Pain: musing on language, motivation, and meaning

I’ve been away from writing for a while because life is happening all around me and I haven’t made the time, but a recent blog post by Dr. Bronnie Lennox Thompson got me thinking (as they usually do!) on a whole lot of topics. Appropriately, her post was titled “Musings on New Learning” and those musings got me onto plenty


I didn’t follow through, does that mean I failed?

I have been meaning to write this post for a while, but the post I thought I was going to write isn’t the post that I am now writing. This post was supposed to be a follow up to the post I wrote two months back (two months!) about how Simon Roost Kirkegaard helped me to change my pain by gently challenging some

Improving communication, giving voice to those with chronic pain

In the last few months my readership has jumped a bit (thank you to everyone who has shared my posts or had recommended my blog to a patient, client, family member, or friend) so I wanted to take a moment to explain a bit about what I’m trying to do here. I’ve also been living without internet for nearly two


Confidence when coming back from injury or while in pain

This post is a sort of intermediary between my last post, where I shared some of my discussion with Simon Roost Kirkegaard, a Danish physiotherapist and awesome human being, which led me to a new understanding of my pain and how my beliefs/fears/expectations about my hip were limiting me in ways I didn’t realize, and my next post, which will be

Changing pain: reaching out to patients, healthcare providers, and pain practitioners

I have had a lot of interactions with folks over the past couple of weeks about the changes that need to take place, and that are taking place, in the treatment and management of chronic pain and I’m ecstatic! I’ve heard amazing stories from people who are successfully managing their pain and truly LIVING their lives. I’ve also heard stories


What’s the definition of success when treating chronic pain?

Yesterday one of my pain heroes, Bronnie Lennox Thompson over at Health Skills, posted an article that really resonated with me called ‘Deciding When to Say When: Pain Cure? Or Pain Managed? I left a pretty lengthy reply on her blog post, two of them, actually, and felt like they contained some thoughts I should share with you all as well about

Nudging Pain: Movement Variability and Expanding our World

In my last post I talked about movement variability and how important it is for folks trying to change their pain, or just live more healthfully and resiliently in general, and in this post, I want to dive into that topic a bit deeper and talk about ways I’ve added more movement variability into my own life. This is part of

Movement Variability and Changing Pain

This post is both stand-alone as well as a part 3 from my ‘Expanding Our World, Expanding Our Movement’ series (Interested? Here’s part 1 and part 2). It revisits and reinforces some of what has been written about in previous movement posts but this one is specific to why I think movement variability and moving through postures, and not specific


Getting real, changing pain: how my ego held me back

Wow, weeks can fly by! I had started the first two parts of my movement repertoire series with the intention of getting parts 3 and 4 out the following week. That obviously didn’t happen. And this isn’t yet part 3 because I want to share something with you all. It’s related to everything I’ll talk about in those posts but

Expanding our world and our movement repertoire when we have pain: Part 1

When we have chronic pain our world can become very, very small and when our world becomes very, very small, it becomes less populated, less interesting, less motivating, less engaging, less enjoyable…just less. And when our world becomes so very small, our movement becomes small too. Our movement becomes stifled, guarded, restricted, limited…less. We may not move much or as much as we used