I know that not everyone likes to read stories but if you do... For real life examples on how the ‘same’ pain has different patterns for each of us Example #1 I had a student (we’ll call her Judy). Judy came to me with some serious hip pain…the kind of pain that had been going on for decades. In our second session we found the movement pattern that had been causing her hip to be so ‘cranky’ (as she called it). We were able to find a movement that calmed her cranky hip in that same session. And the decades of pain started to unravel. And anytime her hip started to be cranky all she had to do was that movement to calm it. Eventually Judy became aware of how often she did that movement that caused pain and we worked together to find supportive ways that her body liked to dissolve that pain. But it wasn’t always that way…. When she first approached me about doing a session, I let her know that when someone starts with this work, I recommend a series of 8 privates over 4 months, and that it would require her to do a few minutes of movement homework daily to increase her awareness of her body. Judy decided that this was too much of a commitment for her at the time. A year later Judy came back to me, still in pain, and decided to book a program. Judy’s hip pain pattern was decades of having an over used outside of the hip muscle and leg rotation (an old injury compensation), her hip pain really calmed down fast by learning to use her inner thighs properly. Example #2: Rose had hip pain for years, and was REALLY diligent at doing all the homework she was given by her massage and chiropractors. She was and is perhaps, the most dedicated to her homework I have ever seen. The homework that her practitioners gave her was good, and useful…except there were things that they didn’t see when they gave her the homework. Rose had a tendency to overdo stuff - if the instructions were to do it 5 times, she would do it 20, if she was to do something 4 times a week, she’d do it twice a day - regardless of what her body was telling her. With Rose it took a little longer but eventually she realized that she had a habit of forcing her body to do things beyond when they were good for her - even if they were good for her in smaller amounts. We also noticed that she had a tendency to tuck her pelvis with everything she was doing. So once she noticed herself forcing herself, she would bring in some breath, and slow down, did less…she eventually was able to decrease her need to tuck her pelvis (a compensation from blasting through and overdoing) and her hip started to ease up. Judy and Rose both had hip pain - they both circled the exact same spot on the intake form…the hip pain was the result of very different things.