Entropy of the Body: The Nobel Prize-Winning Science That Explains Why Your Pain Keeps Coming Back
What You Are Truly Experiencing During Bodywork
The craft of being a bodyworker is a very dicey profession. Often times when I am working with people, I get one of three stories:
- I went to somebody and did not feel any results.
- I went to somebody and they hurt me and made me worse.
- I went to somebody and I got better for a day or two then right back into pain.
This is because when it comes to the pain industry there are two types of individuals - wizards and magicians. Wizards perform alchemy. They change the physical and the metaphysical. They can show their secrets to someone, but no one will be able to copy them. Magicians do tricks that FOOL the audience into believing they possess something above the audience. When the magician exposes his secrets, nobody is impressed and the magician loses both face and credibility.
When it comes to pain, a drug “fools” your brain into thinking that the pain no longer exists. Just like a drug, a cortisone shot fools your central nervous system into thinking the problem no longer exists. Both of those scenarios get exposed by one thing and one thing only: Time.
Like Rocky said, “Time takes everyone out. Time’s undefeated.”
My statement to you is if your drug, shot, practitioner, therapist or body guru only takes your pain away for a while – he’s a magician, not a wizard.
What people in pain fail to realize is that the body is a machine, but it is not a machine in the sense that your car is a machine. You cannot take a person’s body apart piece by piece like a car and then put it back together again and expect it to work just fine. You’ll look like Frankenstein. Problems in the body are mechanical in nature, yes, but they cannot be fixed through an isolationist mindset.
Back pain is not back pain, and knee pain is not knee pain. Pain in our body is a wolf’s cry for help. Something in your body hurts and your brain is trying to protect you. Pain IS protection. Where it sends the pain is a moot point.
To me, back pain is an alignment problem first, a butt problem second, a hamstring problem third, and a neck problem fourth. Sometimes it can be all four at the same time. This is because (as I’m sure you have heard) our body contains a fantastic substance called fascia.
Fascia: The Unsung Governor
We know more about space and the bottom of the ocean right now than we do about fascia in the human body. In anatomy class we are told to cut the skin and throw away the fascia to expose the muscle, blood vessels, and nerves – you know the “important” stuff. It turns out that living fascia is much different than dead fascia, so much so that without it our muscle tissue is considered a dumb piece of meat.
We used to think that it was the bone and muscle that gave our body structure, but it clearly is not. Fascia acts as a 3D web that provides posture and alignment from our nose to our toes, and from our core to our cuff. We now know it is fascia that tells the brain to tell the nerves to tell the muscle how to hold the body’s structure.
Fascia also:
- Is with you two weeks after you are conceived until the day you die.
- Is the only thing that cannot be removed from your body.
- Is the skin of all living tissue.
- Is made up of collagen fibers that have a disorderly attachment with no apparent logic as to how they fire.
- Is made up of 65-70% water.
- Provides uninterrupted transmission of energy to all structures down to the bone.
- Helps with circulation, proprioception, and awareness.
- Provides muscle with its “memory” or what we call its arrangement.
- Acts as a shock absorber.
Ida Rolf, the Godmother of Fascia, said in the 1960’s, “In any energy system, no matter how complicated, structure is experienced as behavior. Structure is behavior.” This means that your body becomes what you habitually do over your lifetime.
Human movement is never 100% correct. We sleep, sit, and stand in compromising positions. We compensate movement patterns daily. Our machine breaks down from both action and inaction, and needs to be maintained on a regular basis. Enter the subtle art of bodywork.
Kinks in The Chain: The Localized Chaos
Our body goes through hundreds of trillions of chemical reactions every second while at rest. As a result of regular wear, tear, and orientation, the fascia deploys several defense mechanisms to “shore” things up, eliminating instability, overuse, and degradation, which ultimately lead to what we call pain.
These defense mechanisms are the kinks in your chain:
- Trigger Points: Small areas of wound up muscle impeding a signal the brain is trying to send. If you obstruct a nerve, you can get pain upstream and downstream from the obstruction. This is what makes pain managers chase their tail treating symptoms.
- Adhesions: Can be muscular and fascial. Fascial adhesions will be to bone and act like shrink wrapping. It draws itself down and feels like sand or grit on the bone as the collagen tubes dry out to create a super glue-like bond, providing more stability for a joint at a subsequent reduction in the range of motion.
- Fibrosis: Created when muscle gets so tight that two things become infinitely impossible: you can’t get nutrients in to repair the muscle, and you can’t get toxins out from muscle energy production. The nerve-muscle complex essentially goes into hibernation.
Most of the people I see usually have a mix of all of these problems going on – very rarely is it just one or the other. When correcting these dysfunctions, the body even more rarely corrects itself in a positive manner. To understand this crucial point, we must turn to the realm of Thermodynamics.
The Law of Thermodynamics: Why Your Body Isn't a Car
Ilya Prigogine, a Russian-born Belgian theoretical chemist, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1977 for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Now, I know you wouldn't think of thermodynamics when you think of getting rid of pain, but I promise if you hang on and listen to what I’m about to tell you, you’re going to be fascinated just as I was when I made the connection.
The traditional Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in any closed system (like a car engine or a sealed box), entropy—or disorder—must always increase. Unless energy is added, the system will break down until chaos takes over, causing it to cease functioning altogether. This is why your car eventually rusts and breaks down.
