Introduction (00:00.00)
You are listening to From Pain To Possibility with Susi Hately. You’ll hear Susi’s best ideas on how to reduce or even eradicate your pain, and learn how to listen to your body when it whispers so you don’t have to hear it scream. And now here’s your host, Susi Hately.
(00:23.19)
Welcome and welcome back. I’m so glad that you’re here because my special guest today is one of my private clients. She’s actually finished her three-month series, Marian Nevil. And why I’ve brought Marian into this series, which is all about becoming a movement detective, is that you’ve already heard from Candice and from Kendra, both trainees, of how I’m helping them be movement detectives, but it’s a whole different game when we’re working with our clients.
Because in my way of thinking, I’m ultimately working myself out of a job. I want my clients to understand what they need to understand so well in their own body that they do not need me anymore. They might look to me as being a trusted advisor, but that’s very, very different than, “I need your help getting out of pain.”
Right? It’s a very different world. So I wanna k- kinda walk you through, because I, I remember distinctly, Marian, you actually saying, “I think I’m becoming a movement detective. I am being my own detective.” And I’m just, like, raising pom-poms over here of like, this is terrific. And the other thing I wanna also mention is we did this all via Zoom.
So I never had my hands once on Marian. We never met in person. This all happened through the power of online teaching. So we’re just gonna kinda walk through this, this world with Marian, and she’s gonna kind of bring you alongside her journey. So why don’t we just start at the beginning, Marian. Like, why did you even email me?
You know, I’m a open-minded searcher. I had been to more practitioners than most people would ever be able to afford and have the, have the fortitude to, to pursue. Plus online people. And I still don’t remember how I came across your website. And I was, first of all, struck by your online offerings, how reasonably priced they were.
I thought, “Well, how can I lose? I’ll just see what this is.” And the very first one I… And I can’t even remember what it was. Hip, hips and ribs it- I had, I got some relief. It was so clearly related to the class. And then I got sidetracked, went back to my people. One of my most trusted practitioners said, “No one will ever be able to help you unless they can put your hands on your body.”
And I had that in my mind. Time passed. I traveled to see a practitioner, and that created so much tension in my body, the exercises she gave me. I went back to one of your classes. It was all about the tension, the holding, and I thought, “You know, this is my last hurrah. I agree with this philosophy. It makes sense to me, and I’ve experienced it, so I’m gonna do this.”
And it took you a few sessions, I think, to really penetrate that all the stuff, the knowledge, and the rules, and the names of muscles, and the traditional exercises that would fit my complaints. Although my two primary complaints, nobody ever responded to or paid any attention to, but you did. Which were those complaints?
That my foot on my left side is not contacting the ground- Mm … in a, in a flat, even way on… And that my, my whole leg, you know, is, feels rotated, and it doesn’t support the pelvis and hip where I feel the most pain. Mm-hmm. So even though I said, “Let’s start at my thoracic and my kyphosis,” we very quickly got to the floor and how my foot contacted the floor, and it’s been a game changer One of the things that I remember when we first started out was you ex- you expressed a lot of different symptoms, and there was almost a desire from you to, like, work on each of those.
And I didn’t quite go there with you because it’s just not– that’s not the way I work. To me, the symptoms that are expressed are signals of stuff going on in the body. So let’s come right back to the basics, and let’s just get the primary joints, the, that are the largest joints moving first, right? And in doing that, that’s when we discovered what was going on with your foot and the relationship between the foot and the hip.
So I didn’t go after the foot, but we, we, we came to realize how the foot and the hip were related. Yeah. So that then when you had the experience of yourself feeling taller, and when I looked at you on the screen and you looked at you on the screen and your kyphosis had shifted dramatically, your words had something to do with something being in your legs.
And it was very much, uh, that holistic feeling. It wasn’t just, just my thoracic spine felt different. It w- it didn’t feel like that. It felt like a whole body being supported from the ground, from the earth, without a lot of work. And the, uh, the whole time, the most important thing, though, is my feeling of positivity and confidence that I could feel my body in a way where I could be my, my own therapist, my own detective, that I could help myself.
