Feldenkrais and the Jaw

Gentle Exercises for Jaw Tension and TMJ

Most advice for a tight jaw comes down to one instruction: stop clenching. If you could simply stop, you would have stopped already. Clenching is not a decision you are making.

The Feldenkrais Method takes a different route. Instead of telling you to release something you cannot feel yourself doing, it works through attention and gentle movement, using the whole of you rather than one isolated joint. The jaw does not act on its own. It works with your tongue, your eyes, your breath, your neck and shoulders, and even your pelvis. Change those relationships and the jaw changes with them.

The mouth takes up roughly 30% of the sensory motor processing center of the brain, which is a large share for a small area. Dr. Feldenkrais found that working with the jaw and the tongue was a particularly effective strategy for anxiety, because so much of what we hold emotionally settles there.

This page is a starting point. It covers what the method is, why gentle attention reaches jaw tension when forcing it rarely does, and where to go next depending on what you are looking for.

What Feldenkrais jaw exercises actually involve

The Feldenkrais Method is a form of movement education. You are not being treated or corrected. You are given conditions in which you can notice what you are doing and find an easier option.

Lessons are verbally guided and most are done lying on your back or side, so your head is supported and your neck has nothing to hold. The movements of the jaw are small, slow and always within a comfortable range. Nothing asks you to open wide, stretch the joint, or work into pain.

A lesson rarely stays in the jaw alone. You might explore how the tongue rests and moves, how the eyes travel, how the head turns, how the breath changes when the mouth softens. Working in these areas often releases tension elsewhere in the body, including the lower back, hips, shoulders and abdomen, which surprises most people the first time it happens.

The rests between movements are part of the lesson. That is when the brain compares, and when the change settles.

Why you cannot simply stop clenching:

There is an assumption built into most jaw advice that the problem is a habit you could drop if you paid more attention to it. The difficulty is that the habit is running below your attention. By the time you notice your jaw is tight, it has usually been tight for hours.

Muscular tension like this is held rather than chosen. It builds from stress responses that never quite switched off, from hours of concentrating at a screen, from holding an expression, from the simple fact that the jaw is one of the places most of us store what we are not saying. Telling it to relax does not reach it.

What does reach it is sensation. When you can feel the difference between a jaw that is working and a jaw that is resting, you have something to compare, and comparison is how the nervous system learns. The release comes as a result of noticing, not as a result of trying.

That usually means:

• Moving the jaw in small ranges, well short of any strain

• Including the tongue, the eyes and the neck rather than isolating the jaw

• Letting the breath move freely instead of holding it

• Noticing what changes, not how much you achieved

• Resting often, and stopping well before fatigue

None of this asks you to push through discomfort. If something hurts, it is information, not an obstacle.

Related Podcasts

If you would rather listen than read, these episodes cover the same ground in Sarah's own words.

Go deeper with the full courses:

Coming to Your Senses takes everything on this page and builds it into a complete course. Across eight lessons you will explore the space of the eyes, mouth, jaw, ears, and the vocal and breathing apparatus, with most lessons done lying on the back or side. Working in these areas often releases tension elsewhere, including the lower back, hips, shoulders and abdomen.

What students use it for:

• Reducing facial tension and jaw clenching

• Easing TMJ symptoms

• Releasing stress held in the body

• Improving breathing function

• Reducing eye strain and headaches

• Easing tinnitus symptoms

• Fewer tension headaches

• Better balance

Other Feldenkrais Courses focused on the Face, Jaw, and Nervous System:

Yoga + Feldenkrais Blended Classes:

This class is an example of how I blend yoga and Feldenkrais. It takes a committed look at how the neck responds to different poses and actions in the body. There is more of a focus on strengthening the neck than there is stretching it. Exerting in the neck is not a bad thing! You don't need to worry if you feel some exertion in the neck. By strengthening the neck and easing tension up into the jaw, we help keep the head upright, soften jaw tightness, and break out of habitual forward head posture.

Understanding the Difference: Yoga, Feldenkrais, and the Jaw

Yoga and the Feldenkrais Method® both build a deeper connection to your body, but they work differently. Yoga tends to focus on alignment and the external shape of a pose, often demonstrated by the teacher and held while you breathe.

A Feldenkrais® Awareness Through Movement class has no shapes to achieve. The whole class is verbally guided, the movements stay slow and small, and the attention is on the internal experience: coordination, quality and effort. That suits an area like the jaw, where the movements involved are tiny and the point is to feel them rather than to see them.

Sarah's Yoga + Feldenkrais Blended Classes bring the two together, infusing a more traditional asana practice with the curiosity of Awareness Through Movement, including self massage and targeted breathing work.

