In the context of active body listening and self-help, there are three questions that need to be answered to start with resolving health issues : When did it start? What has changed? and What can I change?
When you suddenly and unexpectedly begin to experience tension or pain, or perhaps an elevated body temperature, itch, diarrhea, or any other bodily discomfort, the first question that you need to ask yourself is when it started.
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That sounds easy, but the moment you become fully aware of an affliction is often not the moment it really began. The reason for this is that we usually aren’t consciously aware of the first signs, or don’t pay attention to them.
In fact, it’s typically because of poor body listening and poor body testing that we “didn’t see it coming.” I could also say it differently: due to a lack of body attunement, we have ignored or weren’t aware of the first signs.
Yet, it’s often important to know when complaints started to develop, because that can help you find their cause. The cause is most likely due to a change in circumstances, which leads to the next question you’ll need to ask: What has changed?
It also follows that to be able to accurately know when a health complaint began or started developing, you typically first need to have cultivated conscious body listening.
Nevertheless, even without having attained full body attunement, the three questions — When did it start? What has changed? and What can I change? — can help you out.
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Now, in some cases, finding a specific starting point in the past is not so important. What I mean is that a bodily complaint may show up at the moment you engage in a particular action, while being directly related to that action. For instance, every time you use the computer mouse you feel pain in your wrist.
Sure, using the computer mouse started somewhere in the past, but it’s the gradually increasing overuse of your wrist that causes you pain every time you use the mouse now. It’s relevant that excessive repetitive use of the computer mouse is the cause, but it’s not so important when that started because you can clearly make the connection between overuse and pain. The solution is also clear: stop doing that, find an alternative, or change the way you use your mouse.
In other occasions, a specific starting point of a bodily complaint is highly relevant because you might not be able to relate it directly to a particular bodily action or habit.
Let me give you an example. I had a client who complained about recurring pains in her right ankle. As far as she knew, she had this issue for years, and neither she nor any healthcare provider could resolve it. It came and went.
But, while I was massaging her left ankle, she suddenly remembered that she had a severe left ankle sprain during a basketball play more than twenty years ago in high school; massaging this ankle triggered the memory.
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She remembered that her left ankle took months to heal, but in the meantime, she started to lean more on her right ankle (while standing and walking) to avoid pain of the sprained left ankle and give it much needed rest, which is a typical case of body compensation.
Yet, apparently, even after the left ankle healed, she kept the habit of using her right ankle (slightly) more than the left ankle, which gradually led to overuse of the right ankle, and finally — pain.
So, the obvious solution here was that she should start using her left ankle more, thus giving much needed relaxation and rest to her right ankle. That is, she needed to become balanced again.
As you can see in the example above, it sometimes needs the skill of a Sherlock Homes to find out when a complaint started and what changed for you in that time, and how that relates to a current health issue.
At any rate, finding the point in time when a complaint began might be either difficult or easy to pinpoint, and sometimes it’s important to know when it began (in order to find out what has changed in your circumstances) and sometimes not (when a complaint is obviously related to a particular bodily activity). Your skill in knowing when it’s important or not will develop over time as you advance in body listening, so don’t worry about this.
