Pain As Portal: Learning to Speak Your Body's Language
Last night I was putting my son to bed and we were playing our usual game—the kissing monster. I give him a thousand kisses all over his body and he looooves it.
After 15 minutes, I said, “Okay babe, you’re jacked up. Let’s take a moment and I’ll give you soft, gentle kisses.”
So I’m doing that and his whole body is tense, prepared for the tickling that is (inevitably) coming.
He thinks I’m going to tickle him because that’s one of the ways that we play—I trick him. I tell him I’m not going to do it, and then (surprise!) I do it. And he loves it.
But, this time, I was serious. It’s bedtime.
Yet his body was anticipating the familiar.
So he says to me, “Well, how come I trust that you’re not going to do that, but my body is telling me that you are?”
My response? “Declan, always listen to your body.”
Your Body Cannot Lie
Listen to Louise LeBrun’s podcast with Anne Berube on “The Body is on Your Side”.
In that moment, my 5-year-old son noticed the difference between “my mind believes you, but my body doesn’t.”
Why?
Because his body’s primed for what has happened every.single.time that I have said, “I’m not going to do that,” and then I do it.
That’s a “small” example. But it’s a profound example because it was a moment for him to notice the difference between “I know something” and “my body in this moment is telling me something else.”
This is the one thing I wish my son takes as a life lesson from me: your body never, ever lies.
It cannot.
It is literally designed to process the signals that are moving through it.
One of the ways to hear what the message is is to learn how to speak the language of the body.
Which is something that no one has taught us.
We’re Taught to Ignore What Our Bodies Tell Us
In a highly intellectual culture, we are taught to “use our words” to process what we’re feeling (enter: therapy for life).
But, your body speaks in a language that is different than the language of your intellect.
Your body speaks in metaphor.
We’re not taught to live a life from metaphor. Even though a life lived from metaphor is far more powerful. It’s far more enriching. It’s far more natural to what we are as human beings.
Because we’re not what we’ve been taught we are.
We are so much more than that.
One of the ways to discover that is to begin to connect with the intelligence of our bodies. As opposed to:
Overriding the sensations and disconnecting
Analyzing to understand
Numbing to avoid the discomfort
Playing nice to not shake up the status quo
Busying ourselves to not notice
Trying to control and manage the outcome
Making our world smaller and tighter to manage
Seeking clarity with our intellect when the body is screaming
Talking about it forever (55-minute hours for the rest of your life)
Medications, meditations, vacations ...
All of it an effort to move away from the truth of the body. Because it’s uncomfortable. Like a skin that we don’t want to wear yet cannot escape.
And at the end of the day? None of these away-from strategies are going to lead to where you want it to lead.
Why?
Because your pain is seeking to deliver a message.
My Journey with Chronic Pain
I struggled with chronic pain for decades. Since I was 14, if not earlier.
My period would hurt like hell. And I’d go to the doctor and they’d tell me, “Well, your period hurts because you need to be on birth control. And also you have a thyroid problem. And also these panic attacks that are leaving you collapsed on the floor—here’s some more medication.”
And I realized I don’t want to live like this.
So I pursued a different path. I tried yoga and meditation and breath work and alternative and functional medicine and all kinds of different pathways that led me to, fortunately, WEL-Systems.
In that journey, I discovered that a lot of the stuff helped. Like yoga, for example. Of course it helps ... BUT it doesn’t leave me with an intentional process that I can engage in the moment where my body feels so foreign I am itching to escape it.
You see, my body’s aches, cramps, pains in the neck or hip, or even chronic pains ... are all here as messengers about what’s going on in my thought structure.
What’s going on in what I believe about myself and what I believe about the world.
Pain Is the Messenger
Here’s what I know about pain: it shows up loud to get your attention.
Before it actually becomes pain, your body’s been trying to get your attention in different ways. Whether that’s a nudge, whether that’s a gut feeling, whether that’s a “go here” or “don’t go there.”
Your body’s been trying to do that for a very long time.
