I would like to make a plea. A plea to stop framing pain as the enemy, a thing to be battled, defeated, beat, eradicated. A thing not to be tolerated, to be vilified and stamped out. Perhaps our emphasis on pain as evil, pain as punishment, pain as suffering is only serving to make pain worse. Perhaps using warlike, military →
I recently attended a writer’s camp in Big Sur, California, a stretch of rugged coast, and afterward took six days to drive from there to Colorado. I wanted to keep myself immersed in nature to let all that I’d learned percolate. I wanted to reflect, to think without distraction, particularly of the digital sort. I didn’t have cell reception for most →
My grandpa Fred died earlier this month. I went home to help my mom out a bit after his passing and have had time to reflect on life, meaning, happiness, compassion, regret…I think death tends to make us philosophers, does it not? Especially when we have regrets. Regret I told my mom that I felt guilty for not coming home →
I have been in a bit of a flare for over a week now, it’s been getting better with each day but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me, that I wasn’t a bit worried (oh how I worry!). That I wasn’t a bit bummed. Even with all that I *know* about pain science and my own →
Hello folks! This is part two of my good friend Heidi’s blog post on how being injured or in pain can lead to social isolation and how we can better handle it. I consider myself lucky to call Heidi my friend and I’m grateful our virtual paths have crossed, she speaks my truths and addresses a pretty tough, and not →
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 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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
This whole chronic pain thing has been quite the path to navigate over the past 5+ years, and I have discovered a lot of things along the way. I’ve learned a lot about pain science and a lot about the art of living with pain. I’ve learned that pain is incredibly complex, just as people are incredibly complex. But I’ve →
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 →
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 →