The One You Feed - Sarah Shockley on Living with Chronic Pain

Episode Date: September 18, 2019

Sarah Shockley is a multiple award-winning producer and director of educational films including Dancing From the Inside Out, a highly acclaimed documentary on disabled dance. Sarah is the author of a number of books on living with chronic pain, including the one discussed in this episode, The Pain Companion: Everyday Wisdom for Living with and Moving Beyond Chronic Pain.Need help with completing your goals in 2019? The One You Feed Transformation Program can help you accomplish your goals this year.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Sarah Shockley and I Discuss Living with Chronic Pain and…Her book, The Pain Companion: Everyday Wisdom for Living with and Moving Beyond Chronic PainHow it’s hard for us to heal when we’re in a battle with painThe good wolf aspect of painFeeding into healing vs feeding in living with chronic painHer experience with debilitating painThe many components of chronic pain – in addition to the physical componentHow isolating chronic pain can be Chronic emotional painSeeing pain differentlyTurning towards pain and asking it, “What could positively be your positive purpose here?”What you resist persistsBecoming partners with your painThinking of pain as the voice of something within you that wants to be healedCreating a different relationship with painWe lock pain in place when we get into a resistant modeGiving pain a lot of spaceBreathing into the painThe messages that pain brought herAsking pain, “What do you need?”How her life has been transformed by changing her relationship and experience with chronic painThat she wrote the book she wished she had been given in the midst of her struggle with painThat being seen in your pain can be the beginning of healingLiving with chronic pain and what she imagined her pain looking likeSarah Shockley Links:thepaincompanion.comFacebookYouTubeDoorDash – Don’t worry about dinner, let dinner come to you with DoorDash. Get $5 off your first order of $15 or more when you download the DoorDash app and enter promo code WOLFThe Great Courses Plus – learn more about virtually any topic – beyond the basics and even master a subject if you want to. Get 3 months of unlimited access to their entire library for just $30. www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/wolfIf you enjoyed this conversation with Sarah Shockley on living with chronic pain, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Toni BernhardMichael GalinskySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Instead of fighting pain, I might say, all right, pain, you're here, I don't like you, but what are you here for? What are you bringing? What might be your positive purpose? Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor what's in the museum of failure and does your dog truly love you we have the answer go to really know really.com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign jason bobblehead the really know really podcast follow us on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Sarah Shockley, a multiple award-winning producer and director of educational films, including Dancing from the Inside Out, a highly acclaimed documentary on disabled dance. Sarah is the author of a number of books on living with chronic pain, including the one

we discussed today called The Pain Companion, Everyday Wisdom for Living With and Moving Beyond Chronic Pain. Hi, Sarah. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Eric. It's great to be here. I'm excited to have you on. We are going to discuss your book called The Pain Companion, Everyday Wisdom for Living With and Moving Beyond Chronic pain. But before we start with that, let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love.

And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second. And he looks up at his grandfather. He says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I'd be happy to speak to that. In terms of pain, you know, the first thing we might automatically think of is, oh, yeah, I get that. The bad wolf is pain, and the good wolf is not pain. So that makes sense. But in my work, and the way I view it is to consider the wolves kind of the way we perceive pain. So we can look at pain and see it as the big bad wolf, as the enemy, as the thing to be destroyed, as the thing we have to fight.

And that's often where we start with pain. We think of it as totally negative, totally bad. And we feed into that. We respond to it that way. We fight it. We try to kill it. We want to end it. It's natural.

It's kind of, you know, it's not a thing that we like very much and it's very uncomfortable and difficult. But when we only perceive pain in that way, we're actually locking it in place. And it's harder for us to heal when we're in that battle with pain. So I think of moving that perception over to the other side is one of the ways we can begin healing. And perceiving pain maybe not as something we want to invite into our life. healing and perceiving pain maybe not as something we want to invite into our life but if we see the good wolf aspect of pain we can begin to say okay let's ask different questions instead of fighting pain i might say all right pain you're here i don't like you but what are you here for what are you bringing what might be your positive purpose how can i perceive you and work with

