Pain As A Catalyst For Change
Between Breath and Air
S1-E1: Intro Episode, Dana Smith
Welcome to Between Breath and Air I'm your host Dana Smith I've been working with people in a healing and transformation capacity for the past 11 years or so. The vehicles through which I formally do this is massage therapy and life coaching.
I am recording this from my backyard studio on the unceded lands of the lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking peoples, colonially known as Victoria, British Columbia. We are at the southernmost tip of Vancouver Island and surrounded by the waters of the Pacific Ocean.
I started my career in massage therapy in 2012 and it wasn't long into the start of that practice that I realized that the limitations to the profession wouldn't fit how I was called to help people. So, I began to look for other avenues to help people heal, evolve, and show up in their lives with more vitality, purpose, and meaning.
I began to become really curious about the instances where my patients would show up on my massage table because of some sort of injury. Some people would experience profound emotional pain around their shifting identity, now that their body was no longer the companion they were accustomed to journeying with. Because of injury or illness they were no longer able to recognize themselves as they once had.
I can think of countless times where a patient with a limiting body change would spin off into a place of catastrophizing fear in response to this. This could have been twigged by a doctor’s diagnosis or their own interpretation of what was happening.
Who am I now?
What value do I have any more?
How do I fit into the world in this new way?
Huge questions sometimes get asked. Fears can rise related to worth, belonging, and the ability to survive.
Sometimes this is with a person who is experiencing their first back spasm at age 68. Someone who’s lived an active life, able to do what they want, when they wish to. Who has never had to experience the impacts of suddenly not being able to complete life activities for a few days. Suddenly they see with technicolor all that they took for granted related to their ability to move freely without pain. It can be scary and so incredibly humbling.
Other times this is a person who has a daily experience of pain that’s intensity cannot be predicted or consistently managed. This could be migraines, unexplained fatigue & body aches, or debilitating menstrual cramps. They have lived with the impacts of these often invisible limitations and had to make accommodations in their lives to function.
I’m not judging.
All pain is valid.
If you feel pain, it is real.
And no matter how it onset, or how long it lasts, it has the power to inspire tectonic shifts in your identity and how you are able to participate in life.
When something is taken away from us without our consent — in this case the ablity to live pain free — it is at the very least upsetting, and when tied to our perception of ourselves and what we think we represent in the world, it can be devastating.
A process of cobbling back together the pieces of our now-relevant identities occurs.
Through loss it becomes clearer what matters most.
We become more concise in deciding what to take action on and what to drop.
A new sense of value is set for our attention and energy, too.
Physical pain — well, pain in all forms really – is a powerful teacher.
Why is it that some people feel emotional tumult related to their body pain while others don’t?
I started to notice a relationship between the types of thoughts a person had about their pain and the intensity & quality of pain they were perceiving.
I also started to notice that a person's ability to BE with their pain – as opposed to push it away and resist it – impacted their resilience to managing it.
When they didn't have so many opinions or make so much meaning personally about how the pain was affecting them, they were often better equipped to BE with their body sensations neutrally.
And that’s a key part of chronic pain management: body neutrality = Not buying into preferences for certain sensations nor having resistance to others.
Interestingly, this pain-science approach is reminiscent of Eastern spiritual philosophy of non-dualism or non-attachment. So maybe science and spirituality are more entwined within humans than we'd like to admit.
When we remove the opinion of a sensation being good, bad, scary, or otherwise, we can better experience it as it is. And this becomes less complicated and less entwined in the thoughts around those opinions and emotions.
For instance, I have a personal history of back pain related to a lumbar disc herniation.
I’ve been in relationship to this for the past 7 years, and what I’ve noticed helps the most in managing those pain flare-ups is just not caring so much about it.
Sometimes flare-ups rock my boat.
In these moments or days, I cannot be neutral about the physical pain nor the impacts on my mental health.
I lose objectivity and the ability to converse with my body with compassion and curiosity. I can’t neutrally experience it, it’s too uncomfortable to be with.
Sometimes I get hijacked by the fear that I’ll forever be limited by this. I’ll never feel strong and capable again, and that I’ll be missing out on things I love to do like skiing, gardening, or making pottery at the wheel. And I will have to sit out when my friends are off on adventures.
On days like these, inspiration and desire dissipate like vapour.
Motivation and follow-through plummet. And as a result my confidence takes a blow. Which is a great way for my mood to drop into the abyss.
It’s a wicked spiral.
Other times I can be more neutral.
“Okay, today pain is sitting close by.”
I might be able to soften my body in response to the discomfort instead of tensing up, which usually makes it worse.
I might be able to discern the types of thoughts I want to believe, no matter what types are present.
I might be able to notice thoughts of despair without letting them take hold of me.
I might be able to dig deep for the courage to connect with hope and gratitude, instead of slipping into the downward spiral of fear and giving away the power to change my perception of the experience.
I might be able to see how having a body for this lifetime is profoundly magical. And that I am here in this way to experience all that being a human entails – including the pain, the pleasure, the joy, and the loss. Afterall, pain is just one of the many sensations we can feel, and isn’t that just incredible?
In the treatment room, I create space for my patients to experience their body sensations while noticing how their mind and thoughts influence this. I facilitate them into a guided parasympathetic experience, using breath and sensation awareness to keep them rooted in present time.
I help them experience body sensations without judgment while keeping a relaxed body. I strive to create an environment where they can practice self-advocacy, asking for what they want and need, which increases a sense of safety by knowing that they are in control of what is applied to their bodies and how this is done.
I don’t believe that body treatments have to be uncomfortable to be effective. From what I can tell, bodies prefer to be shown where the edge of change is and encouraged to explore that edge in order to move beyond it. A body that is pushed too far too fast often recoils and is unable to integrate the change that was forced upon it.
From what I can tell, gentle facilitation, and amplifying what is already working in the body, seems to be the most impactful approach.
I believe in using comfort zones to increase windows of tolerance. The more experiences of safety we have the bigger playground we can courageously romp in. And more overlapping zones of safety that we can occupy boost our resilience by having the ability to pull from these overlapping realms that we are securely rooted in. More areas of safety create more opportunities for sustainable expansion, be it in our relationship with our bodies or when looking at growing and expanding from a personal development perspective.
Psychology, biology, physiology, and spirituality are inextricably linked, and from my somatically biased viewpoint, the flaws in our current Western culture and medical system are rooted in the inability to recognize and incorporate this interconnectedness.
The body holds a lot of information. And the way we interpret this information can colour the pictures of the stories we tell about ourselves.
I help people deepen the types of conversations they’re having with themselves by understanding the roll their mind plays in their interpretation of their body sensations and by taking a look at the types of stories they are telling themselves about this.
Often we cannot change the circumstances we are living through, and in cases like this the only thing we can do is curate the internal environment that we live within. How we interpret our experiences impacts our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us.
Investing in the stories that help us become who we want to be, can be a useful approach.
These somatic and narrative lenses I hold inform both of my practices.
This podcast will explore things I’m wondering about, stuff my clients and patients might like to know, and we will get to hang out with some really cool people who I have the pleasure of interviewing.
I hope you’ll join us in exploring what it means to be a sensitive human in this achingly complex world.
Please like and subscribe so I can notify you when the next episodes are released. And if you want to reach me, please do so through the contact form on my website.