Chronic Pain Is a Heavy Box

In Feldenkrais terms, we say that when you are lifting a heavy box, that's not the time to reorganize your spine. And chronic pain is a heavy box. It is challenging to reorganize while in pain. But. Some of the pain is that ambiguous churning-interoception out of whackness, and Feldenkrais does have some tricks for jumping off that not-so-merry-go-round. So what do we do? At one end, the nirvana of Feldenkrais work—our tender touch or the sly tricks in a novel movement lesson can relax the whole system. There is a body-wide, abrupt and noticeable shift. Porges (the vagal nerve guy) calls this a 'neuroception of safety.' (He obviously hasn't read my diatribe 'it's not just the neurons.') And Naviaux (the cellular-level sickness behavior person) refers to a healing cycle as returning to "an updated state of readiness"—an all-clear signal. The shift happens. It feels amazing to the practitioner and the student. It might create conditions for a reset. But it doesn't happen all over like that every day. However, we can more typically calm the system down considerably, and there are myriad similar if more humble shifts Feldenkrais practitioners can observe as their students (slightly) let down the heavy box of chronic pain. In that trusted space, we might be able to invite a new set of attractors, specifically in the realm of the ambiguous, elusive, difficult aspects of chronic pain.

[i need to make a bridge to the way we help people get rid of the last vestiges of a limp... parallel to this]