The, the answers weren’t always out there. Yeah. And I remember one of the first things you said to me in our first session, you had said that you had looked for answers outside of you, and in the process, you stopped listening to your int- intuition. You weren’t quite sure how to come back to your intuition, but you’d always known yourself as someone who was intuitive What do you think, and can you answer this, what do you think led you to stop listening to your intuition?
Well, I’ll take it back to what you, what you do. One of the things that happened was that I was, I think, wanting to do more. And when I would always push my body to do more, then I started not trusting it because it created more pain. But the dividing up of motions into very small, very small pieces and in a certain order that you do, that you have, is what restored me back to, oh, I don’t have to work so hard and push so much because I have adequate strength.
It’s not, it’s not only a strength thing. That’s something I wanna build on, but it’s the, it’s the order and the small foundational pieces that help me understand that my… You know, I, I can– I know these things. Y- once you experience them then with you, then I know that I know them and I can feel them and pay attention to them.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. So it’s remembering what you already know about your movement pattern. Yes. And remembering that you simply forgot or that you bypassed that innate knowledge. Because the reality is, is that as people with a lot of experience helping people reduce and eliminate pain, there is a certain, uh, skill set that comes with, with that.
And so there’s a, there’s a trust when we hire someone to help us in that process. And I… And something I say to my clients when they’re asking me like, “Should I go see a,” blah, blah, blah, like fill in the blank, whether it’s physio, chiro, what, like what- whatever, right? And what I’ll say is go… I mean if your inner knowing is saying that’s what you should do, then you should do it.
And then just check in and- You ought to feel something shift pretty quickly. And I usually give it three goes, meaning I could be in a bad space, and so I can’t really receive whatever the person’s providing. The person might be in a bad space because they’re just having a bad day, or the technique might not be the right thing.
So then if you give it three goes and there’s been nothing that’s shifted, then maybe that’s not the way to go. And you take what you learned from that experience of it not working, and then you integrate that back in as opposed to just saying, “That didn’t work.” It’s like, okay, what about it didn’t actually work?
Because if it is the person but the technique might actually be helpful, then maybe it’s about finding another, another person. Or maybe you learn something about your body in the process, right? Because ultimately, pain and all the sensations that we experience are simply messengers, and learning how to listen and act and then refine from what we’ve acted upon.
And that’s actually something you did really, really well at right from the beginning, is taking that time and not like, “Oh, I need to like carve out my day,” kind of time. You just, you, you, you, you attended to it really, really well. And then you go to a person and you can feel relief, but it doesn’t last.
And so are you gonna pay for endless snippets of relief instead of… You know, and notice I didn’t really do that with you. I didn’t ask you about seeing every other people ’cause I’ve seen them all. And I, I very intentionally stopped that- Mm … when we were working together, and I think that was huge for me.
It did not confuse things. It didn’t… Um, I had gone to a massage therapist right when we started. In manipulating my body to be something other than what I was feeling or doing, that it was, it created new pain that was significant. So, so that was even another message to say, “Just stick with this person and this lane and this philosophy because it works Interesting.
Interesting. Yeah, interesting. So now when you think about your body, so we’ve had our sessions together and we’re working together in another, in another, another format. But when you think about where you are now versus where you started, like what… Can you explicitly say what’s different in terms of how you’re, how you’re listening to the various things that come up in yourself?
I choose the amount of walking I do, the amount of, uh, cooking and sitting, and I’m aware of how much, um, that I don’t overdo it. I don’t push myself. You know, I don’t get up in the morning and worry about if I can do what I’m supposed to be doing because I’ll be in so much pain. And that then really, I think, seeds for me the idea that I can sustain physically my day without thinking about it or worrying about it.
Well, I think the difference is, is if I repeat back what I heard, is that you’re no longer worrying about whether you can sustain your day. Yeah. Whereas before you did, and then, then how you went about your day reflected that particular belief. Exactly. Either I sat on a heating pad or, you know, I said, “Oh, this is good.
I’ll walk a long, long way,” when it didn’t really feel good after a while. I’m a much… I just have better judgment. It’s like… And that is, I wanna be really clear. It, it’s not just mental judgment. It’s the connection between my decisions and my thoughts and how my body feels. Respect my body. And I think the important thing I wanna add for people is that while I have a very, very clear understanding that the way people believe and think about their bodies is definitely going to have an impact on how they feel, that’s actually not what I do with people.
