Fascia, your body's connective tissue network, serves as peripheral nervous system super highway.

There are six times as many sensory neurons loaded in fascial network as in any other tissue of the body, except for your skin. Much of what you feel physically is relayed by the well functioning nerve endings laced through the scaffolding of the fascia.

The nerves, like any other tissue, depend on proper motion, nutrition, and balanced fluid environment in order to signal correctly.

When pain persists, both peripheral and central nervous system undergo significant change.

Pain spells less movement. Less movement leads to limitation and dehydration of fascia, which, in turn,  leads to compression and dehydration of peripheral nerve endings - so they are not able to communicate sensations correctly or clearly.

Peripheral nerve endings also undergo another significant change: nerves that once sensed motion, position, temperature or touch lose their capacity to do so. Instead, they become nociceptors, which are signalers of pain. This is why many of chronic pain folk become super sensitive to cold, touch, and even clothing tags.

Another side of this change is that your brain can no longer sense the location of your body parts in space - your nervous system is so busy sensing pain, that it no longer has the capacity for proprioception (body sense). The more pain you have, the less coordinated and more prone to injury you are. Converse is also true: the more body aware you are, the more you are able to turn your pain down - it is like flipping the sensory nerve communication switch, so that pain sensors cannot dominate your brain any longer.

This is part of the reason why we spent a lot of class time on body mapping (the other piece of it is that body mapping rewires the brain itself - if I get going on this topic, the e-mail might be 20 pages long!).

I have attached a 10-point relaxation practice - something that we use in regular classes to improve proprioception and body sense.

Persistent pain changes the way we breathe.

We hold our breath when we move or getting ready to move. More often than not,  we hold our exhale.

With time, this pattern of holding or uneven breathing becomes ingrained - we simply no longer aware of how we breathe.

Unfortunately breath holding and uneven breath patterns signal our brain and nervous system that our physical body is in distress. Nervous system responds by flipping the adrenaline switch and sending our body into fight / flight mode - all because of uneven, shallow breathing. Fight / flight mode creates more shallow breathing, and also changes our biochemistry, making the peripheral system nerve endings (read above) so much more sensitive. In other words - poor breathing habits perpetuate pain.

In class, our main focus was on developing healthier breathing patterns, as well as establishing breath-movement connection. Here is why this is important:  

Here is a link to the guideline for a fundamental practice that we've used in yesterday's class, and below is an image that compares upper/ chest and lower/diaphragmatic body breathing.