Why Choose the Blended Class?

If you like having a visual model to follow, or you want the familiarity of yoga without the pressure of perfect poses, the blended format gives you both.

See the difference for yourself:

Where the jaw is and what it does:

The jaw hangs from the skull at the temporomandibular joints, one on each side, just in front of your ears. You can find them by resting your fingers there and opening your mouth slowly. Because there are two joints working as a pair, the jaw cannot move on one side without the other side responding.

It is one of the busiest joints you have. It works when you chew, speak, swallow, yawn, laugh and hold an expression, which adds up to thousands of movements a day, most of them unnoticed. The muscles that close the jaw are among the strongest in the body for their size, which is useful for chewing and unhelpful when they stay switched on.

The jaw also sits at a crossroads. Its muscles connect up into the temples and the face, back towards the ears, and down into the neck and the floor of the mouth. That is why jaw tension so often arrives together with headaches, eye strain, ear symptoms and a stiff neck, and why working with one of them tends to affect the others.

The jaw, the tongue and the breath

The tongue is easy to forget, because most of us have no idea what it is doing when we are not using it. It has a resting place, it takes part in every swallow, and it is closely tied to how freely you breathe.

When the jaw clamps, the tongue usually presses too, the throat narrows and the breath moves higher into the chest. It also works the other way: soften the tongue and the jaw often follows without being asked. This is why the lessons keep returning to the mouth as a whole rather than the joint on its own, and why a jaw lesson can leave your breathing feeling easier.

Stress, screens, and what the jaw holds on to

Everyone has habitual ways of holding themselves. Some are easy to spot. The jaw is one of the harder ones, because the movement involved is so small and so constant that it stops registering.

Stress is the usual starting point. Anxiety commonly shows up as a clenched jaw, a tight neck and shoulders, and shallow breathing, and when the stress response stays on after the trigger has passed, that clench settles into a steady state. Many people meet it first thing in the morning, having spent the night grinding or holding.

Modern working life adds to it. Long hours at a screen, looking forward and down, holding an expression through video calls, and the low grade fatigue that comes with all of it, all tend to gather in the face. The habit is not just muscular. Holding the face still is also a way of holding feeling still.

The work here is not to strip the tension out. It is to give your system a genuine alternative, so that ease becomes an option it can find again on its own.

Releasing jaw tension through the rest of you:

Jaw tension rarely releases by addressing the jaw alone.

The clearest example is the pelvis. One of Sarah's audio lessons begins by finding a soft movement of the pelvis, the jaw and the tongue together, then explores how that quality spreads through the rest of you. People often expect those two areas to have nothing to do with each other, and then feel the connection immediately.

The same is true of the eyes and the neck. Eye lessons calm the nervous system and reduce muscular tension in the eyes, cranium and face. Neck work changes what the jaw has to hold. If stress is the root of the pattern, the nervous system page covers how the lessons work with regulation, and how you carry your head and shoulders is covered on the posture page.

Explore Our Audio Lessons

If you would like to try something before committing to a course, the audio lesson library has complete Awareness Through Movement lessons, not samples, so you get a real feel for what the longer courses are like.

Class library membership

The Feldenkrais and Yoga Class Library gives you ongoing access to the whole collection instead of buying courses one at a time. New classes are added weekly, so you can move between jaw and face work, nervous system lessons, posture, walking and anything else as your needs change.

About Sarah: Sarah Baumert is known for her thorough and diverse instruction and her dedication to holding space for individual personal discovery. She facilitates whole body alignment in her students as a way for them to access balance, strength, mobility and physical clarity. Through sensory rich movement experiments, she guides students in cultivating mindfulness and deepening their learning process.



Her experience includes working with people suffering from chronic pain, injury, illness, and other forms of dis-ease. She works with a variety of populations including athletes, seniors, artists, dancers, children, and those recovering from injury, using pain management, and alignment.
 Sarah is a certified Yoga Therapist, an Authorized Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement® Teacher and Feldenkrais Functional Integration® Practitioner. Her objective is to acquire the most effective skills for helping her students live with less pain and more pleasure in their bodies.

Testimonials

What people are saying about Sarah's teaching and this course

This is a non-judgemental, non-corrective way to experience your body in motion. Nothing is forced, nothing is stretched, and noticing what feels good is part of the point. Lessons suit all levels and most are done lying on the back or side.

If any of this sounds familiar, whether you wake up with a sore jaw, catch yourself clenching at your desk, or have been told to relax a face that will not listen, it might be time for a different approach. Take twenty minutes, lie down, and start by noticing what your jaw is already doing.

Frequently Asked Questions