But your body is not a closed system.
Figure 1: The critical difference between a Closed System (which decays) and an Open System (which maintains order by dissipating chaos).
The Human Body as a Dissipative Structure
Prigogine realized scientists were only applying the Second Law to closed systems, which was a mistake when studying life. The human body is an open system. It constantly exchanges energy and matter with its environment: you eat, you breathe, you sweat, you create heat.
Because we are an open system, we can resist the universal march toward disorder. Prigogine’s theory showed that systems far from equilibrium can spontaneously organize into what he called Dissipative Structures [1].
A Dissipative Structure (like a living cell, or your entire body) maintains its high degree of internal order (low entropy) by constantly dissipating entropy (disorder) out into the environment. You are literally a flow of information and energy, constantly fighting chaos by exporting it.
When you are in pain, your body is in a state of high local entropy, or chaos. This makes sense, right?
The Bifurcation Point: Order from Chaos
As the molecules of a chaotic system become more disordered, they collide more and more randomly with each other. This is where the magic happens.
Prigogine found that as an open system, you can take chaos and dissipate it through your structure, creating more order. A brick or a steel rod cannot do this. More pressure on a brick and it shatters; more strain on the steel and it wears down. We, as human beings, are self-organizing and can take outside energy and use it to create more order in our own energetic environment.
When your system builds up so much entropy that it starts to crash to a halt (a bedridden back injury, for example), this is known as a bifurcation point—a point of no return where the system is forced to reorganize. As you rest, your body reorganizes the chaos, and your system becomes more coherent.
The body’s only outlet is to compensate a movement pattern and send the pain somewhere else. Pain in the human body does not go “away.” It goes somewhere else in the body.
These moments where pain is eliminated are what I call “Periods of Latent Potential.”
Figure 2: The Chaos-to-Order Cycle. Pain is the signal that your system has reached a Bifurcation Point and must reorganize to a New Threshold.
The Concept of Threshold in The Body
Being the open system that we are, you cannot continuously rearrange and reorder on an infinite scale. Your joints, tendons, ligaments, and muscles all have a level of tolerance at which they will break. Until that happens, there are an infinite amount of other possibilities that may take into effect.
A conversation I had with a couple of colleagues led us to believe most people have between 13-16 pains their body is dealing with at any one moment, but most people come for just one serious issue. This serious issue is the bifurcation point.
As a result of this reorganization, your body has built up a new threshold that allows it to get rid of chaos at a faster rate than the old system, as your brain creates new understandings that allow you to deal with a situation that previously overwhelmed you.
The principle of threshold works the same when you are healing. I talk about this in my book The Back Pain Bible—about how we do not heal in an ascending line. In bodywork there truly are no setbacks. As long as the pain is changing, you are on the right track.
Let’s look at this example:
Your back hurts and you find out that you have a really tight hamstring and glute on the same side. You roll on the hamstring and glute for at least 2-3 minutes and the next day you feel better – great! The next day you do the same thing, but wake up on the third day in more pain.
Wait. What happened?
Well, you overwhelmed the system and your fascia, brain, nerve, muscle, and tendon need time to rearrange and relocate – they need to make sure you don’t try to pick up 400 pounds before it has everything figured out. We go back to my previous statement of pain being protection.
Reversing the Damage: The Wizard's Approach
The human body has absolutely no obligation to make sense to you. Let me say that again. THE HUMAN BODY HAS ABSOLUTELY NO OBLIGATION TO MAKE SENSE TO YOU!
You need to understand I had the same frustration as you when I first started doing mobility exercises to get rid of my pain. I couldn’t believe how painful everything was to press on, and initially when I did my foam rolling and smashing with lacrosse balls, softballs, and baseballs my pain did subside and I could actually move.
The wizard’s approach is to use the chaos a ball, foam roller, or accurately placed elbow will create and stimulate your system to repair itself. We are not replacing a part; we are adding energy to the system to force it to dissipate old, stuck entropy and reorganize into a new, higher-order state.
The more complex a structure is, the more entropy it must dissipate to maintain its structure. This is why most people need several sessions along with some self-care at home.
Are you ready to stop chasing symptoms and start rewriting the code of your body?
BOOK YOUR SOVEREIGN FREQUENCY CONSULTATIONThe Chaos-to-Order Cycle in Pain
| State | Thermodynamic Principle | Physical Manifestation | Bodywork Goal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chronic Pain | High Local Entropy / Stuck Dissipative Structure | Trigger Points, Adhesions, Fibrosis, Limited ROM | Add External Energy (Chaos) to Force Reorganization |
| Bifurcation Point | System Crash / Forced Reorganization | Bedridden Back Injury, Sudden Increase in Pain Post-Bodywork | Allow System to Dissipate Entropy and Find a New Threshold |
| Latent Potential | New, Higher-Order Dissipative Structure | Pain moves to a new location, Increased ROM, Improved Posture | Maintain New Order with Consistent, Targeted Input |
This article is part of the 5-Dimensional Pain Elimination series, guiding you from physical breakdown to Sovereign Frequency.
RECLAIM YOUR BODY NOWReferences
Figure 3: The Healing Trajectory. The expected linear decrease (The Lie) vs. the actual non-linear path (Chaos-to-Order) where temporary increases in pain are part of the reorganization process.
