When You Finally Stop Bracing

There’s a moment in my practice that I’ve witnessed hundreds of times.

A client comes in with their shoulders tight, jaw clenched, body tense. They’ve been bracing for so long that they don’t even remember what it feels like to relax. 

And then, slowly, as we work together, something shifts. They let go a little. It’s not dramatic or sudden, but it’s real. And sometimes what comes next is surprising... they cry. Not always, but often enough that I’ve learned not to be surprised by it, and to simply allow them to experience the release.

It might be sadness, grief, relief, happiness, or even anger. Sometimes it’s all of these at once. When you’ve been holding yourself together for a long time, because you have to in order to keep going, finally having some space to soften can bring emotions to the surface that you haven’t had room to feel.

It can be grief for what you’ve been through or for what you’ve lost. Sometimes it’s simply the relief of realizing that you don’t have to fight quite so hard anymore. 

I think about it like this…

Imagine you’ve been holding something in your hand for so long that you’ve forgotten what it feels like to open your hand. Your fingers are tight around it. You’ve tried to let go before, but it hurt, so it felt safer to keep holding on. Eventually, you start believing, “This is just how my hand is now.”

Then one day, after some subtle shift, you slowly move one finger… and there’s no pain! You move another and then another, until suddenly, your hand opens and what you’ve been holding on falls away. 

There is something incredibly emotional about that moment, because not only is the pain gone, now your hand is free to do all kinds of other things!

It’s a big moment to realize that your body isn’t the problem, only that it has been trying to protect you. But that protection mode can completely change the way you see yourself.

I know it changed the way I saw my own body at the time of my lower-back injury, because I came from being quite strong.

I started to think, “My body is weak.” I was frustrated with it, because I was comparing it to what I used to be able to do, and felt my body was constantly letting me down. 

Eventually I realized something vitally important: My body wasn’t “weak;” I simply wasn’t as strong as I once had been. My expectations needed adjusting.

There’s a difference, because if I wanted to, I could work toward becoming stronger again; but first I needed to accept where I was and be willing to look at the facts. I stopped being angry at my body for not being what it used to be. I started seeing my condition as something I could work with instead of something I had to fight against.

Letting go isn’t a one-time event. There will still be days when the old patterns come back. Stress happens, pain happens, life happens.

But when shifts happen and the pain eases, your world gets bigger again. Like the hand letting go of the ???, much more becomes possible.

One of the things I remember most clearly from my own recovery was being able to travel again. Sitting on a plane for eight hours, getting off on the other side without pain and actually enjoying the trip — it sounds like such a small thing. But when you have lived with chronic pain, it isn’t small at all. It takes all your energy.

To be able to make plans, to see friends, go for a walk, travel, work, laugh; to sit in a restaurant without thinking about your back; to wake up without immediately wondering how your body is going to feel, without having to manage every moment — it’s freedom! (Has it happens it’s my #1 value!)

Chronic pain can be incredibly lonely. It can become just you and the pain. You and the illness. You and the fear of what might happen next. There isn’t much room left for anything else.

And when that starts to change, the ripple effect can be enormously wonderful. I’ve watched this happen with my clients, and I sometimes get emotional because I know how much it takes to get there.

They’ve reached that pivotal realization that their body isn’t the problem, it has been doing the best it could with the information it had. And maybe they don’t have to become exactly who they were before; in fact, they get to become someone who understands their body differently, who trusts themselves more, and who has hope again.

That, to me, is the real gift of letting go.

It isn’t about getting rid of every sensation or pretending everything is fine. It is about creating enough space to discover what is possible now. And often, what becomes possible is much bigger than you imagined. It can be freedom!

The Practice of Letting Go: Why Holding On Keeps You Stuck PART 2

The harder we try to fix something, the more we actually hold on to it.

Take impatience (not speaking from experience, of course!):

You can’t really practice being patient by forcing yourself to be patient. You can, however, become aware of your impatience.

What triggers it? What are you expecting? What happens when things don’t happen as quickly as you want? What pattern have you developed around needing things to happen now?

Letting go isn’t about forcing yourself to stop being impatient. It’s about understanding what is underneath the impatience. The same can be true physically. “No pain, no gain” has no place in chronic pain. Forcing a nervous system that already feels threatened isn’t necessarily going to make it feel safer.

