During this Venus retrograde cycle, I’ve been exploring the factors that cause me to avoid visibility: why I don’t promote my work and let myself claim my spotlight.
Nothing impacts my visibility more than being in pain.
In brief, it goes like this:
When I don’t feel good in my body, I don’t feel good about myself, my work, my offerings, or really anything else in my life. As a result, I go into hiding. I don’t share my work or promote my offerings. I lose confidence in myself and my work. I stop trusting myself.
Pain tells me that something is wrong. If it comes in the gym, then it must mean I’m not lifting with the right form or technique. If it comes in the yoga studio, it must mean I’m not doing my poses correctly.
If it arises seemingly from nowhere, it must mean I’m deficient somehow.
And this is the crux of it:
The Psychological Pain of Physical Pain
When I am in pain, I believe that something is wrong with me.
When I am in pain, I don’t believe that I have anything of value to offer anyone.
When I am in pain, looking around at everyone else hurts. I see their progress, how they move in the gym, or through life, and wonder why I can’t have that. Why is it my lot in life to be in pain?
Pain becomes the sole overriding focus. Getting anything done efficiently and effectively is nearly impossible.
The site of the pain calls me to tend to it, like a sick child that needs constant bedside care.
Hold me. Massage me. Move me around. Let me out
In these moments, I don’t just feel pain. I am in the pain. It can overwhelm everything.
And it causes me to question every decision, action, and idea.
This may sound over the top, unless you’ve experienced pain. If you have, then you know how pain can shut you down and take away everything.
The more you try to reason with it, the stronger it becomes. It can feel like there’s no way out.
In pain, I am isolated and alone, stripped of my rationality and reason, believing that I have nothing of value to offer, and that I have no value.
When I am not in pain, I get access to higher wisdom that can help me step out of my pain and find a path through it.
5 Things to Remember When You’re in Pain
Here are five things my higher wisdom wants me to remember when I’m in pain.
(1) Pain Distorts Everything
Pain lives in the brain, and it distorts everything. In pain, we lose our powers of perception. We can’t see situations clearly. Our thoughts can become hijacked by the pain.
When I remember this, I can remind myself that the thoughts are just the pain talking. I don’t have to believe the pain thoughts.
(2) Causation is Complicated
When I feel pain, I immediate jump to the conclusion that something is wrong. I am not safe. I did something wrong. Nobody protected me.
The big myth about physical pain is that it always starts with some issue in the physical body, but that is not necessarily true. The physical pain might not be physical in its origin. It might be emotional or psychological. It might be stored trauma. It might be all of the above.
(3) You Can’t Prove or Disprove a Negative
When I am in significant discomfort I begin to question my decisions to devote time to daily exercise and the investments I’ve made in physical therapy and neuromuscular rehabilitation.
I might wonder what’s the point of all of the various modalities I’ve tried. I get down on healing.
In pain, I don’t see the progress I’ve made. Suddenly, I view everything I do as a waste of time and energy.
This causes me to doubt myself and not trust my decisions.
The belief that “my physical pain is evidence that my practices don’t work” is a distortion of facts.
To paraphrase my teacher Nevine Michaan,
What you see is true. But what you don’t see is also true.
There’s no way to know the pain I’d be feeling if I wasn’t showing up to the gym every day, practicing yoga, or practicing meditation. For all I know, without my practices, the pain would be worse.
In fact, when I’m able to get distance, I know that my daily practices help me navigate the pain with greater ease, less resistance, and more self-compassion.
(4) Healing Isn’t a Once-and-Done Process
Healing is a journey; not a destination.
This isn’t an overnight process. Nor is it a once-and done process.
Pain is a part of life. As we shed the body of held trauma that causes pain, we expose deeper wounds and more sticking points.
The work of healing is a process. We naturally have periods where we might feel paralyzed by the pain and also periods where we feels like we can move with the pain.
Just like the same thoughts repeatedly arise, the same pains might repeatedly arise.
Doing the work in the gym as well as the inner work must be a regular practice. It’s like doing laundry: you don’t think something is wrong because the clothes got dirty again. You put them back in the washing machine.
As I say to my clients: this is the work.
(5) Progress Isn’t Linear
When I’m in pain, I’m often telling and believing a story that I’m not making progress. This feels real and true because it seems to be supported by evidence.
When I struggle to lift a weight that is half of my max load, that feels like clear-cut evidence that I’m regressing.
As they say in the gym (and other parts of life): numbers don’t lie.
Except that isn’t entirely true: numbers often don’t tell the whole story.
They can’t account for the time of the month, where I was in my cycle, or what else was happening in my life on the day of my best lift or the day that I struggled at half of my max.
The number also doesn’t tell me anything about my form. Maybe the heavy lift was not with good form, while the challenge with a lighter load came because I was finally starting to recruit the right muscles. Those muscles may be hurting because they are being stressed in a way that will lead them to grow.
In the gym, in the body, and in business, there are good days and bad days.
When the same beliefs pop up repeatedly, I don’t have a story about not making progress. I know that I simply need to do more work to examine those beliefs. To think that we can create transformation by addressing a belief one time would be to set ourselves up with a false expectation and guaranteed failure.
Similarly, when pain arises in the same area, it doesn’t mean that my efforts are wasted; this is just what happens.
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