Change pain by getting a refined sense of position and movement in your body.

Injury from physical or emotional damage can leave lingering effects of altered control in your muscle systems. There are likely areas that are over active and areas that are under active. Slight position changes can have a significant effect on your ability to increase your comfort but you can’t make little changes in a locked down system.

The common advice to just pull your shoulders back or pull your head back doesn’t work if the too tight muscles never lengthen.

There are endless streams of exercises that you might choose or be instructed to do to alter or improve pain, but this series is different. The focus here is not on certain exercises, or doing them right.

This series is about developing a detailed sense of the parts of your body and learning how to locate position sense and locate movement sense. These fundamental senses are often reduced by injury, habit, exposure to trauma, or never developed well in childhood in the first place.

Additionally, we tend to think of our muscles mechanically like big rubber bands or pulleys shortening lengthwise to move our bones. We have lost the idea that muscles can work in little bits, like a patch of well directed tension. We think of our bones as being one whole unit for movement when really, a bone will have regions of movement along its length.

You might be someone with low back pain. When you try to move your low back it feels stiff. When you get moving it loosens up but it doesn’t stay that way. Possibly some of the moving parts are doing all the work and the stuck parts remain stuck. In order to restore activity to the whole area, you need to develop a bit of a detective sense about what’s working, language for talking about this, and imagery that helps.

You have a built-in capacity for this but it often gets lost. There are many ways we can imagine our moving parts. This is a way to do it in imagery that is playful, useful, and linked to progressively greater embodiment and self healing.

I will be laying out some images, shapes, and language for the series. I will endeavor to give some basic ideas and then build more advanced ways to play with the ideas. But first, start getting the basics.

In this series I am providing you with images that you can mentally start to connect and pair with your internal sense of your body as a 3 dimensional, moveable grouping of parts. These images can be thought of as shapes.

For example, the image for the collar bones is a hot dog. When you break that down into 1/3 segments, you have 3 small horizontally oriented columns on each side. If you consider my image for the core as a stack of cakes, again you have a column. The image for the lower leg is a stack of donuts. This too is a shape that is like a column.

Thighs are a pretty muscular and softer area for many of us. Especially so if there’s padding from fat. No insults intended here, this is just the way many of us are. This is a more shapeless area and the image I paired here is bread dough on a vertical rolling pin. The rolling pin pairs with the sense of the thigh bone, your femur being something much denser within the softer dimensions of muscle and fat surrounding it.

The image for the foot is of a flat triangle with elastic properties. The narrow sense of the heel and the broader sense of the webbing at the base of the toes gives the felt sense of the shape. The idea of a big duck foot is an exaggeration. Sometimes imagining a shape as larger then it really is makes it easier to make the mental-body connection.

For any area that you are connecting yourself to better, for the purpose of changing pain, your starting place is to develop focus and curiosity in your internal awareness so that you can feel an area’s shape. There are millions of brain connections waiting in reserve for you to start to tap into. You may have disconnected or never developed these senses very well. But, your brain has this hidden network available to you. It’s there, but takes practice to build up your ease of tapping in.

So, you find the shape or shapes that relate to where you are focusing.

The next part of the process is to mentally begin to explore what way a shape is positioned relative to a center idea. In Physical Therapy descriptions of motion there are generally 3 dimensions of movement.

There is rotation around a vertical axis. At the connection of your head to the top of the neck this movement would be turning from side to side as if saying no. You might also call this twisting.

A movement forward and back is a second dimension of movement. If you were to reach for your toes, your core will shorten on its front side and lengthen on your back surface. With my image of your core as a stack of cakes, the frosting gets squished on the front and stretched apart on the back. In PT language forward bend is called flexion and backwards is extension.

As you explore movement in whatever shape you are noticing, you can feel for forward and backwards directions. Sometimes you will notice you never make it even to the center place between going forward and going backward. That’s okay, just allow your attention to invite motion towards what you perceive as missing from movement possibilities.

