The Kinetic Sense

Home
United States
Kirkland, WA
The Kinetic Sense

Massage Therapist | Movement & Exercise Specialist 🫶 Feel first, think second 🧠

02/25/2026

If all your pain seems to live on one side of your body… this might be the missing link. 👀

For years, most of my pain showed up on the right side: right hip pain, right neck and jaw.

I kept stretching.
Strengthening.
Foam rolling.

But real change didn’t happen until I stopped chasing muscles and started training my brain, specifically the Pontomedullary Reticular Formation (PMRF).

Here’s why that matters:

The PMRF lives in your brainstem and has a big say in:

• Pain inhibition on the same side of your body
• Postural tone on that same side
• Sympathetic (fight-or-flight) tone inhibition

So when one side feels tighter, louder, or more painful… it’s often not just a tissue issue.

It can be a sensory input or integration issue. 🧠

For me, progress came when I:

✨ Trained left body coordination
✨ Trained my visual system, especially right smooth pursuits
✨ Stimulated my left vestibular system, especially left horizontal VORs and saccule

Less “fix the hip.” More “upgrade the systems controlling the hip.”

If you have a lot of pain on one side, try the drills in this video and tell me what you notice.

➡️ Follow for more movement tips.

➡️ And if you’re ready to go deeper into training the brain (not just the muscles), comment LIST to join the waitlist for The Brain Body Blueprint.

02/22/2026

POV: You say you’re exhausted, overwhelmed, dizzy, in pain…

And someone responds:
“Who isn’t?”

We’ve normalized living in low-grade survival mode.

When stress stacks up (kids, business, pain, poor sleep, scrolling at midnight), your brain starts prioritizing protection over performance.

That can look like:

• back or jaw pain
• dizziness
• shallow breathing
• snapping at your family
• feeling wired but exhausted

And everyone around you saying,
“Welcome to adulthood.”

But your body isn’t dramatic.
It’s adaptive.

Bringing balance back to your nervous system doesn’t have to be the removal of stressors or meditating.

You can ADD safety to your system with:

Face tapping
Humming
Listening to prosodic music
A walk in nature
Sitting comfortably on the ground

✨ Let’s normalize calm and connection, ease and flow.

➡️ Comment RESET if you want 5 simple tools to shift out of survival mode.

02/18/2026

When clients list all the things they’ve been told are “causing” their pain:

• “It’s your arthritis.”
• “Your discs are degenerating.”
• “You’re just weak.”
• “Your muscles are too tight.”
• “Pain is just part of getting older.”

Let’s normalize something.

Pain is complex.
And on the simplest level?

Pain is an output from the brain designed to create behavior change.
It’s protective. Not punitive.

We’ve been taught:
Pain = damage.
Pain = weakness.
Pain = something is wrong.

But research shows that imaging findings like arthritis or disc changes often do not correlate with symptoms or disability.

You can have structural changes and no pain.
You can have pain and very little structural change.

Several things can be true at once.

That’s why I’m careful with language.

Words matter.

When we tell someone:
“Your pain is from arthritis.”
“Your pain is from weakness.”
“Your pain is from tight muscles.”

We unintentionally narrow the story.

Pain is contextual.
Highly individual.
Influenced by lived experience, perceived threat, stress load, sleep, vision, vestibular input, immune health, and nervous system state.

Your body is not working against you.

It is adapting.

And instead of reinforcing fear or self-doubt, we can get curious.

Curious about:

• Why your brain might be turning up protection
• What inputs feel threatening
• What makes symptoms better
• How to increase safety signals

That’s the shift.

From fear → to empowerment.

From “what’s broken?” → to “what does my system need?”

If you want tools that take a whole-body approach to pain and movement, where vision drills can change your squat and working on an abdominal scar can influence neck pain…

You’re in the right place.

➡️ Comment RESET if you want my free guide to start shifting from protection mode to performance mode.

➡️ Comment LIST if you want to join the waitlist for my upcoming course Brain-Body Blueprint where we dive deeper into my favorite tools to support a thriving nervous system.

02/13/2026

Wise words from a professional dancer. I feel this quote in my soul. ✨

Because muscles don’t perform in isolation.
They express what the brain allows.

Flexibility?
Strength?
Control?
Recovery?

All of it is an output of the nervous system.

If the brain perceives threat, it limits range.
If it doesn’t trust stability, it creates tension.
If it’s overwhelmed, performance drops.

You can stretch harder.
Or you can train the system that decides how much motion you’re allowed to access.

When we improve sensory input including visual clarity, vestibular accuracy, proprioceptive feedback, we change the brain’s map.

And when the map and movement prediction improve, the output improves.

That’s why I’m so excited to record this podcast episode tomorrow diving into:

• Nervous system regulation for performers

• The brain’s influence on pain + flexibility

• Nervous-system-first tools to support range, performance, and recovery

Because dancers don’t just need stronger muscles.

They need safer nervous systems.

And honestly? So do most of us.

If you’re a dancer or movement enthusiast, what’s been the biggest frustration in your training: pain, flexibility plateaus, recovery, performance anxiety?

I’d love to bring your questions into the conversation.

✨ wishing you ease and flow today and always

02/05/2026

We were taught that calm comes after productivity.

But the nervous system works in the opposite direction.

When regulation comes first:

• movement feels easier
• pain settles faster
• focus improves
• strength and mobility actually stick

This is why forcing posture, grinding through workouts, or “powering through stress” often backfires.

Safety first. Capacity follows.

I’m building something for people who want a smarter, kinder approach to movement and nervous system health.

Comment LIST to join the Brain-Body Blueprint waitlist and be a founding member of my first online course. You will be the first to know when doors open! 🙌🏼

Address

Kirkland, WA

Website

http://www.thekineticsense.com/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when The Kinetic Sense posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Practice

Send a message to The Kinetic Sense:

Shortcuts

Want your practice to be the top-listed Clinic in Kirkland?