Living Pains and Nearly Living Experiences

Over the years, I'll bet you've developed what I call Living Pains. The sometimes small, sometimes big aches and pains that you've been living with, but are starting to really impact your life now. 

​Are you tolerating any of these Living Pains right now?

• I can't do that, not with my knees​
• There goes my hip- again
• One little thing and that's it for my back
• Ever since the baby I just haven't been right
• One of my legs is longer than the other
• ​Everybody in my family gets a prolapse or enlarged prostate eventually
• Diastasis recti. Still. 
• I could never sit on the floor, never mind getting back up again
• My big toe doesn't move, I can't lift it​

• Sometimes food doesn't agree with me
• I'm bloated/dry/inflamed
• I'm brain fog/forgetful/so tired
• I'm clumsy/uncoordinated/accident-prone
• It's hard to go to the bathroom sometimes, or sometimes it's far too easy
• My periods are (or were) a nightmare
• ​I've always had respiratory issues
• Sleep is often a problem for me
• Stress is my spirit animal

​​

Avoiding and fending off Living Pains takes up a lot of time and energy, and you miss out on parts of life that you'd actually love to enjoy. Instead, you have Nearly-Living Experiences that don't quite compare.

​I think many of us are regularly having Nearly-Living Experiences, nearly living as fully as we can but not quite. We're ignoring these experiences in the face of our busy lives, letting them pass us by, and instead accepting Just Getting By (JGB) as good enough.
 
Nearly-Living Experiences are the chances, opportunities, and openings for us to make the big and the small changes that would wildly improve our quality and appreciation of our lives- but the steps involved usually prove too much:

1. Look up from the crazy-busy of our life
2. Recognize the moment in front of us
3. Accept that whatever the venture is, you can both accomplish it AND benefit from it
4. Take on some amount of extra work to learn some kind of new skill
5. Practice this new skill while it’s still different and separate from your normal reality
6. Absorb this new skill into your very being’s fibers, making it automatic and ordinary for you 

The route from step 1 to Step 6 is, actually, huge. These are legitimately HARD steps.

---

It’s no wonder we can’t take advantage of our Nearly-Living Experiences, what with all the rest of Life™ going on, and that JGB is the habitual order of things.
 
And it’s also no wonder that a LOT of people come to the realization that they MUST make some kind of change at a crisis point in their life, when JGB has stopped being a viable option.
 
At that point, you realize that any amount of work required between step 1 and step 6 is reasonable, since you simply must get to step 6 to ever feel better.
 
But this JGB habit, it’s not really a comfortable one, is it? It’s like the frog in the pot metaphor- if you put a frog in hot water, it’ll jump out. But if you put a frog in a pot of cold water then put it on low heat, the frog will sit there with its world getting gradually hotter, until it IS the soup.
 
(I have no idea if this story is true. But it illustrates the point!)

​We tend to accept small injuries, small adaptations, small shifts in our patterns as just one more thing that we’re too overwhelmed to deal with.  In the buffet of dumpster fires before us, what’s a sore ankle?
 
Over time, though, that sore ankle causes a limp, that changes your gait and your hip function. This impacts your psoas, which tightens up and tilts your pelvis, impinging circulation in your abdomen. Slow, heavy, uncomfortable periods become the norm, and digestion stagnates too, leading to bloating and pain since lymph can’t drain away. Now your energy is low, because you’re not digesting well to support it, nor are you eating well because you feel like crap and that’s a hard place to make healthy choices from.
 
While you’ve been focusing on the dumpster fires, your own building is burning.

It turns out, you're your own firefighter in this situation. Nobody else can conquer your Living Pains, nobody else can help you move from Nearly Living and Just Getting By to living your fullest life. My work is dedicated to teaching you the what and the how so you can regain authority over your own self, and live that life you're missing out on.

---