The day I stopped being Pinocchio

Before I met Josep Castella, my relationship with my body was mechanical. To me the hip was like a block of wood, as if I were Pinocchio. The idea that there could be movement inside didn't register. It was like a car part. A bolt that's out of place and you put it back. That's how I understood my own body.

The knife in the sternum

I had chronic pain in my sternum. Like a knife lodged there. Constant. I had lived with it for years. I had normalized it the way you normalize the background noise of a city. It was always there, but I had stopped expecting it to go away.

The revelation

And then, during a session with Josep, something happened. When I suddenly felt for the first time that he was touching the vertebra and I could feel that the vertebra was rotated... that was a revelation. It wasn't theory. It wasn't a diagram in a textbook. It was my body telling me something I had never heard it say.

Without causing any harm, without cracking, without any kind of aggression, doing it extremely subtly, the pain disappeared and never came back. A paradigm shift. Everything I had understood about the body — that it was mechanical, that you had to force it, that pain was inevitable — collapsed in that instant.

From wood to living body

I stopped being Pinocchio that day. My body stopped being an object and became a living system, with layers, with intelligence, with a capacity to reorganize itself that I didn't know existed.

It's something magnificent that most people have never had the chance to feel. Discovering that your body isn't a machine that breaks down, but a system that can find its own order when someone knows where and how to touch.