When the Signal Gets Loud

Chronic pain was never a part of my story...until it was. Before my early 40s, I had a lifetime of body image stuff and various somatic sensitivities - resulting in my husband calling me “ailment lady” for much of my 20s. (Thanks, J.) But whatever I was dealing with - largely a function of my very sensitive system, I now know - it always moved through.

Then six years ago we made the seismic move across the country, from a lifetime in NY to sunny San Diego. The brave and bold leave-everything-you-know-and-put-the-dog-the-kids-and-lots-of-our-possessions-in-an-RV-and-drive-across-the-country-in-a-global-pandemic move. People often ask what it was like to leave the coast of my whole life and everyone I knew, and I answer that I have no idea. There was a whole actual transition committee assigned to settling us in when we arrived...but I digress.

We arrived still well inside the thick of the pandemic. Getting to know people was entirely a Zoom or a go-for-a-walk reality. Per that aforementioned committee, I was blessed to soon have the pleasure of walking all over my area with a variety of women from our new community. I was also simultaneously introduced to the latest trend in sneaker perfection at the time, Hokas. (I have since graduated to Brooks.)

Sometime in that first year of walking A LOT, my right heel started to twinge. It began as a kind of poke toward the end of walks, but eventually my whole foot was compromised. I began the fairly useless rigamarole of trying to get help in the disaster area that is our medical system. PT, CBD oil, arthritis cream, chiropractors, podiatrists, acupuncture, massage. Cuz seeker me is always on the hunt for the next right remedy and practitioner. I wore the boot. I wheelchaired it through the airport and all over NYC while my mom went through cancer treatment. I tried ALL. The. Things.

I saw some improvement, but over time my right foot became my left and then my knees got on board. Five years later, I have been dealing with unprecedented chronic pain in most of my lower body. Standing is often hard, sustained movement has consequences, and mama hasn’t seen a cute heel in ages. It sucks. Especially the cute shoes part!

Yet it has also called me into a whole new way of being in relationship with my body. A lifetime of hating my size has largely been healed because the desire to simply feel good, move how I want to move, and have reliable mobility has replaced it. Everything is relative, right? When you deeply want your body to function with ease, you become much less interested in whether it is the size you once thought it was supposed to be. Pain changed the question from How does my body look? to What does my body need? That alone has been a profound healing.

As my relationship with the pain has changed, I have also become curious about its timing. Why then? I cannot help but notice that it all started so soon after we moved. I don’t believe moving across the country caused my pain. But I do believe that leaving the place where I had spent my whole life, stepping away from so many familiar roles and relationships, and creating literal and emotional space gave something in me permission to surface.

Very often we cannot feel what we are carrying while we are busy carrying it. We get through. We manage. We perform. We take care of everyone and everything. And then, sometimes, when there is finally enough space, the body says: Okay. Now can we look at this?

I can’t prove that is exactly what went down, and I don’t need to. Bodies are bodies, and pain is complex. But I am deeply interested in what pain can reveal. The move created distance from so much that had shaped me. And in that distance, I began to see physical, emotional and energetic patterns I simply could not see while I was inside them.

Which is, of course, so much of the work I do with people now. Often transformation begins when we create enough space from the thing to finally see it, and sometimes what becomes visible hurts. What if that hurt is not only something to get rid of? What if it is also information?

Pain is an alert system. This is not a new idea. Not remotely. Humans have understood pain as messenger, teacher, signal and invitation for thousands of years. But I have been thinking about it through the lens of the work I do every day.

Pain says: Pay attention here.

Something needs care.

Something needs understanding.

Something is asking to be seen.

If you have ever done any kind of bodywork, you know how deeply connected everything in the body is. Often where pain presents is pointing us toward another source, or multiple sources. We assume that because the pain is here, the problem must also be here. Sometimes it is. And often the place that hurts is simply the place loud enough to finally get our attention.

I see this constantly in my work. A leader comes to me burned out and exhausted, or because their team is dysfunctional. Someone wants to thrive in their work but cannot get beyond the slog. An individual knows something has to change but cannot access what they actually need above the din of daily demand. Those things are real, and they hurt, but often they are not the actual problem. They are the alert.

Maybe expectations are unclear. Trust has eroded. Critical conversations are being avoided. Self-betrayal, inauthenticity or fear are driving someone’s choices. Maybe it is time to leave the job, hire more staff, or change how something has “always” been done. The pain point gets us in the room. The deeper work is figuring out what it is pointing toward. This is why I say all the time: we cannot heal what we cannot see.

Of course, this is much easier to say when you are not the one hurting. When pain is acute, physical, emotional or otherwise, curiosity can feel like an absolutely ridiculous ask. Sometimes we do not want the lesson or the invitation. We just want it to stop hurting. I deeply get that. If there were a snap-my-fingers answer for my feet and knees, I would be deeply tempted to take it.

Matt Haig’s The Comfort Book has been a deep salve for me in my own pain journeys. Haig is a British writer who, in his 20s, experienced devastating depression and anxiety and came terrifyingly close to ending his life. He survived it and has since written extensively about living through the darkest periods of being human. The Comfort Book is a collection of reflections and reminders about finding hope when life is deeply hard. One of Haig’s ideas that stays with me is that the bottom of the valley does not give us the clearest view.

Of course it doesn’t. When we are deep inside pain, we almost never have access to robust perspective. Asking what it means, what it is teaching us, or what transformation might emerge can be not only impossible, but cruel. Sometimes being in pain is enough. We do not need to spiritually bypass it or turn every terrible thing into a gift before we have even had the chance to live through it.

Maybe the practice is smaller than that. When we can, we get curious. What hurts? What is the pain asking me to notice? Am I treating the signal, or am I willing to look beneath it? What becomes possible if I respond to the alert with care and curiosity instead of only trying to silence it?

Think of the bodies that go on living because pain called attention to what needed care. The relationships that deepen because conflict exposed what had gone unsaid. The people who change their lives because what had become intolerable finally demanded change. The organizations that transform because the friction became impossible to ignore.

Pain is not always the problem. Sometimes pain is the thing that finally makes the problem visible. And while I would still very much like my feet and knees to stop hurting, and perhaps even put on a cute heel again in my lifetime, I am trying to listen to what they came here to say.