Last night something weird happened to me.
I had a powerful insight while drifting in and out of sleep.
Lately I’ve been waking up frequently because my left shoulder is hurting. It doesn’t matter how I twist and turn. Every position hurts.
Pole dancing, it turns out, is hard on the human body, especially our shoulders. Shocking, right?
So I started working with a rehab specialist. And I noticed something fascinating.
Usually, when I lie down, my shoulder immediately hurts.
But after doing these rehab exercises and backing off the intensity of my training a bit, I could fall asleep with no pain.
Then the pain would return again in the middle of the night.
So I started experimenting.
Whenever I woke up hurting, I’d get up and do some gentle mobility exercises. Then I’d lay back down and the pain was GONE.
I did a little research to understand what was going on. Apparently, the brain creates a painful sensation as a way of saying, “Don’t do that.”
Sometimes because something genuinely needs protecting.
Sometimes because the nervous system is simply anticipating harm.
But when the body safely gets stronger and learns to move again, the brain updates the story:
“Oh. We’re okay. We’re stronger than we thought.”
So in the middle of the night, I started doing these shoulder mobility exercises whenever I woke up in pain.
And suddenly my shoulder wouldn’t hurt anymore when I laid back down.
On this night, somewhere between sleep and waking, I had an insight that hit me so deeply I was crying in the dream.
I saw that just as feelings let us know how we’re using the power of thought…
Pain in the body lets us know how we’re using the body.
Feelings say:
“This thinking is creating suffering.”
Pain says:
“This movement isn’t working for you.”
It’s not punishment. There’s nothing going wrong.
It’s feedback. Guidance. Intelligence.
And then there was another realization:
Pain doesn’t actually exist in the place we think it does.
The sensation feels like it’s “in” my shoulder, but the experience is creates by my brain through nerves and interpretation. It’s not really there. Not in the way I think it is.
Which is wild when you really sit with it.
Thought is like that, too.
It’s intangible, not solid, and yet we create entire realities with it.
Before bed I’d been reading The Secret by Mavis Karn, and this quote came alive:
“Feelings exist to warn us away from using our thinking to create trouble in our lives and guide us back to our natural healthy ability to live our lives to the fullest.”
Yes.
And maybe pain is doing something similar, too.
Not evidence of something wrong with us. Just information.
I don’t think I’ve fully unpacked what I saw yet.
It already feels more ordinary in the sunlight than it did at 3am when it felt like the universe cracked open and revealed one of its secrets for one, brief moment.
But it left me with this feeling:
Whatever I’m feeling is what’s supposed to be happening right now.
And that feels nice.
Yours in love and play,
Steph 🐲❤️
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