Male Announcer: You’re listening to From Pain to Possibility with Susi Hately. You will hear Susi’s best ideas on how to reduce or even eradicate your pain and learn how to listen to your body when it whispers so you don’t have to hear it scream. And now here’s your host, Susi Hately.

Welcome and welcome back. With this episode I am offering up a concept inside of the biomechanics of healing. Where we look at the biomechanics of pain reduction, I provide you a small little snack, a small little dose that will give you something to be curious about and explore and see how it lands in your body and your mind.

When it comes to reducing pain I think it’s really important for us to remember that where the pain is is not the problem. That where the pain is is merely an expression of the problem. It’s an expression that there’s a limitation or there’s a dysfunction present. And when we can recognize that, that there’s a limitation or a dysfunction present, then we can actually stop chasing a symptom.

Along with that, when we start to recognize that symptoms don’t have to be chased, we can begin to recognize that symptoms really are a mode of communication. Communication between our body and ourselves to let us know that something is up.

So if symptoms are a mode of communication and where the pain is isn’t really the problem, then how the heck do we determine what the heck is going on so we can figure out what to do next to actually solve the problem that is? In my mind a big piece of this puzzle is to recognize that where the issue often resides is under our level of awareness. It’s why it hasn’t been solved for yet, because if you were aware of it you would already have it solved.

So oftentimes the issue is under our level of awareness. And the aim then is to become aware of that which you’re unaware of so that you become clearer on the actual problem, which leads you to be more accurate with how you choose an intervention to support you in the process of moving forward.

Okay, so then how do you become aware of something that you’re not aware of? Well there’s a few ideas I’m going to provide you, and the first one, which is obvious is find a teacher, find somebody who has got a trained eye. Now it can be a teacher, it could be somebody else but have someone watch you move and help you understand what’s going on in your movement.

Now, that might not always be available to you so then the next two are ideas you can do for yourself. The first one is you can watch yourself in a mirror do the movement. You can also film yourself with your camera and then watch back the video or you can just place your camera on and watch yourself in the camera itself if you don’t have a mirror.

When you’re looking at yourself then in the back of your mind think about the cueing and the instruction that I played in my YouTube of Facebook videos because you’ll have an understanding of where I’m asking you to focus. I like to focus most of my instruction on specific biomechanical movements like moving the leg bone in the pelvis, keeping the pelvis quiet, letting the rib cage be quiet, moving the arm bones in the shoulder socket.

I like to use as objective instruction as possible so I can guide your awareness and your attention to the area that I would like you to move. When you can focus your attention to that area, then you can also pay attention to the parts of your body that are moving that ought not to.

So those are the parts that get involved, perhaps they’re compensating. They’re the ones that might be contributing to some inefficiencies in your movement patterns. They’re the ones that are contributing to a lack of integrity between your body parts, a lack of connection.

When you can tune into how your body is moving, quieting those compensation patterns, quieting the areas of tension that don’t need to be in tension while connecting to and nurturing the parts of your body that are working well you will feel a whole lot different in your body.

Now, sometimes when people are new to what I’m talking about here they have the question of, “Well, how does moving better change the way that I feel? That makes no sense at all.” Well, thinking about your infrastructure, thinking about efficiency of movement patterns, think about how we have muscles that are designed to move body parts in a certain way.

Think about your psoas or you quadratis lumborum as examples. These muscle groups, like every muscle group, have specific jobs to do in terms of moving body parts and helping us get on with your lives. They are also two muscle groups that tend to have a lot of stuff going on in them. And that stuff is often a result of compensatory strategies.

I often find with both of these muscle groups that we can see issues up in the rib cage, in the shoulder blades, the way the arm bones move in the shoulder socket, the way the leg bones move in the pelvis. And what I mean by that is we think we’re moving well, bringing our arm over our head or moving our leg into a rotation or doing some hip opening exercise, and if you look closely what you’ll see is that is not the case.

That when that arm comes up overhead the ribs often move, or the jaw gets tight, or the head pokes forward. Maybe even the tailbone tucks and the pelvis tucks. Or when you go into a hip opener with your hips, your hips aren’t doing the movement at all. That leg bone is not really moving that well in the hip socket.

Instead what’s happening is your pelvis is doing a little bit of a dance, a little bit of a jig. It gives the impression to your brain that you are opening your hips, but you are doing anything but.

So these compensation patterns, as they build upon one after another after another we’ve got body parts doing things that they’re just not meant to be doing. When they get pooped out then our body finds other ways of compensating in order to get the job done. It’s a tremendous system that exists inside of our body and mind because if we didn’t compensate then it would be a little bit difficult to get on with life sometimes.

But when they start to build upon each other, when they begin to stack, that’s when we start to feel really, really cruddy. And we want to be able to improve those neuromuscular patterns, i.e. reduce the compensatory patterns, have the body parts move the way they’re designed to move so that you can reduce pain.

You’ll begin to recognize the relationships of those parts getting perhaps tighter or more limited when they want to kick in and jump in and compensate. And then you’ll be able to notice them doing that and then, again, quiet them down. You get to just keep your eye on them, help them out and help them retrain. And by doing that, then the psoas and or that QL get a chance to settle out and unwind.

If this resonates with you and you are looking for my help to support you in moving forward, I would love to work with you in a one on one private scenario where I work with you, just you, in an online format over a three month period of time.

You can hear all about the private sessions from Kiya at [email protected]. Just send her a note and she’ll be happy to share all of what happens in the private sessions to support you in moving in the direction you want to go. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

If this episode has resonated and you're looking to deepen this idea of getting your body back on board, of listening deeply to your symptoms, of listening to the whispers so you don't have to hear the screams and you're looking for one to one support or professional training, then reach out to us at [email protected] where we can customize your learning path. That's [email protected], looking forward to hearing from you.