The way I see it, pain and pleasure are opposite sides of the same coin. They’re both urgings, guiding you to or away from something. There’s an Israeli dance choreographer named Ohad Naharin featured on the Netflix special Move who created a particular form of dance he calls Gaga. Something I love about is is the simplicity of it, the viscerally felt sense of the movement, the movement as a metaphor. One of the things he tells his dancers is “to move towards pleasure, away from pain.” Not in a hedonistic sense, but in a practical sense. 

I experienced a taste of what he helps people tap into through is Gaga technique when I went to a Feldenkrais practitioner for knee pain that left me crippled for over a year in my early 30’s. The practitioner helped me to tune into my body more deeply than the typical unconscious way I was moving. I tended towards pushing myself with a head down, miltant approach, and she helped me listen from the bottom up to what my body’s actual experience was while I was moving. 

What I learned from that experience of not being able to walk for so long with the knee pain and then seeing the Feldenkrais practitioner was that trying to increase the steps I was taking (as I had been through physical therapy) was forcing the knee in the wrong way. Instead what I really needed to move out of pain was finding the right movement, the right rhythm and pace through listening inwardly, and feeling the easiest most efficient movement for the knee. Only THEN could I go farther because it was working with my knee and not against it. It also used less energy. She taught me all kinds of tricks like scaling down both my knee’s ability and letting my left knee (the stronger one) take its lead from my right. Suffice it to say, it felt like “movement as metaphor” for my life at that time, and it was absolutely transformational. By the way, I am currently stronger than I have been in most periods of my life now and pain-free in both my knees :)

I think so much pain and suffering (both physical and at a deeper soul level) could be avoided by following this simple principle - just having the presence to tune into your body at a physical sense can often guide you straight into the heart of what you need to know. And whether the message shows up through pain and pleasure, it’s really all the same energy, and the work is to first listen and then actually follow through on what your inner wisdom is telling you. Sometimes it can be really simple, like Naharin tells his dancers when they are working through a physical limitation or pain, “move towards pleasure, away from pain.” This is why being in pain can be like a good teacher, if you consciously choose to use it to grow and learn.