you in such a way that we're working together rather than me just fighting with you? And that way you're feeding into healing rather than feeding more into the battle with pain, which can be exhausting and sometimes seemingly never ending. That's a great, great way to look at it. Will you tell us briefly about your journey with pain, kind of what brought you to the point where you were living with chronic pain? Boy, for me, it happened fairly quickly. It was a big surprise. I've been very athletic all my life and kind of person who gets things done and had a background in business management and was considered myself very capable and

somebody who just took care of things and responsible. And I'm sure many people can relate to that. And then almost overnight, I contracted something called thoracic outlet syndrome. I had a few warning signals. It was some strange pains in my left arm that didn't seem to relate to anything. And then some tingling and numbness in someplace else. And it wasn't sustained. And I couldn't relate it to anything I was doing. But it turns out that it was related to computer use, which should be a warning to people to be really careful about having an ergonomic setup. Mine was very non-ergonomic.

And I was using quite a small keyboard, little tinyomic. And I was using a quite a small keyboard, little tiny laptop. And I was working for somebody where I was in front of the computer quite a bit. And literally, though, when it came on, it was virtually one day I was active and the next day I wasn't. And it's quite a shock to the system to go from being somebody who's holding things together as a single mom. I had to work all the time. I didn't have a lot of benefits and things that would take care of me. So all of a sudden, whoa, one day I'm okay. And the next day I'm in terrible pain and can barely move. And thoracic outlet syndrome is a collapse between the clavicles, the collarbones and the first rib. So there's a squeezing of

nerves and arteries and muscles on both sides of the body. So it's very painful. It's very debilitating. It's not that well known, but it is unfortunately getting more prevalent from computer use. So wow, everything just stopped. My life stopped overnight. And I'm sure there are listeners out there who've had a similar experience from different reasons, perhaps, but it is a shock when you go from being active and capable to just full stop, and you're in horrible pain. And I had a kid to take care of who was about 11 at the time. And so what do you do with that? And that started my journey of how do I work with this? And for me, I wasn't given a whole lot to work with. I'm not really big on using pharmaceuticals to begin with,

so that wouldn't be the first place I'd go, but I was offered some to try and they had horrible side effects. And the exercises and treatments I was given made things worse. So I was kind of left to my own devices and that started my journey on how do I work with this? One of the things that you describe is how you come down with this condition, you're in a terrible amount of pain, you start trying to do everything that you can to make it better. You're seeing doctors and you're following all that advice. And it doesn't go away. And you say that we start to feel that our chronic condition is a negative reflection on us. There is something wrong with us for continuing to experience pain.

Yeah, that's a very common response. And I've talked to many people and particularly, of course, we're talking about chronic pain when it just won't go away. And chronic is the label we put on something that a lot of people say three months, whatever, it's just not getting better. And first, you have the pain to deal with itself. And then you've got this horrible feeling of, oh, no, it's not leaving. What do I do with that? And sometimes, as in my case, everything I was given to make it better made it worse. sometimes, as in my case, everything I was given to make it better made it worse. And it's terrifying.

And one of the things we don't talk about a lot when we talk about living with pain is the other aspects of living with it besides the pain itself. We focus on that a lot. But there's also all this other stuff that comes in. And part of the other stuff that comes in that we have to deal with is the feelings of what have I done wrong? Did I screw up? You know, we've got all kinds of answers that come in from new age things to it's your karma and you must have had a, you know, you must have been a terrible person in a past life to I must have made bad decisions in this life or am I a bad person? So we have to contend with these questions. And when you're not in pain, it might be easy to say, oh, no, no, you don't want to think like that.

But when you're in pain and it won't move, you can't help but begin to wonder, what's wrong with me? Right. And this book is really your path for how you primarily worked with these more emotional components of pain. with these more emotional components of pain. You know, you describe things like victimization, powerlessness, isolation, silence, invisibility. There's all these things that come along with the pain. You've got the physical sensation, which God knows is bad enough. And then there's everything else that comes with it. And this book is, you know, from my perspective, is really about you learning to deal with all those other components of pain beyond just the

