic reviews. Journal of Biomechanics, 2020;102:109312.
• Kent P, O’Sullivan P, Hancock M, et al. Cognitive functional therapy with or without movement sensor biofeedback versus usual care for chronic, disabling low back pain (RESTORE). The Lancet, 2023;401(10391):1866–1877. PubMed
• Hancock M, et al. RESTORE trial 3-year follow-up. The Lancet Rheumatology, 2025. Summary: News-Medical, 5 Aug 2025
• Van Wesemael S, Janssens L, Amerijckx C, Goossens N, Klaps S, Vlemincx E, Bogaerts K. Breathing interventions for spinal pain: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Clinical Rehabilitation, 2025;39(12). SAGE
• Chen AY-J, Lin I-J, Chen Y-T, Luo H-J, Chen Y-W, Wang WT-J. Can breathing exercises effectively treat people with chronic non-specific low back pain? Journal of Back and Musculoskeletal Rehabilitation, 2026. SAGE
• Seyedhoseinpoor T, Jafari R, Shafizadegan Z, Abbaszadeh-Amirdehi M. Effects of breathing exercise and thoracic techniques on pain and disability in low back pain. PLOS One, 2026. PLOS
• Canlı K, Demirkıran G, Can F. The efficiency of tactile discrimination training and oculomotor exercises in people with chronic neck pain: a randomized controlled trial. BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, 2025;26. KTU record
• Saki F, Ziya M. Effects of integrating Feldenkrais method with dynamic neuromuscular stabilization exercises in older women with nonspecific chronic low back pain: a randomized controlled trial. BMC Geriatrics, 2025;25:573. Springer
• Cochrane Australia for the Australian Department of Health. Natural Therapies Review 2024: Feldenkrais evidence evaluation. health.gov.au
• Bricot B. Total Postural Reprogramming, 3rd ed. Dux Lucis Books, 2008 (originally Reprogrammation posturale globale, Sauramps Medical, 1996).
• Feldenkrais M. Awareness Through Movement. Harper & Row, 1972.
• Hanna T. Somatics: Reawakening the Mind’s Control of Movement, Flexibility, and Health. Addison-Wesley, 1988.
• McKeown P. The Oxygen Advantage. William Morrow, 2015.
This article is for education only and is not medical advice. The Functional Living Method™ is a somatic education program and is not a substitute for diagnosis or treatment by a licensed healthcare provider.
