Body & Health

Maybe it’s the afternoon coffee, the screen before bed, stress at work. Maybe.

But in my practice, this line is also said by people who have already fixed everything fixable. Sleep schedule, melatonin, blackout curtains, a breathing app, meditation, yoga, a glass of wine. Control helps. Partly. And the price is a life built around conditions and rituals.

And in the evening, exhaustion beats tension: the day has wrung you out, the body crashes. But wake up in the middle of the night, even slightly rested, and that’s it: tension fires up the word mill, and sleep is gone again.

The topics that keep you awake rotate: today health, tomorrow money, the day after that, the kids. The topics differ; the state is one. It’s not the topics that create the anxiety and tension. The head reads the body’s state and picks a matching storyline.

You can’t remove this tension by effort. And relaxation only works while you’re focused on it. The moment your attention slips, your body slips back into its old state, setting off the same chain of consequences.

You can go down the path of controlling the symptoms. Or you can find, with my hands, the chronic tension in the body that keeps sending the brain an alarm signal. And gradually release it. Anxiety over real reasons isn’t going anywhere; it’s based on something real. The background kind goes away.

The change isn’t about controlling tension. An off switch appears. The night stops splitting into two halves. The evening stops demanding a ritual. The head goes quiet on its own when the body isn’t prodding it.

The first thing to do with chronic pain is to see a doctor. If the cause is an illness, the illness is what needs treating. My work begins where doctors have found no cause and the pain remains. In that case, the cause is very often tense muscles, and that’s exactly what I work with. I can find that tension with my hands and gradually release it.

Sometimes this can be done very easily, literally in a few sessions. Results like these have a real wow factor, but the credit goes not to me but to the nature of the tensions. They were localized, loosely integrated into the body’s overall pattern; their emotional and psychological causes stayed in the past and were worked through, so nothing keeps them in place. Remove them, and they’re gone.

But sometimes the emotional reaction is still alive. Resentment, anger, fear, shame, sadness. And sometimes intense joy creates its own muscle tension too. Then the emotional cause and the bodily reaction form a self-supporting system: remove one, and the other puts it back. After talk therapy, once the emotional cause has been worked through and understood, the pain soon returns. The same thing happens the other way around: the muscle tension is released, but the emotions are still alive. Either way, they have to be removed together. And that takes longer, because you have to go step by step.

Sometimes a muscle block formed a long time ago. And it’s deeply integrated: the body adapted and built a system of counterweights that balance it out, letting you live with chronic tension in rough equilibrium. Counterweights are muscle blocks too, and they need to be removed as well. Also together: if you remove the main block but leave the counterweights, the balance breaks. The body will look for the simplest way to restore it, and the simplest way turns out to be putting the familiar tension back where it was.

Some of these counterweights are sneaky. If they resemble the body’s natural response to emotions, the mind reads them as emotions that didn’t just stay in the past but never existed at all. And the person lives with background anxiety or sadness that has no cause and never had one: the body created it.

But in any case, if the work is done in the right order, without creating new imbalances, and the tensions that balance each other are removed at the same time, they don’t come back.