{"id":4713,"date":"2014-11-14T09:15:20","date_gmt":"2014-11-14T14:15:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/?p=4713"},"modified":"2014-11-14T09:15:20","modified_gmt":"2014-11-14T14:15:20","slug":"wawadia-update-19-thomas-myers-misdefines-pain-but-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wawadia-update-19-thomas-myers-misdefines-pain-but-why\/","title":{"rendered":"WAWADIA Update #19: Thomas Myers Misdefines Pain. But Why?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: right;\"><em>Please consider supporting this <a href=\"https:\/\/www.indiegogo.com\/projects\/what-are-we-actually-doing-in-asana\/x\/1850453\">IGG campaign<\/a> to fund the two years it will take to finish the book that will emerge from this research.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>____<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"dropcap size-1\" >T<\/span>\nhe ideas and trainings of Thomas Myers (of <em>Anatomy Trains <\/em>fame) have been popular amongst the yoga therapy professional class for over a decade. What Myers says carries weight in\u00a0hundreds of yoga teacher training programmes throughout the world. In many\u00a0ways, his impact is positive. In general terms, it has expanded the language of embodied mindfulness for many practitioners by opening a horizon of deeper anatomical consideration. Specifically, it has enriched the lay understanding of tissue connectivity, and of how loading patterns track systemically through living structures.<\/p>\n<p>Looking carefully, we might say that\u00a0Myers\u2019 work is resonant in the yoga world\u00a0because he has built his ideas in true modern-yogic fashion: charismatically weaving\u00a0an inextricable fascia of intuition, metaphysics, and claims from complementary and alternative medicine that appear\u00a0to intersect with the hard data more often than they actually do.<\/p>\n<p>When it comes to his ideas about pain, for example, Myers\u2019 followers may not be any better off if they\u2019d gone to neuro-anatomy school in the 17<sup>th<\/sup> century.\u00a0On November 4<sup>th<\/sup>, he released a sun-kissed and breezy video called \u201cWhy does Massage Hurt?\u201d<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/XG1A-Ct69ug?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Amongst many other things, Myers says that:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>pain is \u201ca sensation accompanied by the motor intention to withdraw\u201d,<\/li>\n<li>pain consists of three types: \u201cpain that enters the body\u201d, \u201cpain stored in the body\u201d, and \u201cpain leaving the body\u201d. Although he says at (4:30) that he doesn&#8217;t share the no-pain-no-gain ethos of many of his fellow Rolfers, Myers implies that the &#8220;leaving&#8221;\u00a0kind of pain might actually be therapeutic, because &#8220;stored pain&#8221; must be felt as it&#8217;s &#8220;coming out&#8221; (6:45)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>The claims are poetic, and might be inspiring for many. But they also avoid or ignore\u00a0the last fifty years of neuroscience. Additionally, they might actually be dangerous in a therapeutic context, if they create the expectation between yoga teachers and students, or bodyworkers and clients, that pain is an inevitable part of the healing or \u201creleasing\u201d process, and should be provoked and\/or tolerated to prove that the therapy is working. As <a title=\"WAWADIA | What Are We Actually Doing in Asana?\" href=\"http:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/multimedia\/wawadia\/\">this\u00a0project so far<\/a> is showing, this sacrificial description of pain is common in yoga discourse.<\/p>\n<p>Nick Ng debates each one of Myers&#8217; pain\u00a0claims in <a href=\"http:\/\/tellusnewsdigest.com\/anatomy-trains-stirs-painful-controversy\/\">this thorough article<\/a> of November 10<sup>th<\/sup>. Joseph Brence makes some\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/forwardthinkingpt.com\/2014\/11\/11\/why-does-_________-hurt\/\">additional refutations<\/a>. I encourage you to follow both links, but I\u2019ll also summarize the critique here, as best I can (not being a pain researcher):<\/p>\n<p><strong>Pain does <em>not<\/em> necessarily involve the \u201cmotor intention to withdraw\u201d.<\/strong> Several types of pain \u2013 including chronic pain, or the excruciating cramp of a phantom limb \u2013 do not provoke any such intention. Additionally, nociception \u2013 \u201cthe neural process of encoding noxious stimuli\u201d, according to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.iasp-pain.org\/Taxonomy?navItemNumber=576\">International Association for the Study of Pain<\/a> \u2013 may not register as pain at all, as in the example of the quick, pre-pain withdrawal of one\u2019s hand from a hot surface. If pain seems to saturate the burned tissues over time, it does so <em>after<\/em> the reflex\u00a0to withdraw has activated and completed the protective movement. Most mystifyingly, pain can also emerge in the complete absence of a noxious stimulus, or tissue damage.<\/p>\n<p><strong>There is no \u201cpain from outside the body\u201d.<\/strong> This is Myers\u2019 most Cartesian anachronism. Simply refuted: there is no &#8220;pain&#8221; but that the coordination of feeling and naming makes it so.<\/p>\n<p>Pain is the collaborative product of tissue stimulus, nociception, cognitive awareness, and numerous psychosocial factors. It is a neurological and then cognitive meaning that evolves in a person\u00a0responding to stress. The tissue stimulus may not even be noxious, as in the case of the feather-stroke that causes searing pain for those who suffer from a particular type of neuropathy.