We don’t learn safety by forcing ourselves into the deepest end, hoping we’ll adapt. We learn through experiences that our nervous system can actually process.

Small steps, manageable movement, attention, breathing, repetition and evidence.

Letting go doesn’t mean giving up. It doesn’t mean surrendering nor accepting that you’ll always be in pain. It means accepting where you are today. It means letting go of what you used to be able to do, of the fear of what might happen. Letting go of the need to control every sensation, of some of the tension you’ve been holding.

Sometimes it means allowing yourself to feel the pain without immediately fighting it, taking a breath. Relaxing around it. Observing it and noticing what happens.

Does it change? Does it move? Does it soften? Does it dissipate? You are not giving the pain permission to stay. You’re giving yourself permission to stop fighting it for a moment. And that can be a surprisingly different experience.

I worked with someone experiencing very acute shoulder pain.

The pain was affecting their ability to make a living. They were frightened for the future and were full of tension. They had spent a lot of time and money looking for answers and had been told that there was nothing structurally wrong with their shoulder and to keep stretching and resting. They came to me desperate.

We started by looking at the evidence. Together, we looked at the scans and the facts. We looked at the information from their medical team.

Their body was structurally sound, that didn’t mean nothing was happening. The stress, tension and worry were very real, and this was acknowledged and understood. The pain was also real!

So we started gently, we explored movement, paid attention to the pain rather than immediately fighting it. We used breathing, worked with small movements and gave their body opportunities to experience something different. We observed without fearing the pain by gently providing signals of safety.

Slowly, they began to realize something. Their body could move, the pain could change. They could move without the pain they had been expecting.

Something else happened. They started to believe there was hope and with that hope came results. The tension began to release. They could breathe more easily, move better and sleep better. Their confidence began to return slowly.

This is what letting go can look like. Sometimes you can actually see it. There’s a smile… a deeper breath. More freedom in the movement. A little less fear.

And it’s simply the moment when someone realizes: “Maybe I don’t have to hold on so tightly anymore.”

Sometimes, letting go is emotional.

It can be powerful to tell yourself: “I’m safe. I’m okay. I don’t have to hold everything so tightly.”

You can fully fill up your lungs, relax a little. You can take a slightly bigger step. You can test something you’ve been afraid to test. Not because you’re forcing yourself to get better. But because you’re giving yourself the opportunity to discover what happens when you stop protecting yourself in quite the same way.

Letting go isn’t about doing less. It’s about fighting less, understanding what you’re holding, why you’re holding it, and whether you still need to hold it in the same way.

Because the things that once protected you may not be the things you need to protect you now.

Letting go is one great first step to take!

And for me it’s beautiful to witness.

Who I Work With Beyond the Stage

I’m a very lucky practitioner. I get to work with people across every walk of life: musicians and performers, yes, but also the 74-year-old woman who can’t walk without pain, the person rebuilding after cancer, the person recovering from surgery who thought they’d never move the same way again.

These are the clients who taught me something profound: the nervous system doesn’t care about your age or your diagnosis. It cares about whether it feels safe.

Take Julie. She came to me three months after an accident with severe hip pain. She couldn’t walk without support. Her doctors were already talking about hip replacement. And she was the one considering selling her house, installing an elevator, reshaping her entire life around the limitations.

When she looked at me, I could see the resignation. The acceptance of a new, smaller life.

But here’s what I knew: even if she eventually needed surgery, her body still needed to be strengthened. Her nervous system still needed to learn that movement was safe. That she was capable.

What I also knew was this: her mind was part of the problem. Fear was telling her story. Anxiety was writing her future. Her thoughts about what her body could no longer do were as much a barrier as the pain itself.

After two weeks of working together,  not pushing, not forcing, but gently reinstalling trust in her own body, her own mind and making lifestyle adjustments, she started walking again. The pain began to shift. But more importantly, her relationship with her body changed.

Months later, Julie wrote to me: “When I started with Hélène, I was considering selling my house. Now my legs work. I accept that my body requires maintenance. And Hélène makes that process inspiring, effective, and sustainable.”

This is the pattern I see across my practice.

The elderly client afraid of falling. The cancer survivor rebuilding identity and trust in a changed body and a changed mind. The post-surgery person waiting for pain that should have healed but hasn’t. The person with chronic pain that no scan can explain.

