When your body is a shifting landscape of chronic health, “feeling at home in your body” can feel like a joke spoken by someone who has never had to renegotiate with their pain levels or nervous system before getting out of bed. Chronic pain has a way of keeping your nervous system in a defensive and hyper vigilant loop, whereas “home” implies comfort and stability. It’s four walls and a roof offering safety. But what if we stopped treating home as a familiar and predictable structure, and instead simply approach it as something we keep returning to?
My approach to healing isn’t born from conceptual theory, but from lived necessity as someone navigating multiple disabilities and chronic pain. I know what it’s like to live in a body that has carried too much. Hypervigilance scanning for easily triggered symptoms, pushing through bedridden months as a mother, and fighting to survive became my baseline. My body needed care, but the support available often came with high price tags, lacked trauma informed care, and was rooted in approaches that ignored social realities and minimized my lived experience. I was stuck in a revolving door, navigating countless spaces that promised care but reinforced harm. So I set out to reclaim authority over my healing and began to root in the intimacy of imperfectly learning my way back to myself by listening to my body with radical honesty.
I had to unlearn messages that told me that care only comes from hierarchical authority, that my body was broken, my identity too much, and my intuition untrustworthy. My goal shifted from healing my illnesses, to reclaiming what ongoing medical harm and complex health tried to dim- my voice, my presence, my belonging, and my embodiment. I began to trust that my body is my greatest teacher and care provider. It was a journey of exploring the landscape of just how resilient and wise our bodies can be and learning to feel my experience rather than endure it. Reclaiming my embodied presence became inseparable from healing.
Through this process, I found several practices that helped. Distinctly different from the wellness industry’s talk of “coming home to a body” and feeling the joy of being alive, these are practices of coming home to a body you might not be comfortable in, or are furious with, or are still trying to understand. It’s a subtle shift in embodied practices that are nuanced and accessible and don’t erase difficult realties and ongoing symptoms.
Embodied Practices for Those Navigating Chronic Pain:
Allowing yourself to grieve your body without judgement, because grief is part of embodiment.
Creating “comfort zones’ in your home: places to settle in and rest without having to modify your environment. Comfortable furniture, anything needed to create the right temperature and lighting. A place where you don’t need to reduce your psychical needs.
Waking up and connecting with your feet on the floor to ground before you stand, even if the body you’re stepping into isn’t the one you were expecting.
Coregulation: tapping into the breath and presence of someone safe, when your body isn’t.
Seeking out touch that isn’t medical-someone to hold your hand, offer a hug or a place to rest your head. Or a sustained self embrace.
During overwhelming symptoms, find a place in your body that feels unimpacted or neutral and anchor in this place of your body for a bit.
Name what you feel without the story of what it means. Ex. “My lower back has a burning pain,” rather than “my back is failing me again.”
Practice something simple that offers benefits- humming, slow breathing, a hand on your chest for 30 seconds, a weighted blanket and just allow your health to be what it is without trying to fix it.
Limit the constant feedback loop of pain by setting a time to assess, rather than living in constant surveillance.
Connect with people that don’t require you perform wellness, so you can truly be in your body as it is that day, without masking.
Have a quick go-to list of micro movements that don’t result in fallout- an ankle roll, flexing and relaxing your fingers, gently nodding your head yes and no, etc.
Accommodate without guilt -Let your body rest, and adjust your schedule and to-dos as needed, knowing it can have more value than pushing beyond your limits.
Slowly scan your environment when in physical overwhelm and let your eyes rest on a window looking outdoors or a comforting object in your house and ground in your surroundings, rather than the body itself.
Place a hand on a painful part of your body and name the pain simply- “I see my painful hand,” then transition to an area that is working for you and thank it. Ex “thank you for breathing for me,” with hand on lungs. Going back and forth between bodily pain and your body as it shows up for you.
Borrow what speaks to you, let go of what doesn’t. Shape your own practice of what returning to a body in pain sustainably looks like for you. You are not a predictable structure, but the one who keeps coming back. Even when it hurts.
What resonates for you, or what’s on your own embodied practice list?
