§ DOES THIS RESONATE?
Why does pain keep coming back?
I’m guessing this isn’t the first time you’ve sought help for your pain. Most therapeutic care treats the symptom — the quick fix — but leaves the pattern behind. Most care is applied to your body by an expert, without you understanding what they’re doing or how it works.
Those therapies and treatments give you relief. But the specialists can’t follow you around in your day-to-day life, ready to make adjustments for you when something suddenly gets tweaked.
So pain returns.
Mujō takes the opposite approach. First, I teach you how to be your own pain expert. Everything we do is guided by your awareness of how you feel.
Second, you’ll develop skills and practices you can use whenever you notice signals of on-coming pain—so you can defuse it before it blows up.
That’s how you stop reliving the same injury story.
§ HOW MUJO IS DIFFERENT
Mujō means “impermanence.”
Everything I do with clients begins by embracing impermanence and adapting to change.
Pain is impermanent. It too can shift and change.
If you do nothing about your pain, entropy (chaos) takes over and disorder in your body spreads. Pain in one area leads to pain elsewhere as your body tries to solve how to move without triggering the original source.
Instead, you might accept that pain can also change in the opposite direction: it can go away.
If you’ve gone to other pain and movement experts—physiotherapists, massage therapists, exercise physiologists, shiatsu therapists, acupuncturists, osteopaths, etc.—they’ve likely helped give you pain relief for some period. That’s fantastic. That means your pain can go away.
What makes the therapeutic yoga approach different from those modalities is we treat the client as the expert. You listen to your body, then we listen to you. Ours is a collaborative relationship with both sides holding half the solution.What makes me different from other yoga therapists is that I treat each client as a unique being adapting in unique ways. I believe in small incremental wins that prove how long-term pain can respond to effective noticing and retraining.
Nothing is inevitable except change.
Hi, I’m Margaux
I first tried yoga because I wanted an exercise to replace rowing, which itself replaced volleyball, which replaced gymnastics. While yoga gave me the movement work I craved, it also came with unintended but beneficial by-products through meditation and pranayama.
I took my first teacher training with less than a year of practice, not so I could teach, not to get stronger in the poses, but to learn about yoga’s heritage. My only goal was to be able to teach yoga to my ageing parents safely.
But then I hurt myself. Yes, the 5-min long downward dog challenge in hot yoga was a bad idea. This caused right shoulder pain because my right shoulder was already compromised from repetitive use from photography and computer use. I found relief through osteopathy and physiotherapy treatments and strengthening exercises and returning to rock climbing.
And then perimenopause came. Like many women, I had no idea how much my joints were benefiting from estrogen until my estrogen levels went down. I had frozen shoulder that got worse for months before I found an osteopath to work on it. This help give me more ease and movement back, even though the pain and range of motion did not fully return for about 18 months—what I later learned is the norm for frozen shoulders in women going through perimenopause.
Meanwhile, in the last few years, I’ve noticed other weird body imbalances. More than 40 years ago, I badly sprained the ligaments in my right ankle. It healed after 6-8 weeks and felt fine for years. What I didn’t notice was the micro-compensations my body made to protect that ankle. Over time, the ankle started to cause my direct problems and this increased the compensations.
This is how our bodies are so proactively intelligent, managing pain and discomfort behind the scenes without asking for our conscious approval.
Using therapeutic yoga, I’m now helping mature adults disrupt both pain patterns and creative compensations so they can reawaken their innate abilities to rebalance body and mind
