There is the pain — and there is everything your body starts doing around the pain.
When something hurts, your body responds.
You might brace. Guard. Hold your breath. Move differently. Become more vigilant. Maybe you begin avoiding movements you're afraid will hurt.
None of this is wrong.
Your body is trying to protect you.
But sometimes, the protection itself can become part of the loop.
The Alchemist is a self-paced embodied process for learning how to work with what your body is doing around pain — rather than only fighting the place that hurts.
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Maybe you know this experience.
Something hurts, and suddenly a part of your attention is always there.
Is it still hurting?
Is it worse today?
What did I do?
What if it doesn't go away?
You adjust how you sit, walk, bend, sleep or move.
Maybe you tense before you've even done the thing you're afraid will hurt.
Maybe you've tried stretching, strengthening, resting, massage, physiotherapy, medication, different practitioners — sometimes with relief, sometimes without.
And slowly, your relationship with your body can begin to revolve around
fixing what is wrong.
Pain changes the body.
When something hurts, breathing can change.
Muscles contract. Attention narrows. Movement changes.
We protect.
Sometimes that protection resolves as the pain resolves.
And sometimes bracing, guarding, vigilance, fear or changes in movement begin to participate in the experience themselves.
There is the pain.
And there is everything your body has started doing around the pain.
The Alchemist gives you a way to begin working with this second layer.
Not by forcing your body to relax.
Not by convincing yourself that you're safe.
And not by telling you that the pain is “in your head.”
But by learning to recognize what your body is doing, listen to what is happening underneath the protection, and begin exploring what else may be possible.
This is the capacity I want to give you through The Alchemist.
To begin noticing:
What happens to my breath when this hurts?
Where am I bracing?
What happens to the rest of my body around the painful place?
What movements have I started avoiding?
What am I anticipating before I even move?
Is there fear, helplessness, frustration or another response underneath the tension?
What changes when I find more support?
What becomes possible when I don't immediately try to make the sensation disappear?
These are not questions you need to answer intellectually.
They are things we explore through the body.
You may not always be able to control whether something hurts.
But you can learn how to meet your body when it does.
Not as another collection of information about pain, but as something you can actually return to when you're inside the experience.
Through more than 20 short teachings and embodied explorations, I guide you through the way I work with pain — step by step.
Inside, we explore things like:
Recognizing bracing and guarding
Learning to notice what your body begins doing when pain appears.
Breathing around pain
Exploring how breathing changes and what becomes possible when we work with it rather than forcing relaxation.
Pain and movement
Noticing movements you've begun protecting, restricting or anticipating — and gently exploring the possibilities around them.
Finding support
Exploring how the experience of pain changes when the body has more physical and internal support.
Fear, helplessness and emotion
Learning to recognize when emotional or protective responses have become part of what is happening around the pain.
Expanding beyond the painful place
Beginning to experience your body as more than the area demanding your attention.
You can move through the material at your own pace.
And you can return to individual practices whenever you need them.
The intention isn't for you to become an expert on pain.
It is for you to develop a capacity you can carry with you:
When something hurts, I know how to stay in relationship with my body.
When I'm in pain, what do I actually do?
This is why I created
The Alchemist.
I know this territory from both sides.
I lived with chronic pain for around 15 years.
I searched for answers in many of the places people search when something keeps hurting.
And eventually, my own journey took me deeper into the relationship between the body, emotions, movement, trauma, fascia and the nervous system.
What changed wasn't simply my understanding of pain.
It changed my relationship with my body.
For more than a decade, I have also worked professionally with people at the meeting point of body and psyche.
The original impulse for The Alchemist came when a client contacted me while travelling in Thailand in severe acute pain.
I couldn't work with her hands-on.
I was thousands of kilometres away.
So I began guiding her through what she could notice and explore in her own body.
What was happening around the pain?
What was bracing?
What happened when she breathed?
What happened when we brought attention somewhere else?
Where was there support?
What happened when we listened rather than immediately trying to change?
That experience showed me something important:
There are capacities I use when working with pain that people can learn for themselves.
The Alchemist grew from there.
Dana Biechonski Fernandes
Somatic Psychotherapist · Fascia & Nervous system Manual Therapist · Supervisor · Educator
€88
I wanted to make this work accessible without requiring you to enter a long therapeutic process with me.
Because I believe some of this knowledge belongs in our homes.
We should have ways of meeting our bodies when something hurts.
Not instead of receiving help.
Alongside it.
The goal isn't to become so good at working with your body that pain never frightens you, contracts you or throws you off.
Bodies protect. Bodies respond. Pain can be frightening.
The practice is learning how to find your way back into relationship when pain throws you off.
To listen before immediately trying to change.
To recognize protection rather than fight it.
To discover where there may be choice inside an automatic response.
To meet pain without making your body the enemy.
When something hurts, you can learn how to stay in relationship with your body.
Important note
The Alchemist is educational and experiential and is not a replacement for medical assessment, diagnosis, physiotherapy, psychotherapy or other appropriate healthcare.
New, severe, unexplained or changing pain may require medical evaluation.
The practices in The Alchemist are not intended to diagnose the cause of pain or encourage you to ignore physical symptoms or push through pain.
The course offers an additional layer to explore alongside appropriate care:
your body's response to what you are experiencing.
