You already know something is off.

Your lower back has been locking up... your hips are tight and stretching doesn't make one ounce of a difference... your shoulder has that crunchiness again that you keep blaming on how you slept... and you've been moving through your days like it's just what happens when you get busy, or when you "get older."

But... what if it's your body's language, and it's trying to tell you something deeper? Something that your conscious mind can't yet see?

When pain shows up, there's often a physical explanation that needs actual care... injury, inflammation, structural strain, nerve compression, something that a practitioner needs to look at...

...but underneath that, there's usually another layer. Your body is sending you information about how you've been moving through your life. In my work, those messages tend to fall into 4 categories, and once you know them, you'll know what your body is asking you to look at.

And if you're here from Episode: 04 of the Wake Up with Jenna Podcast: The Plant Medicine Initiation - this is the post I promised you in that episode.

Before you read further: this practice is not a replacement for medical evaluation or treatment. New, severe, persistent, or worsening pain deserves appropriate medical attention. Everything here explores the emotional and nervous system layer that can exist alongside physical care, not instead of it.

Your body is communicating, and most of us learned to talk over it

I started paying attention to this while I was going through network spinal chiropractic care. At the time I was dealing with constant lower back issues and hip issues, and I kept hearing the same thing... "The Body Keeps the Score"... the body is holding onto things...

It was a lot for me to wrap my mind around back then, because I'm someone who always wanted the answers. I had to know exactly where everything came from. I wanted it spelled out, with all the dots connected and explained before I could accept that as truth.

What shifted for me was a simpler idea: that a sensation in the body could be carrying information, and that I could get curious about what it was telling me instead of just being constantly annoyed that I was experiencing it.

Then something happened in my life that made this whole idea impossible to ignore...

I've told this story in full on the podcast, so I'll keep it short here. Basically, in a guided plant medicine session, a memory surfaced that I'd repressed since I was 10 years old. I'd carried it for over 20 years without knowing I was holding onto it. And as it came up, and as I finally said to that 10-year-old version of me the things she'd needed to hear, I could feel the tension move. It traveled in a ball of energy... it started in my pelvic floor, traveled up through my chest, and out through my jaw in the biggest yawns I'd ever let out.

That same night, I stopped grinding my teeth. I'd been sleeping in a plastic mouth guard for more than 15 years... and I have not worn one since that experience back in 2022.

Within that week, the pelvic organ prolapse I'd been diagnosed with after giving birth had resolved. The same prolapse my OB had told me would require surgery once I was done having kids.

Through that experience, I learned that my jaw and my pelvic floor were connected, which is something somatic practitioners talk about constantly and also something I'd never once considered. I'd treated those 2 symptoms like they were completely unrelated... but they both released within days of each other - in totally different parts of my body - because the root of the pain underneath them was finally heard.

That's when I stopped treating physical sensation as separate from everything else.

The whole point of learning deep nervous system communication is that you build fluidity before things have to get loud. When you learn to listen to the whispers, your body doesn't have to escalate to screaming in order to get your attention.

And once you can identify which of these 4 messages your body is trying to tell you, you can work with it quickly and deeply... without having to excavate every reason it's there. You don't have to connect every dot and spend hours in ceremony or deep somatic puddles... sometimes you just have to hear what's being said.

That's what stops you from spiraling through the same patterns, replaying old scenarios, and staying stuck in cycles you've already outgrown. Instead, you get clarity, and you move.

Numbing works. That's the problem.

You've been managing your physical pain: ibuprofen... heating pads... a massage every 6 weeks that buys you a few good days... a chiropractor you see regularly... that weird stretch you do in the doorway of your kitchen without even noticing you're doing it anymore...

You've built an entire lifestyle around keeping those pain sensations calmed down enough to keep going.

And it works!

That's the problem.

Every time you successfully make pain stop, you move further away from understanding the root of why it started. The relief is real, and it's also the reason you've been managing the same lower back pain symptoms for years.

And to be clear: Take care of your body.... see the practitioners that support you.... take the supplements that help you sleep... because a body that's screaming isn't listening either. Do all of it... and at the same time, get curious about how to actually listen to the deeper messages your body is sending you.

Because when "making the pain disappear" is the entire goal, you'll get temporary relief with zero information about why it keeps coming back or why it keeps moving from your back to your shoulder to your hip... because the deeper pain is looking for an outlet, and that's the only way it knows how to communicate with you.

Most people never get past this part. They do what they need to do to silence the symptoms, stay on schedule, and repeat... forever. They're really good at staying on top of it, and they're doing whatever they can to stay ahead of their symptoms.

And to be clear - sometimes medication, rest, physical therapy, or actual medical treatment are exactly what allow your nervous system to settle enough to hear anything at all. A body that's in acute pain isn't in a listening state, so sometimes getting support is what makes these deeper layers accessible.

The point is: when your only goal is to make the sensation disappear, you'll miss the information that helps you understand why it keeps coming back.

At the root, it's much more simple than we think. There are only 4 things your body is trying to tell you...

The 4 voices of pain

1. The pain of avoiding

This one is straightforward... there's something you know you're supposed to be doing, and you're not doing it.

There's a woman on TikTok I think about constantly when we talk about the pain of avoiding. She makes these videos where she says, "Come with me to do a task I've been avoiding for 2.5 years, and see how long it actually takes me." Then she sets a timer and actually does the work. In the one I saw she was cleaning out her bathroom vanity. It took her 16 minutes to get everything out, wipe it all down, throw everything she didn't want in the trash, and put it all back.

16 minutes... top to bottom.

She'd been walking past that vanity for 2.5 years feeling disgusted by it every single day and doing nothing about it.

That's the pain of avoiding. It's never really about the "task"... it's the story you've built around the task.