Of course if you are working with a severely arthritic joint like a big toe joint, you may not be able to regain some directions of motion. Being realistic is important too. In the low back if there’s significant narrowing of space for the big nerves, this too can make for a movement block. The limitation to motion is usually under the control of muscle and muscle will stop you from irritating and squishing nerves in tight boney passageways.

The third major motion is bending to a side. At the connection between your head and your neck this would be the movement of one ear going down and one going up.

All shapes of the body that you may be exploring here, can be invited to move in each of these 3 ways. Take note of where a part tends to position, and explore where that is in relationship to a sense of center.

If you are working on decreasing knee pain, here is something to notice. Are the top several segments of donuts at the top of your lower leg are twisted inward towards the other leg or outwards, away from the other leg. Evaluate the same sense at the lower part of the thigh. You may find your parts are not lining up in a fairly balanced way. Then you can begin to deepen your connection to the pattern of motion that corrects position towards centered.

You might wonder if you should be holding still or be in motion while you explore a shape and its position. Try both ways. I find that using attention and focus on a piece of yourself while walking can be helpful. The walking adds in lots of sensory signals that makes feeling a place come easier.

We’re going to get to know the top of your CORE which is a critical piece of you. This is important for comfort in the head and neck. It’s a critical piece for comfort in the shoulders and arms. And it’s a critical piece for addressing emotional holding patterns. Also, it’s a critical piece for changing posture and habit patterns.

Ok, here we go. For now, there are 5 parts to notice.

1.) The top of the wedding cake is the top of your CORE. The top of the wedding cake is, of course, on top of the stack of cakes that represents the whole of the torso.

2.) At the center, on the front of the top cake is the top of the breastbone. This bone is the transition between the top of the CORE and the place that your arms attach to the CORE. It’s also part of where your neck attaches. This bone’s anatomical name is the Manubrium. Don’t get too hung up on the technical name unless that appeals to you. I am representing the top of the breastbone with a piece of cantaloupe rind for this bone segment. In some images it’s the shape cut out of paper.

3.) The hot dogs represent your collar bones. The hot dogs can be divided into 3 parts on each side, because the movement awareness you are developing will be more clear if you focus your attention on a smaller piece. Also, how the #1 piece moves is often different from the movement patterns in hot dog parts #2 and #3!

4.) Above the surface of the top of the wedding cake is the stack of pancakes representing your neck. The eyes on the front of the pancakes shows that the segments of your neck can look to different directions. More about that later.

5.) We’ve been focusing on the front of the top of the CORE. Let’s remember that at the back of the torso, embedded in the cake are marshmallows representing spine segments.

The top of your core is represented by the top cake of a wedding cake. The top of the breastbone is represented in a piece of cantaloupe rind. The anatomical name for this bone is the manubrium. To each side of the cantaloupe are the collar bones represented in hot dogs.

Let’s say your goal is something perhaps expressed as decreased crankiness and increased calming abilities.

We are going to use an awareness approach directed at movement control. We are opening up the interface between conscious and unconscious activity in our very basic brain and body structures.

Of course, there are many different kinds of mindfulness approaches. And there are many different kinds of physical exercise activities that support better mental states. Heavy lifting, running, yoga, seated meditation focusing on breath are some examples.

This is about developing a certain kind of connection and experience of the building blocks of the body segments. The point here is to gain clear, unified discernment of your parts and their positioning patterns. This enables advancement of emotional and or physical comfort desires. We will explore body segments to feel if they can move toward or away from a sense of center. The more time you tap in and notice, the more refinement and usefulness emerges from the process.

Our familiar language helps us identify our body areas. You likely can feel the front of your body as a different space than the backside. You can tell what is up or towards your head and what is downward towards your feet. Somewhere in the middle is something like a personal equator that gives you a felt sense of having a space of yourself above and a space of yourself below. You know the arms, legs, hands, feet, neck, jaw, and head.

It gets less clear when we wonder what our CORE is? Where does the neck end and the shoulder begin? What are the edges of a place we call the chest? What’s hips and what’s low back? When it comes to talking about the body, it’s parts and their patterns I think of a favorite piece of writing that resonates for me in my love of metaphoric imagery. Barry Lopez wrote in Arctic Dreams of his “…general unfamiliarity” as he walks across an arctic island. “If I knew the indigenous human language, it would help greatly. A local language discriminates among the local phenomena, and it serves to pry the landscape loose from its anonymity.”

