Things didn't start very well for me. A couple of weeks after a traumatic forceps delivery, I suffered an eye infection that spread causing me to bleed from my ears, nose and eyes, and I was readmitted to hospital. My head started to swell up and, besides swabs from my facial orifices, I had a spinal tap in my lower lumbar to take a sample of my spinal fluid to check for an infection – not a bad idea I guess, but in those days the prevailing belief was that babies didn't feel pain, so I was probably not given an anaesthetic. I've since heard that even with an anaesthetic, a spinal tap is extremely painful. I recovered but it wasn't a happy start.

Later I had difficulty walking – I developed extreme "knock-knees" with both my knees turning inward dramatically. Although these days it is regarded as a self-righting defect that can be aided by physiotherapy, only requiring corrective surgical intervention if the problem persists beyond puberty, I endured the fashionable solution at the time which was to put me in callipers by day and bind my legs together in a half-plaster cast with a steel rod down the middle by night. 

Of course, I didn't like this very much and in order to curb my violent reactions against this treatment, I was given sedatives, one of which was actually an antidepressant with sedative side effects. I was also given laxatives – I assume to get me to shit on time as it would have been difficult wearing all that paraphernalia. At the end of this treatment which went on for about 18 months between the ages of three and five, I had "perfectly straight legs".

 As an adolescent I loved to play sport and I was pretty good at it too – I played rugby and cricket for my school and town teams, football for my school, and badminton for my county – I was not far off playing for my country. The problem was that I kept injuring myself. Shoulder and groin injuries kept interrupting my progress and a major back injury when I was 14 brought it to a halt altogether. 

I was finally told by a consultant that there was nothing they could do for me and I should lead a "sedentary life". I asked what that meant and was told: "Don't move too much, avoid lifting things, and never try to lift anything heavy." I took that advice – my interests were changing anyway – though I continued to suffer pain in my back intermittently.

By the time I was 25, this intermittent pain had become constant and it got to a point where I couldn't sleep at night because of it. When I was 14 I'd had some success with an osteopath and, not being too keen on doctors – though somewhat ironically I had earlier flirted with the idea of becoming one – I again turned to osteopathy for help.

When I first presented myself I was given a diagnosis that read like a shopping list: an unusual three-curve scoliosis (resulting from a twist and a half untwist of my spine), major kyphosis, a couple of fused vertebra at the base of my spine and a fibrotic lump running down the inside of my right shoulder blade next to my spine that stuck out half an inch. I started to go fortnightly to the osteopath, determined to sort this out somehow, receiving painful deep tissue massage to disperse the fibrosis as well as the usual clicking and crunching.

I took a short course in mime and physical theatre and ended up on a full-time Circus and Performing Arts course at Fooltime in Bristol. There I continued to see osteopath weekly or fortnightly. During a theatre class, a teacher offered an exercise that seemed to reach right into my core. I asked what it was and was told it was a Feldenkrais exercise. I looked for a Feldenkrais teacher and found one giving classes half an hour's walk from my house – what I didn't realise was that there were only four practising teachers in the UK at the time.

My body seemed to drink up that information and transform with it. It began my interest in working with awareness as a tool for change in the body – broadly, working with the idea of repatterning my neuromuscular system. A practical explanation of this switch in thinking is the story of how I gave up my dependence on osteopathy 

With Feldenkrais, you usually explore very small and slow movements with lots of awareness and experience the effects of all sorts of subtle variations on the theme of the class. Without really having to do very much, your body recognises the potential for easier and more efficient movement. At the end of a class you stand up and feel the, sometimes dramatic, changes that have occurred, and then walk off into the world and see what stays with you.

When I came to train at the circus school after a class, all sorts of movements got much easier – I got more flexible without stretching, stronger without having to do repetitious "muscle building"exercises, and my posture began to improve significantly.

One immediate effect of the Feldenkrais classes was that when I came to walk home afterwards I'd often feel my bones clunking into new positions. What I think was causing this was that I was chang- ing the tone of my muscles. 

I remember the osteopath was at the top of a couple of flights of stairs and on one occasion I remember him cracking my back, which was a relief, but it cracked back out of place on the way down the stairs immediately afterwards. I realised that working on the tone of my muscles through my nervous system brought more lasting effects.

The more I gained awareness through Feldenkrais classes, the easier I found it to "wriggle intelligently" on my floor to crack my bones back into place myself. The last couple of times I saw the osteopath, I just got him to look at my back and tell me what he saw. There was no question about it, Feldenkrais had given me the power to sort myself out at my own pace. 

One thing that did happen a lot in those early days was that I started to recall lots of uncomfortable memories from my childhood and saw a counsellor to deal with this fallout – a practical experience of the "bodymind" and the sense that memories were not simply stored in the brain.

This very soft but powerful experience of working with the body soon became at odds with the attitude I found at the circus school – the common cultural attitude of "no pain no gain" – and after a transitionary period of trying to do trapeze incorporating this "soft" information, I discovered Contact Improvisation and "New Dance". Through them I found a lot of other techniques to improve my posture and the way I moved by working with awareness and the idea that there is more to movement is than the simple mechanics of muscles and bones – Release Technique, Body Mind Centering, Developmental Movement, Ideokenesis, the work of Elsa Gindler and more.

These interests led me to the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam and to study, and to continue studying, independently with some of the leading teachers in this area. These days when I move, this troubled movement history is barely visible, though from the inside there's always something else to learn. It's as if my ability to sense imbalances in my body has become much more finely tuned – as awareness grows travelling an inch can feel like a mile. I bring all this experience to bear when I teach movement – my basic premise is that if I can do this, anyone can.