Your dream Byron Bay Holiday begins: You’ve finally arrived at your holiday destination to relax but by day two you end up with a severe headache or neck pain. You blame it on the pillow you slept on.
But is there more to it than that?
As a Byron Bay Remedial Massage and Therapeutic Massage therapist – and having learned through my own experiences – I have become more aware of how our body speaks to us, whether it be through a frozen shoulder, lower back pain, head aches or exhaustion and so on.
We can override this pain and keep going by pushing through, or take a pill to keep the pain under control, drink more coffee, increase the sugar intake to keep going… until one day we end up collapsing and need to take days off work, or end up in hospital because the body has finally come to a stop. The message is often quite clear!
The mind can take over and make up stories while the body knows the truth. The more we listen to the body the more we will give the mind its rightful place.
We have denied the wisdom of the body for far too long and given undue reverence to the mind, but where has it gotten us?
The state that humanity is in right now is surely an indication what we are doing is simply not working.
We cannot think our way out of the mess we are collectively in; if we could we would have done it long ago.
Perhaps the answer then is to look to the body’s wisdom and attune ourselves to a whole different form of communication. Our body and its sensitivities and the memories that it holds from past experiences can become locked inside for a long time.
Isn’t it time to consider that what we carry in our bodies, for example our hurts, is in fact affecting how we live? And what would happen if we healed those hurts? Would we change the way we are in life?
Often when I massage clients, especially with Esoteric Massage, so many people want to share and talk about long held issues that are in the body.
One of my clients, a woman in her 50s, came to me with severe shoulder pain. I said to her, ‘you are carrying a huge burden of responsibility’ and she immediately said yes, ‘so would you, we have only recently learned that both our daughters were sexually abused by a family friend and we are only just learning about it now. I feel like I failed to protect them,’ she said. ‘You just keep blaming your self.’ She said that she was going through the court process.
The weight of the responsibility for what had happened had become a burden that she carried in her body.
At the end of the session she looked at her own eyes in the mirror and saw a joy in her face that hadn’t been there for a long time. .
The pain is emotional, but the beauty of the body is that it shows it up. Or as someone very wise once said “The body is the ‘marker of all truth’ (SIB).”
When we embrace the healing process with this understanding, we go beyond surface reasons and environmental factors as to why our bodies are in pain and we go deeper so that the true shifts can occur.
Yasmin Lang is a Remedial Massage Therapist based in Byron Bay. She specialises in aged care, oncology massage and pregnancy massage. Learn more about her services here.
Are you still planning your Byron Bay holiday? For all my Swedish friends you might want to check out momondo’s Byron Bay Guide for travel inspiration.