I have had a lot of clients wonder if they could ever get enough bodywork that they would no longer have any tension. How many times a week would it take?
I think this inquiry begs a few clarifications. I’m not talking about Pain. I want to distinguish between the discomfort of tension in the body and chronic pain or other neurological disorders. Pain due to tension is an expected signal from the body to the brain that it’s uncomfortable. Chronic pain is when these signals aren’t functioning as expected, in a constant feedback loop of discomfort that typically gets worse as the pain-signal lingers. Discomfort might be interpreted as painful, and the spectrum of interpretation within these very subjective words is vast. This discomfort causes temporary pain, and how we compare this acute pain from chronic pain is how long we endure it, and what ADL’s (activities of daily living) it impedes.
So, back to imagining a body beyond it’s tension. What is your baseline? It is a sticky question because our memory can be inaccurate, and our bodies are dynamic, meaning they are ever-changing, adapting in real time to the actions and stressors of our day-to-day. Often these adaptations can lead us away from alignment, or balance, which can lead to weakness from patterns of imbalance in repetitive motions. Another sticky question, is weakness perceived as pain?