physical sensation. If you can't make the physical sensation change, can you work with all these other things that make the overall experience better? And then sometimes, ironically, the relaxation that comes from dealing with those emotions better starts to lessen the pain. Yes, exactly. It's twofold. One aspect of looking at it this way is that a lot of times the emotional aspects of living with chronic pain aren't recognized. They aren't addressed. The doctors aren't equipped to really do that. They aren't addressed. The doctors aren't equipped to really do that. But also, if you're not, if you haven't lived with physical pain over time, it's hard to imagine what it's like. So we kind of feel very alone in our pain and very isolated. There are millions of people in pain right now, just in this country alone in the United States and all over the world. There are many, many more. And yet, we feel very alone. And we feel very much like I'm in my own world of pain here. And it tends to take over our whole sense of self. And one of the things that's not being addressed, and when we look at chronic pain, which is a big

calling it an epidemic, really, we look at the opioids, we look at the use of pharmaceuticals and what that's doing. But we all but we aren't really addressing how does this affect the person? How does it affect how they feel about themselves? And as you were saying, when we can begin as people who are working with pain to look at that, and hopefully the medical community can begin looking at those aspects as well. If we shift our focus onto ourselves, sort of away from the pain, not to push away from it, not to ignore it, but just kind of begin to say, how am I doing in this? Who am I now? Where am I? And begin to look at how it's affecting ourselves.

At first, it can be kind of shocking. It took me a while to realize, wow, I'm in a lot of emotional pain here too, because the physical pain takes up so much attention that you kind of lose sight of yourself. So I'm trying to help people see what what's going on for them and to begin to work with those aspects. And as you said, what I found was that if I began to recognize what was going on for me emotionally, and began to take care of that a little more and began to be more present with myself and and create a different attitude towards working with pain which we can talk about then the pain itself started to lessen everything you can think the body relaxes but i also kind of think the pain relaxes it feels like all of you starts to feel a little bit better and

when you're in a lot of pain, and you can feel a tiny bit better, that's progress. And for me, I've made significant progress over the last years, in in working on this kind of level where I begin to address, how can I feel better about myself first. And then, paradoxically, the pain starts to feel better to it starts to lift a little bit. And I think there's physiological reasons for that, too. It starts to lift a little bit. And I think there's physiological reasons for that too. I think we do begin to relax. I think we breathe differently. I think the blood flow begins to release. We contract less. There's lots of things that go with that. And so where do we start? Let's get into some of the things that

you found that were helpful for you. There's a number of ways to start. One is to begin to see pain a little differently, as we started out talking about, to allow yourself to think, okay, I'm in this, I'm already here in pain. If fighting hasn't helped, you know, fighting is helping and you're moving out of pain by fighting it, keep doing it, you know, if that works. A lot of people find that they end up locked in a battle, but you know, pain's pretty strong. And it's like it's not releasing. So if that's not working, then begin to see pain differently to allow yourself to step back a little bit, just take a little bit of a breath and say, Okay, what if just what if,

instead of treating pain as the enemy, I asked it a different question. I said to a pain, let's say you turn towards pain in a sense, and say, well, what could possibly be your positive purpose here? There must be a reason you're here beyond just torturing me. So beginning to relax a little bit around the just the whole concept of pain. And that sounds like a tiny thing. And it is sort of a subtle change, but it's also very profound. When we're when we're head on with pain, we're locked in this battle, we're kind of we've drawn our lines and pains on one side, and we're on the other. And we're using our medications, and we're using our treatments, and we're gritting our teeth, and we're getting and we're going to

get through it. And we're pushing, pushing, pushing. And, you know, that old saying, what you resist persists is it can be really true with pain, too. So it's not about giving into it, not at all. It's not about acquiescing. It's just about kind of stepping away from the battle line. And thinking of pain rather than in front of you as something that you have to kill, get rid of, stop. Thinking of it as sort of moving to the side in the sense of, okay okay we're going to become partners now and beginning to imagine that pain is in fact the voice of something in you that wants to be healed it's trying to heal you even though it feels really bad but changing that perspective

all of a sudden begins to relax just a little bit. And I think of pain almost kind of weird. It's almost like its own entity. But it isn't, but it is part of you. But it's also feels like it isn't. So when you can imagine pain as a positive force, a positive being that's trying to get your attention, it's very unpleasant, but it's must be saying something really important because it's really using a lot of juice to get your attention. So you kind of turn toward it. So that's the first thing is to begin to try to create a different relationship with pain and on a more positive level. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you, and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you two? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com.