They all arrive with the same underlying question: Is my body still mine? Can I trust it again?

Sometimes, there are issues that I see need referral. But the answer, 90% of the time, is yes, But not because we fix them. Because I help them understand what their nervous system has been trying to protect them from, and how their mind is participating in that protection.

That’s where the real work begins.

What Working With Performing Artists Has Taught Me

My work has involves supporting classical and jazz musicians and performing artists across Canada and Europe. Depending on the individual and their needs, I also often work in coordination with physicians and other healthcare professionals as part of a broader care team.

Performing artists develop remarkable levels of discipline, focus, repetition, and commitment to their craft. They learn to perform under pressure, manage demanding schedules, and maintain a high level of consistency even when conditions are not ideal.

For many, travel schedules are exhausting. Time zone changes add further strain, sleep becomes fragmented. Some weeks, simply figuring out what day it is or which country you’re in, can feel like part of the job description. Routines that normally anchor the body become harder to maintain. Balancing performance, rehearsals, recovery, and personal life requires constant adaptation.

In many ways, this ability to adapt is one of their greatest strengths.

At the same time, I have noticed that the same capacity for adaptation can sometimes make it difficult to recognize when the body or nervous system has been carrying more than it can comfortably sustain.

Tension becomes normal. Fatigue becomes expected.

A constant background effort develops , often so familiar it no longer registers as unusual. Discomfort is managed, worked around, or pushed through in order to meet the demands of performance, rehearsal, travel, teaching, or daily practice.

Over time, these adjustments can become so familiar that they no longer stand out as separate concerns. They simply become part of how life and performance are experienced.

What I find particularly interesting is that many of these patterns are not unique to musicians.

I see similar adaptations in people living with chronic pain, ongoing stress, anxiety, caregiving responsibilities, and other forms of long-term demand.

The environment may be different, but the underlying process is often similar: the body and nervous system adapt in order to keep functioning, often without the person fully noticing how much has been normalized along the way.

For musicians, however, these patterns are often easier to observe because performance creates such a direct relationship between their body, attention, emotion, and nervous system.

For many performers, the body is not simply something they use. It is the instrument through which they express their craft.

Over time, this has become an important part of how I understand both performance and recovery.

What Chronic Pain Does to Identity and Daily Life

Over time, chronic pain does not only affect the body. It begins to influence how you move through daily life and how decisions are made moment to moment.

At first, these changes can feel subtle. How you plan your day, how you pace your energy, and how you interpret sensations in your body all begin to shift in response to your pain.

Gradually, life can become more cautious, more calculated, and more centred around managing what might happen next. Confidence can begin to change as trust in your body, and in yourself, slowly erodes over time through this constant adaptation.

For many of the people I work with, this process is already well established by the time they seek support. There is often a background experience of ongoing tension, fluctuating fatigue, heightened awareness of symptoms, and a reduced sense of ease or spontaneity in movement and in daily life. Frustration and fear often become part of the experience as well.

Because these changes happen gradually, they are not always recognized as symptoms in themselves, but rather as a general change in how life feels to live.

It becomes the new baseline.

From a nervous system perspective, this process makes sense. Your system learns from experience. When your body has been exposed to prolonged pain, stress, or overload, it begins to organize itself around protection and predictability.

As time passes, even the anticipation of movement or symptoms can begin to trigger protective responses, reinforcing cycles of tension, vigilance, and avoidance.

This is where chronic pain becomes more than a physical experience. It becomes a lived pattern of perception, behaviour, and internal expectation.

These adaptations, with time, can begin to feel less like responses to a situation, and more like part of an identity.

This is where my work begins to support change. We begin to redirect the process. Not by forcing change in your system -recovery is not about intensity- but by gently rebuilding capacity for movement, resetting your baseline of calm and trust.  Through small, consistent shifts which your system can gradually integrate.

This is where change often becomes sustainable.

Small shifts in regulation.

Small returns of ease.

Small experiences of expansion that begin to accumulate.

Trust, confidence, and a calmer relationship with your body can begin to return.

Many of my clients arrive feeling worn down by pain, nervous system overload, fatigue, anxiety, or a long-standing sense of disconnection from their body.

This work meets you exactly where you are.

Often, all that is needed is an openness to take the first small step.