Feldenkrais Spine Recovery: Dwight Pargee on Learning to Walk Again
Losing the ability to walk can happen fast. Rebuilding it can take patience, attention, and a different relationship with fear.
Dwight Pargee lived that reality after a sudden illness left him without function in his legs. In a candid conversation, he shares his Feldenkrais Spine Recovery journey, explaining how the Feldenkrais Method, Awareness Through Movement, and hands-on Functional Integration helped him rebuild his self-image and keep moving forward, even when the outcome was unknown.
Dwight Pargee and Lavinia Plonka shared these insights in a talk at the Move Better, Feel Better Summit called “Learning to walk again, and again and again…Oh, where do I begin?” We have extracted the wisdom shared in that interview for your reading pleasure.
Dwight Pargee’s Feldenkrais work
Dwight Pargee comes across as someone who has lived in his body in many ways. Lavinia Plonka describes him as a blend of athlete and “free spirit”, a martial artist who also loves fishing and being outdoors.
His professional path reflects that same mix of grounded study and real-world application. Lavinia notes that he has degrees in Exercise Physiology and Body Mechanics, informing his expertise in musculoskeletal organization. Dwight is also an assistant trainer in the Feldenkrais Method and has a practice in Bend, Oregon, where he has worked with thousands of people, from recovering from severe injuries to high-performance athletes.
That range matters because the conversation is not only about a diagnosis. It’s about motor control, self-image, and what happens when a nervous system gets shaken hard.
If you want a broader foundation for the terms used here, start with this clear primer: Introduction to the Feldenkrais Method.
When he lost the ability to walk
Dwight says he made the “move better, feel better” his daily mantra, not as a slogan, but because he “got sick and lost my ability to walk.”
He describes getting very ill while teaching in a Feldenkrais training program. It sounded like viral pneumonia, “walking pneumonia bronchitis” type symptoms. Then, in the middle of the night, everything changed. He lost function in his legs and had to crawl to the bathroom. Sensation was gone from the waist down.
He got to the hospital quickly and stayed about a week while doctors ran tests and tried to rule out serious causes. He lists possibilities they had to eliminate, including:
- Brain tumors
- Spine tumors
- Meningitis
- Multiple sclerosis
The emotional tone behind that list is easy to imagine. At that point, he didn’t have a neat story or a timeline. He had a body that was not responding, and a medical team still searching for answers.
This transverse myelitis recovery story highlights how suddenly neurological illness can change everyday movement.
The Impact on Spinal Cord Function and Righting Reflexes
Dwight’s eventual diagnosis was transverse myelitis. He explains it as an autoimmune response triggered by the virus infection in his lungs, which led to swelling in the spine. The swelling damaged upper motor neuron pathways.
This kind of disruption often resembles challenges seen in spinal cord injury recovery.
The spinal lesion was tiny, “about the size of a pinhead,” located around C7 to T1 in the thoracic spine (near the base of the neck). Lavinia highlights the shock of that, that something so small can disrupt an entire system.
Even after the illness symptoms cleared, Dwight was left without normal function. He used a walker for about three months and couldn’t work.
A major hit was to his righting reflexes, the built-in mammal response that helps you organize uprightness. Dwight uses a vivid image: the way a cat can twist in midair and land on its feet. His injury wiped out that easy, reflexive upright organization, so he had to recruit other muscles just to stabilize.
The key insight: when the nervous system loses its default organizing patterns, forcing “correct” movement from the outside can miss the real problem. The work has to include reorganizing how the person senses themselves.
Nervous System Healing Through the Feldenkrais Method
Restoring the Internal Body Map for Spinal Cord Injury Recovery
In the hospital, Dwight had his wife bring his Feldenkrais mat. He did multiple lessons a day while doctors worked to reduce swelling and limit damage.
A key idea he returned to was one central in the Feldenkrais Method: we act in accordance with our self-image, which shapes our muscle patterns. Dwight describes trying to use a set of “primary image” lessons, sometimes called the “five lines,” a simple internal map of yourself in space.