And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What we resist persists. I use this phrase all the time, you know, suffering equals pain times resistance, right? Yes. And I have, I'm not going to call it chronic pain. I have back pain that is around a lot of the time. And sometimes it's more severe than other times. Sometimes it's pretty bad and most of. Sometimes it's pretty bad. And most of the time, it's pretty manageable. And I've just really realized how when I actually, like you say, turn towards it a little bit, it gets much better. My brain seems to take these shortcuts where I get

a twinge of pain. And my brain then goes off into all the stories about that pain. I can't take it, how it's going to happen. I mean, all this stuff. And if I can stop that for a second and go back to it for a second, I often realize that, yeah, the sensation is there and it's unpleasant, but it's not nearly as unpleasant as the whole mind state that I have gotten myself into as a result of feeling those physical sensations. And I feel that when we go there, when we go into the fear and we go into the resistance, I mean, it's easy to do. It's a natural response. But if we can kind of let go of that, then we're helping pain move on.

We're helping it move. We lock it in place when we get into that resistant mode. And again, it's so easy to do because it's like, there that is again. And one of the first things we do, you may have noticed when we feel those twinges or much bigger than twinges for some of us of pain. And some of us are in pain all the time. There's just sort of levels that kind of go up and down, but it doesn't go away. The first thing we often do when we feel into the pain is we pull our breath in. We try to stop it.

And often one of the ways we try to stop it is by not breathing. And this is one of the things I discovered when I thought, what can I do with this pain if I can't really do any of the treatments and I can't really, you know, help it with pharmaceuticals and I'm trying to eat right and nothing's working? What can I possibly do? And I thought, well, I don't know, I can try to meditate with it or something. But sitting still and trying to breathe deeply actually made me in much more pain because my condition doesn't work well with sitting in the same position for too long and deep breathing wasn't so great. So I thought, well, that doesn't work. But it did put my attention on breath and how I was breathing. And I started to notice that. And I thought, oh, I'm holding my breath a lot. In fact,

and I'm breathing very shallowly. And sometimes we feel like we have to almost, you know, because if we breathe deeply, we'll feel more pain. Sometimes that's true. But we also want to notice not to hold our breath too much because that restricts the blood flow. It restricts the oxygen. We're tensing up. We're also contracting a lot. So there's a lot of ways we respond to pain. We don't even realize it.

We're responding physiologically by holding ourselves in. So if we can begin to say okay i'm just going to be with pain then i can i'm going to begin to breathe just a little more easily doesn't have to be deep just breathe a little bit and one of the things i experimented with was asking myself well what if i let pain relax what if i let pain breathe what if i imagined pain was you know sort of all contracted and weird, and I just kind of with it, just started to breathe differently, and just relax a little bit around the pain. And the pain was still there, it didn't automatically fix everything,

but just kind of relaxing around it. And then I moved into a space of okay, what if I let pain have a little more space instead of contracting and trying to stop it what if I let it kind of breathe outward and just take up more room which sounds like the worst thing you can do and yet if you try it and you just kind of imagine okay pain take the room you need it strangely starts to relax a little bit and and I have found dissipate, and a lot of people that have tried this, it's not that pain is going to go away instantly. But if you can find these ways of being a little more relaxed around it, of breathing a little bit more freely, of letting it just be where it is, that's the path to healing. You mentioned earlier sort of seeing that pain

is sending us a message or it's there to do something for you. What were some of the, I don't like this word lessons that pain taught you because it's not like, you know, I don't believe that like we get these awful things in life to teach us lessons. I agree. Yeah. However, there does seem to be truth that I guess the phrase I like is, you know, it's not that things always happen for the best, but we can try and make the best out of what does happen. You know, and so for you, what are some of the things that you felt like pain brought to you? What were some of its messages? There's a couple levels of messages. One is, of course, the almost obvious physical level of, okay, you need to change something physically on what you're doing in life.

And that's often one of the first things we look at is what do I do differently? And sometimes we don't even listen to that. It might be slow down. It might be rest more. It might be I need you to just, you know, be more relaxed, be differently with your breath, as we were talking earlier. So there's, there's the levels of how we are with our body that it might be sending messages about absolutely, what we're eating, what we're, you know, imbibing in whether we a lot of us don't rest enough, we stay up too late, we're on screens all the time. There's a lot of things that pain from a condition that might seem not related to those things might be benefited by if we really listen and we can even turn. Sometimes I imagine pain is sitting in a chair and I say, okay, what do you need?

