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That Nagging Shoulder Pain is Clickbait...

“I don’t want to fall asleep…I don’t want to pass away”…my youngest the dj in the car, playing “death bed (coffee for your head)” by Powfu for the zillionth time.

Why this time I clued in to those lyrics, I don’t know.

What if waking life is sleep? Is death? Is hell or heaven?

Held apart from the stream of woo*, in some artificial matrix of “stable” or “static” what if we are the opposite of alive? In effect, dead - at least in varying degrees.

Are we alive enough to receive all the messages our own bodies bring us? The deep gut clench we feel when our partner says “we need to talk”? The almost imperceptible thrill that runs through our forearms when we pick up something we have been longing to hold?

Are we aware? Do we receive?

Or do those messages move like a wave, and crest just shy of the threshold of our conscious impression, circuitry already running “rational thought” programming that keeps us on the straight road of “right action” and away from joy detours and shame back alleys?

Somewhere into my early travels in the woo, after over a decade working 12 hour ER shifts I realized the work did not “serve my body”. What I mean by that is, I became aware that for years I worked those stretches without taking a break to use the restroom. Sometimes even to eat. Rarely did I sit down and check out from the grind, check in with my body to see how I felt or what I needed.

When I started listening, and feeling, everything changed for me.

Prior to the “awakening”, I thought my cold hands were just part of my make-up, maybe I had some disorder, like early Raynaud’s syndrome. Maybe not, maybe someday I could look in to biofeedback or something.

But when I started down the rabbit holes of “alternative medicine”, I became a guinea pig for all sorts of "therapy”, experimenting with my body like the scientist I was. What happens if I get acupuncture? How about chamomile tea? A colonic? That one was fun.

Reiki was touted as “energy medicine” and explained as “opening the body to the universal energy field”. Back then, that sounded like deep end of the pool woo, but I tried anyway.

The first session, I found myself on a massage table with the requisite “New Age Smooth Jams” mix in the background, curiously unfamiliar crystals and incense aroma surrounding me in a dimly lit room. The practitioner held her hands above my body and I felt a warmth out of proportion to the hand placement - she wasn’t even touching me and at times it felt like my body was burning.

Mid-way through the session she mentioned my cold hands (how she perceived this I don’t know since she wasn’t physically touching them), and I rattled off the story…”they’ve always been like that…maybe a vascular problem…maybe I’ll try biofeedback…”. Then I felt the flush of warmth in my hands, astonished.

They stayed warm. Until I went back to work, and found myself with a colleague that frequently challenged me (read: that dude stressed me out). A minute into our conversation I realized my hands were cooling, almost cold. And when I got the message, with my new appreciation of my body’s ability to actually have warm hands, I did something different.

I kept my focus in part on my hands, and paid attention to that “stressed” feeling. The blood flow and warm sensation started returning.

Holy superpowers!

That started a whole new way of navigating “stress”, and listening to this beautiful vessel that previously served mostly as a transporter for my big head.

How did I graduate medical school, train for years in emergency and family medicine, and not have a clue how my body really worked? Did I really know what “medicine” was best for my patients?

When I woke up, there was more space to put the puzzle pieces together of what I saw those patients experiencing.

School age kids with belly pain and headaches from stress about standardized end-of-grade testing. Parents and kids not fully aware of the impacts on those little bodies.

College students, usually women, in the ER with severe abdominal pain. The culprit massive constipation, from habits starting in grade school because they weren’t allowed to freely use the restroom, and when they did “no-one poops at school”.

Every shift I saw someone with chest pain who on deeper digging had a broken heart. Most times the EKG’s and bloodwork was “normal”…and yet the pain - and the disconnect with what message their body was sending - was real.

The more I made space for my own body’s texts and emails, the more capacity I had to listen more deeply to people coming to me in the Emergency Department for symptoms that had crossed the threshold for them. Shortness of breath that now made getting in and out of the car difficult, or shoulder pain for months that reached a point of “I can’t work it’s so bad”.

I could help guide them to reconnect with their bodies, listen more carefully, be their own “doctor” a little more. Maybe lower that threshold and open up the channels of communication a bit.

Connect the dots between “feelings” of emotional pain and “feelings” in their physical body. A little at a time.

Because contrary to the binary sleep wake we take for granted, the waking up to life in the body is incremental.

Like when you have a friend, and they come to you with something they need help with. Vulnerable, they ask hesitantly for your time - when you respond with openness they share more.

Maybe your body is waiting patiently for you to listen with more space, and when you give loving attention to more of the messages - even the too angry voicemails and embarrassing text pictures - you will grow trust in yourself. More of yourself.

And feel more alive.

*woo to me is the allthereis, like Source, Oneness.

Not to be confused with a gang in Brooklyn. Although Wu Tang Clan is beyond.