Body Maps and Interoception Click below for an interview I did with the wonderful Brooke Thomas. Brooke runs the Liberated Body website: ‘Liberated Body is 100% in service of helping people to reduce or eliminate pain, normalize range of motion, and embrace their body’s full potential by returning it to the happy, fully functional, badass
There is lots of great new science around pain. The central message is that persistent pain is a more about a learned reflex in your nervous system and is not about the tissues – even if there are X-rays showing arthritis or MRI’s showing tears. Chronic pain nearly always involves unconscious habit, meaning and emotion,
Soft Wired from Dr. Michael Merzenich is an excellent guide to plasticity in the brain – it describes how the brain benefits from new challenges. This model, I believe, is one of the keys to breaking cycles of pain. How can you creatively stimulate your control and communicating systems (mostly your nervous and immune systems) to work
I tend to describe the failure to inhabit the body as dissociation. There are a whole continuum of responses, from complete withdrawal/ catatonia (this is what the psychiatrists focus on) to the inability to feel your toes. Frequently in cranial work I notice people are working from incomplete body maps, for example often a limb
