Chronic Pain and How You Pay Attention: Stifle

As scientists discover more about how chronic pain alters our organismic coordination at the cellular level, let's not forget the slightly more obvious stuff: how you organize your moves and underneath that, how you pay attention to yourself. And wow, is that 'pay attention to yourself' part complicated in chronic pain. Culturally, we have an obvious story about suppressing pain. In my experience, for instance, athletes are the most oblivious to their bodies. Weird, right? They might have trained themselves to do that shot with the perfect, precise angle of their wrist, but in that practice they usually also have—I observed—shushed the signal of 'ouch that hurts' at least partially. And oh, I have heard plenty of such stories from people on my Feldenkrais table! Can you feel which of your sit bones you are leaning on most right now? In my experience, the more expert the athlete, the more likely they are to look at me like I am out of my mind when I ask this question—as though sensing their weight were an absurd proposition. (And yet, at some level, some part of them has to be tracking this!) They don't just not know, they react with consternation and amusement. And the truth is, for a while, if they become conscious of their weight—not even their pain—, it can mess them up. Until it doesn't any more and suddenly they realize they have upped their game. But that is another story... My point: stifling isn't the absence of fixing. It's the opposite of bearing witness to yourself.

[the cycle of learning where you go from competent and ignorant to incompetent to more competent and less ignorant; aging]