Liminal Herbs & Bodywork LLC

02/18/2026

🧠 The ‘Pain Nerves’ Story, and why it keeps therapists stuck

Most of us were trained in a simple storyline 🧩. Something is wrong in the tissues, that problem irritates ‘pain nerves’, then a pain message travels to the brain, and pain is the conscious experience of that message.

From there the logic feels obvious 🙌. If pain is coming from the tissues, the job is to change the tissues. Stretch, release, mobilise, melt the restriction, remove the knot, and you change the input, so the pain stops. Some trainings even imply pain is 'trapped' in tissue, and skilled hands can release it.

That belief makes sense because it fits what you see in clinic 👀. People point to a specific spot. Symptoms can change during touch. One therapy session can reduce pain. If your training told you that means you changed the tissue problem, you will naturally assume you changed the pain source.

Here is the issue 🔍. There are no ‘pain nerves’ that carry pain. What we actually have are nociceptors, specialised sensory endings in tissues that respond when conditions suggest potential tissue threat, such as strong mechanical loading, extremes of temperature, or chemical irritation linked with inflammation. When nociceptors activate, they send nociceptive input, meaning incoming information about potential threat, not pain itself.

Pain is different ⚠️. Pain is a protective experience the brain constructs when it judges protection is needed. Nociceptive input can influence that judgement, especially in acute injury, but it is not the same thing as pain. This is why the idea of ‘releasing pain from tissue’ is not accurate. You cannot extract pain like a substance, because pain is not stored in fascia, stuck in scar tissue or trapped in muscle.

If the brain worked like a simple receiver 📥, it would need to process vast amounts of raw information from the body and the outside world, every moment, then build perception from scratch. It would need much more capacity than we have. The brain is also metabolically expensive. It is a small part of body weight, yet it uses a large portion of the body’s energy at rest. That cost only makes sense if the brain is doing something efficient.

This is where predictive processing comes in 🧠➡️. The brain is not a simple receiver, it is predicting the future. It continually generates best guesses about what is happening and what is likely to happen next, then checks incoming sensory information to update. It does not run one prediction only. It runs multiple predictions at once, then settles on the one that it judges as the best guess estimate with the least energy cost. That is efficient, and efficiency is survival.

Now link that back to pain 🔁. If the brain predicts threat, it will often shift the body towards protection. That can include guarded movement, increased muscle tone, changed breathing, increased attention to sensations, and yes, pain. This is why pain can change fast. When the brain updates threat level, the protective response can change fast too.

So what does this mean for hands on therapy 👐. Touch can still help, but the explanation changes. We do not ‘fix’ tissues in the way we were taught, as if we are correcting a fault and removing pain from a structure. Touch is information delivered in a context. When that context supports safety and control, the nervous system may lower threat prediction, and protection can soften. That is not ‘melting' or 'releasing' tissue to remove pain’. It is shifting the brain’s best guess about danger.

Feet on the ground conclusion ✅. Pain is real. Bodies are real. Nociceptive input is real. But pain is not trapped in tissue waiting for release. Pain is a protective experience constructed by a predictive brain, and good therapy supports safer predictions, not tissue mythology.

02/01/2026

Been experimenting w/ new kombucha flavors. This is apple cinnamon…smells fab!

12/21/2025

12/04/2025

All of this

Fascia, fabric and the ‘secret tissue’ story
The recent Guardian article on fascia and foam rolling has been doing the rounds. On the surface it looks balanced, and in places it is. But woven through it are some very old fascia myths dressed in new language.

👉A simple way to see the problem is this:
We talk as if tissue is fabric, and the therapist is the tailor. If fascia is fabric, we can smooth it, lengthen it, retune it and fix people by adjusting the weave. It sounds neat. It does not match what we know about fascia, or about pain.

