You don't know how good you could feel in your body until you feel good in your body

In praise of felt experience

There are some things in the body that feel innately good (orgasms!) or innately bad (pain): these things need no comparisons or qualifiers, they are clear and simple enough in our bodies as they are.

Then there’s the nuance, the places we can go in and with our bodies that open up a new field of felt experience and changes the baseline of what “good” feels like. Feelings are subjective, so what one person feels is good or bad will be different to another. The fascinating area of pain research confirms this - pain sometimes comes from damage to tissues, but is often a perception of threat from the body rather than something physiological. Pain is in the brain, which doesn’t mean that it isn’t real or easy to solve, but its causes are sometimes surprising.

A period of mental health struggles last year made me feel like I was inhabiting someone else’s body. Everything hurt, from ongoing pain in my back, my hips and my pelvis to more acute pain in certain areas of my body that my doctor couldn’t easily find a cause for. It didn’t surprise me that my muscles were aching when I felt like I was continuously bracing for catastrophe, but I did feel amazed by the way the body responds to an ongoing sense of danger. A litany of major and minor symptoms stacked up and responded to each other, a wave building on a wave.