Movement and the Present Moment: What Practice Teaches Us About Aging and Adaptability
Why a conscious movement practice reshapes how we age, how we learn, and how we meet life as it unfolds
Many years ago, I heard Ido Portal say a sentence that stayed with me long after that moment passed:
“Nothing ever happened. And if it happened, it doesn’t matter.”
At first, it sounded like an attempt to dismiss reality, to downplay the impact of events or emotions. In truth, it was a reflection on orientation, on how we relate to what life brings us. Things happen: difficult, beautiful, confusing, transformative... And, whenever something touches us, we feel it, intimately. Our system registers the contraction, the excitement, the anger, the joy, or the vertigo of uncertainty.
If we allow it, those sensations move through us, and eventually, they move out of us. When this happens, we can then continue - not unchanged, but updated.
Life does not pause to wait for us to process what happened yesterday, whether we like it or not, whether we are ready or not. It unfolds now, moment after moment. And the real question is always the same: How do I respond to this moment, from the version of myself that is available right now? This is where practice comes into play.
Practice Expands the Ways We Can Respond
We do not practice to polish ourselves into an ideal shape, nor to perfect a specific gesture or skill. We practice to increase our options, the repertoire of responses we can access when something new or unexpected appears.
Conscious movement, whether through Feldenkrais, Movement or Conditioning classes, broadens this repertoire. It teaches the nervous system to choose rather than to react, to reorganise rather than collapse into familiar patterns, to meet the unknown with adaptability rather than rigidity. In essence, practice expands our behavioural and perceptual bandwidth. And more options means more freedom.
Why Practice Matters at Any Age
There is a widespread belief that movement classes are primarily for the young, for bodies that look “trained,” “mobile,” or “athletic.” Yet, our community tells a very different story. A significant part of the people who practise with us are far beyond the age one would stereotypically associate with movement or conditioning. They come because movement — the right kind of movement — restores something essential to everyone:
- greater ease in daily life
- a wider range of responses, physically and emotionally
- renewed trust in their own capability and adaptability
- a sense of aliveness grounded in learning rather than performance
Just a few days ago, after a Movement Conditioning class, a long-term student in her mid-60s who also attends our Movement sessions consistently told us: “You should advertise your classes as a way to slow down the aging process. With your lessons I’m learning to use myself differently, and that changes the way I respond to life.”
Her words capture something important. Not because we sell anti-aging solutions — we do not. But because when you can move in more ways, you can live in more ways.
Why Many Older Adults Stop Moving And Why They Shouldn’t
A common narrative around aging is that people become less active because their bodies cannot do what they once could. When running, jumping, lifting, or training in “the usual” ways becomes unavailable, many assume their options have vanished altogether.
But this assumption is far from true. The brain and the nervous system retain their capacity for learning until the very last moment of life. Neuroplasticity does not disappear; it simply requires the right input, the right conditions, the right kind of exploration.
When older adults engage with movement that is intelligent, varied, and respectful of the nervous system, they often discover:
- new patterns
- new confidence
- new mobility
- new strategies for organising themselves
It is not aging that limits learning. It is the belief that learning is no longer possible.
And What About Younger Adults? A Different Kind of Challenge
While many older adults struggle with the idea that learning has an expiration date, young adults often struggle with something almost opposite: a perpetual orientation toward a hypothetical future.
They wait for the lives they see online. They seek shortcuts, intense sensations, perfect results, impossible realities. They postpone presence, waiting for the “right moment” to begin living fully. But life does not happen later. Life is happening now, relentlessly and continuously.
Practice is what roots us in this “now.” It connects us with reality instead of fantasy, with process instead of projection, with the body we have today rather than the idealised version we imagine for tomorrow. In this sense, younger people need practice just as much as older adults — perhaps even more.
Orientation, Not Perfection
We do not speak from theory. Everything we teach comes from what we practise with ourselves, as students and as teachers. Our own practice has changed many times over the years, and it will continue to evolve. That is the nature of learning.
What becomes clearer, however, is the importance of commitment. Not to a method or a teacher per se, but to ourselves. To showing up. To curiosity. To the willingness to be available to experience life without rigidity. When we practice this way, the boundary between movement and life becomes permeable. Each moment becomes an opportunity for organisation, reorientation, and choice.
“Nothing ever happened,” not because events lack meaning, but because life keeps happening now, and now, and now again. There is neither a past to stay attached to, nor a future to be waiting for. And a Movement Practice makes this “now” a place where we have options — physically, mentally, and emotionally.
What to do now?
If you are ready to build a movement practice that grows with you — at any age — we offer different ways to begin:
- In-person group classes in Milan (Movement Practice, Feldenkrais, and Movement Conditioning)
- Personal Training (One-to-one movement education tailored to your needs, goals, and current abilities.)
- Online coaching (a personalised, ongoing program to develop your movement practice from anywhere in the world)
If you are looking for more options, more awareness, and a way of responding to life that feels grounded and alive, you can start exactly where you are. The practice will take you forward.