What the Guardian piece gets right✅
👉Fascia is presented as connective tissue that runs through and around muscles, nerves, vessels and organs.
👉It is described as having a rich nerve supply, contributing to body awareness.
👉The article clearly says you cannot break up fascia with a foam roller in the way many people believe. That is progress.
So yes, fascia is real, innervated connective tissue, and no, we are not smashing it to pieces with a roller. All good.

Then the fascia folklore creeps in.☹️

💧The 70% water claim, in perspective.
The Guardian repeats a familiar line that fascia is about 70% water. That sounds dramatic, but it needs context and, another number. Robert Schleip and colleagues have estimated that all fascial tissues together make up only about 17% of total body weight. Most adults are already around 50–60% water overall. Many lean tissues, including muscle, brain, heart and fascia, sit in the 70–80% water range. So yes, fascia is watery, but it is not uniquely wet and it is only a small percentage of the whole. The message cannot honestly be ‘keep your fascia hydrated’. What we are really talking about is keeping the whole person hydrated and healthy. Keeping it in perspective stops the hydration story turning into yet another fascia fairy tale.

🍊Tangerine pith and the internal wetsuit.
‘The easiest way to describe fascia is to think about the white pith of a tangerine… essentially the body’s internal wetsuit.’
Nice picture. Completely misleading 🤨 This idea harps back to the old-fashioned story of the fascial structures being dissected away from the rest of the body and binned.

Fascia is not a separate suit wrapped around internal structures. It is a continuous three-dimensional matrix that blends into muscle, tendon, ligament, capsule, periosteum and organ coverings; it communicates with every other part of the body. Turning it into a wetsuit suggests a distinct layer that can be tightened, lengthened or adjusted, as if tissue is fabric and the therapist is the tailor.

‘Constantly talking to the brain’ and ‘locking us into movements’👀 The article claims fascia is constantly talking to the brain about what the body feels, and that it can lock us into certain movement patterns. Fascia does send information to the nervous system. So do skin, muscle, joints, viscera and blood vessels. There is nothing uniquely chatty about fascia 😜

Adaptation to repeated postures and loads is a whole system process. Motor control, expectations, confidence, joint range, muscle tone and multiple tissues all contribute. Saying fascia is ‘locking us in’ feeds the idea that if we can just free that fabric, movement will normalise. It keeps everything firmly tissue centred when the real organiser is the nervous system.

The invisible-on-scans, deep structural problem narrative
🧐This is the most worrying part. It claims, ‘Many issues that can arise with fascia will not be clear on MRI, which is one reason deep seated structural problems are hard to diagnose.’
The story hinted at in the article is the idea that fascial problems are invisible on scans and therefore explain persistent, deep seated pain that no one else can find. This has all the ingredients of a perfect ‘secret tissue’ story to be blamed for long standing pain and positioned as something only specialist therapists can assess and treat.

To claim that a hidden fascial layer is the cause of pain ignores everything we have learned in the last few decades about pain itself.

Pain has never mapped neatly onto any single tissue, visible or invisible. People can have a lot of pain with minor structural change, and very little pain with quite dramatic findings. That mismatch is not a fascia problem. It is how pain works.

On top of that, fascia is not (yet) defined as a new organ in any serious anatomical classification. Calling it a ‘sensory organ’ may be useful metaphorically, but it is not a licence to present it as a newly discovered system that explains every stubborn symptom.

👉Victim, perpetrator and the pathoanatomical trap
The article at least admits you cannot break up fascia. Then it says, ‘It is the way muscles and fascial lines interact, or fail to, that leads to discomfort. Do not mistake the victim for the perpetrator.’

This sounds clever, but it still treats tissue as perpetrator.
Pain does not live in tissue. Pain is a perception, a protective output of the brain. Local load and tissue state are just one part of a much larger picture that includes past experience, beliefs, attention, stress, sleep and social context.

