Pain is My Teacher

Pain is one reason why I became a massage therapist.  My first massage was to get help in healing a shoulder injury. I was inspired by my wonderful therapist, she introduced me to the idea that I could pay attention to what my body was telling me and adjust what I was doing to prevent injury. I wanted to learn to do what she did as well as learn more about my body, why I was in pain, why I had aches and why I became injured so easily.

What is pain?

 It's communication!  It's one way our bodies communicate that something isn't right, that you should change what you're doing.  Sometimes the communication is instantaeous!  For instance, if you step on a thorn or have a stone in your shoe (not really pain, more like a nuisance, unless you ignore it, then it will be pain) and we hear the signal right away and take care of it.  Some signals are more subtle and we often are so busy rushing around that we just don't hear.  So, the signal gets louder.  If we still try to pretend nothing is wrong, then the signal gets even louder = pain!  and still many people don't do anything about it.  Sometimes we can't really do anything about it.  We keep pushing on.  In the case of walking a 20 mile walk for charity...  Your feet are likely to ache and hurt, but you keep going.   No one is coming to pick you up after all, not until you get to the finish line anyway. We don't do these types of things every day though, so it does make some sense to ignore that, keep going and finish so you can stop and take care of your feet.

Sometimes, and I think this is quite frequently what happens, we may hear the signal, but not really understand the message, or we don't think we can change it. So we ignore it, hope it goes away, live with this new normal. This often happens with repetitive movements that we do day after day after day, maybe because it's our job and we have to.

So then what?
tune in tomorrow!  or maybe later today since I'm off by a day and need 2 posts today to keep up!