Coaching and Healing Basics, Ch 3 - Listen to Your Body

When I began practicing yoga in the early 1990s, our focus—in both teaching and practice—was on breathing into pain. At the beginning of class, I would ask students, “What pain or chronic pain have you brought in with you today?” I would then invite them, throughout the class, to breathe into that area.

During this process, they often discovered how easy it was to move away from the pain. Yet, with guidance and support, they also learned how to lean back into the pain and stay steady with it. Inevitably, a release would occur—through memory, emotion, or vibration (for example, the front leg in Warrior II beginning to tremble).

The nature of the body is to splint around an injury. The splint ceases when the wound is healed. Imagine a doctor externally splinting a broken bone; once healing is complete, the splint is removed.

The key is that splinting protects the injury and allows the healing process to take place—until it is complete.

On a primal level, the body remembers: never let this trauma happen again. It learns to avoid the sensations of vulnerability, helplessness, and smallness.

These three words—vulnerable, helpless, small—are embedded in the wound itself. A kind of primal splinting occurs to prevent ever feeling that way again. This defense serves a short-term purpose, but over time it becomes obsolete, restricting our capacity for growth and aliveness.

In this way, one becomes loyal to the trauma itself. By staying guarded, the injury becomes part of one’s identity. We remain in relationship not only with the trauma, but with the intention behind it—to protect, to survive, to never be hurt again.

It feels safer to stay with what is known than to risk vulnerability again.

Yet this loyalty manifests through chronic symptoms—physical, emotional, and relational. When we breathe into this relationship, we begin to see it clearly.

Insight arises.

Healing begins.

This is why listening to your body is an important part of the therapeutic practice. It is as if the therapist now becomes one's splint. One's armor can yield. The burden of vigilant protection lifts.

I am reminded of being in an argument with a girlfriend in which there seemed to be no resolution ouside of holding ones. It was obvious, that all this would do was to build resentment.

I realized I was spending a lot of time building a case against her. Why would I want to do this with someone I cared for?

So I said to her, 'I find myself building a case against you. I don't want to do that anymore."

Suddenly, several resolutions presented themselves. Our conflict soon was resolved..

Once the energy behind the armor (the armor that was to protect someone who was hurt) was dissipated, completion was allowed.

Listen to your body.

Therapy can be your splint.

Eventually, the splint itself becomes unnecessary—what remains is your true self.