Do you define your boundaries based on pain or pleasure?

Do you define your boundaries based on pain or pleasure?

by | Apr 13, 2025 | Body Intelligence, Nervous System Health, Somatic Awareness

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.

 

Our brain’s need for our physical antennae

Our brain’s need for our physical antennae

by | Apr 10, 2025 | Blog, Nervous System Health, Video

In this video, I talk about becoming more aware of how you use your senses – the physical antennae that monitor the physical world around you. They help regulate the nervous system and they give the brain the right information to attune itself to the here and now.

An important task for our brains, as the incoming information helps the brain create a predictable outcome to face the situations life brings us as efficiently and energy–savingly as possible.

When our brain does this successfully, we experience it as having the energy to do the things that are meaningful to us, and to have a sense of ease, peace, and joy as we move through our daily lives.

Play, play and play

Play, play and play

by | Apr 9, 2025 | Blog, Ignite your sparkle, Nervous System Health, Video

We find much of our ease and pleasure in play. You only have to look at small children and see how they get fully absorbed in playing, and then how they enjoy themselves. Indeed, playing helps us to be completely in the present moment, and to feel carefree and joyful for a while. When we play, our attention is not so focused on our more intense inner world.

For us adults, it would be healthy if we spent more time in our playful infant mind space, where curiosity, awe and wonder dance together. Play awakens our creativity and inventiveness. It creates space in our minds.

So why not play more? Everything in our daily lives can be ‘play’ by approaching it with a playful attitude. Our brains love it. It is a powerful nutrient for a resilient nervous system. And it gives space and relaxation in the body. Let’s talk about play…

Help your brain come home by using your visual sense, your eyes

Help your brain come home by using your visual sense, your eyes

by | Apr 9, 2025 | Nervous System Health, Video

In this video, I talk about using the visual sense as a way to regulate the nervous system and help the brain map itself into the here-and-now physical- and human environment.

Did you know that our eyes play a big role in our social engagement? In this video, I will tell you about it.

I introduce you to a few minutes of orientation in your physical environment by letting your eyes off the leash of thoughts, images, emotions, and sensations inside. And to invite your mind to be a passenger of the eyes that wander.

Natural impulses to heal

Natural impulses to heal

by | Feb 2, 2025 | Blog, Body Intelligence, Nervous System Health

Let´s have a look at our brain´s agenda

In the former blog I wrote about the importance of a sustainable energy budget for healthy emotional, mental, and physical being.

Maintaining a sustainable energy budget is one of our brain’s priorities. It is constantly adapting to the environment in the most economical way to keep the system in a dynamic balance (homeostasis) with minimal impact on the energy budget.
By natural design, it does so by mapping itself into the here-and-now environment through the senses. Then the brain asks the somatic communication channels emotion, sensation, image, and meaning about ´how the information that the senses bring in feels. Our brains then can get to the task of predicting how best to adapt to the environment based on the maps that it has created. That is, maintain a dynamic balance in the system without using precious energy when it is not needed.

But what if our past gets in the way?

Painful past experiences, and associated attention habits, movement- and postural patterns, limiting beliefs, negative self-image, and intense feeling states such as excessive worrying, anxiety, sadness, anger, or shame disrupt the spontaneous in-the-moment flow of information through the somatic channels of sensation, emotion, meaning, and image.

Rather than commenting on the input of the senses those channels then send signals related to these painful inner experiences to the brain. As a result,  your system stays stuck in a self-repeating cycle of rapidly building intensity, over-arousal, and collapsing that demands more energy from the energy faculties in your system than is available.  Instead of the brain making accurate predictions based on its maps of the present moment, the predictions come from intense inner experiences that push the system over and over again into high energy-cost survival strategies such as fight, flight, and freeze.

As you can imagine, this erodes your energy capacity which then leads to even more stress, overwhelm, anxiety, and exhaustion, risking serious long-term chronic health issues.  So it is important to break this cycle to allow the brain to get back to doing what it is meant to do so that your system can function optimally and you can dance through your life in healthier, resilient, and joyful ways.

Addictive patterns in attention

Yet over time, many of us have quietly become addicted to attention habits rooted in the idea that something is wrong and that life is supposed to feel like a struggle. Ideas like “You have to feel worse first to feel better” or “No pain, no gain” still underlie most forms of therapy, coaching, and movement education. Many of us have been taught that we must attend to our painful experiences to heal, or push our bodies and minds to grow.
But rather than leading to healing and growth, these ways reinforce the hypervigilant, painful trauma patterns that underlie the ´What is wrong´ attention and belief that we have to be hard on ourselves or struggle.

The first step to breaking the cycle of stress, overwhelm, anxiety, and exhaustion is to follow the natural impulse of your system. 

Our organic intelligent system teaches us that living and feeling in the present moment is a much more rewarding, healing, and economical way to recover from our trauma and maintain vitality, joy, and resilience. It restores our energy budget, giving our brain the energy and capacity to process life better.

When you learn to eliminate this parasitic attraction to inner disturbing, very intense signals, your movements, thoughts, feelings, and life choices become more coherent. You then no longer fight against yourself, and the living system that you are. Rather you begin to collaborate with your system’s self-healing impulses and potential. You will find that this gives you the energy, peace of mind, and space to create a meaningful, authentic life in a fluid and sustainable way. And you will start to feel better in your body, mind, and emotional faculties as well.

