Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner in Redmond WA helping with chronic pain
I am Shrutee Sharma, Feldenkrais Practitioner and movement nerd
Every day, I help people like you step out of pain, so they don’t miss out on simple pleasures like sitting on the floor with their kids, playing recreational sports with family OR the more athletic endeavors like skiing, horse riding, hiking, bicycling without re-injuring themselves or being achy afterwards.
My clients often feel surprised and are lit up with the change they feel in a short amount of time. They appreciate being able to sustain it on their own.
I do things differently by…
Caring enough to learn about your body, not anybody.
Getting to the root cause of your chronic pain. I zoom in to where you’re hurting and then zoom out to sense how your pain is being created in the context of how you move your whole body, the things you do and want to do. It’s my superpower (my clients tell me I have X-ray vision)!
Educating you on how to listen to your own body and supporting you in integrating the solution in ways that work for your life.
Creating a safe and lighthearted space that kindles your own capacity for healing.
But my road to understanding the human body was not as smooth as my range of motion is now!
15 years ago, I completed an MBA from Carnegie Mellon and began working at Amazon.
I spent many years delivering results and deep diving to understand root causes. I continually raised the bar for what was possible for my customers, no matter the challenge.
After the birth of my sweet baby girl, I found myself with a debilitating pain in my right knee.
I’d limp to conference rooms. Getting dinner on the table took courage to tolerate pain and being opportunistic about what I could get done with my limited leash of time on painkillers. A conditioned overachiever, I thought I could push through the pain.
When my daughter was 15 months old, she was enchanted with the world. Her favorite hangout spot was the ‘ducky pond’, a hop and a skip away from our apartment. But I couldn't be there with her. The 500 yards to the pond was a trek that my tender knee couldn’t bear.
It really hurt that I couldn't be there for those choicest moments with my daughter.
Like most people, I spent a couple years doing the rounds with specialists, physical therapists, chiropractors, and massages with not much to show in terms of re-integrating back into my life.
After much suffering, I found a Feldenkrais Practitioner and finally found relief. In a few months, I was taking long walks on kelp beaches. I had many lightbulb moments learning how I had been perpetuating my pain - something none of those therapists had told me.
I decided to take the plunge and spend 4 years training in the Feldenkrais Method.
I fell in love with the philosophy of deep nervous system listening as the starting point of healing. I was fascinated with the wealth of cues that became available to me when I took the time to tune into people’s bodies. Instead of fixing them or correcting them, I would layer these cues with my study of movement science and neuroscience to expand the range of possibilities in their body.
Thanks to doing this work, I am fully engaged with my kids. I am also an avid skier and hiker.
Instead of treating the individual as a resource for their own healing, most approaches treat them as ‘broken’. This deserves our strongest rebuttal. The information to heal a person lives within that person. Experts ought to be measured by their skill in helping the individual access their own intelligence to heal.
“Shrutee is an amazing mix of geeked out nerdy, intelligent woman but also has a very caring, loving sense about her.”
I’m very active with mountain biking, hiking and lifting weights. I had some unusual pain in my hip from a free fall on my new hardwood floor. I exacerbated it by having my giant John Deer mower stuck in the mud and having to reef it out by myself. Mostly wasn’t too difficult to live with but would hurt unpredictably. Sometimes sleeping at night or after a long drive, it would go down my left leg.
I felt that you identified the problem. You worked to treat the source. Instead of attacking the pain, you were looking for how I was causing the pain. Especially with chiropractic and massage, they’re trying to relieve the pain but not having the body act in a different way to not cause the pain in the first place. How can I press down my heel without tensing all my muscles. That took a lot of my attention there but then it was also fun. I took my big 20 mile mountain bike ride and I wasn’t in any pain after that!
John Latta, Spiritual Coach and Author in Redmond, WA
“I went from unable to put my feet on the floor to walking pain free...in just an hour with Shrutee”
I still struggle to believe that this is possible. In 10 sessions, I went from being in the kind of sciatic pain, I would be crying in pain, getting out of bed to being able to dance and do my life. You have an effect, not just on my body, you link into something else in my life. You reach into you. You have depth & a sparkle!
Debbie Scally, Accountant & Dancer
“If you have a desire to really get to the bottom of your pain…work with Shrutee. It’s like really good chocolate!”
“Sooo much empowerment to know that I can take myself from being super afraid, unsure of what I was going to do, to actually being able to take care of myself, while doing my life!”
Erica Swedberg, Nurse & Lactation Consultant in Redmond WA
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The Feldenkrais Method is a powerful approach to relieving chronic joint pain by improving the way you move in your whole body. It is different from approaches like physical therapy that focus on strengthening or stretching muscles around the point where you’re experiencing pain.
A Feldenkrais Practitioner combines their powers of observation honed through 4 years of training in movement science and neuroscience with thousands of hours of hands-on work. They can quickly diagnose how a person's pain is being caused by their habitual patterns of walking, sitting and other day to day activities.The practitioner gets you comfortable lying down and uses their hands to communicate with your nervous system. They gradually educate you about how your pain is being created and cultivate your participation in actionable steps that feel enjoyable and intellectually satisfying.
Instead of fixing or fighting the pain symptom, we take the time to understand where the strain in your knee or hip or back or shoulder is coming from, hence reaching into the root cause of your pain. The whole body approach + nervous system approach make it effective in recovering from injury or years/decades of pain.
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The training to become a Feldenkrais Practitioner is rigorous and extensive. In order to become a Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practioner (GCFP), I graduated from 4 years of training with the Seattle Eastside Feldenkrais Training (SEFT) and am a member of the Feldenkrais Guild of North America (FGNA).
There are also advanced trainings to deepen one's expertise in specific areas. I’ve taken the 18 month training with the IOPS Institute. And continue to take continuing education deepening my expertise in different aspects of healing.
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I am a champion for debunking the myth that you have to pay the price of pregnancy in back pain & achy shoulders and suffer through childbirth. I’m on a mission to bust that by supporting pregnant women being being active while growing a baby! Read on for what some of these women have to say about me:
“Shrutee literally got my back when I was pregnant with twins + running my own business + running around after a toddler! I suffered from pelvic pain and mid-back pain. I had a really hard time changing positions. Thanks to Shrutee, I felt supported in my whole body, I slept better and could be active without feeling stuck and broken!”
Tara Kolesar, equestrian + Equine Therapist from Woodinville, WA
“I found Shrutee when I was in the second trimester of pregnancy and having severe muscle spasming in my lower back and sciatic area. I couldn’t do anything besides lie in bed. I had tried the chiropractor several times, physical therapy, tens and none of those things made the pain bearable enough to get back to work.
Shrutee and I made progress in the first session and I was able to get back to work a couple of days later (physical job that requires standing for 8+ hours a day). In a few weeks, my back pain was quickly gone. I continued to see Shrutee to work on some other issues that came up as my pregnancy progressed. In my third trimester of pregnancy, my husband and I are still getting out for several mile hikes. It feels great to be empowered to do my normal pre-pregnancy activities, even though I'm carrying around and growing a baby!
Kelli Taylor, veterinary doctor living in Redmond WA