Which is also a question we don't often ask. Pain, what do you need? We usually say, how can I get rid of you? But you might surprise yourself and imagine pain sitting there and it might say, wow, thank you for asking. You know, I'd love you to just take me to the beach or, you know, I need your toes to be in some sand and some earth. And these things that we kind of forget about in our rush, rush life can be incredibly healing. And we overlook

them because they're not giant, big things, but a lot of things that, so, so a lot of times pain might be telling us to do a lot of small things that add up in terms of changing how we are in life physically. But it also if it's chronic, if it stays around, it kind of forces you to look at yourself and to be with yourself or can maybe you don't have to go that direction. But for me, I had to start asking questions about, well, who am I now? I can't do all the things I used to do. Is pain sort of part of me needing to change who I am in life? Is that part of what's going on here? Or whether it was meant to be that way? Or, or, you know, I agree with you, I don't really into the, oh, it must be here to teach you a lesson or it's some kind of punishment. I don't go, that's not what I see at all.

But it may be asking something and it may be that on a soul level, perhaps, something's been asking you to change for a while and the only way it could get your attention was to come through through pain. Again, it's not a punishment thing. to come through through pain. Again, it's not a punishment thing. It's more of a, if you can think of it as a directive or a signpost or a, okay, look over here. Oh, well, maybe I need to change how I am in life. Maybe I'm way too critical on myself. Maybe I, for me, it had a lot to do with learning how to be with myself, which sounds sort of like an oxymoron. How can you not be with yourself? You're always with yourself.

But a lot of us go through life kind of being here for other people, especially for parents, or we don't really notice how we are. We run from ourselves. We're always on movies or we're running to work or we're out doing something. And I found that when I was with my condition, I couldn't go anywhere. I was stuck in my little house for a lot of the day. And then I was stuck with me. And I couldn't even, you know, I couldn't read books, I couldn't watch movies, I was in so much pain, I was so limited that I could barely do anything. And there I was

me and me. And, and it's just you, you know, learning how to be with you. It may sound like a small thing, but it's really huge. I had to face loneliness, I had to face who I thought I was, I had to come to terms with how I was uncomfortable, just being alone with myself. And I didn't really want to learn those things particularly. And I certainly wouldn't want to learn them through pain. But they now feel like very rich gifts that I was offered ultimately. And again, I don't know that we have to go through pain to get those. But I have them now. I have a different way of being with myself that is much more self-accepting.

It's much calmer. I feel at home with myself in a way I never did before. So there are very unexpected gifts if you look for them. And so what is your experience of pain like now? So how long ago was this that this happened? So this was 11 years ago. So I've been in it for a long time. And I'd say about the first five years I was in very intense pain, which, I mean, it's a long time. And I found that things didn't help. So I stopped doing all the things that were making it worse. And I learned to live a very restricted life. It was always really painful, but I'd keep it

from spiking too much by just limiting what I did. I did that for a long time. Plus, I had to be a mom. So I kind of had to be able to get up in the morning for someone and get them off to school and then collapse for the rest of the day and then go go get them at school. And you know, that was my life for a long time. And then I kind of went, wow, I can't I can't live like this. You know, it's kind of a stoic, just putting up with it thing. And so that's when I started looking at more closely at what pain is and how I could be with it. And so it took some number of years for me to kind of develop this process and figure out because I wasn't a lot of pain. So I wasn't sitting around every day

wondering how I could do this differently. It was just every so often I go, okay, well, what can I try now? And so it took me quite a while to get to the places where I realized that I needed to be with pain and with myself very differently. So now what's happened is I still have pain 24 hours a day, but it's way more reduced. I couldn't be talking like this when I first started out. I mean, I would have been exhausted by now in the first five minutes. And my brain would have gone off to I wouldn't have known what I was talking about or couldn't remember what I just said five minutes ago because you don't have much of a brain when when you have a lot of pain and so for me at this the changes have been significant I'm still limited in what I can do I'm still working with you know

the physical restrictions but my energy levels are much better. And my ability to think is better my ability to of course, I wrote a book, which took me a long time, but process of writing it helped me kind of express, which is another thing I talked about, I think it's important to express pain, find a way to express it. And that helped release more and more. So, so my process has been pretty slow. On the other hand, I was told I would never get better. Nothing was ever going to be better by the doctors. And in fact, it was going to get worse. So you can, even when you're in a pretty hopeless situation and the doctors say nothing's going to work for you, there are

ways you can work from the inside out I think and Tilden. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend.

Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really.

Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you think that had you had the skills that you now have earlier,

that your journey through pain would have been less painful? Absolutely. In fact, I wrote the book I wished I had been given when I first got in pain because I was looking around for like, what do people do? What do you do? How do you deal with this? And how do you live? How do you get up in the morning? And, you know, when you're waking up in terrible pain, and some days I felt worse when I woke up than I went to bed. I don't know how that could be so, but I would just, I would and turn all night. I know people that have terrible pain, recognize this, you wake up feeling like you've been hit by a freight train. And you've been, you know, boxing with a gorilla

all night, like, Oh, man. And the only way I could get up was because I had a child to take care of. So, you know, that kept me going. But I was slogging through my days, just barely able to, you know, maintain. And I'm not the only one who's gone through that. And I looked hopefully for something out there that would help me make sense of it, help me at least feel like somebody else knew what was going on. And that's when about five or six years in, I started, well, maybe I can write about what's going on. And writing was very painful. I could barely hold a pencil, but I started, well, maybe I can write about what's going on. And writing was very painful. I could barely hold a pencil. But I thought, well, I'm going to write a sentence a day.

And that began to release things. So, yes, if I had, I think, something similar to the pain companion, some similar ideas, when I started, I really think it would have helped a lot. And people have written to me and called me and said, wow, just knowing that somebody gets it, that they read it and they go, ah, you get what I'm going through is a relief. And a relief is healing. So being seen in your pain and being recognized and being acknowledged can also be the beginning of healing too. It's really important. I agree 100%. That's the other part of the book we haven't really talked about is the first part of the book is very, very practical. It talks very much about ways to organize your life and to interact with others and

some very practical ways of dealing with pain. And then the second half of the book tends to go more into deeper ideas of non-resistance and allowing pain space. And then eventually you have a bunch of meditations in the book that are also intended for people who are in chronic pain. Yeah, I sort of developed these for myself. I think I have about 11 different, very easy, simple practices. One of the first things that I did to, you know, I didn't know I was developing these ideas and sort of meditations. But I when I was thinking, OK, I'm really stuck in this and I I can't go on like this. I cannot imagine my life going on for decades more in horrible pain and even getting worse.

I just can't deal with it. So I thought, what what can I do in my little, you know, in my little house with, you know, I am so limited, I've got to go inside to find the answers. And that's when I started asking about, well, what if I looked at pain differently? And so one of the things I did was I said to myself, well, all right, let's say pain is, it feels like a, you know, it feels like an invader when you're, when you're in a lot of pain, it feels like something else has shown up. And like, you know, your roommate, you never wanted only it's a body mate, you never wanted, you know, what are you doing here? And I can't go anywhere without you. It's everywhere, you know, like, could you just leave me alone for a while, but it won't, you know, there's no vacation. So I thought, okay, well, what if I started to use sort of an active imagination process with it? And I thought, what would pain look like if it

kind of was outside of me and I met pain, you know, my pain specifically, what would it look like? And I had a lot of nerve pain is a lot of what I have. It's very pins and needles and stabbing stuff and a lot of burning. And when it was the worst, it felt like my whole body was on fire in my brain. So I thought, well, okay, I'm going to imagine that I'm just going to meet pain and we're going to have a talk. So this is when I thought of pain as a horrible, you know, negative thing. But I imagined, okay, I'm going to let pain come to the door, which in itself is kind of scary. If you're, if you're in a lot of pain, you don't really want to look at it. But if I'm going to open the door, I'm just going to take a glance at what pain looks like. And then close the door again. You know, that's about all I could handle. So in my mind, I imagine going to

my real front door of my little house that I was in. And I imagine opening it and not letting pain in, but just kind of taking a look. It's already here. But so you know, it's already it's already in, but I wanted to metaphorically look at it. And I opened the door kind of cautiously. And I expected almost like a fiery demon out there or something really, really awful. And then I could slam the door on it again. But it would have started some kind of process, I imagined. But I opened the door, and there was this very nice looking young man out there wearing silver with silver shoes and the silver hat and wings on his head and wings, little wings on his shoes. And he was just very friendly looking. I said, what? And he had a little like a postcard. It was Hermes, or otherwise known as Mercury, the messenger of the gods.