Calling the problem a ‘dysfunctional fascial line’ instead of a ‘tight muscle’ does not fix the basic mistake, it is still the same tissue based blame story. ⛔️

👉Keyboard pain, hypervigilance and hypersensitivity
The Guardian example of fascia tightening you into a keyboard posture and making other movements trickier is another rebrand of old thinking.

Two people can sit at a keyboard for the same length of time. One develops pain, the other does not. The difference is not that one person’s fascia has secretly stiffened and the other’s has stayed supple.

Hypervigilance, hypersensitivity, previous pain experiences, stress, sleep, workload and beliefs all influence whether the nervous system outputs pain in that context. Fascia may be one of many tissues providing input, but it is not the decision maker.
When we tell this story as a fascia problem, we strip out the nervous system and the person’s life and blame the fabric.

👉Pandiculation and the stretch–yawn response
The article edges towards the idea that the body instinctively knows how to move to free restricted fascia, for example when people fidget and stretch after being still.
What is being described is pandiculation, the stereotyped stretch–yawn behaviour seen across many animals. It is a centrally driven neuromuscular pattern. It involves muscle, joints, skin, fascia, breathing and shifts in arousal.
Some authors have speculated that it helps maintain myofascial integrity. There is no good evidence that this response is primarily about fascia, or that its effects can be isolated to fascial tissue.

It makes more sense to see it as the nervous system using movement to regulate comfort and state. Again, fascia is part of the picture, not the star of the show. ⛔️

The ‘secret fascia’ story and why it is harmful 👈
The secret fascia story treats fascia as if it is uniquely special, more important than other tissues because it is watery, innervated and supposedly hidden on scans. From there it is easy to blame fascia for every stubborn problem and to suggest that only particular techniques or practitioners can fix it. That way of thinking isolates fascia from the rest of the body and from the person living in that body. It turns tissue into fabric and the therapist into a tailor, instead of seeing fascia as one strand in a much bigger weave.

We cannot single fascia out as the place where pain lives. Pain is not stored in any tissue. It is a perception, constructed by the brain as a protective response, using information from across the whole system, including but not limited to fascial input. If we make fascia the villain or the saviour, we have missed what modern pain science is trying to show us.

Fascia still matters. It is a rich, interesting connective tissue network with complex mechanics and sensory roles, and it is worth studying. The point is not to make fascia special, it is to place it in context.

When therapists understand fascia as part of an integrated system, and understand pain as a perception rather than a property of tissue, our touch, our explanations and our treatment plans become more honest, more flexible and more effective.

That is the real value in keeping up with fascia research, not to sell a new magic layer, but to deepen how we think about the people under our hands.

Train with In-Touch Education.

Read the Guardian article here. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/nov/24/secrets-of-the-body-what-is-fascia-health-foam-roller

11/25/2025

Learn how to infuse oils with herbs and then turn those oils into salves. We will discuss which plants work best topically, the different ways to infuse oils, and how to make salves more effective. We will create a salve in real time! Each participant will walk away with a salve and a herbal “swag bag” to enjoy personally or to gift for the holidays.Cost: $20-40 Sliding Scale. There is one spot available for work trade scholarship. Hosted by Green Table Initiative & Montapata Farms.
RSVP: https://www.greentableinitiative.org/homesteadershub/q8d5aab7qu5u0hi530a6ffeo7t9yte

05/08/2025

A sensory experience with herbal infusions, flower essences, journaling and yoga asana. Come join us in a 2.5 hr session to nourish and tend to our internal gardens of self. The herbs will help us release deep exhaustion and things we need to w**d out of our bodies, minds and spirits. Let’s soften our edges, heal old wounds and brighten our vessels. Please bring a journal. Everyone will receive a flower essence to support their journey.

01/24/2025

Come see me! Up for grabs: house plants, herbal goodies like salve, oxymels, flower essences, mini herbal consultations & more!

09/10/2024

Unlike other parts of the country, goldenrod tends to be less abundant here. A lovely find nonetheless. So I harvested a small amount and look how green that tincture is already!!!

09/07/2024