Your Pain is Not a Malfunction
[A Soft Place To Land]
Nervous system-focused care for overloaded humans
Issue 01 · Your body has been trying to tell you something · Week 1 of 52
A cairn or stones placed upon a lakeside log near purple flowers.
A NOTE FROM JENNY
Welcome. I'm so glad you're here. This actual newsletter has been a long time coming. It has taken me 5 years to craft my self and what I wanted to say beyond “schedule your session here”. But if you need to get on the calendar… go to the top Right button, and get in there!
Whether you've been coming to see me for years or you just found your way here, I want you to know what this newsletter is — and what it isn't.
It isn't medical advice.
It isn't a quick fix.
And it definitely isn't one more thing telling you to do better or try harder.
It is coming from the 20 years I have been in this industry and a culmination of all of that experience. I can confidently say, I’m not your average massage therapist. There is SO much more to this dynamic practice.
What it is, I hope, is a weekly invitation to slow down and listen.
To your body.
To your patterns.
To the stories that have been living in your muscles and your nervous system for a long time, waiting for you to finally pay attention.
Over the next year, we're going to explore the connection between stress, emotion, and physical pain — not in a clinical, detached way, but in the honest, grounded way we talk about it in my treatment room. I'll share what I know from Bowenwork, massage therapy, HeartMath coaching, and years of sitting with people at their most vulnerable. And I'll say the things that are sometimes hard to say, because I've learned that the kind truth is almost always more helpful than the comfortable silence.
We're starting at the very beginning. And the beginning is this: your body has been trying to tell you something. It's time to listen.
Sincerely and with Gratitude,
— Jenny
THIS WEEK'S TOPIC
Your pain is not a malfunction
Here's something I say to clients on my table more often than almost anything else: Even though it may feel like it is: your body is (most often) not broken. It is not failing you. It is not betraying you. It is doing something far more sophisticated than that. And yes, there are those of us with joint replacements, compensation patters, torn labrums, slipped discs and nerve impingements- all feeling very broken.
AND
Pain is your body’s way of talking to you.
Pain, tension, fatigue, that chronic tightness in your shoulders that no amount of massage seems to permanently fix — these are not random. They are not simply the result of sleeping wrong or getting older or working too hard, though those things are real. They are, in most cases, your nervous system's attempt to communicate something it hasn't been able to get through to you any other way.
I want to offer you a reframe that changes everything for the clients that choose to work more deeply beyond the table: your symptoms are not the problem. They are the message. The problem is what the message is about.
This is not a comfortable reframe. Because if your pain is a message, then you have to be willing to ask what it's saying — and that question can take you places you weren't sure you wanted to go. Most of you have literally cringed in my office when I have asked it… and I get it. The places we may go are the stress you've been outrunning. Into the grief you packed down somewhere around year three of doing everything for everyone else ( I know that one well. May and June are the months where a lot of my symptoms flare up and it’s the grief I still experience from my mother’s passing). Into the anger you experienced that had nowhere to go so it settled into your jaw, your lower back, your hips.
I've been a massage therapist and Bowenwork practitioner for many years. In that time I've worked with hundreds of bodies. And the pattern I see more than any other is this: people come in for their physical pain and leave having touched something much deeper than they expected.
That's not an accident. The body and the mind are not separate systems running parallel to each other. They are one system — profoundly, inextricably connected. What lives in your emotional world lives in your body. What your body carries, your mind eventually has to reckon with.
This newsletter is about learning to work with that connection rather than against it. One week at a time.
THIS WEEK'S REFLECTION
Begin to listen
I'm not going to give you a breathing exercise this week, or a technique, or a protocol. I'm going to ask you to do something harder: just notice.
This week, when you feel physical discomfort — tension, pain, fatigue, tightness — pause for just a moment before you do what you normally do (push through, ignore it, reach for something to make it stop). Instead, ask yourself:
1. WHERE exactly am I feeling this? Can I describe it more specifically than I usually do?
2. What was happening — in my day, in my thoughts, in my body — just before this showed up?
3. If this sensation could speak, what might it be trying to say?
You don't have to have answers. The practice is in the asking. Notice what comes up — even if what comes up is resistance.
CLIENT STORY
A voice from the table
D has been with me for years. One of my most favorite referrals I have ever received. Not every client likes to chat during bodywork sessions, but this one does and through our chats I’m able to pick up the threads of context clues to sort out where their pain may be sourcing from.
This one particular time they had been suffering from more headaches than usual and they gave me permission to ask some specific questions around that.
Through our conversation, we learned that they had been holding back their honesty at work. Avoiding conflict by not saying the very thing that needed saying in a situation where they were essentially being walked all over and treated like a doormat. This silence created a compression of sorts and it was all going to their head, into their neck and down their shoulders creating a burdensome tension pattern.
By the end of the session, D had identified specific areas where this was really becoming problematic, imagined the shift in the workplace dynamic and felt the tension began to ease, AND devised an action plan to resolve this problem.
The following month, they came back and shared their progress that not only had they followed through with their action plan, but that it WORKED and resolved the headaches and they felt freer to speak their truth. They hadn’t realized they had a pattern of minimizing their importance in the room, and unintentionally invited themselves into tension. Just the awareness alone was enough to begin the shift. Taking action and seeing where else that pattern shows up in their life was icing on the cake.
Now when a headache shows up, they ask themselves: “Am I not sharing my truth somewhere and is it contributing to this discomfort?” Quite often nipping the headache in the bud.
If you'd like to share your story for an upcoming newsletter, I'd love to hear from you. Reach out at hello@jennyodell.me
A FINAL THOUGHT FROM ME
If you've been coming to see me — or thinking about it — and wondering whether your pain might be connected to something deeper, you already know the answer. The fact that you're asking the question is your body doing its job. The next step is deciding to listen.
If this week's topic is resonating with something you've been feeling but haven't had words for, I'd love to have a conversation. My Building Your Personal Resilience coaching program exists for exactly this — to take the awareness you're building through bodywork and turn it into lasting change. Learn more or book a free clarity call at jennyodell.me.
Sincerely and with Gratitude,
Jenny O'Dell