<\/p>\n<p>The full background for this non-mechanistic understanding of pain can be gleaned from the work of Ronald Melzack\u2019s \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.jdentaled.org\/content\/65\/12\/1378.long\">neuromatrix theory<\/a>\u201d. The upshot is: pain does not \u201center\u201d the body. Pain is a relationship between sense and meaning. Like every relationship, it is co-created by its constituents in the moment.\u00a0To his credit, Myers does elaborate on pain as an interpretational process, which makes his language of &#8220;entering&#8221; an odd choice.<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u201cPain stored in the body\u201d might be a misunderstanding of <em>adaptation<\/em>.<\/strong> In the video, Myers supports a popular claim: that the effects of injury, trauma, or emotional stress constitute a kind of \u201clatent\u201d pain. He suggests that latent pain accumulates silently, manifesting through symptoms that are actually pain itself, though disguised: lack of vitality, distorted posture, or distorted movement. He then goes on to claim (admitting to going out on a limb\u00a0from 7:15)\u00a0\u00a0that latent pain not only builds through an individual\u2019s gathered\u00a0experience, but through the social and historical fascia within which the individual is bound.<\/p>\n<p>While this last bit is supremely evocative, and could definitely shed insight into the physiological effects of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.naho.ca\/documents\/journal\/jah05_03\/05_03_01_Intergenerational.pdf\">intergenerational trauma<\/a>, the larger idea seems to be\u00a0built on a confusion of terms. Ng\u2019s informant Jason Erickson says Myers is \u201cmisinterpreting changes in posture and movement as pain instead of as <em>non-painful co-occurring symptoms.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The problem with identifying postural and kinetic adaptations to stress as signs of stored pain is that it may encourage practitioners to believe that correcting those adaptations will\u00a0force latent pain out. The likelier reality is that the adaptations are <em>preventing<\/em> the experience of pain. That\u2019s why they exist. If correcting them is painful (as is likely), the practitioner might believe they\u2019re doing a good job, instead of ignorantly violating the Hippocratic Oath. This leads to the last problem:<\/p>\n<p><strong>There is no \u201cpain leaving the body.\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0If it\u2019s not &#8220;stored&#8221;, it\u2019s not leaving. This is more than semantics. Through Myers\u2019 suggestion that massage or other forms of tissue manipulation \u201crelease\u201d embedded pain, instead of more likely\u00a0<em>causing<\/em> it, the \u201creleasing therapist\u201d becomes more aligned with an exorcist than a health care provider. In this model, both the exorcist and the possessed client are taught that the stored pain will cause as much damage going out as it caused going in. Pain is seen as the angry demon of one\u2019s history \u2013 sleeping in repression, a terror when awoken.<\/p>\n<p>The idea of \u201cpain leaving\u201d shares an affinity with the literature and practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, in which the past emotional wounds of the client are actively evoked and perhaps recreated in a transference relationship with the therapist, so that they may be observed transparently and navigated differently. Setting aside the fact that this seems to work for some and not for many others, are all the bodyworkers who use Myers\u2019 ideas also qualified as mental health care workers?<\/p>\n<p>At about 7:00\u00a0in the video, Myers acknowledges that the release of stored pain can be &#8220;really disturbing&#8221; and &#8220;really emotional&#8221; for the client, but that &#8220;it&#8217;s really important that they go through it.&#8221; It would be ironic if this idea provided cover\u00a0for the possibility that the therapist is simply hurting the client in the present moment, instead of doing what they think they&#8217;re doing, which is provoking the release of an invisible hurt.<\/p>\n<p>We should\u00a0consider that\u00a0highlighting the psychic side of the therapeutic equation\u00a0can obscure a lack of material\u00a0evidence.\u00a0We can also reflect upon the fact that this approach is\u00a0conveniently familiar to the largely science-sceptical (or illiterate) subcultures of yoga and bodywork.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>_____<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"dropcap size-1\" >I<\/span>\n\u00a0don\u2019t know enough about the work of Myers to know how much he might be short-handing his themes for a lay audience here. Nor do I know whether he modulates these views elsewhere. The video doesn\u2019t have an academic feel to it: he might be speaking only to a specialized audience he\u2019s confident won\u2019t take these misdirections to heart.<\/p>\n<p>But let\u2019s say he does actually believe in this three-part model of pain. Where might this belief be coming from, and why is it more important to him than decades of established neuroscience?<\/p>\n<p>To speak of pain that \u201cgoes into\u201d and \u201cleaves the body\u201d resonates not only with the psychotherapeutic literature that saturates our entire self-help zeitgeist, but with a very old metaphysics from which we can\u2019t seem to release ourselves, no matter how firm our philosophical foam-rollers are. It\u2019s a belief system that may even be more attractive to Myers\u2019 followers than his specific claims about tissue health.<\/p>\n<p>What does this metaphysics say? It says that the body is a vessel, built to <em>contain<\/em> the life-force, its tensions, and its distortions. (\u201cContain\u201d being the operative term here.) It says that experience enters into the passive flesh, and can stay as long as it likes, until it is pulled back out of the flesh of those\u00a0who are blessed to encounter magically attuned therapists. Pain as an experience becomes objectified and seen as a thing that has invaded.