That what I’m doing with people is that as I’m helping them move better and they have the results of moving better, that result is what shifts their thinking, right? Mm-hmm. It provides this novel experience of like, “Oh, I feel different, and I haven’t felt this way in a very, very, very long time. Maybe it’s actually possible for me to feel differently more often,” right?
And then that kind of opens up the opportunity so that that’s what changes the thinking, and then that’s what changes people’s actions, right? And then we go from there. So I kind of do it from a, a body place, and I allow the embodiment of the movement and the exercise and the breath and the all the things to then give evidence to our thinking, and then that just naturally makes the shift.
So there’s not like, “Oh, by the way, Marianne, you should change your mind about the way your body is,” right? Your body is what it is. Let’s just, let’s just- Work with what it is, right? You know, it, and it’s, it’s the old, you know, it can be really a lot simpler than- Yes … but that doesn’t mean it’s easy for people to connect and to feel.
Yes. Because, you know, this is a world that, you know, is not not necessarily about that. And it’s true that that’s been my… That’s not new to me. Even though this was quite a transition for me, I’ve meditated, I’ve really done things that are very, you know, feel your body centric. But I’m just doing it in a new and different way, and that’s because you, you s- I don’t know what, whether you say it or not, but You know, it’s, it’s this idea of pain, and it’s what we do when we feel discomfort and pain.
Did– Do we tense up around it and make… You know? We want it to go away so badly that we don’t really join with it almost and figure- feel it in a different way. So yeah, you were cutting up just a little bit there, but it’s the idea of the way that, that, like, we’re looking at pain or working with pain. The experience that you had with me was different than what you’ve had with other people- Yes
in terms of the interpretation of or being able to interpret whatever the sensations you were, that you were experiencing. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And you, you when you tell me to do something, it’s, there, there’s a confidence about how you go about what you’re doing that is really infectious. Mm. It’s, uh, it’s calm, but it’s very clear, and you also, um, try to, you know, help, help us to go deeper and to expand the way we are thinking about the whole thing and…
Or it could be the way we’re doing the movement. It could be about what we’re saying. There’s a, a precision about what you do that is super important- Mm … and specific to you That’s really interesting. That’s a really good point. And that precision, though, has helped you be able to tune into your being in a very specific, precise way, too.
Yes. Yeah, really good. Really, really good. Now, I think we need to also let people know how old you are, because there is such a common refrain about what it is to be of a certain age and if change is possible. So why don’t we just let everyone know how old you are? I’m 76. Or am I 76? 76, yeah. So 76. There was a shift in her kyphosis.
There was a shift in her ability to stand. There was a shift in her pain levels. So what I really want people to understand here is that I didn’t fix anything for Marian because in my mind there was actually nothing broken. Sure, there was some coordinating patterns between her brain and her tissue that were, you know, circumspect, but there was nothing broken.
So it was a matter of helping to retrain patterns by first giving her some relief, helping her recognize where she was compensating, and then when she could recognize that and recognize that these were really strategic patterns and creative patterns that she had, she had created, now she could retrain them.
And so in the process of that, it just goes to show that no matter your age, tissue can actually change. And in fact, I prefer working with people who are older because they actually, and this is gonna sound crazy, but they actually change faster than younger, younger folks. And I mean, we could go down the rabbit hole on why that might be, but that’s a very, very clear reality that it’s no longer that the older you get, the more decrepit you become.
Amen. Marian, thank you so much for sharing parts of your story and here we are to this next chapter for you of continually getting stronger and more mobile and feeling better and better and better. Thank you. Thank you, Susi.
If this was interesting to you, listening to the story that Marianne and I were sharing about her process and her recovery, and you are a yoga teacher and you wanna be able to help your students who have not just one issue going on in their body, but maybe more than one, maybe two, maybe five, and you want to find the simplicity in it all, then come and join me for the Foundations of Becoming a Movement Detective.
We begin in July. It’s 13 weeks. I would love for you to join me. You can learn more about it at functionalsynergy.com/detective.
