I Went In for Neck Pain. What Left Was Older Than I Am.

About ten years ago, I went to see a physical therapist for my neck and shoulders. They’d been bothering me for a while — the kind of ache you carry around so long it starts to feel like part of you. I expected the usual: an assessment, some exercises, maybe a plan to strengthen something. What happened instead changed how I understand pain, healing, and what we carry in our bodies.

The therapist I saw was unusually perceptive. Before she touched my neck at all, she looked at me and asked how open I was. “Open to what?” I said. To the possibility, she explained, that what was going on wasn’t really about my neck.

I told her I was open. So she had me lie down, and she began — quietly, almost like a prayer — with a light touch at a few points on my torso. And then something happened that I had no framework for at the time. My whole midsection went rigid. Not tense — rigid, hard as stone, like my body had turned to rock from the inside. Images started coming, in black and white: people I didn’t recognize, in scenes I can only describe as horror. And I began to sob — not a normal cry, but something that came up from a depth I didn’t know I had. My body shook. I kept asking what was happening. She just said: let it pass through.

What was moving through me, she told me, was something I’d been carrying in my body from generations ago.

Here’s what I knew, and didn’t know, at the time. My family line is French, going back to a period of war and religious persecution centuries ago. We were on the wrong side of the dominant religion — the persecuted side. I knew this vaguely, the way you know any piece of family history. But I had never studied it. I had no memory of it. There was nothing in my own life that those images could have come from.

And yet my body knew. That’s the part I keep coming back to. My body knew what my mind had never been told.

We worked through that layer — and honestly, I’ve worked through more since; that’s how this goes. But here’s the detail that taught me the most: the neck pain I’d come in for was gone. Just gone. Because the neck was never the cause. The cause was deeper and older, and it had been showing up in my neck the way smoke shows up from a fire in another room.

If we’d done what I went in to do — treat the neck, strengthen the neck, stretch the neck — I might have gotten some relief. But we’d have been chasing the smoke. We never would have reached the fire.

I want to be careful here, because I’m not telling you to ignore your body or skip your doctor. Some pain is exactly what it looks like and needs exactly the treatment it looks like it needs. But some pain — the kind that lingers no matter what you throw at it — is a messenger. It’s pointing somewhere. And sometimes where it’s pointing isn’t even in this lifetime.

I also want to say something that often gets lost in conversations like this. What I released that day was heavy. But the same lineage that handed me that weight also handed me other things — a fierce resilience, a strong sense of who to trust, a deep loyalty, a refusal to look away from the truth. Those came from the same history. I don’t want to lose those. The work was never to erase where I come from. It was to set down what I was never meant to carry, and keep what made my family strong.

If you’ve been carrying something that doesn’t quite seem to belong to your own life — an ache that won’t resolve, a fear with no source, a feeling of bracing for something that already happened to someone else — I’d gently invite you to consider that it might not have started with you. And if it didn’t start with you, it doesn’t have to continue with you either.

Your body remembers what you were never told. Sometimes healing begins the moment you’re willing to listen to it.

Academic Research

Transgenerational Energy Transfer — An Energy Intelligence Method™ Model of Inherited Frequency, Somatic Imprinting, and Lineage-Level Healing

The full academic paper — including the neuroscience framework, three case illustrations, and the complete theoretical model — is available now on SSRN and Zenodo.

Read the full paper → https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20601115

This Month's Blog Series

I Went In for Neck Pain. What Left Was Older Than I Am.

Coming next week: Blog 2 of 4 - Always Look for the Always Why the word “always” may be the clearest clue that a pattern you’ve struggled with isn’t actually yours — and one simple question that can change how you see it.

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Author: Janell Rae, Energy Healer & Founder of the Energy Intelligence Method™

The Energy Intelligence Method™ is a bottom-up emotional and energetic transformation process developed by Janell Rae to resolve identity-level imprints and restore nervous system coherence.