sensing sensations

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?

I find my baseline is a moving target. Most days, I am in disbelief that a baseline even exists, as there are so many discomforting variables to consider. We all manage and feel pain differently, so there isn’t a right way to “move through pain” or “rest”. To be completely transparent, my personal lesson is: how to not barrel through the discomfort. It is a living lesson, meaning some days I don’t or can’t achieve it, but I hope to, I try to.

I don’t mean to sound defeatist, but tension is unavoidable. We use our bodies in so many ways minute-to-minute, from movement to static patterns (like sitting at a desk). Our state of mind when we are using our bodies can alter the ways we sense, or not, the information and sensations in our bodies, which has a great impact on our perception of discomfort and pain.

Often our corrective ideology in the West constrains the idea of discomfort as a state of being, among many states of being, like its opposite, ease. We desire a quick fix, we desire a numbing agent to not be burdened by sensation. Living is sensation. And sometimes these sensations are overwhelming, and sometimes our rational response to overwhelm is avoidance. Our work together hopes to transmute the overwhelming sensations into manageable sensations. We wonder, together, how to acknowledge what the body is telling the brain and how to adapt to the needs of the body.

In response to this work, clients are often frustrated that they can’t achieve this recalibration on their own. It seems so easy once we suss out what the body is telling us. But that inquiry is the crucial part, and some people are adept in this as solo work, though I am not one. Coregulating my overwhelm is always a gift. I am grateful for my bodyworkers, providers, and friends who help me move through the sensations of living.