But what happens is we don’t want what the body’s trying to say. So we come up with reasons why it couldn’t be this way, why it shouldn’t be this way, why it must be a different way.
And so we lose ourselves. We lose the connection to our truth because we don’t want to face what we believe is the inevitable outcome.
Here’s the thing: pain is not the enemy. Pain is the messenger. So no matter how hard we try to avoid it, it just keeps coming back, doesn’t it...
Start listening differently by learning how to decode the pain or the information that the pain is desperately trying to give you.
That’s how you gain clarity.
Where your symptom shows up is the place where you want to begin to explore. For that, you need to know which line of inquiry am I going to engage in to be able to get an answer.
Because if you don’t engage a line of inquiry that expands your worldview, you might insist on wanting to make the pain go away.
And here’s the thing: it’s not going to do that.
It’s not going to do that because it has a message. It has a message to give you.
Will you choose to listen?
That’s the question.
The Starting Point: Being Willing and Able
The starting point to have a healthier relationship with your body: being both willing and able to decode it’s messages.
Our process cannot help with the first (willing), but it sure can help with able.
That’s what The CODE Model™ does.
If we presuppose for a moment that the quantum sciences are right about our body being a quantum-biological processor...then we can conclude that:
pain has a message, and you have not been able to hear it
your body holds the answers and will only reveal them once you feel safe enough to ask it the right questions
your body is the ultimate source of truth and we must choose to trust it (even if we don’t understand it - yet)
The CODE Model™ and the Body
This is where the CODE model comes in.
For anybody that’s been through our Signature intensives, including Decloaking and Living Authentically, you would know that the CODE model is the coalescence of all of the models that lead you to really get to know yourself more deeply and more intimately.
And that matters because when you know yourself, then you are powerful. When you know yourself, you cannot be manipulated — especially by your own thoughts. You cannot believe the lies of your culturally conditioned mind.
How wonderful is that?
I mean, I don’t know of a better, more expansive, more meaningful, more fun, more joyful way to live.
And I want you to find out what’s possible for you.
Imagine a Life of Congruence
Imagine, just imagine for a moment, a life lived from a process of intentional staying with the truth of what’s presenting, in flow.
Meaning an intentional life staying with the intelligence that you are constantly revealing itself to you. Constantly revealing its secrets to you. Constantly living in truth.
Imagine a life where you are so congruent inside your skin that you know your truth, and no one can mess with that.
I mean, that’s a pretty powerful way to live.
This is exactly what we explore in the Pain as Portal workshop.
That’s what becomes possible when you learn to speak your body’s language.
The Pain as Portal workshop is where we begin. Where you learn how The CODE Model can help you unpack your pain in a meaningful way.
It’s where you might discover how to stay with the discomfort safely instead of fighting it.
Instead of circling the same loops, you learn how to hear what your body’s telling you in real time. You begin to learn what questions to ask yourself to unpack what the symptoms mean.
And in that you might actually notice that you’re regaining trust in what you’ve always wanted.
Which is a healthy relationship with your body.
In this workshop, you’ll:
The specific questions to ask depending on where pain shows up
How to decode the messages your symptoms are holding
How to stop resisting and start listening
Discover Quantum TLC—the process of staying with sensations instead of controlling them
Understand what becomes possible: unshakeable, congruent, truth-telling
Begin to decode what your body has been desperately trying to communicate for years
Why your pain won’t disappear until you hear what it’s saying
Your body has been trying to get your attention for a long time. Pain is one of the ways in which it communicates. Pain has a message for you.
The question is: are you ready to listen?
🎧 Listen to Related Podcast Episodes
This is a solo episode about learning to listen to your body's language—and it starts with a story about my son that makes more sense of this whole "listen to your body" exploration than what most adults can muster.
Listen to Louise LeBrun (founder of the WEL-Systems Institute) explore with Anne Berube how trusting your body leads to transformation — and why it’s often the mess, not the perfection, that becomes the portal to your truth.
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