What to do with it: do the thing. Take the action, get it done. And if you truly can't do it yourself, hire it out, delegate it, get the support and get it handled. Most of the time you'll find the thing itself was never the thing putting all of that weight on you... avoiding it was.

2. The pain of managing

This one shows up when you're trying to hold way too much at once.

Your plate is overflowing... you're managing your business, clients, social media content, the house, the kids, deadlines, creative ideas, and the emotional weight of all of it... and your body is basically like, "Hi, we cannot keep doing this at this pace."

Sometimes, that really is the truth. You genuinely do not have the bandwidth for everything you're asking yourself to carry.

And when that's the case, you have two options:

You either surrender into the season you're in and let something be easier, slower, later, or supported by someone else...

Or you intentionally build the capacity to hold more.

But this is nuanced... and here's where you have to be really honest with yourself. Once you start learning about capacity, it becomes very easy to use "I'm at capacity" as a more self-aware way of avoiding something you don't want to do, and it becomes a subconscious excuse.

Sometimes you aren't actually at capacity. Sometimes you're uncomfortable... sometimes you're scared... sometimes you're resisting the exact action that would move everything forward, and you're saying you're doing "nervous system work" because it helps to justify the avoidance. I lived in this cycle... the somatic puddle... for nearly 2 years.

Those are not the same thing.

And as an entrepreneur... a lot of the pressure you're trying to manage is pressure you created. You picked the deadline... you decided it had to happen now... you turned it into an emergency... and then started responding to it like you had no choice.

Sometimes that pressure creates momentum... and sometimes it's stress we create for ourselves, then build entire storylines around it so we can get off on playing the victim.

So really look...

Is there genuinely too much on your plate? Have you been creating a story around "being at capacity" so you don't have to take responsibility and actually become the next level version of you? Can you actually manage it all - or create systems that support you?

3. The pain of not making progress

This one shows up when you've outgrown a level of your life.

A business... an identity... a relationship... a version of yourself you've been holding onto... This pain tends to surface when it's time to make a change, when you saw the change coming and didn't have the energy to follow through, or when you're in denial that the change is required at all.

This is the wake up call.

It's time to let this go. It's time for this piece of the business to end... it's time for the pivot... it's time to shift identity and move into the next version of you... it's time for that relationship to shift...

You already know which one it is for you.

You knew before you finished reading that list.

4. The pain of not knowing the gift

This one is basically the pain of forgetting what the hell any of this is for.

This shows up when you've gotten caught in the 3D monotony of it all...

You're doing all the things. You're showing up, getting the work done, taking care of everyone, moving through the day... but you've become so focused on keeping everything going that you've completely disconnected from what makes any of it meaningful.

You aren't connected to what you actually want to create... you aren't letting your gifts move through you... and you may be so used to being the one who gives, handles, and holds everything that you aren't receiving much of anything either.

Sometimes the pain is asking you to remember what makes you feel alive... what you're here to give... and what you're finally ready to let yourself receive.

A note on chronic illness

These 4 voices may be present alongside chronic pain or illness, but they are not meant to explain the condition itself. Chronic conditions have their own medical reality and deserve appropriate care.

This work is simply one way to explore whether there may also be an emotional or nervous-system layer asking for your attention.

What to do when pain shows up

The first step is getting curious about which voice you're hearing.

Is this the pain of avoiding?

The pain of managing?

The pain of not making progress?

Or the pain of not knowing the gift?

You might know immediately. You might read one of them and feel your entire body react because... yep. That's the one.

But recognizing the message is only one piece of it.

You can intellectually understand exactly what your body is trying to tell you and still feel the pain sitting there. You can know you're avoiding something, know you're carrying too much, or know you've outgrown a version of your life... and still have no idea how to help your body actually move what it's holding.

That's where pain integration comes in.

Inside Uncapped Capacity, I walk you through the full somatic process I use to communicate directly with the pain, understand what it's carrying, and help the sensation begin to shift through movement, sound, visualization, and the nervous system.

The goal is to hear what your body is saying, help it process what it's holding, and then take the conscious action the message is asking for.

Where this work goes next

These 4 voices give you a place to begin, and the Pain Integration somatic work gives you a way to work with what you find.

That full experience lives inside Uncapped Capacity, along with the nervous system foundations, down-regulating out of fight or flight, up-regulating out of freeze, building your capacity to safely hold more, the full 12 Stages of Healing, and the upper-limit work that stops you from getting pulled back into the same cycles.

It's for the moments when you know something in your life is asking to change... but understanding it hasn't been enough to get your body on board.

And - if you know you want to move deeper into my world for the long term - Uncapped Capacity is included inside The Empire membership, alongside the rest of the curriculum and ongoing support for integrating this work into your actual life.

Your body has been talking this whole time.

Now you know what to listen for.

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Real transformation happens across multiple planes of your system, unfolds in phases of leadership, and progresses through stages of healing as your nervous system learns to stabilize a new identity.

If this resonated and you want to go deeper, you can explore all of my work here:

→ Work With Me

→ Free Resources

Everything I've created is designed to support identity stabilization and expansion across all five planes - spiritual, energetic, emotional, logical, and physical - so you can trust yourself to move at the pace your system is ready for.

I'm glad you're here. ❤️

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If you want a place to start getting curious about specific pain locations in the body, I recommend grabbing the book You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay. I referenced it on the podcast because it maps the body-mind connection more clearly than almost any other resource I know. If you're curious about what your physical symptoms might be trying to tell you emotionally and energetically, start there.

Her maps are specific: Lower back links to fear around money and survival, the hips link to resistance about moving forward, the right shoulder (the masculine side of the body) links to carrying what was never yours to carry.

Louise Hay tells you where to look... and the four voices help you understand what your body may be asking of you.