Hello, I’m Laine

The Good Body Space is the result of over 25 years of curiosity. Curiosity that has taken me all over the world researching, trialling (and in most cases rejecting) anything and everything to do with relieving pain.

Why all this searching?

After having my twins 18 years ago, I developed chronic pain. My body felt 80. I couldn’t sleep because I could never feel comfortable. I tried everything: chiro, physio, massage, acupuncture, meditation, CBT, CBD, wine… weeping in foetal position. Most things made a difference in the moment and maybe for a short while. But nothing made a fundamental. lasting impact. Until I met a BSR practitioner by chance while on a holiday. After three sessions I was pain-free for the first time in 7 years. My body also felt different, unstuck. I couldn’t believe it.

Back in the UK it took about 6 months before the pain started to return. And I realised that because I hadn’t changed anything else (psychological as well as physical habits), I’d of course recreated the same pain. I returned for more BSR and did the 4 month residential training to become a practitioner. I had found the first piece to my pain puzzle. The second piece was changing my habitual ways of moving and breathing. Clinical somatics exercises and breathwork are a killer combination for both re-sensitising the brain to what is actually going on in the body (rather than ignoring automated processes that create pain) and retraining the nervous system to default to calm rather than hypervigilance.

The last piece fell into place when a new set of challenges appeared along with a breakdown that turned out to be the, all-too -common, experience of an ADHD nervous system once perimenopause hits. My system was strung out from being chronically set to hyper-vigilant. Learning to change my state, to change my habitual internal narrative, to reframe and to live into the future rather than from the past… brought me home to myself. I have years of therapy, plant medicine and a meditation practice to thank for that.

What I realised is that if I want to make a real difference to clients in pain I must be able to work with the whole person. Why do we separate talking and physical therapies in the first place? It seems bizarre to me.

We will work somatically together. This means taking the whole of your inner experience of your pain into account and seeing how many angles we need to approach from. For pain that is obviously ‘just pain’ e.g,. a sports injury, a fall, pain from repeated poor movements and posture (like sitting at a desk all day) - the combination of BSR with somatic exercises, breathwork and mindfulness, is powerful. For pain that’s the result of past trauma or neurodivergence or that’s psychological, adding embodied coaching to the mix is hugely beneficial.

This is a very long story, but I wanted to tell you how I got here. I see so many people with similar stories. Pain is exhausting, but I truly believe that on the other side of the pain coin, is freedom. The first thing to know is that it is possible to be pain free.
My aim in my work is first to interrupt your pain and then to empower you with tools and practices that make you your own best and wisest healer.

Last thing: The question I get asked most often is: how long will it take? I want to try and answer that here… and you probably instinctively know what I’m going to say:

It depends! On how long the pain has been there. On what it’s connected to (psychologically). On how ready you are to let it go and how committed you are to doing the homework. What I can say is that for simpler and more recent types of pain - like RSI, a sports injury, a minor accident: 3-5 sessions. 5-8 sessions is a good number to think of for anything more complicated.