Dear body: I'm sorry.

What message is your body trying to send you? This is the annoying question my therapist has asked me about 500 times in the course of our work together. “Pain is our body’s way of making contact,” she would say. “When we can’t process difficult emotions mentally, our bodies will do it for us physically,” she would remind me. All the while I’d nod my head and say something like, “No, really, that makes perfect sense, I just have to get clear on what my body is telling me.” All the while I thought to myself that my body was telling me that my right hip hurts so fucking bad that I want to barf. So I would kindly ask my body to shut the fuck up while I went to the gym to do corrective exercises or to the chiropractor for an adjustment.

What is the message your body is trying to send you? After five years of chronic, widespread, sometimes disabling pain, I have learned many strategies I can use to try and drown out the noise of the pain. I pack my work and social schedule, I eliminate spaces of downtime where I’m alone, I listen to music at the loudest volume, I got to the doctor for treatment, I go to the gym to do corrective exercises, I drink until I can’t feel my pain anymore, I bury myself in a book or movie, and the list goes on and on.

You see what I’m getting at here, I haven’t taken the time to ask my body why it is causing me so much pain that I can’t keep food down or focus on a simple task or even get up out of bed. My therapist has always challenged me to approach my pain with curiosity, whereas I usually choose to approach my pain with anger, disappointment, fear, panic, anxiety and/or a “I’ll figure out a medical remedy for this as quickly as possible” attitude. As you might imagine, my approach doesn’t usually go well.

You might imagine that going to one of my many doctors for medical intervention is necessary and appropriate, and you’re not wrong. In some instances, I need medical intervention. But I always use that intervention as an excuse to shut up the pain signals so I can go on with my life blissfully ignoring the message being sent and putting the strategy of approaching my pain with curiosity in the category of something meant for hippie white people who eat gluten free food and read tarot cards. It should be noted here that I am a hippie white person with a gluten allergy who consistently makes his friends do tarot spreads under the full moon.

Moving right along. I have always known that my therapist is right. I know that my body is trying to tell me something. But I feel completely and utterly hijacked by the medium of that message. When my pain flares up, all I can think about are all the times I’ve been bent over a toilet, curled on the floor, sobbing because the pain is so debilitating I can barely move. And when I remember those things, the last thing I am interested in is exploring the depth of my pain with an err of curiosity so as to ask my body, “Body what is it that thou wouldst have me hear? What ails you? From whence did this pain arrive and what dost thou require for remedy?”

Don’t ask why I talk to my body using Middle English pronouns. That’s between me and my body. Just kidding, that’s all sarcasm. When I find myself experiencing familiar pangs of pain, the only thing I can think about is how can I get rid of this shit IMMEDIATELY. My pain is your in-laws at the holidays, unwelcome and overbearing. I don’t plan on leaning in to the pain, I plan on letting someone stab acupuncture needles into the trigger points that hold the pain so it goes away as quickly as possible.

I do this often. And look where it’s gotten me. Sure I’ve made physical and emotional progress over the past 5 years, but I’ve also not gotten any clearer on what my body is trying to tell me. To be fair, I have spent the majority of the past 5 years being mad at my body. I feel betrayed. My body used to be strong, fast, capable of great feats of physical strength (eg pole vaulting 15 feet through the air). Now my body is weak, prone to flares of debilitating pain, and incapable of some daily, routine tasks. There have been so many times where my pain has flared and my body is yelling at me and I yell back, “Fuck you! Look what you did to us! Look what you keep doing to us! Just stop already!” That betrayal is something that weighs heavy on me and has for 5 years now.

So cut to the point of this whole story - let’s be honest, you’ve got to get back to the new episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, you don’t have time to be burying yourself in the ramblings of a white hippie witch with a gluten allergy – I recently tried to take a listen to my body and boy, did I fucking learn something.

So yesterday I had a pretty free and open day. My body wasn’t feeling great, but not too bad. I have been trying to dig myself out of a depression rut that I dug myself into by numbing my feelings. And what better way for a white hippie witch to dig themselves out of a feelings/physical rut than with some yoga! Truthfully, I have been reading a dynamite book that I wrote about previously called d what better way for a white hippie witch to dig themselves out of a feelings/physical rut than with some yoga! Truthfully, I have been reading a dynamite book that I wrote about previously called The Body Keeps the Score that discusses the benefits of yoga for individuals with chronic pain who are seeking to combat the rewiring of the brain that happens after trauma. The theory is, in a nutshell, that after trauma, our body rewires itself in such a way that we are constantly alert, awaiting danger, thus creating a positive feedback loop for our pain and trauma. Yoga is a suggested method for reconnecting with the self and, as luck would have it, engaging our pain from a lens of curiosity.

