Sunday: All We Have Is Now & MLK! Updated: 8:06 PM

 It's Sunday! Sunday fun day! Yes. It's the day we try and relax just a little bit more before we have to start thinking about Monday. I like Saturdays also, but it usually goes by with just a little bit of carry-over stress from Friday if you didn't work it off at the gym or the local pub..or like in my case both! LoL. It was Friday the 13th this weekend, and I made it out after having a blast from the past gym moment only to take in a couple of drinks while waving the MIC at a local sports pub. Then I made it home to watch a remake of an old horror movie, The Amityville Horror Story, with the housemates and friends. The week was more or less normal. There were a few moments when it was not 'normal' and in them all of my instincts awoke...again--all things seemed to connect in their disconnectedness for just a few moments till everything balanced out. I'll touch on that just a bit because it's been brewing in the recesses of my person this last week, but it's time for another weekly edition of Rants From A Midwest Guy In The Land Of Milk And Honey! 


If it wasn't obvious, I've decided to write towards the end of the weekend rather than the beginning of it. Hahaha. That way, I can actually enjoy a little more of it enough to have or let my thoughts from the week settle. This was what was happening this week for sure (as it does about every three weeks or so). The sciatic pain I have been experiencing for weeks with seemingly no end in sight, regardless of the therapies I was throwing at it, finally has almost gone away. This was largely due to a change in my treatment strategy, and the reprieve from 'pain status' has led to a change in my mental status or maybe just a reinstatement of my normal frame of mind that I had before I was distracted by pain.

As I mentioned last week, having pain can mess up your ability to see things clearly, understand things or experiences for what they are because all you can think about is pain. It controls what you think you will do, who you will do things with, and what kinds of things you will try, and that's just physical pain! There is also emotional pain which has the same kind of debilitating effects on you as physical pain. In fact, there is enough research that validates you can be having physical or emotional pain and not know which is really the problem beyond the obvious. What I mean by that is you can be having, let's say, a physical type of pain, but it can show up as an emotional type of distress. For sure, the physiological experience of pain can and will affect your emotional states, and this is true in the opposite direction where you can be having an emotional type of pain or distress and without it being obvious to you, experience pain in your physical person.

The interconnectedness of the mind and body is an area of study people strive to understand because if you can figure out where pain is coming from or causing it, and necessarily how it is being experienced, you can uproot its grip on you; you can be free! If you can do this, or at least find a person that can help with you achieving it, you can change your experience of the moment, live more fully, and enjoy more your life! Listen to yourself breathe. Take a snap-shot of all of your thoughts and understand what's in them. See all of the people around you or the light coming in through the window that you never really take note of because you're too far into your thoughts or buried in pain-emotional, physical or both. All of this is happening right now, and how much more rich could your experience of these fleeting moments be if there were fewer or no distractions blinding you from them!?

"All We Have Is Now," as the picture at the start of the blog states. Yeah, it's on a super buff, chiseled chic I follow on(I know, right?! These are the kinds of things I think about when I'm not in pain or trying to figure out how to get out of it....getting buff.) Instagram as motivation to get to the gym, but the message (apart from the vehicle it's being delivered on) is true! In our forward motion in life, all we have is the present. Tomorrow may not happen, and you cannot go backwards. What you can do is 'now.' Originally, I was thinking through what I was gonna write on while considering last week's rant- being present. Then MLK's son came into the office, and I had to think a little bit about all the things MLK's taught us through his 'direct non-violent' approach to people that may be on the opposite side of the fence from you. He spoke about the urgency of the moment, the importance of now, and why taking action is important so as to not fall into complacency and eventually 'do-nothing-ism' and taking no-action, and just accepting things for what they are. Doing nothing at all is essentially accepting what you're experiencing, good or bad, as normal. So, before we give up or decide things are as good as they're going to get, you better think about it because you never know how things may change if you do something different than what you have already.

Most of you know I'm a chiropractic physician, and I focus on sports and wellness types of care. I am also a runner and body builder. I thought about how many things I hadn't done in the last couple of months because of the pain I was experiencing in my low back/ass. While thinking through a few of my patients' experiences and how pain had changed them, I thought about my own pain and how I was avoiding any activities that might cause me pain. I was still experiencing it anyway because of the interconnectedness of the body, but I was not doing the things I wanted as a result of it. I was losing the battle for myself and in some cases at a standstill for a couple of my patients even if we were both getting a little bit of relief.