So let’s start out. It’s a good plan to begin with a body area that you feel relatively alright with and relatively connected to. Let’s say that place is your chest. The chest is on the front of the torso. In order to locate the chest more clearly, we will begin to find the shape of the torso. This is a starting place for beginning to feel the many parts of your CORE.

The beginning image I use for the torso is a stack of cakes resting on top of the bowl made up the bones of the pelvis. The image implies a somewhat circular column with a front, back, sides, and horizontally stacked layered sections.

In order for your mind to become engaged and to stay engaged in the feeling process, several ideas need mention.

First off is keeping any processing in a safe enough state of coping. Pretty much everyone has nooks and crannies (or even quite a bit of their body) that contain distress. The idea of staying in a manageable level of relative experience of body state coping is required. I am assuming that you are using these ideas with sufficient self-mastery to keep yourself from overloading. If something bumps you into distress that feels like TOO MUCH, don’t keep doing that. Return yourself to the world outside your body and allow yourself to stabilize. Disclaimer: These practices do not take the place of professional therapy, nor are they suitable for everyone.

Secondly, your brain will wander off target unless you have enough novelty to help stay in exploration of shape and position. Curiosity, patience, small movements, and tolerance for developing as a learner are helpful. Consider that why is a 4-letter-word and re-direct your focus back to feeling and not thinking if you go into this rabbit-hole.

Feeling nuance and movement limitations is part of this. Say you notice that some of your cakes feel tipped forward, or somehow compressed on the front side. You might think to readjust your cake positioning.

Because the habits of posture bear strong influences on CORE shape, you can’t shift a position briefly and get a longstanding change. But, what you can do is gently change shape a little bit so that you feel the very earliest beginnings of inelasticity, and then try and keep that gentle “tug” present as a new pattern. It gets a lot easier to sustain changes, the more parts of your CORE, you learn to feel.

I suggest beginning to familiarize yourself with noticing your felt sense of what is rib cage, belly, and bones at the base. If you are sitting on something firm, you can likely feel the bones that form the bottom of the glass bowl. They are more forward than the tailbone. As you explore the feeling of the bottom of the ribs, you may notice the hardness of the top of the bones of the pelvis.

Take some time with the cakes and then you can add in the backside, and the top of the CORE. First off though, get a central area to reference from.

One more thing I should mention. Belly fat and breasts are not under muscle control. Yeah, they are part of us, but we are working on the awarenesses that arise from our movement systems. So, don’t get too hung up on the roundnesses of shape that are on the outside of the shapes within. The great part of this is we feel our lean and muscular self.

Once you can easily check in and find a feeling that represents the sense of a stack of moveable cakes, the hardness of the pelvis bones represented as the glass bowl, the chest as a part of this, then it would be good to get familiar with the other parts of your CORE.

In Trauma Therapy processing, recovery eventually includes trauma releasing actions in muscle. Yet, despite lengthy trauma therapy, there is often still discomfort or pain associated with dysfunctional muscle tension.

This is often coupled with physical damage, and or emotional damage. So, one could assume that the muscle pain and tension is related to some aspect of damage.

In Physical Therapy, there is often attention on pain recovery via creating change in muscle behavior, strength, patterned movement sequencing training, and restoration of muscle and joint length. Yet, there are frequent challenges to restoration of a felt sense of muscle control and position sense. Known as akinesthesia, clients often struggle to grasp what their PT’s are trying to impart.

Relevant for both from the trauma world and the physical rehabilitation world, is an underdeveloped feedback loop in the postural system. Training in proprioception and kinesthesia can be a key to further recovery. A self correcting, hardwired re-balancing of muscle actions creates a more comfortable body, a more emotionally secure physical embodiment, and a bodily based way to modulate Central Nervous System alerting-calming cycles.

I came across this article and I thought it was really cool. Just when you might have thought breathing was a settled habit, this is about how the cells join their signals to create each breath in a unique way.

