Your Body Is Trying to Tell You Something. Are You Listening?
Pain Going In vs Pain Going Out — Why Discomfort Might Be the Best News You’ll Get
Your most significant relationship isn’t with a partner, a career, or a belief system. It’s with your own body — and most of us only tune in when it starts hurting.
Pain arrives. We treat the symptom. It quietens. We assume the problem is solved. It isn’t. What subsides is rarely what caused it. The root remains — and it will surface again the next time stress, strain, or circumstance gives it the excuse.
This is the cycle most people live inside without ever questioning it.
Pain is not the enemy — it’s the message
Current research supports what experienced practitioners have long known. A 2024 peer-reviewed study published in PAIN — Pain reflects the informational value of nociceptive inputs — establishes that pain perception is fundamental to human learning and adaptive behaviour. In other words, pain exists to tell you something. The problem isn’t the signal. It’s that we’ve been trained to silence it rather than read it. PAIN
Pain moves in two directions
Here’s what most people don’t realise: pain can go into the body — the result of injury or strain. But it can also come out of the body — old, stored tension rising to the surface as it begins to release. These two things feel similar, which is why so many people quit a practice just as it starts working. They interpret the discomfort as damage. In fact, it often means something is finally shifting.
This is where intelligent, consistent practice changes everything. Practices like Qi Gong and Tai Chi Chuan are uniquely capable of bringing deep, unconscious holding patterns into conscious awareness — not to punish you with them, but to dissolve them. Slowly, consistently, and with proper guidance, the body begins to let go of what it has been gripping — sometimes for decades.
What you can do right now
If you recognise the cycle — recurring pain, injuries that never fully resolve, a body that feels more like an obstacle than an ally — this is your invitation to approach it differently.
- Check your alignments. Small corrections in how you stand, breathe, and move can begin to shift patterns you’ve carried for years.
- Find an experienced guide. The difference between practice that releases tension and practice that compounds it is guidance.
- Commit to the process. Not to perfection or overnight fixes — but to showing up, paying attention, and giving your body the intelligent, consistent care it has always deserved.
The body is not your enemy. It is the most faithful record of everything you have lived through. Learning to work with it — rather than around it — may be one of the most worthwhile things you ever do.
See Events for an introductory session to the work.
https://journals.lww.com/pain/abstract/2024/10000/pain_reflects_the_informational_value_of.12.aspx
