In this podcast I discuss my recent pain and emotional overwhelm, due to many current life stressors including the war in Israel + Palestine. I share my process of awareness, attunement, tending and orienting towards life and connection while navigating this flare. Content note, brief mention of suicide.
Here's the links mentioned in the podcast -
https://calendly.com/paincoachdeb
https://humansystems.co/body-sensations-wheels/
https://humansystems.co/emotionwheels/
https://www.focusforhealth.org/gratitude-our-bodies-natural-anti-depressant/
[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Curiosity Cure. My name is Deb and I am your friendly neuroplastician, coach and host. This is a podcast that explores the relationship between the body and the mind from a health at every size, judgment free perspective. I teach you how developing a new internal conversation based on curiosity. Self friendship and simple neuroplasticity techniques can rewire your body mind out of pain and emotional overwhelm to help you build the rich, full life that you want to live.
[00:00:38] Disclaimer, this is not a replacement for medical care.
[00:00:42] So yesterday I had a big pain flare in my knees and I don't know why. My body has been feeling tender. Weather change, not enough sleep, too much coffee, not enough coffee, the wrong kind of food, microplastics and other toxins creating inflammation.
[00:01:04] It's kind of insane, all the thoughts that run through my head about what might be wrong with me. What's wrong with me? What's wrong with me? What did I do wrong? That is a reoccurring thought that I have, when I'm feeling something uncomfortable and I also hear this from my clients. And it is such a drumbeat of fear and future fear.
[00:01:31] And yesterday I took a different approach. I took a walk to the grocery store that felt good and as always enticed my mind to pay attention to what feels good, to relax any tension and to build trust each time I moved with ease. What I was noticing was a heaviness in my body. And I said to my friend, I'm tired.
[00:01:57] I knew I wasn't tired. I was weary, drained, beleaguered, hopeless due to the news about the attacks and conflicts going on in Israel and Palestine. I felt activation energy arising in my body, the desire to make the fighting stop and the knowledge knowing that there is nothing. At least in this moment that I can do anything about it.
[00:02:25] And the friend I was spending time with is also my ex partner. And that too carries with it a quality of heaviness, sadness, and regret. Even alongside the absolute joy of being chosen family, sharing time and care with one another. She's having difficult life events going on right now. There's all that tenderness wrapped up in listening, connecting, offering support and feeling helpless to make things better in those Situations.
[00:02:59] My own father is suffering with dementia and while I have the ability to create a certain level of comfort, I am helpless to prevent these degenerative changes and the distress that comes with this kind of experience. At home, my boiler is currently broken because of flooding from the intense rains we had the other week.
[00:03:21] And while I trust that it will be repaired. I feel overwhelmed by the threat of this kind of rain happening again or more frequently, putting myself and the people who live in my building in jeopardy. If you've ever been affected by too much water, you know there's a quality of helplessness and resignation.
[00:03:43] I even sent this email to the folks in my building. In general, the building is fine with rain and we don't usually flood, knock on wood. But when it's every drain in the city backing up and cars floating down the street, sea lions swimming out of their enclosure, waterfalls in the subway kind of rain, our little building just needs to hold on and pray.
[00:04:08] We'll be looking to see what. If anything we can do for moments like this, like getting a stronger sump pump to keep the water out of the boiler /water heater room.
[00:04:18] But there's no such thing as having total control. My ex and I were going to Memorial for a friend of ours who had taken her own life.
[00:04:28] So many beautiful memories were shared and there were conversations about the emotional pain that she lived with. And as I was standing and experiencing pain in my knees, both knees, which is usually not what's happening for me, I could just feel an intensity flowing through my body and internally I heard my mind speak, life is pain.
[00:04:50] And when that inner thought was spoken my body relaxed. Life is pain.
[00:04:58] There's nothing that's gone wrong by our feeling pain per se. Feeling pain is one of our greatest gifts. The events of the world, both war and climate change are scary and fearful. And I noticed that I Feel helpless to them. And I like so many other people who experience neuroplastic pain or TMS are sensitive to that kind of helplessness and feel pain somatically, not to say this is your fault or there's something wrong with your personality, take the temperature of how we feel things. We humans are easily wounded and I can't help but think that is a part of our attachment system.
[00:05:42] We are designed to care and we have designed a world in which we are more and more helpless via globalization, capitalism corrupt power structures, through systems of oppression like racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, the way that we organize ourselves into us versus them. And for those of us who aren't in the middle of these events, We learn about great tragedies happening all over the world in the blink of an eye, while we're scrolling on our phones when we first rise up or when we're on the toilet.
