Anything can work some of the time. Nothing works all of the time. This phrase works really well to illustrate the complexity of working with pain. Pain is dependent on multiple, diverse, interacting variables. Pain is a perception due to the interplay of biological,...
What would it be like if your arm had a mind of its own? Even stranger, if you had eight arms so ‘suffused with nervousness’ that they wander, explore and feel with their own goals, acting as ‘agents of their own’. This is the model offered for being an octopus in...
An old client of mine has written a book, 'Leading Beyond the Numbers’, for business people on feeling. She wonderfully, and generously, describes some learning from a set of sessions we did together, in this extract from the book, below: “I still remember my first...
Here's a big question for you: if you have pain in your big toe, is your pain in your big toe? Or is your pain inside of you? We used to always think that the pain was in the big toe. That the issue was in the tissues. And that's useful to some extent – of course the...
We used to think that pain was just about the tissues; we focused on operations, we focused on aligning things. But we now know that a huge contribution to our pain experiences is the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we’re given by other people. The modern...
I want to explore a very powerful notion with you - that pain can be like a bad habit. At one stage the reflex to withdraw, to rest, to protect yourself from a difficult stimulus is important. For example, if you twist your ankle, you do need to rest and protect so...
This article was written by Sylvia Benoist. (Note from Steve: Sylvia recently completed her training as a TRE - Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises - supervisor (mentor with me), and I asked her to share her journey with TRE and Ankylosing Spondylitis, a type of...
There is a lot of pain around: In a huge study (Breivik et al 2006) across 15 European countries, 19% of people reported living with moderate to severe pain for more than 6 months. That’s 1 in 5 people in persistent pain states, the majority for many years. Holy moly....
Pain is strange in that it is non-linear and quickly becomes amplified over and above what is happening in the tissues. A leading definition emerging from the latest research is that pain emerges when your brain decides something is unsafe. At the core of the...
When it comes to working with pain, I believe the core of our clinical work is finding creative ways to help people find agency, strength and choice. In my early work, I used to believe there was a stretch or a manipulation for every health challenge. Over time I...
About Touch Is Really Strange When did you start working on the book? The idea for a book on touch has been in my head since 2019, but definitely a lockdown project. The Really Strange series has been huge fun and continues to get heartwarming feedback. There have...
When I teach that “pain involves the brain,” people often feel that I’m saying that it’s their fault. That’s really not what I am saying. I like to talk about the mind, the brain, and the body. The mind is our consciousness, our awareness, our sense of self. The brain...