Do you define your boundaries based on pain or pleasure?
A while ago, I wrote about respecting and growing your boundaries. In particular, your boundaries to yourself. These could be boundaries from your nervous system or your body to you, or the limits you impose on your body. Today I want to share something about the boundaries that are about ourselves and the window of pleasure.
Often, people become aware of their boundaries only when physical or emotional pain comes into play. Pain then becomes the measuring stick by which boundaries are defined. Boundaries formed by the fear of pain are often all-or-nothing boundaries; an on-off switch because when pain occurs, our system steps on the emergency brake or shuts down.
To feel pain, you need pain.
In Feldenkrais sessions, I find that many people, when they no longer feel their pain, immediately start looking for the pain. Their attention is, so to speak, hijacked by the pain. This leaves them in a vicious circle of pain. The thoughts, feelings, and movements are so focused on avoiding pain that it actually reinforces pain, creates more pain, and sometimes leads to chronic pain and tension patterns… An attention pattern, under the spell of pain, causes people to experience needless pain for a long time. Why?
Pain and the nervous system in a nutshell
If we experience pain anywhere in our body (emotional pain included), it is because pain receptors in a certain area in our body perceive a certain stimulus that can cause harm to the body. We experience this as pain. A message is sent to the central nervous system. Once the brain understands what has happened, it sends a message, to the muscles to make a movement or prevent movement so that no further damage occurs and the damage is limited. I call it a kind of protection program.
All sorts of things are also set in motion in the body to heal the pain. In addition, the pain is stored in your brain’s memory library along with the emotions, and sensations associated with this particular pain. And every time there is a similar emotion or sensation, your brain sends the protection program for this pain back to the muscles.
Besides physical pain stimuli, our ‘Something is wrong’ thoughts and anxious emotions also trigger stimuli to which the central nervous system responds with this pain-protection program.
Sometimes we keep sending stimuli to the brain with our ‘pain-oriented’ thoughts and emotions, long after the actual physical pain has healed. This constant pain stimulation makes our nervous system over-stimulated and increasingly sensitive to pain. It can even change certain neural networks as a result. It expands the original protection program more and more and fires it more often and faster.
As a consequence, pain in one area of your body can cause long-term tension in your whole body, psyche, and mind, causing you to lose a lot of energy and bandwidth in feeling and moving. Even such traits as curiosity, flexibility, creativity, and solution-oriented thinking then often take a back seat. This is a vicious neurobiological circle, which we can break by consciously focusing our attention differently. The beauty is that both the body and our nervous system then have much more room to tap into their self-healing capacity.
Window of tolerance or window of pleasure?
Besides focusing on what hurts, we can also turn our attention to what feels good or perhaps even pleasurable. By doing this, we again widen our bandwidth and our variety of feelings. I like to call this expanding the window of pleasure in preference to your window of tolerance.
When we direct our attention to pleasurable sensations, we move out of fear and all fear-oriented tension patterns. To feel pleasure, all we need is a very small pleasurable sensation somewhere in the body, even if just in your fingertip or your little toe. We find pleasurable sensations more readily by focusing on what feels easy rather than strenuous, and effortful. For example, we experience ease by moving smaller, softer, slower, and more mindful.
When you make movements with very little effort, your brain is again able to register the differences between different movement options and choose what is most efficient, pleasurable, easy, and comfortable. With these new choices, the brain can rewrite the pain protection program and create better-feeling patterns.