But something startling happened. Part of his internal image was just gone. He couldn’t visualize clearly because he couldn’t feel clearly. He describes the experience like a TV channel that flickers in and out, especially in the leg lines, and worse when fatigue was high.
That’s where his practice became very methodical. He talks about using micro-movements in Awareness Through Movement lessons to “fill in the gaps,” building a clearer template between intention and action, and improving the quality of the nervous system “messaging.”
If stress and fear are part of your daily body pattern, this related piece may help connect dots between nervous system states and movement habits: How Feldenkrais Reduces Anxiety and Stress.
Re-patterning vs Nervous System Reorganization
Lavinia asks a practical question many people ask: how long does it take to “re-pattern” habits? Dwight draws a line between an external model (doing a pattern because someone imposes it) and an internal learning model.
He points to neuroplasticity as ongoing learning, then says something simple and strong about hands-on work. Even in Functional Integration, the person’s nervous system is the one doing the integrating. It is not rule-based. It is not “do it like this.”
Here’s a quick comparison based on how they describe it:
Dwight’s blunt line lands: “Repetition without awareness is useless.”
He adds what does work: “Repetition with variation.”
Those tiny variations can restore lost options, especially when someone is moving “like a block.”
Trauma, fear, and nervous system choice
Lavinia names what many people feel after illness or injury: fear of pain, fear of relapse, fear that the body can’t be trusted.
Dwight doesn’t minimize it. He says the fear was huge, especially when doctors couldn’t promise how much recovery he’d get or how long it would take. He describes standing on an edge, that moment where you can “freak out” or take action.
He chose what he calls “biological optimism.” Not blind positivity, but a practical orientation toward what he could do next.
Creativity, Constraints, and Becoming New Again
He also offers a useful paradox: on the flip side of fear and the unknown is creativity. Constraint can force new solutions. He brings in the idea of autopoiesis, self-organization, then describes turning fear into action “in a very methodical way.”
Lavinia connects this to a Feldenkrais teaching tool: constraints are often built into Awareness Through Movement lessons to shift where movement and awareness show up. Dwight applies the same logic to his condition: the goal isn’t returning to the old walk, it’s becoming “new once again.”
What Helped Him Relearn Walking
Dwight tried many inputs early on, including standard physical therapy. He describes much of it as repetition with not much variation. Some was helpful, including assisted treadmill walking with an air-support system that reduced body weight, “like walking in water.”
But he also learned his limits. Too much treadmill work could trigger spasms through his spine. In contrast, he says he got “much more bang for my buck” from Functional Integration sessions, along with two to three hours a day of Awareness Through Movement.
These feldenkrais method exercises helped him rebuild coordination gradually without forcing movement.sa
He keeps returning to one word: integration.
He also shares an experience that changed his approach. After focusing so hard on “my legs need to move,” he worked with a Feldenkrais trainer who focused more generally: head, neck, arms, rhythm, and vibration. Dwight says it improved him quickly, even though it temporarily wiped him out. Later, the gains showed up over days and weeks.
That story carries a practical lesson for anyone doing somatic therapy exercises for anxiety, trauma, or recovery: sometimes the fastest way forward is not attacking the “problem part,” like low back pain but improving the whole system’s coordination.
For another angle on how slow pacing supports learning and nervous system regulation, see: Why Slow, Small Movements Matter in Feldenkrais.
Relearning to Walk: A Developmental Approach
If you are looking for nervous system regulation exercises to improve your own gait, Dwight suggests beginning where walking truly starts — in early human development.
Walking is not a single skill. It is the final expression of a long developmental sequence that includes:
- Rolling over
- Creeping and crawling
- Moving from sitting to all fours, to hands and knees
- Standing and organizing yourself in gravity
By gently “regressing” to these earlier stages, the nervous system can rediscover the easy, efficient movement patterns that Moshe Feldenkrais often described as “easy and elegant.”
