A BodyLogic approach to the Physical Body

Your story about your pain is unique. Your pain may be one that will go away. It may be one that you learn to manage by modifying or deleting certain activities from your life. It may be one that will become your dance partner in life; here to teach you lessons in all kinds of unexpected ways.

Through self-correcting therapies (manual muscle therapy, massage, movement, strength training), you can begin to release your physical aches and pains. This is done by working with the existing patterns of your body. For example, if your neck hurts, we look at where it hurts (front, back, side, general, specific, etc) as well as how it hurts (sharp pain, aching pain, non-specific annoyances, crackling, etc) and when it hurts or when it feels good (hurts turning to the left, feels better when the shoulder is up, feels comfortable bent forward, pain begins when looking up, etc).

This explains the beginning of what muscles are holding you in pain, and the “pattern” of that pain. Then, we use your body to place that muscle, or group of muscles, in the most comfortable position. This is usually the way the muscle is already contracting. By doing what the body is already doing, but with less effort, we begin to send signals to the brain and nervous system that the muscle can relax and your body can realign.

Sometimes this is done passively, meaning the therapist does most of the work and you focus on relaxing. The moves can be gross, or large, movements of the entire leg, arm or back; or the moves can be very subtle, a vertebra, a section of muscle, a knee cap.

At other times, the therapist may have you participate in the movements. This helps your body integrate the changes and teaches your physical body how to move in a different way. Again, the movements may be large as in walking, sit ups, or rolling; or they may be subtle, moving the rib cage, rotating your wrist, or flattening your back.

Needless to say, when your physical body is in a comfortable position, you emotional, cognitive and spiritual bodies will also feel safe and begin to express themselves as well.

 

The Physical Body

Physical Body

The Physical body is the one we can sense the easiest. It’s where we need to live most of our life. It’s tangible, it has the ability to move, it has mass and its existence is usually not up for debate.

Our physical bodies are amazing machines that work (mostly) without us having to think. This works for and against us. Consider breathing, pumping blood, blinking; if we had to put effort into all of these movements at every moment, we would hit “brain overload” and never be able to accomplish anything. Nature took care of us by creating an involuntary nervous system, or a sort of system that works whether or not we are aware of it.

We also have a voluntary nervous system, which, as you can guess, is the one we think about. Try it. Put your hand in front of you. Think about moving your finger. Then move your finger. SHAZAM! Simple for some, very difficult for others, depending on the way your body functions.

Now things get tricky. What about as I sit here and type? Am I really thinking about each and every move I need to make with my fingers? Well, fortunately, not any more, but when I was learning to type it was a slow, slow process. I was able to learn to use my fingers and my body to know where the keys are and how each finger needed to move to get to the proper key. Now I can do it without “thinking” (although I’m still thankful for spell check!) This is what we call training, or in rehabilitation its called neuromuscular re-training.

Training is when a movement becomes familiar so that we no longer need to think about it; it becomes habit. It’s not involuntary, as we still have to initiate the movement, but if your not really paying attention to it, it becomes unconscious.

We fall into a trance of habit or unconsciousness  all the time in our lives. Walking. Swimming. Driving. Playing an instrument. Sewing. Whatever it is that you do. Then our bodies will continue to “do what they do,” until one day, when they don’t. And we call this “pain.”

Our physical bodies work overtime, or compensate, to try to stay in balance. This is why we can “get away” with inefficient movements for a very long time. You may have a sudden, or acute, injury or pain. Sometimes you know the cause of it (car accident, fall, surgery, etc), but more often than not, you have no idea what happened. Your body just hurts. Usually, your body finally got tired of compensating and your brain sent the signal to STOP. It may have been the only way to get you to literally stop, listen to your pain, and learn to move in a different way. If neglected, this is the kind of pain that can turn into chronic pain.

(Yay! Time to call BodyLogic! Hey, have to get our plug in somewhere.)

We can help you to relearn your “unconscious” and habitual movements by slowing them down, making them very voluntary and conscious and re-teaching your body the basics it has forgotten. This will allow you to manage your pain cycles or perhaps even eliminate your pain.

Oh, and it works in all four bodies!