Working with pain & trauma in the body

How I've been using Body Mapping to heal

A couple of months ago I was driving down to see my friends in Portland. I love driving, and it's about a two-and-a-half-hour trip from Seattle so I was prepared for a nice, relaxing time alone on the road when I felt a migraine coming on.

Some of you may know, I've had chronic migraines for over 25 years now, sometimes being put out of commission for weeks at a time. My Capricorn nature drives me to always want to find solutions, so I've tried EVERYTHING to heal these migraines over the years, doing everything from herbs, medication, and acupuncture to restrictive diets. All with little or no success.

But recently I was listening to a podcast from Jess Lively who was helping clients work through chronic physical and emotional pain using a well-known trauma technique created by psychologist and trauma expert Peter Levine. I call it Body Mapping. I've taken many courses on how to release trauma from the body and so I know this practice well and even use it with clients but I'd never been able to make it work for me because of both the intensity of my pain and the patience that it takes to make a practice of this work.

But as I was driving in the car, I decided to try. I knew that I could always take medication to alleviate the pain if it didn't work. I listened to her podcast episode, and as she was walking her client through the process, I followed along. This technique involves softly focusing on one part of the body until it 'releases'. It can be used for both physical pain or emotional trapped emotions or stuckness in the body. I will explain the technique in detail in my next newsletter.

For the next two and a half hours, I focused on where the most intense pain was felt, in my face, head, neck, and shoulders, and let each area know that it was safe to release. As one area would release, then the pain would move to another area. So I followed the pain which was doing a little loop, over and over but getting less and less intense throughout the drive.

By the time I reached Portland, my migraine was gone! Woah. I couldn't believe it actually worked. It took 2 1/2 hours but my migraine never got worse or came back the entire day.

So I decided to try this technique with other pain and stuck emotional trauma in my body. As you know if you've been reading my newsletter or posts, I have had trauma come back in the past two years and it's caused a lot of physical pain in my body, as well as emotional pain. Being diagnosed with breast cancer made me get very serious about healing this pain, especially because the pain itself travels through the exact path where the cancer was found!

So in my meditations every morning and night I would use this technique and feel the pain that was radiating through my torso and the emotional stuckness in my chest. Eventually, it would dissipate and my body felt calm and relaxed.

I've been struggling with sleep so much in the past couple of years, and now, using this technique my sleep has improved immensely. I will wake up in the night with either a migraine or anxiety and I will use this process to relax any of these stuck pains or emotions until I'm able to fall back asleep. It also seems like my migraines have lessened in intensity and become less frequent. I feel more at home in my body and I have trust in it that I didn't have before. I know that it WANTS to release everything that it's been holding onto all of these years. The result is being able to connect to yourself and have clarity of focus.

I'm not going to sugarcoat it. This takes WORK and a lot of time. Sometimes hours of intense focus. But, the more I do it, the easier and faster it is for the muscles to relax and the pain to dissipate. I wanted to share this with you because I know that so many of you are going through similar experiences as I am. We have all had a massive shift and collective trauma and so much residual is left in our bodies.

If you are curious and want to learn how to use this practice, stay tuned. I'm hoping, in the next newsletter to share exactly how to use this process and walk you through it.

Much Love,
Esther