Pain is a Smoke Alarm, Not the Fire

Pain is a Smoke Alarm, Not the Fire

Where it hurts is often just where the story surfaces, not where it begins.

How often do you find yourself holding a spot that hurts, trying to name the exact muscle or tendon that’s to blame? I see it all the time in my private sessions and classes.

“I think it’s my psoas.”

“My doctor says it’s the SI joint.”

“My physio says it’s the piriformis.”

Everyone has a theory — and yet, no one’s quite sure.

Even if we could zoom in with perfect imaging and see the exact fibers that ache, that still might not reveal the recipe for healing. The pain may not be the problem. It may just be the alarm sounding off.

I’ve seen it again and again — in clients and in myself. For example, when I lie down, my left pelvis aches. But when I roll on a lacrosse ball between my left shoulder blade and my thoracic spine, my hip releases. When I learn to move my right lowest ribs more independently — up and down — my pelvis releases again, and my posture recenters.

That’s not coincidence. That’s the hidden network of cause and effect inside the body — the tensegrity web of how we hold and move ourselves.

If someone had told me what to feel, I would have missed it. The magic happens when we notice for ourselves. When curiosity replaces diagnosis.

Doing yoga or receiving bodywork can both feel wonderful — but the deeper shift happens only when you begin to sense from the inside. This is interoception — the felt awareness that allows new patterns to form, and old compensations to dissolve.

I get it — “noticing” doesn’t sound like much. It doesn’t sparkle with action. It’s not a quick fix. But in truth, undoing is real work. We can’t “think” or “do” our way into balance; we have to notice our way there.

So I start with movement — or sometimes, stillness. We play with what moves and what stops moving. We trace the echoes back to the source. That’s when the story of the pain begins to unravel — and healing can finally catch fire in the right place.

Lyndsay Savage Lamb

Spontaneous CORE