And so I looked and saw that the local yoga studio was offering a gently yoga course in the afternoon that day. Because of my pain, I can only engage in more minimal forms of yoga like gentle, restorative, and yin. I had attended several yin yoga classes at the local studio that I really enjoyed, and so I bit and signed up for the course that afternoon.

The class started like many other, and like I had experienced in many other yoga classes, I had trouble “melting into myself” and “letting my concerns fade away” as is always asked of participants in one way or another. I always have trouble at this juncture because I know I need to delve into myself and let go of outside concerns, but I’m mad at myself and I’m using my outside concerns to distract myself, remember? The whole delicate system of willful ignorance hangs in the balance at moments such as these.

I tried my best to “bring breath to the places that ache” (fucking yoga talk, am I right?) and tried to engage with my body. And then, it fucking happened, y’all. It started when the instructor asked us to lay flat and pick our right leg up off the ground a few inches. A simple enough request, but one I can’t follow. My right hip flexors are the source of all my pain and lifting my leg like that feels equivalent to being stabbed in the stomach and having the knife drug all the way around my back and up to my shoulders.

I laid there and thought about how mad I was that I couldn’t do something so simple, followed by the embarrassment that I couldn’t do something so simple. There goes my fucking body, betraying me again.

We soon moved into a pose where we were on our backs with a strap around the soles of our feet, legs up in the air, “heels to the sky” (more of that yoga talk). I liked the pose, I could do it and it gave a stretch that felt like it was hitting the right spots so to speak. And I wish I could tell you what the teacher said at this moment or what was going through my mind, but all I can tell you is this: I started to cry.

I started to cry because somewhere in that moment a simple phrase popped into my mind: I’m sorry. For the past five years, my body has been screaming at me and I have screamed back, berating it for its betrayal, for taking away the life I thought I would always have. And in that moment, for whatever reason, I didn’t view my body as an enemy or as a perpetrator of betrayal. No. In that moment, I saw my body as the victim of my own betrayal. My body didn’t do this to me, I did this to my body.

Tears started to stream down my face as I begged for my body’s forgiveness. I thought about all the times it screamed at me. It was hurt. I was hurting it. It was screaming for my attention, begging me to stop, but I wouldn’t. I screamed back. I blamed it. I told it that it was the reason for all my pain. But it never was.

I cried as I thought about all the times that my body begged me to stop, care for it, and give it what it so desperately needed. And subsequently I thought about how I ignored every request. I thought about how my body tried to tell me that I was being unfair, that I was expecting too much from it, that I was wrapping the crushing weight of my identity around it. And again, I thought about how I ignored all of that.

I cried as a realized all the terrible things I had accused my body of doing were things that I brought on myself. I thought about how my body was trying to bear the weight of these things, and how, in doing so, crumbled under the weight of my demands.

I always thought about my time as an athlete as my getting to know my body and my getting more acquainted with its potential. And in a lot of ways it was. But I also recognize that I put the entirety of my identity into my body and what it was capable of doing. And in doing that, I pushed my body beyond so many of its limits. I ignored signs of pain and weakness and thought of them only as signs to train harder. I never stopped to listen, to approach with curiosity.

And for the past 5 years, I have been the victim of a body hijacked by chronic pain. But in that moment, I saw that my body is the real victim. I realized that my willful ignorance had put me in this position. I saw my bodies ringing pain as less of an attack on me and more as a desperate cry for help. Listen, my body said. Stop, it begged. Why did you betray us, it cried.

It was a hard message to hear. And I’m not entirely sure what this all means moving forward. I do know that I cried in a silent room of 6 people and immediately ran out afterwards…so there’s that. But ultimately, I saw something I needed to see: the truth. Our minds and bodies are so precious. We only get one of each on this journey around the sun. And in that moment, my heart broke as I thought about all the ways in which I have betrayed and continue to betray my body rather than protecting, respecting, and nurturing it.

I plan to go back to yoga, despite the waterworks because I think there is more to be gathered from that experience. When I find out what that is, I’ll be sure to share.

Until next time.

Peace and love,

Adam