Then it hit me as I continued my thoughts on Dr. King's work. He said that, "The pain of staying the same must become greater than the pain of changing." Of course this was directed at a major societal problem, but its principle was still applicable to the problem of pain and its changing our way of thinking and our behavior to avoid it physically and otherwise. I thought, "Why not do things I want or that my patients want to do that are causing them pain versus nothing and still have pain and use them to understand how to fix the problem?" So I started to do the things that initially caused me the injury gradually and slowly. Sure it hurt. Sure it was unpleasant, but it was less unpleasant than watching other people do things I know I can do if I could get the pain under control.

It was the same for my patients. I had them begin to do the various activities that caused them pain with one stipulation: "Only do as much as you can tolerate and for only brief periods of time, and when you do them think about your pain and try and understand which motion aggravates it. Where is the pain coming from?" They did what most people do when you tell them to engage in a potentially painful activity--they shied away from it; they looked for a reasons to not do them; some didn't do it at all in a couple of instances. This was largely fear based or whatever that hurt was or is. As you might expect, the people that didn't do anything but got their regular therapy only improved to a certain degree but eventually regressed to a worse condition when they did substitute activities.

The others that took on the active therapy had a different experience--their experience of pain began to change. As they did their activities (run, bike, and swim) they felt pain, but not like they had before their therapy as they focused on the pain as it was happening, where it was happening and exactly what motion it was that caused it. When we reviewed the pain inducing activities, we discovered that the motions had become interrupted from smooth performance because of scar-tissue or other adapted motions to compensate or avoid the motions all together essentially stressing other parts of their body. We as sports minded doctors know to look for these type of materials because your body is dynamic, and it tries to heal itself. Sometimes our body needs a little help getting it right, and other times it's our own worse enemy because it too wants to avoid pain and creates ways for itself to avoid it-pain- with compensatory motions.

As chiropractic docs, we learn to scan for scar tissue and often miss it where it needs to be found. We are excellent at feeling things out, but there is no one that can tell you where it exactly hurts better than the person feeling the pain. What I found was that although the patients attempted to make the movements that caused them pain they couldn't until we pin-pointed where the inhibitions were and what was causing them--scar tissue. After working the material directly with some intended healing motion and therapy as the patient did the painful movements-their pain began to decrease and their ability to perform went up. With this change, came a other changes in attitude, mental status, and desire to do everything that they could.

I remember when one of my patients first began to resume one of her activities and how she said it hurt her to even think about doing it. Eventually, after we got to the source of her problem, and we got the order of therapy and the kind of therapies right, she began to heal. The more she resumed getting on her bike, the less pain she would feel in the aftermath and infusion of therapy in between her riding. Every time we did therapy, she knew it was not gonna be an unpleasant experience because breaking up some our of own body's self-healing strategy is uncomfortable but a necessary tool. As time moved forward in the first two weeks of intensive therapy, she was nearly back to pain-free status and nearly 100% of her activities including the biking after over a year of doing different things to try and correct the problem or more importantly, avoiding it. She had given up in believing it was gonna get any better till then.

More than not, we take on a new reality we allowed to happen to ourselves as normal, and we accept it maybe knowing it could be better or maybe not, but we decide the pain may be too great to overcome so we do nothing and often avoid it-painful situations, but that's not living. That's just getting by, and there are better ways to live. Sure most of what I've written about was about physical pain, but the principles and activities are the same when it comes to emotional pain. We avoid it. Our person tries to heal our wounds, and we accept the outcome, painful or uncomfortable, as the new norm when in fact, it doesn't have to be. "The pain of staying the same must become greater than the pain of changing."  Those changes, the better way of living and experiencing life begins with the word, "NOW." Now is the time to grasp onto things that maybe causing us pain and understand them for what they are so that we know what needs to happen to bring some healing about it because that hot girl at the top is wearing more truth than she realizes. All We Have Is Now.

The last picture is the sun setting to the West over the 101. When my one year anniversary weekend comes in a couple of weeks, Ill tell you the story of how I ended up in this spot and why the exit ramps that lead to it are significant. Till then, "Be well. Do good work, and come on back."