And I was so shocked, I sort of jumped out of my meditation, I thought, what? And that's when I started thinking, oh, pain isn't just the enemy or just a horrible thing. Pain's a messenger. Oh, pain is something to say. That's when I really shifted the way I was with it and looking at it. So a lot of these, like mini meditations that I have at the end of the book are about how we can create a different relationship with pain, because that's when it really started to shift for me was I went, Oh, my gosh, pain is something, you know, to offer me, what does that mean? Pain is a message pain is it? And then I really started to think about it. Well, of course, it's a signal from the body. of course it's a messenger and then i began to think

of it as a messenger on other levels of the being besides physical which is always i've always been somebody who looks at the other side of things kind of mystical sides of things and and so i've always going to ask the question okay what else is there what else what else do i need to see so the meditations aren't particularly deeply mystical in nature, but they allow you to look at the other side of what's going on. They allow you to dialogue with pain. I'm going to start interacting in a more positive way. And then you begin to see, oh, something's coming back. I'm getting a few little, instead of just pain sort of shouting at me in the sense of that sensation of horrible pain, it's to me in my mind like pain shouting. You know, it's like, ah, pain can calm down because you're finally listening. It doesn't have to shout so loudly.

ah, pain can calm down because you're finally listening. It doesn't have to shout so loudly. And it actually, for me, had physiological effects as well as emotional and psychological to do these things. Excellent. Another analogy that you used in the book, a metaphor you used, was to imagine pain as a wild animal, injured and alone. That was one of my imaginings that I thought, you know what if it's like because you kind of go into the space of okay what what does pain feel like i finally realized one day well pain is in pain which is weird but it's like your your body's in pain it's not against you it's not trying to fight you it's trying to heal so pain is the feeling of healing in a way and that helped a lot and i thought well what if I imagine,

you know, what if pain is, I don't know, scared? Or, you know, what if all of this horrible feeling is not something so big and powerful and scary trying to get me? But what if I think of it differently? So I just sort of spontaneously got this imaginary idea of there's a wild animal, let's say it's a tiger or a lion or something, and it's in your house, but it's wounded. So that's what pain felt to me one day was like this thing with claws and it's really scary. And then I then but it itself is in pain. So I thought, well, what if it's a wounded animal? What if it's this big, scary thing, but it's actually trying to heal? And so I did this thing of imagining, well, what do you do? Let's say you have a wounded animal in your house. I mean, do you run up and try to hit it? That's what we do with pain. Or do you kind of slowly kind of get a little bit

closer and a little bit closer? Because it is kind of scary. I mean, pain is really scary. get a little bit closer and a little bit closer because it is kind of scary. I mean, pain is really scary. And it can be, it feels very dangerous to get close to pain. So using that kind of metaphor as a way to kind of move toward it when it's really scary, because some pain is really big. It's like people say, you're crazy, I'm not going to get close to that. So when you imagine it as the animal that's wounded, you can begin to just really gently get a little bit closer, a little bit closer, and you develop a trust relationship, which also again, sounds sometimes strange. We don't talk about pain in these ways. And yet that's part of it. You're beginning to trust the part of you that is trying to heal. That's really

what's going on. And then you can get a little closer and a little closer, and then you can begin to breathe a little differently and maybe just sit down next to that painful thing. And then you begin to notice, wow, it's not quite that scary. This thing is in pain too. How can we help each other move out of this? Wonderful. Well, Sarah, it's quite an extraordinary journey you've been on and a gift that you've given to people who are in chronic pain. So I want to thank you so much for taking the time to come on and talk with us. Oh, thank you, Eric. And thanks to all the listeners. Really appreciate it. And we'll have links in the show notes to your book and all of your other work.

Great. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like Why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor what's in the museum of failure and does your dog truly

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