I’m writing about language…again! It’s because this year I have had the great honor to speak at a number of conferences, and it’s come up every time. One of the most important talks I’ve ever given was at the Paincloud Convention. It was the most vulnerable I’ve ever been on stage, probably the most vulnerable I’d ever been in public period (including →
In the last week I’ve gone on 2 runs. This is a big deal for me! I love running. Running has been one of the things I’ve missed most these last 7 years. I’ve given it a go a few times, and was quite successful last summer (read about it here!), but I started experiencing new pain in my left hip →
How do we get better if we have to constantly prove we’re in pain? And does that constant need to prove we’re in pain prevent us from getting better? In recent posts I wrote about the shame I felt after developing chronic pain and how I’ve been working through that shame. They were the hardest posts I’ve ever written, my most vulnerable by far. And →
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 →
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 →
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 →
I ran today. Well, I went for a jog today. Well, a joggish walk may describe it more aptly. Like a 2-minute joggish walk. Two 2-minute joggish walks to be precise. But I’ll stick with ‘I went for a run today’ because that’s what it felt like. This may not seem like a big deal, people run every day. I →
At some point along the way in writing this blog and trying to figure out this whole chronic pain thing, I went from learning about and understanding more about the science of pain to actually living what I know (well, mostly living what I know, I have my moments). I didn’t really notice it myself, at least not until it was →
I recently wrote about how my thoughts on movement have changed over the past couple of years (part 1 and 2), and I thought I’d delve a bit more into the evolution of those thoughts and why I posted them. Why I think our emphasis needs to shift a bit from the overly formulaic and prescribed movement to exploring enjoyable →
As many of you know, I have had my share of struggles over the past few years, trying to successfully navigate a few changes of direction along my life’s course, in particular injury, medical retirement from my career as a firefighter/paramedic and ongoing pain issues. I’ve had my fair share of angst-ridden freak outs about what I was going to do →
In the first part of this post on movement and pain I talked a bit about how I didn’t think about movement and posture much outside of the gym and lifting heavy things during training; how after I got injured, had surgery, and had persistent pain, I obsessed about movement and posture ALL THE TIME, to my detriment; and how →
My thinking on movement and it’s relation to pain has shifted pretty dramatically over the past couple of years. Before I got hurt, before my surgery and my pain issues, I was a gym rat who loved working out and did a lot of physical training at work. In the gym and on the training grounds, I was a form fanatic, largely in →
My brother was out for the past week with his girlfriend, it was a wonderful trip, as it always is when I get to see my bro (that’s him in the pic with me), but he said something to me that really got me thinking, something that kind of brought together a number of ideas for me, a culmination of →
This past weekend I attended the first annual San Diego Pain Summit and I can’t even begin to put into a cohesive string of words all that I am thinking, nor can I come close to formulating into a single blog post all that I learned during the course of three days of thought-provoking presentations from a stellar line-up of speakers. On top →
After my flare at the end of last year (which I talk about a bit here), and the months of getting through it, I started reading a book on pain called Pain: The Science of Suffering, by Patrick Wall, the guy who literally co-wrote the textbook on pain. I took my time, just recently finishing it, and figured I’d share some of →