For a while now, I’ve thought that there’s something more to the story we’ve been told about frozen shoulder. The dominant narrative says there’s no fix. 

You can only wait it out. 

Let it runs its course. 

Eventually, it thaws. 

But in my own body, and with others I’ve worked with, I’ve noticed things that make me question that narrative.

The first time I encountered someone with frozen shoulder was during my clinical training as a Hanna Somatic Educator. A woman came in who hadn’t been able to move her arm in two years. She was skeptical but willing to try a somatic approach. In one 45-minute session, we worked slowly with gentle muscular contractions and de-contractions. I used a sequence of progressively unwinding muscles grouped together in what HSE (Hanna Somatic Education) practitioners refer to as the Red Light Reflex. By the end, she was moving her arm. Not with a full range of motion. Not completely pain-free. But moving, more than she had in two years. She was stunned. So was I.

I remember thinking: How could something that had been immobile for two years start moving so quickly? Was it an anomaly? Possibly. But it planted a seed of curiosity and doubt.

That doubt deepened over the years. 

A few years ago, I learned that all the women in my family develop frozen shoulder during menopause. And, indeed, recently, frozen shoulder as well as other kinds of joint pain have been acknowledged in the medical literature as a symptom during menopause. But still, the treatment pathway remains vague: wait it out, manage the pain, and hope for eventual resolution.

So when I woke up one morning unable to move my arm, as if someone had strapped it to my body, I wasn’t totally surprised. I was in a surprising amount of pain. Not dull or nagging, but sharp, consuming, stop-everything pain. And I was immediately immersed in the questions I’d long carried.

An online search got me to YouTube by Brad and Bob, who are physical therapists. I’ve liked their straightforward common-sense approach before. In fact, there is no shortage of people claiming they can fix frozen shoulder on YouTube. Brad and Bob, however, say that these claims are lies. They say there is no fix for frozen shoulder, only phases you will have to go through, which will usually take about a year—first it freezes, which I was going through, then it is frozen, then it thaws.

I wondered what the Katonah take on frozen shoulder would be. So I emailed Nevine Michaan.

She replied, telling me to put a tennis ball in my armpit and to FaceTime her as soon as possible. I found a lacrosse ball and put it under my arm, and within a few hours, the pain had decreased. By the time we met virtually on FaceTime, my mobility had already begun to return, not three months later, but three days later. My arm was halfway back to its normal range of motion.

When I told Nevine, she wasn’t surprised. 

She explained that the shoulder is a joint that easily gets disorganized, and the round ball in the armpit begins to reorganize the inner spaces of the joint, to give it structure, feedback, and support.

But she also said something else that reframed my understanding of frozen shoulder. She had me sit on a block with one of my arms up in the air (the one that I could hold up). And she started having me turn that armpit to face forward instead of out to the side. From there, she gave me a series of cues to turn one part one way and another part the other way. She explained that when the spin of the pelvis is off, and the spin of the armpits is off, there can be too much pressure in other joints, in the shoulder, that pressure eventually prevents it from moving (which is exactly what it felt like). In other words, the shoulder isn’t the problem— it’s the result of another pattern elsewhere in my body. Frozen shoulder, through the lens of Katonah yoga, is the shoulder trying to move while the pressure of the system won’t let it. It’s not randomly or mysteriously stuck because it’s weak or injured; it’s a spin issue, it’s a pressure issue.

Now, here is where I say that I am not a medical doctor and I am not giving medical advice, and to consult your physician, etc. But I’m not inclined to say that. And I’m not sure someone steeped in the Western medicine story will entertain any virtue in walking around with a ball in your armpit. And that makes me wonder: How many other “unfixable” conditions are just waiting for a different kind of attention? A different lens through which we look. 

Of course, that wasn’t the end of it. The pattern that brought me to frozen shoulder wasn’t just mechanical. It was hormonal. It was stress-related. It was many years of the spin being slightly off. Nevine offered other suggestions to help me work with the deeper architecture. But what shifted me out of pain wasn’t time. It wasn’t resignation. It was intentional pressure — applied with precision, in the right place, at the right time. And it was the recognition that healing wasn’t just about moving the shoulder — it was about reorganizing the relationship between all of the parts of my body.

Frozen shoulder might be more of a communication breakdown than a disease. It might be more about whole-body postural patterns than about something wrong with one specific joint. Frozen is exactly what it feels like, frozen solid. The name very accurately describes the experience. But with attention and possibly a different kind of lens, one that looks at the relationships between all the parts, it may be more fixable than we think.