Knackered shoulders and hairy monsters
When the pain might be telling you something important ...
Friday lunchtime a couple of weeks ago and I am in the local emergency room. Screaming the place down, crying my eyes out to the bemused nurse as waves of pain shoot from my shoulder down my arm into my hand.
Wave after wave of pain.
Every part of me is tight as a spring as the anticipation of the next shock wave feels more intense and real than the pain itself when it comes.
This has been coming over the last 48 hours or so. There had been no injury or trauma to my shoulder, just from one day to the next it was agony.
Wednesday I had an ache in my shoulder and cancelled Pilates; Wednesday night I didn’t sleep well with stronger pain but figured I could drive a couple of miles to the train station to get public transport to my meeting.
(Bad move - the three miles changing gears with my wrong hand and hoping I didn’t stall half way across the country bridge is not a good look …)
A day on over-the-counter meds didn’t help much and so overnight to Friday saw me waking up every hour, on the hour, really not feeling good. But too worried about taking too many pain meds to dare to take some more.
A few tearful calls to cancel meetings and I was off to the emergency room.
Can I just say - I felt ridiculous. Worried I was making up this shit and that when I was finally in front of the doctor I’d be able to move my shoulder ok, and nothing would be wrong.
But - thankfully (!!) - when I do see him the pain is still there. I still can’t move my arm.
When the doctor sees me and shows me the X-rays he diagnoses calcification of the shoulder tendon. It’s not immediately clear what causes that but he thinks that I may have had an inflammation in the shoulder on and off and not dealt with it properly.
So he gives me some horse tablets as pain meds, tells me to get to the doctor and get a steroid injection, and start at the physio.
There in starts a number of days drugged to the eyeballs on pain medication, sleeping in my armchair because I can’t lie down in bed, attempting to go to physio but her refusing to touch me cos I was jumping to the ceiling in pain, and then arguing with the doctor who was refusing to give me an injection because I hadn’t been in pain long enough.
At the same time, what I also did was take an alternative approach to complement all this. Reiki, sound baths, kinesiology.
And this took me down a very different route - one that was less about clinging to the pain and feeling crap, and more about understanding why it was painful right here, right now and what it was there to tell me.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’ve had enough chronic pain in my life to take these woo woo questions with a pinch of salt. Burst appendix, pleurisy, endometriosis. Decades of doctors telling me that the pain was all made up and I needed to suck it up. I actually think that I got to the stage some time before the burnouts that my body just shut down and refused to feel. Because it was feeling so much.
But, this time the questions took on a different meaning. A meaning that was worth exploring. There are a few reasons for this.
I have come to realise deeply that I make my own experience of my life; its created by the thought I have around the situation I am in; and with that comes a choice about whether I want to cling to the pain, or use it to look deeper
for the last number of years I have been having regular sessions of reiki and kinesiology (and I have also discovered sound baths) and I can see and feel the impact of these measures
I have come to realise that the body keeps score. There is not only a really interesting book by the same title, but the reiki and kinesiology have helped me to heal a lot of the pain that my body has been storing up for years.
The enquiry also coincided with some research that I have been doing on the concept of Threshold Guardians. Threshold guardians, the myth goes, are the big hairy monsters (or equivalent) that stand at the gate to the other world. That new life based on living your purpose and the bigger version of what is possible. They are there to ask you “are you really ready, its going to be really difficult”.
They are the manifestations of all our fears and doubts, all the reasons we think we are not ready, not capable, not worthy. And they can show up as something internal (that head trash for example), or something external (the voices of our friends, or - and wait for it - physical ailments).1
The guardians give us an insight into our character, and act as a reflection of our fears and emotions - so, I learned, when they come up, its worth asking why. When we can approach the guardians with a curiosity and open heart, they can teach us and show us the way; when we ignore them and think we know it all, we can hit a brick wall and end up having to sacrifice part of who we are to move forward.
As I thought about my shoulder pain in the context of this, it just made sense. It didn’t seem woo woo, it seemed like the right thing to do.
why had my shoulder flared up right here and right now?
if it was reflecting my fears, what were those fears?
why was I feeling resistance?
what did I need to learn?
Now, here’s the thing. The timing of the flare up was super interesting.
I had spent the last three months really focusing on my health and well-being, looking at my food, as well as going to a trainer twice a week and Pilates once a week. I was feeling amazing, had turned my back on bread, and was moving easier and more readily than in a long time.
On the Wednesday evening (before that first night of flare ups) I had also launched my group programme. A small group of women for a nine month journey to live their ridiculous life. And during the call, I had sat back and said to myself, “This is it, this is the work I am here to do, these are the people I am here to serve”.
As I began to question and inquire, I had a number of insights into the beliefs that I was carrying around my business and life. These beliefs had been sabotaging me for a while now, and were no longer helpful. But the beliefs had become so ingrained that I had been unable to see them.
Firstly I was carrying a badge of honour around drama and struggle. For too long now, I was carrying this belief that if life wasn’t difficult I wasn’t doing it right. That the most deserving people out there were the ones who had struggled in life. If life and business came easy, that was cheating.
As I turned inwards and looked at this, I realised that these were beliefs of someone else - generations who had come before me. Maybe those beliefs helped them in the past, but they didn’t serve me now. In the past they had lead me into burnout, twice, and today they were forcing me to look for the complicated way to do things. This showed up as procrastination, finding difficult solutions to easy questions, endlessly trying to prove I was the smartest person in the room - rather than just getting on with things and taking action.
I also saw that I was carrying beliefs around money and that it was wrong to like money and want to make an income. I was carrying around some kind of belief that it was my responsibility to take care of everyone, fix their lives, be there to help and support - but certainly not charge anyone for it. I should be doing this out of my moral responsibility and obligation.
Yet here I was setting up this group programme, charging people to be part of it. How dare I?!!
As I began to shine a light on the beliefs, and start to reprogramme them and let them go, things also began to shift with my shoulder. Within less than a week of the trip to the ER, I was off the heavy pain meds, and on to paracetemol; I was sleeping all night in my bed rather than in the arm chair, and within ten days I was back to driving. What’s impressive about this is that in 2019 when I did the same thing to my other shoulder, I was in a sling for nearly 8 weeks, completely incapacitated and going to physio sessions desperately trying to relieve the pain.
Now - the pain around calcification of the tendon has been known to go just as quickly as it appears - some reports talk about the pain lasting a long time, other patients get better quickly.
So, maybe even without this inquiry into the pain as a threshold guardian I would have got better quickly anyways.
BUT I see it instead as that opportunity to learn as I go, to stay open to looking inward, and using that to come back even stronger than before. Even more importantly this will help me work with my clients as they too step forward into a bigger version of themselves, and they too face their own fears and doubts that come up to get in the way.