In my last post I shared some thoughts on pain education and the phrase ‘pain is an output of the brain‘. I compared pain as output to pain as a lived, conscious, complex experience that people feel. From my perspective, describing pain as an output robs the experience of pain’s harsh, all-encompassing, life-changing reality. We are not machines producing outputs. →
On a 4-mile run the other the day I ran my fastest first 2 miles in over 7 1/2 years. My fastest first mile, too. And I did it on asphalt and concrete in heavy sneakers I didn’t buy with the intention of running in. Factors that would have made me avoid running in the first place just 6 months →
Psychological. What do you think when you see that term? Be honest with yourself, what’s going through your head right now? When you think about the word psychological or the phrase ‘psychological factors’, what comes to mind? I ask because I have seen misconceptions abound when it comes to the P word. Misconceptions about the term ‘psychological’ I have seen →
I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the last few weeks. Thinking about it ever since Peter O’Sullivan asked me to tell him my story when I was a patient demo during his Cognitive Functional Therapy workshop at the San Diego Pain Summit. And every time I think about it, I get teary. It touches something deep within me →
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 →
I started this post about trail running just over a year ago. I thought I was on track to being back at it. I thought trail running was going to be a regular part of my life again. It wasn’t. I didn’t finish the post because that whole being a runner again thing didn’t quite materialize. I’d flare-up, I’d feel the →
I do believe so… I hiked and snowshoed 8 miles a couple days ago up in Rocky Mountain National Park. 8 miles. Gaining and losing elevation through a beautiful forest, passing by snow blanketed meadows and catching glimpses of mountain peaks. It was sunny and warm, there were no bugs, no people, no cell service. For about 7 miles of →
This is a guest post (my first ever!) by my friend Heidi Armstrong of the Injured Athlete’s Toolbox. Heidi and I met on the interwebs, for which I am incredibly grateful. She has become a great friend and supporter, she understands what it’s like to be injured, to have pain, to lose yourself and find yourself, and what it takes to →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
In part 1 of this series, I talked about how when we have chronic musculoskeletal pain, our world’s can become pretty small and how in those smaller worlds, we don’t move in the ways we used to or move as much as we used to. It hurts, after all. When we’ve been hurting for a long time, it’s easy to associate →