I want to talk to you about something I've watched happen for thirty years, in clinic rooms, on training tables, in living rooms over Zoom, and in my own body long before any of that.
The biggest mistake people make when they're in pain is that they focus on treating the place that hurts. I completely understand why, especially if the pain is due to a recent acute injury. However, if pain has built up over time, like when your shoulder is on fire, or your lower back has locked again, or your feet are screaming at you by lunchtime, of course that's where your attention goes, but this is generally a symptom of an imbalance in the body, due to a problem elsewhere. But of course it is the immediate place of pain feels wrong. That's the bit you want someone to fix.
So, you book the massage, you stretch the shoulder, you ice the knee, you go back to the physio, you try the new insoles, you scroll for the one exercise that's finally going to crack it. And for a little while, something eases. And then, quietly, it comes back. Sometimes in the same spot. Sometimes wearing a slightly different outfit. And after enough rounds of this, people start to believe their body is the problem.
It isn't. It really, truly isn't. It’s how you use you use the body that’s the problem.
Here's what I've learnt, both from my own recovery and from being trusted with hundreds of other people's bodies: pain is almost never the problem. Pain is the message. It's your body telling you, often after years of being patient with you, that something somewhere else in the chain has been out of alignment for a long time.
(did you get that? Read it again if not!)
Your shoulder isn't misbehaving - it's compensating, because your ribcage is held, because your breath is shallow, because your pelvis is tipped, because your feet aren't pointing the way they were designed to. Bones stack. Joints move. Muscles work together. When one part of that beautiful system falls out of alignment, the rest of you has to take up the slack, and it will, very generously, for years. Until it can't. And the place where it finally gives up isn't the place that caused it. That's why chasing the pain around your body never quite works. You're treating the symptom of a structural conversation that's been going on much further up or down the chain.
The second mistake, which sits underneath the first one, is handing your body over to someone else to fix. With a sense of powerlessness, helplessness, and hopelessness. I say this as someone who spent years as the person other people came to be fixed by. I trained in systematic kinesiology, reflexology, clinical and rehabilitation massage. I know what hands-on work can do, and I have huge respect for the practitioners I work alongside who are helping people in this way. But I also know this: if every time your pain comes back you have to go and see someone, you are not free. You're managing. You're coping. You're on a treadmill of relief that costs you money and time.
Quietly, your sense of agency over your own body disappears. The chiropractor can put you back in alignment. The osteopath can release the bones and tissue. The physio can give you the exercises and ultrasound. But unless something changes in the way you stand, walk, sit, breathe, even think and hold yourself between those appointments, your body will - more often than not - keep moving itself straight back into the same pattern it had before, if the pain was due to long term habit movement habits of your body. That isn't a failure on your part. It's just what happens when no one has ever taught you, in real, felt detail, how your own body is actually meant to work.
For example, I just stood and watched a group of people playing Bowls in my local park,. Some of them, clearly in pain, with absolutely zero concept of how the combination of their alignment, mobility, and gravity - sinking down through their body - was creating their injuries in the present moment.
This is the whole reason I created The Ixchel System, and why it's built the way it is. It isn't a treatment. It isn't another thing to be done to you. It's an education in your own bones that you apply and program into yourself. In Get Into Your Body Level 1, we start at the feet, because almost everything above the feet is being shaped by what's happening below them, and most people have no idea. We work upwards, joint by joint, bone by bone, over seven weeks and forty-eight simple practices, until you genuinely know your own structure from the inside. Not as theory. As felt experience. The kind of knowing that means you can catch yourself collapsing into your hip while you're standing at the kettle, and gently bring yourself back. Or you learn where in space your head should be when you move. That's what changes pain. Not harder treatment of the loudest screaming part of your body. A quieter, more honest relationship with the whole of you is what we know and believe works for pretty much every-body.
The other thing I want to say, because I think it matters, is that bodies don't change well in isolation. Pain can make people disappear. They stop coming to things, stop telling anyone how much of their day is being eaten by it, and try to push through on their own. I understand that impulse. But in 30 years of working with bodies, I've never seen anyone untangle long-term pain alone, in a vacuum, by sheer willpower. Just as the body is made up of a community of internal systems that need to be organised. Bodies change in rhythm and in relationship, within a supportive community. Your body changes when you come back to the accountability, for a few weeks, using the same practices, with other people who are doing the same. Then you use those practices in your day to day activities, standing, walking, sitting. That's exactly why we built the Ixchel Integration membership, why we run the Check Into Your Body sessions every week, and have a global practitioner training community.
So if you're reading this with something that hurts - whether it's fibromyalgia, ME, plantar fasciitis, carpal tunnel, chronic back or neck pain, migraines, IBS, or just a body that's been quietly compensating for so long you've forgotten what easy feels like - please hear me. You are not broken. Your body is not betraying you. It's telling you, very precisely, where the conversation needs to begin. The mistake isn't your pain. The mistake is treating the loudest place and ignoring the whole, intelligent, extraordinary structure that's been holding you up around it. There is another way. It's slower, it's kinder, it's more honest, and it puts you back in charge of your own bones. That's the work. That's The Ixchel System. And it's why we're here.
If this landed somewhere true for you, here's where I'd start.
The fastest way to feel what I'm talking about, in your own body, is our free 7-Day Pain Fix Challenge - ten minutes a day, one simple practice, and a felt sense of what changes when you stop chasing the pain and start listening to the structure underneath it.
When you're ready to go deeper, Get Into Your Body Level 1 takes you through forty-eight practices over seven weeks, from your feet upwards, until you genuinely know your own bones from the inside.
👉 Start the free 7-Day Pain Fix Challenge
👉 Explore Get Into Your Body Level 1
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