[00:06:18] And don't tell me you don't bring your phone with you, at least sometimes. Our physiology is responding to things that we weren't really designed to be able to handle without support and connection. And if we aren't aware of or have no language for explaining the mind body experiences we are having, we label and pursue them as symptoms.
[00:06:44] For instance, the heavy, exhausted feeling I was having felt like an illness, but it's my body's response to the illness of human cruelty. Once I was able to name it and even share a bit of my feelings with my friend, did this sensation lighten. I was able to identify and speak to the part of me that is collapsed inside of me.
[00:07:08] Life is pain, but it is not only pain. When we are in resistance to a feeling or an experience that's happening in our body mind, it knows that we're trying to gaslight ourselves. Which I find creates that kind of sinking, dissociated feeling that I was having and the increase in pain that I was experiencing.
[00:07:31] My process of curiosity means that we investigate the sensations and emotions with a relaxed, kindhearted, and as neutral as possible attention. Even if we're feeling intense, strong emotions, we can take one part of our attention and witness our rage, fear, or worry. I remember years ago being coached on this by Krista St. Germain, who is a grief coach for widows, where she told me that I could just sit with my feelings and pay attention and not just be swept up in them. I told her I had no time or space to process my emotions around the event that I was experiencing, and she helped me see that wasn't true, that it was just something I had never learned yet.
[00:08:17] But that when cultivated. There is always a way to notice, attune, and tend to the parts of us that are suffering. One of my favorite resources for building awareness and attunement is an emotion wheel, and my favorites are from Human Systems Company. They have a lot of granularity in them. There's a lot of different kinds of words, and there's a body sensations wheel as well, and I'll link to those in the show notes.
[00:08:46] Rushing into fix feelings only creates the internal belief that we cannot handle what's happening, that it shouldn't be happening, even though it is, and that we are victims to the experiences around us, which is like a cue for the learned helplessness response.
[00:09:04] Learning how to slow our responses down, whether that's using the breath or one of the anti anxiety pattern interrupts that I teach like the backward spin, faster EFT, shifting out into peripheral vision can really help our nervous system be able to bring us back into a resourced state. We will still want to pay attention to what we're doing with our time and energy. Are we overexposing ourself to news and violent graphic images? Are we fighting with people online? Or are you reaching out and connecting with people, whether that's to cry together, explore creative solutions, organize, comfort, or just be a human amongst other humans. After the memorial, we went to a birthday party. I chatted with old friends. Everyone is sharing stories of life challenges and difficulties.
[00:10:00] There's also something particularly middle aged about it. The time of children, young or less young and aging parents, but we were simply enjoying this moment of gathering around, eating food, watching children play, being together. I was filled with so much awe about the simplicity of these experiences and how simple and essential they are for feeling better.
[00:10:26] Only because of this kind of work have I've been able to really benefit from that kind of connection to gratitude and feeling gratitude has tremendous benefits for our health and for our mood. And by the end of my day, letting it all unfold. Not, not doing activities because of the pain I'd been feeling, which of course has changed today because that is the nature of neuroplastic pain.
[00:10:52] I showed up and I chose to feel it all and love my deeply feeling self and the preciousness of life and even love the parts of me that feel helpless much of the time.
[00:11:04] Life is full of pain. May the structures that keep us fighting for land, resources over ideas and histories be dismantled and evolve. And even then, there will still be pain, because physical and emotional pain and loss are intrinsic to being alive. As vibrantly as we love to feel joy and ecstasy, our capacity to feel pain is inextricable from that.
[00:11:32] If you are someone who feels deeply affected by the world or the environment around you and would love to work with somebody who has experience and understanding of the mind body process, somatics, as well as understanding the bio psychosocial factors of wellbeing and health and socialization through an intersectional feminist lens, I am here to help.
[00:11:54] Please feel free to book a free 30 minute curiosity call with me. I would love to speak with you and see if working together is something that makes sense.
[00:12:04] I hope this podcast has been helpful to give you a little bit of an understanding about how to go in and experience whatever it is that you're experiencing right now while these world events are going on. I'm wishing you love and ease and care. And whatever kind of activation energy towards working for change that feels good to you.
[00:12:33] And if you're feeling collapsed or in a state of shutdown, I'm sending you a warm, comforting blanket. I'm sending you peaceful rest. I'm sending you a light maybe that you can follow to be able to just notice when your energy emerges from that state, knowing that your body is doing its very best job to take good care of you.
[00:12:59] Wishing you well. Thank you for listening.