Feeling & Listening to get out of pain
It really jazzes me up when I see my clients get out of pain and able to do more and more of what they love to do!
Who makes the fastest progress? The ones who learn to listen and feel into their bodies as they breathe and move. But none of my clients arrived knowing how to listen and FEEL what is moving, what is quiet, where is breath, where is gripping, etc.
One of my clients used to say she felt like a “head on a stick”: as long as her body wasn’t yelling at her (ie pain) then she just didn’t pay it any attention!
She is not unique – but why does this matter, if you want to get out of pain and pain cycles?
One of the brilliant capacities of our body is that it can compensate for a movement deficiency by “borrowing” from another part of the body. This is an awesome and creative process!
It is however unconscious and our bodies are literally “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
This is all good until a body part cries “uncle! I can’t do this anymore!” And we experience pain. Frequently this shows up in lowback, knees, or piriformis (sciatica anyone?). These three areas are great superheroes at “helping out” when our true function doesn’t match our movement desires.
We generally can’t just send a body part out for repair and expect everything to be fine again. For example, I see all sorts of people with “post-surgical lowback syndrome” - yup – there’s even a name for it. Or you can go to the gym and strengthen the heck out of your lowback or your abs, yet the lowback pain cycle continues. (Same is true for other body parts in pain.)
Given this process of compensation, where the pain is, isn’t necessarily the source of the problem – it’s often a reflection of some pattern of “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” Pain doesn’t arbitrarily come and go. We have to start to identify the pieces of the pattern.
We can’t change what we are unaware of… AND with awareness, tissues can change, even in “old age.”
To do this, I help clients become aware of what is truly happening in their body. This requires listening for the whispers the body makes before falling over the cliff into pain.
The only way I have seen a client get out of pain – especially chronic pain – is to listen in and grow awareness of their amazing body/mind self. I love when a client comes in and reports they went for a hike because it was sooo nice out, fully expecting their sciatica to flare – and it didn’t! They felt great!
As acute pain quiets, they can listen to a wider bandwidth of yellow lights; they make more shifts toward even better function. As they build stability, they have a better foundation to add more strength, flexibility, load, and complexity. Clients often expand their goals realizing more than they thought was available to them.
The best part is that YOU are doing the listening, the moving in new ways, the quieting of symptoms. And if you can do it with me, then you can do it for yourself at home, on vacation, whenever! And that makes my day!