Many people I work with have pain. Pain serves to alert us to a problem that requires action and care. We experience pain as a physical sensation in our bodies. The natural assumption is to assume the pain has a physical cause. But what if the cause is not physical or not physical any longer?

Let’s define ‘physical’ as pain signals arising from injured tissue as well as from inside the brain, where nerve pathways may still be reporting pain long after the injured tissue has healed. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m wondering about the experience of pain without a physical or structural cause. 

To be clear, I am NOT saying pain is “all in your head.” I don’t think such a thing exists. If someone feels pain, they have pain, whether we can find a physical cause or not. I’m reminded of a client from many years ago who was referred to me to treat her calf pain. Her pain had started 3 months earlier after catching her foot and tripping. I could not find any physical problem with her calf. In addition, the way she had tripped rarely resulted in a calf injury. However, there was no doubt in my mind that she had pain. Her experience of her pain was real. 

If pain is alerting us to a problem and there is no physical cause, what might the reason be? I wonder if the pain is calling us home. Is it our body saying “You’ve been gone too long. Come back inside.”?

What causes me to wonder is this: everyone coming to me for help with pain is taking action to care for themselves. Simply making the appointment is selfcare. Receiving care requires us to turn our attention inside, to see if we feel better, to evaluate whether the heating pad helps or how it feels to do an exercise. Zero Balancing sessions also bring our attention inside. Clients look more like themselves when they get off the table. I commonly hear “I had no idea how out of my body I was.” 

If pain is our body calling us home, why did we leave in the first place? 

Sometimes we’ve left because leaving helped us achieve a goal, like working long hours to get a promotion or simply to make a living. If no one is home to answer the phone, we miss our body’s call telling us it’s time to eat or sleep. We can keep going. 

Sometimes we’ve left because it’s too difficult to stay. Extreme anger, fear from life-threatening situations, inconsolable grief, trauma of any kind. Leaving our body can be an essential survival strategy. 

While we may have had excellent reasons for leaving, once away we tend to stay away. We lose the awareness that we are out of our bodies. Living this way over a period of years has a cost and can deprive us of vital feedback about our internal world. Luckily, our bodies have an inherent and strong drive toward health. This drive toward health may be what sends out the call. And sometimes the only call we can hear is pain.  

Seeking to alleviate pain leads us to take actions that bring us home. Actions that result in experiencing positive rather than challenging feelings. Feeling calmed and comforted by a heating pad. Experiencing the increased strength, flexibility or stamina from treatment exercises. The better it feels in our bodies, the more we will want to come home and stay home.