Overcoming Sensory-Motor Amnesia: Habit, Injury, and the Power of Novelty
When Habit Limits Movement
Even people without major injuries can develop what Feldenkrais called sensory-motor amnesia—the gradual loss of awareness and movement options that comes from repeating the same patterns over and over.
Dwight explains that habit itself is not the problem. Habit is how we function efficiently. But habits can create blind spots, places where we stop sensing and stop updating how we move.
He connects this to high-performance athletes. Strength training can make you very strong in a narrow pattern, such as a heavy squat, while quietly reducing ease and variability in other directions. Over time, movement becomes powerful but rigid.
His simple takeaway: the brain pays attention to novelty. Mindless repetition dulls learning. Variation restores choice.
Reorganizing After Injury: Waking the System Back Up
For Dwight, illness created profound sensory-motor amnesia in his lower body. Rather than forcing his legs to move, he began with the parts of himself that could still move easily—his head, neck, and arms.
In one pivotal session, a Feldenkrais trainer used gentle vibration and oscillation through his skeleton. Because bones are designed to transmit force efficiently, these subtle movements helped “wake up” his nervous system and restore his internal body map, what Moshe Feldenkrais called the primary image. The result was a major reorganization of his movement and coordination.
This process reflects gradual nervous system healing through improved sensory awareness and movement variation.
This kind of movement education for improved spinal function is not only valuable after injury. The lesson reaches far beyond recovery.
Whether someone is healing from trauma, managing chronic stress, or exploring nervous system regulation through Awareness Through Movement, the goal is the same: not to push harder, but to restore options, curiosity, and adaptability.
This is one reason many people seek Awareness Through Movement classes online, including those looking for nervous system regulation exercises, somatic healing movements, or support with stress and trauma. The aim is not to push through, it’s to restore options.
Awareness Through Movement lesson: Five lines
To begin his process of reorganizing his nervous system, Dwight returned to a core concept in the Feldenkrais Method: self-image. We act in accordance with how we perceive ourselves. When Dwight’s sensory feedback was cut off, his internal map of his body became “fuzzy,” flickering like a poor television signal. He turned to a specific set of Awareness Through Movement lessons focused on the “five primary lines” to reconnect his brain with his body.
You can try this visualization to sense your own internal GPS:
A final word on hope and attitude
Near the end, Dwight shares a quote that matches his whole approach. From Viktor Frankl: “This is the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” Dwight connects it to being on the edge of that “rabbit hole,” then choosing to intervene.
His final message is plain: “There’s always improvement.” Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t improve. Keep looking for what you can do, build on it, and let progress accumulate one small success at a time.
Speaker bios and resources
Dwight Pargee
Dwight Pargee is a Feldenkrais Method assistant trainer and practitioner based in Bend, Oregon. In this conversation he also describes a background in athletics, martial arts, and training in exercise physiology and biomechanics.
Learn more about Dwight and his work here: [https://www.movaido.co/]
Lavinia Plonka
Lavinia Plonka is a Feldenkrais practitioner and teacher. In this conversation she guides the discussion toward core Feldenkrais themes, including self-image, posture improvement, choice, learning, and how people relate to fear and the unknown during recovery.
Learn more about Lavinia and her work here: [ www.laviniaplonka.com]
Full interview link (longer listen)
A link to watch the full interview with Lavinia Plonka and Dwight Pargee on YouTube
- Watch the full interview: Learning to walk again, and again and again… Oh, where do I begin?
If you’re newer to this work and want a practical grounding in terms like Awareness Through Movement and Functional Integration, read: Core Principles of the Feldenkrais Method.
If stories of recovery help you stay oriented, you may also appreciate: Feldenkrais in Post-Stroke Rehabilitation.
For those seeking Feldenkrais spine recovery, relief from chronic pain or spinal issues, or gentle nervous system regulation after stress or trauma, we invite you to explore our Awareness Through Movement lessons online and begin your own journey toward moving and feeling better.