Yoga for Pain Relief – Learning to Listen to Your Body
Can you hear me?
Learning to listen to your body can be like dropping into a new country where you don’t know your way around and everything is in a foreign language. Where is Google Maps when you need it?
I am here to help you learn to listen to your body with super simple techniques. Why would we even need to know what our body is saying? Well, first and foremost, to avoid pain. There are subtle signs that our body gives us long before you feel the dreaded pain. I call them “whispers”.
If you have a sudden injury like knocking your knee on a cabinet, well, that’s different. We call that an “acute” injury. I’m talking about the “slow burn” to frozen shoulder or lower back pain where you can’t figure out why it hurts. We can learn to notice it long before we can’t take it anymore and need to go to the Physio, get a massage, or run to the Chiropractor. To be honest, if you visit them BEFORE the pain that can help a great deal. This can be a great way to fend off pain.
What you need to understand is that our body, when in Fight/Flight will pump out a ton of adrenaline to manage the stress load that you are putting yourself under. Adrenaline is a pain killer. So, we typically don’t feel the problems leading up to pain until we come out of Fight/Flight and our nervous system calms down. Then, OH BOY, do we feel it. By then it’s actually a bit too late to help ourselves and so we are in pain.
But if we can learn to slow down, to learn to feel in our Rest & Restore phases, there is hope to notice the “niggles” or “twinges” and even stiffness long before they become pain.
These are the “whispers” we can learn to hear. We just need to use a few tools of relaxation like meditation, gentle movement and relaxed breathing. We can find the time to hear and feel what our body is telling us.
I teach an easy breathing practice that begins in the belly and gently rises to the heart. It only takes 5 easy breaths to start the process to relax and feel.
Meditation works well with some people because they get clear messages from their mind when they relax through simple practices. Shamata practice is one that is easy and helps calm our minds. It asks us to gently focus on easy things like our own breath, our 5 physical senses, or our surroundings.
Gentle and mindful movement can allow us to feel any resistance or understand our range of movement clearly. Hatha Yoga poses and practices are wonderful for learning about the whispers so we don’t have to hear the screams of pain.
Once we learn this, we can then learn how and when to intervene if we need to. There are no surprises and fewer disappointments when pain gets in the way of our life.
Improve your life by listening to your body.
