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This is your weekly reminder to breathe. Inhaling and exhaling through your nose. Filling those beautiful lungs with life-giving oxygen. Notice how many times you are holding your breath throughout the day – you might be surprised at how many times you do this. Now, focus, and spend two minutes breathing in for five seconds, and out for five seconds, and in, and out. Keep coming back to the breath. This is a good, good way to return to the present. Let’s talk about pain. Specifically pain that feels normal. The pain that you carry. You might be thinking, “Abe! This section is about wellness, so why are we talking about pain?” It’ll make sense soon, I promise. We moved back to Denver about two months ago. As soon as we did, I called my long-time physical therapist, Lauren, to start working with her once more. She was the person who truly changed my life four years ago – and working with her inspired my #abeminus100 journey. For years she has been encouraging me to try dry needling, a form of muscle therapy that treats muscle tissue. Using targeted needle insertion, its goal is to reduce pain, inactivate trigger points and restore function in muscles that have been injured or are chronically tight. I kept saying no (NO!) to dry needling, despite two years of chronic pain in my shoulder and left bicep, a TFL muscle that’s never really let me squat properly, and an endless series of tension headaches. I was used to it. We kept talking about dry needling. I kept saying no. Why? Because I was afraid of how it would hurt. I was choosing to sit with my known pain, rather than risk something unknown, despite all the reasons to try it. It didn’t matter that it was a proven treatment for alleviating and healing injury. I didn’t know how it would hurt, and that was reason enough to say no. During my PT session two weeks ago, Lauren said, “Abe, of course I won’t force this, but I think we need to go deeper into treatment, and try dry needling. You’ve been in this pain for a long time; we gotta try something different.” And in that moment, I heard her. I was done with the hurt I knew. Nothing else had really worked. So I finally said, “well, it’s 2020, this year is already wild – let’s make it more wild. Let’s do it.” So, as Isaac held my hand in encouragement, Lauren went in, and we hit eight different locations of my chronic pain. Eight needles, one after the other. And get this: those needles were dramatically less painful than even one tension headache. And. AND. Those needles, after their initial sting, gave me immediate relief. My shoulder relaxed, my range of motion increased – and then, the pain was gone. I cried. For years, I had weighed the pain that I knew against the unknown pain of those needles, and I had chosen the pain that I knew. For years. Those decisions added up, and I endured years of chronic tension headaches, years of not being able to squat, rather than risk something hurting in a way I couldn’t predict. And it wasn’t until I finally said yes to a new, unknown pain, a pain which had the chance of truly healing me, that I would actually find myself free from pain entirely. I’ve been thinking about this concept ever since. What known pain do I choose, rather than risk something hurting in a new way on the path to something better? What am I so scared to try that I remain in the known hurt and ache? Making something better often means temporary discomfort, and how many times do we turn away because unknown pain is scary? It’s so easy to navigate, feel, and work with the pain that we know. It’s comfortable, in its way. Speaking from my #abeminus100 experience: getting healthy looked painful, when I looked at it from my un-health. I didn’t know if I could do it. I definitely didn’t know how to show up in it. So it was easy for me to eat away my feelings and to remain in the pain of unhealthy living – anything but the new shock of change. But here’s the thing – that shock is temporary. We can normalize anything. So why not take the plunge, endure the temporary pain, and then normalize something good for you? Move past what’s holding you back, release the familiar pain, and choose something better for yourself knowing that you can survive that initial flinch. Because at least it’ll only hurt once – and that familiar pain of yours? It’ll hurt you for as long as you decide to hold it. My encouragement to you is to step into that new, unknown pain on the way to your freedom and health and power. It. Is. Worth. It. And you will know that, for sure, on the other side. I believe in you.
Abe
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