If you take my ideas about how to loosen up the chest, the lower neck, the collar bones, you enable your breathing co-ordination to expand into way more moving and movable parts.

Practice feeling the top of the core where the bride and groom stand. Feel the front-side top and center where the breast bone is. Feel the collar bone on each side. Feel what each part is like individually while you breathe!

Here’s the science article link: https://neurosciencenews.com/breathing-rhythm-brain-15847/

Use this as a warm up exercise if you want to start at an easy level.

Many years ago I was working with a client with a severe pain problem in his leg. The problem included a remarkably complete dissociation-disconnection-loss of his leg below his knee and above the ankle. So, even though he had his calf section of his leg alive and attached to him, he couldn’t actually feel himself as existing in that space/place.

This part of him not only was gone from his internal map of his body but was horribly painful constantly and could not tolerate any kind of touch. So, we were treating a part of the leg that was tolerant to contact that was nearby in a safer place.

As we explored his felt sense of his leg with me gently touching his outer thigh, it occurred to me to ask ” Without looking, can you tell if I am touching on the front or the side of your thigh?”

He answered “I can tell you are touching my thigh but I cannot tell if it’s the front or the side.” I was stunned. It had never occurred to me that a person could lose such a fundamental sense of processing. That got me thinking about how some people need to start from a place thats kind of like preschool.

For that reason, you may find it worthwhile to embark on refining a sense of your body position awareness from a basic place first just to be sure you connect yourself to the parts that are easily and securely in place.

Another point worth mentioning is that there may be parts of your body that are quite painful. You might find that as you touch base mentally with a painful place that even noticing the front…back…top of the area…bottom of the area…middle of the area that this is difficult.

Somehow you might also notice that is disturbing to you overall. You may have a body part or region that you avoid noticing because it somehow upsets your overall relative calm. If you have something going on like this, don’t focus on what is deregulating. Instead, practice feeling the parts and surfaces of yourself that are acceptable to visit.

We will get to this more in other posts but I wanted to point out that this deregulating quality is a kind of awareness to be on the look-out for. I generally call this Central Nervous System excitation. As a companion part of regaining a detailed ability to feel your body and it’s parts, keep some attention to whether your overall sense of relative calm gets changed.

You can use this starting place as an exercise in and of itself. You might find this all too easy and therefore boring. That’s great. Move on to something more refined. A crucial part of these exercise progressions is staying in a curious and exploratory state of mind. If the exploring is too easy you will quickly lose interest. If too hard, you’ll likely quit. As you investigate your sense of your parts and their position in increasing detail, you will find the right levels to train at. Stay tuned. This will get clearer as you will see as you move into intermediate level training ideas.

But, if you find that you are someone who has difficulty noticing your body as a whole shape, or some parts are difficult or disturbing, this is a good starting place.

You can do this as a 3- Dimensional grounding/centering exercise.

Notice you have a front side.

Notice you have a back side.

Notice you have a top which is your head.

Notice you have a lower part which might be your feet (or once was your feet.)

Notice in the top to bottom dimension that somewhere there is a middle. Most people experience their middle as somewhere in their torso.

Notice you have a side on the right and a side on the left.

You can be in any position and do this basic orienting exercise. You could be standing, sitting, or lying down.

Then visit your limbs.

You might say to yourself :

“I have a right leg.”

“I have a left leg.”

“I have a right arm.”

“I have a left arm.”

If you are missing all or part of a limb you can choose whether to visit what you have left or your memory of what you once had. If a limb is too painful to notice you can become curious about how near that place you can visit without overly disturbing your starting sense of relative calm.

This is a model of the neck using pancakes to represent different segments and their movement possibilities. The eyes in front are a reminder that there is a sense of where each segment is “looking”.

The red licorice on the sides of the neck represents the large muscles there and then I take those off to simplify the model.

The hot dog I hold up represents the collar bone on the left side of this model. Then I take that away and we just focus on the neck.

I show that you could have some segments looking right and some left at the same time and your brain will average the position out and you might not notice that you’ve got twists where you shouldn’t.