<\/p>\n<p>In Myers\u2019 model, pain is like the soul, but in shadow form. This anti-soul of pain enters the body, wreaks its havoc on the temporary home it holds in contempt, and then departs to find another home.<\/p>\n<p>It is a dualistic view, to the core. This a paradox for someone like Myers, and everyone in body-mind work who tries to bind embodied realities to psychic realities. (\u201cBody-mind\u201d as a moniker only deepens the confusion.)<\/p>\n<p>These beliefs are as old as time, and they aren\u2019t going anywhere soon. The mechanistic pain theory of Descartes, and the old spirit-flesh split upon which it stands, is not only embedded in the very structure of the social and medical sciences, as well as the grammar of most human languages, but it also resonates too closely with lived experience for us to ever cast it out completely. The work of Drew Leder in <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.ca\/The-Absent-Body-Drew-Leder\/dp\/0226470008\">The Absent Body<\/a><\/em> is the best presentation I know of the conundrum of dualism in sensual experience, in which the flesh is felt to contain things, rather than express them.<\/p>\n<p>In Leder, the spirit-flesh split is built upon the simple fact that our internal bodies are, in the end, unknown to us. Despite every yogic aspiration we may have, our interoceptive capacity has a hard limit. Where our mindfulness of the internal body ends, our dreams of the soul \u2013 along with our intuitive healing theories \u2013 begin.<\/p>\n<p>The metaphysics of Myers may compel his students to seek ever deeper for embodied meaning, and to that extent they may have deep value. But they also limit the metaphors that illuminate that search. The nondual body, in which conscious life emerges from material life only to try to refashion it, is not a dumb vessel, or an empty book for experience or God to write in.\u00a0The nondual body, which Myers and everyone else wants to see, treat, and love, is something his pain theory would miss, something so strange it\u2019s almost inexpressible.<\/p>\n<p>Bear with me:<\/p>\n<p>The non-dual body doesn\u2019t contain anything that\u2019s not it. Its experience or movement doesn\u2019t \u201center in\u201d, to animate this slab of meat. Its movement is inseparable from the meat, until the meat stops moving, like a ball stops rolling. Similarly: consciousness is an epiphenomenon of neural activity. Thought doesn\u2019t \u201center\u201d the brain, but is secreted by it, like a juice the body itself &#8212; and bodies around it &#8212; will\u00a0\u201cdrink\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>The memory of the non-dual body is not \u201cstored\u201d, as in a book. If experience wrote upon you, it wrote like a stylus on a wax tablet, and\u00a0continual reading warms and reshapes that wax.<\/p>\n<p>More than a book, the non-dual body is the reader of experience. It is experience, however, that trains the reading process. If we <em>were<\/em> to say that the non-dual body is like a book, it would be more like a collectively-written play, unfolding in real time, in which each character has habitual lines and reactions, but none of them knows where the plot will lead.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>_____<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"dropcap size-1\" >I<\/span>\n&#8216;ll finish with a hard left turn.<\/p>\n<p>The body of our sciences and humanities\u00a0is not a collection of separable parts. It is, as Myers describes the human body, a single fabric, woven of many threads. For generations we have been aware of the independent action of each muscle: we know the language of religion when we hear it, or physics, or history, or sociology, or geometry, or chemistry, or ethics, or politics. But now, thanks to the dissections of deconstruction, we are slowly becoming aware of the hidden glue.<\/p>\n<p>The conceptual split between flesh and spirit is the sticky fascia that knits our dreams together and makes them move as a fractured whole. Like bodily fascia, this metafacsia is a non-living detritus, the hardened junk of metabolizing uncertainty and fear. It gathers in the spaces of not-knowing, increases with age, and slowly chokes out the imagination.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s time to roll that shit out. Gently would be best. There\u2019s probably no point in causing more pain.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>_____<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.indiegogo.com\/project\/what-are-we-actually-doing-in-asana\/embedded\/1850453\" width=\"222px\" height=\"445px\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To speak of pain that \u201cgoes into\u201d and \u201cleaves the body\u201d resonates not only with the psychotherapeutic literature that saturates our entire self-help zeitgeist, but with a very old metaphysics from which we can\u2019t seem to release ourselves, no matter how firm our philosophical foam-rollers are. It\u2019s a belief system that may even be more attractive to Myers\u2019 followers than his specific claims about tissue health.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4715,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"slim_seo":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,23,24,1,27,19,28],"tags":[392,393,394,395,287,396,397,398],"class_list":["post-4713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-blog","category-featured","category-uncategorized","category-wawadia","category-yoga","category-yoga-philosophy","tag-anatomy-trains","tag-cartesian-splitting","tag-chronic-pain","tag-neuromatrix-theory","tag-pain","tag-phantom-limb-pain","tag-ronald-melzack","tag-thomas-myers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4713\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}