Sometimes we know exactly why we’re sore. We’ve strained something, had an accident or done more than our body was ready for. Other times, pain seems to arrive out of nowhere.
We run through the past few days looking for an explanation. Did I lift something? Sleep strangely? Spend too long at the computer? And sometimes, nothing quite adds up.
Classical Chinese medicine offers a way of looking at this that is quite different from how many of us were brought up to understand our bodies. Rather than separating our physical body from our emotional life, it sees them as deeply connected. What we think, feel, say, do and eat, the environments we live in and the relationships around us, all form part of the picture. Our body has a history. In this tradition, that history matters.
An old injury in a familiar place
A recent consultation brought this into focus for me. A woman came in with significant pain around her chest, arm and upper back, near her shoulder blade. She had helped a friend move over the weekend, but she hadn’t been lifting boxes or doing anything particularly heavy. Mostly, she had been helping sort things out. She couldn’t understand why she was so sore.
The pain was there throughout the day and night, interrupting her sleep. It hurt when she breathed. The approaches she had tried so far, including anti-inflammatory medication and physiotherapy, hadn’t changed it.
As we talked, she mentioned a car accident she’d had as a teenager. She remembered the seatbelt pressing across her chest and the frightening feeling of not being able to breathe properly. Then she paused. She hadn’t made the connection before, but the pain was in a very familiar place.
For me, that was something worth listening to. It didn’t prove that the accident was causing her current pain, but it added another piece to the picture.
An important note here: new or unexplained chest pain needs medical assessment before being assumed to be muscular or emotional.
How classical Chinese medicine looks at what we carry
In the classical teachings I draw on, the body has ways of containing things we cannot fully process at the time. These might include physical injury, illness or difficult emotional experiences.
Some of these teachings describe the joints and the Luo vessels as places where unresolved experiences can be held. The Luo vessels are a branching channel network associated, in traditional theory, with Blood and our emotional life. Certain visible superficial vessels, including some spider veins, are interpreted within that framework.
This is a traditional way of understanding the body. What I find valuable about this perspective is the invitation to look beyond the immediate sore spot.
What has this person experienced? What are they managing now? How are they sleeping? What opportunities do they have to rest and recover? And has this part of their body been hurt before?
Looking at the pattern, not just the painful spot
During this consultation, I was thinking about both the Luo vessels and the sinew channels.
The sinew channels are the pathways described in Chinese medicine that relate to the muscles and tendons. They offer a way of considering a connected pattern of tension across an area, rather than looking only at one painful muscle.
The location of her symptoms, their constant nature and her history informed how I approached the Pericardium Luo vessel and sinew channel. As the distribution of her symptoms changed, the Small Intestine sinew channel around the shoulder blade became relevant to my assessment too.
These channel names can sound a little strange if you haven’t encountered them before. Working with the Pericardium channel does not mean diagnosing a problem with the anatomical sac around the heart. Likewise, considering the Small Intestine channel does not mean the bowel itself is causing shoulder pain. They belong to a different traditional map of the body and the meridians that are connected to them.
This is part of what I love about classical Chinese medicine. It gives me a framework for asking different questions and considering how someone’s symptoms fit into their wider life.
Sometimes there is more than one layer
I also knew this woman had been carrying a considerable emotional load for herself and her family. Within the classical framework, I wondered whether her current demands had exceeded her capacity to keep accommodating everything. The image that came to mind was a cup that had been filling for a long time and had finally overflowed.
That was my interpretation, rather than something we could establish as the cause of her pain. There didn’t have to be one dramatic emotional event that weekend. Sometimes it is the accumulation of what we have been managing, alongside physical demands and an old area of vulnerability, that makes us pause and look more closely. And sometimes pain has a straightforward physical explanation. We need to leave room for that too.
Your history is worth hearing
When pain seems to come out of nowhere, I think there is value in being curious about the whole person. That includes assessing the current symptoms properly. It also includes listening to the history, the old injuries, the interrupted sleep and the things someone has quietly been carrying.
We don’t need to put an emotional explanation onto every sore shoulder. But we can make space for the possibility that our physical and emotional experiences are connected in ways that deserve attention. For me, that is one of the gifts of classical Chinese medicine: an invitation to listen more closely to the person living in the body.
Sometimes an old experience comes into the conversation when we least expect it. Food for thought.
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