Ask Me Anything: How Do You Deal with Physical Pain?
Physical and mental-emotional caretaking, exercising body-mind agency, bonus links on Big Pharma and the opioid epidemic.
Hey. Dana here.
Today’s Ask Me Anything prompted a fair bit of procrastination because it rubs against something I’ve been working through lately: dealing with physical pain without numbing with alcohol or other drugs.
A subscriber asks:
“You said pain kept you from yoga class. Could you talk about that? I have chronic pain and am stressed and frustrated. I thought yoga helped? If not, what do you do instead?”
Thank you for your question, and please know that my heart goes out to you. Same for anyone reading this who’s suffering from physical pain. As I’ve been reminded these past two months, it can take over everything.
If you missed the essay from last week, it offers a window into how I dealt with pain and soul-level exhaustion as a 29-year-old who said fuck it and ran away to Mongolia. I’m not suggesting you need to run away to Mongolia! The essential teaching (and the one I’m leaning into now, at age 48) is that solace and healing can sometimes be found in:
Radically changing our surrounds and routines
Radically expanding our perspective and horizons
Radically tending to our body and breath
At once learning from the physical and looking beyond it—to the wider body-mind-spirit that we (and our pain) call home
I shared last week’s essay as a prelude to this AMA. I also shared it because I’ve been looking to my younger self for guidance and wisdom. During that time of my life, my body was in great pain and seemed to be failing. Over the last two months, I experienced an acute recurrence of similar symptoms.