Unlike what you may have learned so far, you then don´t attend to the inside voices that tell you that something is wrong. Instead you let your senses freely roam in your immediate environment and receive what is here and now. And this sensory orientation to the present moment helps your brain make a renewed prediction of what might happen next. And that will most likely be much more neutral, and positive than letting your anxious inner experiences create a future that is reliving your past wounding.

The neural programs that result from this sensory orientation are attuned to what is needed for the system to effortlessly, and economically keep a dynamic balance while dancing with the constantly changing environment. It is a systemic form of energy efficiency and automatic regulation that sets you up for ease and growth and allows your body systems to function optimally. This creates the space to be creative, find solutions, enjoy inner peace, and live life with more lightness and equanimity.

I have two reflective questions for you:

  1. How often do you turn your attention to pleasurable sensations and thoughts as you move, talk, work, cook, think, feel, or do nothing?.
  2. How often do you see, hear, smell, taste, and feel the immediate world around you?

Are you curious to learn more about restoring your internal energy budget? Learn more about this in the Retreat ´Somatic Movement Journey from Freeze to Flow´

When there is not enough energy for what you need

When there is not enough energy for what you need

by | Feb 2, 2025 | Body Intelligence, Nervous System Health

What does your internal energy consumption look like?

There is a lot going on about energy efficiency and how to minimise high energy bills. We all have households with many energy-consuming appliances like smartphones, refrigerators, washing machines, lighting, and computers. We subscribe to an energy supplier for X amount of energy. Often, we don’t have to think about this because we only see the effects of our usage reflected in our bill. But every now and then we may face a shortage of power. The capacity has been reached and the power system says Nope. The demand for energy exceeds the amount of energy that can be supplied at that time.

Often it is quickly resolved by turning off a device. But what if we constantly run out of energy for the appliances we need to keep us warm, give us light, keep our food fresh? If a power outage lasted a long time, it would be disastrous for the food we keep in our fridge, for example.
We all have things that need to be permanently on like a fridge, things that only need electricity when we use them like lights and there are things we put on standby in case we need them like the television or an electric toothbrush. They may use a little energy instead of full power but they still take from the power net.

If our power grid capacity is exceeded, we need to look at what is really needed and where we can cut back by turning off appliances or using them at other times of the day. For example, where we live in Spain, we only have a very limited power supply at our disposal. We cannot use a washing machine and a heater at the same time. And often the light comes on when we turn on the food processor. So we have to think carefully about where and when in the day we need energy to do everything we want to do. And you probably do too now that energy has become so expensive.

But what about the cost of your internal energy usage?

As living beings, we also consume internal energy generated by the energy faculty of our system. And much works the same as in our outside world. There are body systems that run in the background and need energy 24/7 to keep us alive: like our respiratory system, nervous system and brain, heart, immune system, digestive system, part of our motor system, and so on. There are body parts’ that we use consciously and often, such as our muscles that need energy to generate power to move, hold us upright, hold us together, speak, look around, hear, smell, eat, and express our emotional states. Like our mind that needs energy to think, and so on. And all these physical energy processes have to stay within a certain range for us to be on the safe end of survival.

One thing is certain, we cannot buy more capacity for our internal energy system. Each of us has a certain capacity available. So our system has to manage its capacity well to keep everything within a safe bandwidth. If we exceed that bandwidth, we risk an energy outage. And as you can imagine, that can be disastrous. Fortunately, our system then has a preservation system that kicks in as a measure of first aid. it is the Freeze response and it preserves our energy currency ‘Oxygen’ by turning off all systems that do not pose an immediate threat to our survival when they are more or less de-activated, so that our heart and brain can continue to do their work. But the freezing system is not a solution for long-term excessive use.

How energy efficient is your system?

That said, imagine if an energy consultant came to your “home” to check your internal energy meter and look at the efficiency and sustainability of your internal energy consumption patterns? How high would your consumption be? Maybe just look at your movement habits, your attention ahbits and your emotional and thinking habits…

Are you working harder than you need to?
Are you constantly overthinking or worrying?
Do you experience a lot of intense emotions on a daily base?
Do you experience a lot of stress in your day-to-day life?
Do you often tighten your shoulders and clench your jaw to hold yourself together? 
Or do you tighten your muscles to keep yourself upright?
Do you squeeze your buttocks and abdominal muscles together when you speak out? Or perhaps to look a certain way?
Do you metaphorically walk on eggshells and hold your breath to avoid conflict with others?
Do you try to push your physical limits when you exercise or do yoga? 
Do you often have muscle pain after working out?
Are you hard on yourself? Maybe a perfectionist?

Some of these questions may be easy to answer. Some may be about unconscious stress,- and tension habits. Nevertheless, all of these habits and patterns in moving, acting, thinking, and feeling lead to the depletion of your system’s energy budget. This can eventually make you feel stuck, flat, disconnected, overwhelmed, and anxious in your daily life.

In the next blog, I’ll reflect a bit more on how our brain takes care of our internal energy budget and the ways it can become disrupted in the process.