Language Of Healing
Language Can Be A Portal To Embodiment.
I was recently talking with a student who struggles with hip pain. Like no joke, they can't walk when the pain hits type of pain.
So we're chatting it up after an Awareness Through Movement class, and they shared their insight into how shifting their attention from their hip to their head helped them to understand their pain better.
"Do tell," I asked, "what did you discover about your hip pain?"
Before I go on, I want to pause here and celebrate the felt connection this person made about their hip-to-head. Sensing into these types of relationships is no small thing. Especially when pain is roaring and demanding attention, it can be super tempting to focus only on the region of the pain and lose sight of all the other parts of ourselves. And if we're being real, we are each a whole person, and rarely does a painful part exist in isolation.
So let's all give a hip-hip-hooray to this new embodied discovery.
What followed was a typical description from someone in an early phase of expanded awareness and embodied recovery, which is a great place to be. It's the beginning of being truly empowered to move beyond pain.
What did they say?
In short, they proceeded to describe all the positions that triggered pain. They said things like, "When my head was forward, I felt more pain in my hip. When my chin was here, I felt more pain in my hip," and so on.
So I asked, "Was the pain the same in each experience."
"Oh," they exclaimed, "I have no idea. I'll have to explore that more."
"Great," I said, "so now you're inviting a bit of refinement into the experience. But the more important question is, what were you doing when it felt the most comfortable?"
You could hear a needle drop in the deafening silence at that moment.
This scenario is something I see over and over again. I've seen it so often that I've deemed it the Early Embodied Recovery Phase for moving beyond pain. It's that moment when a person no longer fears feeling their pain and has started to expand their awareness.
If this is where you are in your embodied healing journey —congratulations. Now, let me help you move closer to the transformation you desire.
This post contains some ideas, practices, and musings on how to take your embodied recovery to the next level.
Intentional Attention
As I mentioned, I see this pain-focused awareness a lot. People can often describe their pain or discomfort in great detail. However, they're usually speechless when asked what they observe in those pain-free moments. Somehow, those pain-free moments somehow seem spontaneous, elusive, and mysterious. When we become hyperfocused on the pain, there appears to be an unwritten agreement to check out on pleasure.
On the one hand, it makes total sense.
Pain is compelling.
Pain is a powerful signal to stop doing what you're doing — or at least how you're doing it.
Pain is a normal and natural motivator.
On the other hand, to grow our skills in moving without pain, we must pay attention to those moments when movement feels good. We need to become astute students of the pleasures that life offers! We need to grow the pain-free moments by feeding them with attention, curiosity, and a refined vocabulary to help anchor our discoveries (enter the power of words).
We need to grow the pain-free moments by feeding them with attention, curiosity, and a refined vocabulary to help anchor our discoveries (enter the power of words).
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not telling you to ignore your pain. On the contrary, I encourage you to gather the information you need about your pain to effectively communicate to your health, healing, and helping providers — especially your medical providers. But for your healing journey (and for your Feldenkrais Practitioner), please, for the love of your biology, gather as much or more data on what feels good!
Language As A Portal
I just completed Brené Brown's book, Atlas of the Heart. In her introduction, she quotes the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who wrote, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." So, too might the limits of your language limit your experience of or expression of movement.
Brené goes on to say:
"Language is our portal to meaning-making, connection, healing, learning, and self-awareness. Having access to the right words can open up entire universes. When we don't have the language to talk about what we're experiencing, our ability to make sense of what's happening and share it with others is severely limited. Without accurate language, we struggle to get the help we need, we don't always regulate or manage our emotions and experiences in a way that allows us to move through them productively, and our self-awareness is diminished."
“Language is our portal to meaning-making, connection, healing, learning, and self-awareness.”
The key phrase here is "accurate language." Unfortunately, many of us are missing or misusing "emotion words" to describe our experiences — often bypassing language around our physical experience.
But language does more than communicate what we are feeling. Language can shape what we feel.
Brené speaks to this beautifully in her book. She writes:
"Our understanding of our own and others' emotions is shaped by how we perceive, categorize, and describe emotional experiences—and these interpretations rely heavily on language.
Language speeds and strengthens connections in the brain when we are processing sensory information. But newer research shows that when our access to emotional language is blocked, our ability to interpret incoming emotional information is significantly diminished. Likewise, having the correct words to describe specific emotions makes us better able to identify those emotions in others, as well as to recognize and manage the emotional experiences when we feel them ourselves."
The language you use has an impact on your nervous system. How freaking fantastic is that?!?
"Language speeds and strengthens connections in the brain when we are processing sensory information."
Sensations & Emotions
Since we're on the topic of emotions, I want to touch on something called emotional granularity. Why? Because the capacity for emotional granularity is often something that I see improve as people become more refined in their ability to sense themselves.
What is emotional granularity?
The lived expression of emotional granularity is your ability to recognize and label emotions accurately. But how it occurs is far more dynamic.
According to Lisa Feldman Barrett, your brain, outside of your conscious awareness, "constructs" your emotional states based on your vocabulary of emotional concepts. And that emotional vocabulary includes your language, past experiences, and biological cues.
Stay with me here.
In her book, How Emotions Are Made, Lisa writes:
"Suppose you knew only two emotion concepts, 'Feeling Awesome' and 'Feeling Crappy.' Whenever you experienced emotion or perceived someone else as emotional, you could categorize only with this broad brush. Such a person cannot be very emotionally intelligent. In contrast, if you could distinguish finer meanings within "Awesome" (happy, content, thrilled, relaxed, joyful, hopeful, inspired, prideful, adoring, grateful, blissful...), and fifty shades of "Crappy" (angry, aggravated, alarmed, spiteful, grumpy, remorseful, gloom, mortified, uneasy, dread-ridden, resentful, afraid, envious, woeful, melancholy...), your brain would have many more options for predicting, categorizing, and perceiving emotion, providing you with the tools for more flexible and functional responses. You could predict and categorize your sensation more efficiently and better tailor your actions to your environment."
Ok. I know Lisa's quote was a mouthful. But I wanted to share it because I see similarities when people describe their persistent pain and comfort.
So often, they talk about having pain ("crappy") with a rating of how crappy and no pain ("awesome"). Rarely can people distinguish finer meanings in what they sense and how they embody themselves. If we consider the experience of pain an emotion, then being able to categorize your sensations better allows you to tailor your actions to your environment better.
Language, Sensations & Emotions
Hopefully, you're starting to see the overlap between language, sensations, and emotions.
If you've dabbled in the Feldenkrais world long enough, you know that we look at movement more holistically. We see movement as a dynamic expression of a larger experience that includes moving, thinking, sensing, feeling (emotions), and the environment.
When people improve their sensory granularity, they often also refine their emotional granularity. The two are not separate.
And when it comes to pain, persistent types of pain are almost always aggravated by elevated unpleasant emotions (hello, stress)
Three Things You Can Do Today
Start attending to what feels good. Use those moments of pain to remind yourself to watch for what feels good, comfortable, and pain-free. When those moments or experiences arise, pay attention and gather as much information as possible.
Check out Brené Brown's book, Atlas of the Heart (click here). I highly recommend the audiobook as Brené presents it herself and is an incredible presenter. I bought both the Kindle and audio versions so that I could highlight my favorite passages.
Grow your literal vocabulary for feeling and sensing words. I'll even give you a head start by sharing my download of Comprehensive List Of Sensing Words below. 👇
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