One of the biggest problems today is that people don't maintain
their body at a level that will keep up with their chosen lifestyle and as
a result their body begins to break down with injury and illness. Everything
that causes stress to the body will bring it that much closer to developing
a physical problem related to pain.
Working on the muscles, using your hands, is a great way of connecting what you feel in the tissue with what a person is feeling in the way of pain. After many years of doing this you are able to pick up on the many subtleties that exist in a body that's in pain, compared to one that isn't.
Similarly other lifestyle factors can also be felt in the body's soft tissue. Things such as if a person worries too much or doesn't get enough sleep, if they eat well or not, how much exercise they do, even how strong and healthy they are generally. These things all show up in the muscles in the way they feel.
Most of the things that make someone's body feel different from that of a relaxed, strong and healthy body can be put under the heading of 'stress'.
Stress is the body's worst enemy and on its own can be the trigger for many of the pains and illnesses from which people suffer. If you have chronic back pain for example, high stress levels will make the intensity and incidence of your pain much greater than it would otherwise be. This means that one way you can work on your chronic back pain is by addressing the things in your life that are causing your body stress.
A person's emotional state or how you perceive things has an important bearing on how much tension or stress is contained in your physical body. For example, two people could have exactly the same situation to deal with but it is only a source of stress for one of them because the other doesn't see it as a problem. It all depends on the way you look at it.
You must remember the way you perceive things and what causes you stress, is more about the way you have been conditioned throughout your life, it doesn't mean you are looking at things the right or wrong way. It is like the person in pain who gives up thinking they aren't fixable and the other person in exactly the same condition that never gives up, always believing somewhere out there is a solution.
Some healing methods such as spiritual healing and meditation, counselling or hypnotherapy or NLP, much like psychiatry and psychotherapy, work on the mind as a way of releasing the stress that is causing pain or symptoms in the physical body, in some cases with great success. Other methods like naturopathy will release stress through nutrition and supplements, balancing the body chemically and others again such as what I specialize in, SLM Bodywork, will release it through working directly on the physical body.
The mind is incredibly powerful and can be working for or against you, it is your choice. It cannot be disregarded when you are searching for the cause of your pain and although it won't always provide the answer, sometimes it will.
When you use the word 'stress' most people immediately think it is when you worry about things too much or have too much on your mind to organise or think about...... continues
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