Four Weeks, One Pain, and What My Body Was Really Trying to Say

For about a month, I had a pain in my right side — breast, ribs, that general area. Not sharp. Not alarming. But persistent. Present. The kind of thing your body keeps tapping you on the shoulder about.

I know enough about the body to know it's worth listening to. So I did what I do: I brought it into my Focusing sessions.

Once a week for four weeks, I sat with it. I noticed it. I got curious about it. I turned it into images and metaphors — the way Focusing teaches you to do — and I let it speak in whatever language it wanted to use. Things shifted in each session. There were moments of softening, moments of recognition, moments where something moved.

And yet the pain stayed. Sometimes it intensified.

The old version of me would have panicked by week two. Would have decided something was deeply wrong. Would have catastrophized, googled, spiraled. Part of my mind did go there — I won't pretend it didn't. But I didn't fall into it. I stayed above it, somehow. My nervous system, I noticed, was more regulated than it would have been in the past. I could be curious about the pain rather than afraid of it.

After the fourth session — guided by a Focusing partner — I felt prompted to write. Not to journal, not to process. Just to write and let whatever came, come. A few pages poured out. Memories I didn't know were still living anywhere inside me. I didn't try to make them mean anything. I didn't edit or analyze. I just let them be seen.

I could have sworn the pain was leaving as I wrote. But I didn't want to be overly optimistic. So I just kept watching. Kept noticing.

The pain resolved. Completely. After four weeks, it was simply gone.

What I took from those four weeks:

It's not always a one-and-done. Healing isn't always a single session with a single modality that produces a single breakthrough. Sometimes it's four weeks of sitting with something, getting a little closer each time. The body has its own timeline. Our job is to stay curious rather than impatient.

The nervous system is the container for everything else. Over those four weeks, something deeper was happening alongside the exploration of the pain itself: my nervous system was learning, slowly and incrementally, that it was safe to be with this. Safe to feel it without fleeing. And when the nervous system finally felt safe enough — the body let it go.

Sometimes the body just needs to be heard. Those pages I wrote at the end weren't therapy or analysis. They were witnessing. The memories that surfaced didn't need to be fixed or reframed or processed further. They needed expression. They needed someone — even just me, on a page, in private — to say: I see you. I hear you. You can rest now.

This is the work. Not the quick fix. The patient, curious, compassionate turning toward.

Is there something in your body right now that's been trying to get your attention? Not an emergency — just a quiet, persistent knock?

If you've been carrying something your body keeps returning to, this is exactly what I do in 1:1 work. I'd love to sit with you in it.