My Pain Journey

So I have a pain journey and I believe that many people in the health and wellness realm come from a pain journey or the gift of pain now, maybe right now that is where you are, you might be in the middle of an acute meaning in this moment or a chronic meaning. You’ve been dealing with pain for a long time journey and maybe you have looked everywhere, you have seen every doctor, you have tried every remedy and you feel like nothing is working for you. Now let me tell you, I hear you, I see you because that’s exactly what was going on in my own body in my late teens and early twenties, I was experiencing digestive pain and at first it was just taken as me being first born, you know, a high achiever. So before an exam or before a big game because when you’re from a small town like I was, you played all the sports or your high school didn’t have a team, you were involved in all the clubs, you helped your neighbors, you just just did and see that’s when my stomach would start to bother me being the daughter of a farmer. I also had a dad who drove around with rolls of Tums and acids in his pickup truck. And so I actually just thought that I was like my dad, that I, you know, I had a nervous stomach and I would just take Tums, just like he did. 

And so when I moved away to university, the pain escalated and it was not just every once in a while, but it was getting more regular in nature. And so I found a doctor and I started going to see her and she started helping me on my journey and we first did some basic tests and they came back, you know, normal or inconclusive, which meant in the health care system in Canada where I grew up, you just got I just went to a specialist and sometimes that it took five days to get in to see a specialist. Sometimes it took five months to get in to see a specialist. So for the next two years I felt like I was the baton at a relay race. Getting passed from one group of doctors and specialists to the next, I drank everything, I got poked and prodded. I felt like I was going through this 24 month long experiment and every time I would go to the next doctor, the next specialist, I would pray, I would cross my fingers. I would do all the things in hopes that this would be the time I would get the answer, I would get the fill in the blank diagnosis so that I could start to heal. And here’s the funny not funny part of this story is that at the end of this two year journey I was on 11 different medications and some of those medications were to counteract the side effects of the medications that were just a little bit higher up the list from where that medication was. And I started to believe at the young age of 21 that this was going to be my life. 

I went to my doctor one day as I thought we were going to go on to the next plan. you know, not even plan C. Was probably like plan P or Q or R by that time and I sat down across from her and she looked me in the eye and she said to me, Jonah your medical team and I have decided that we truly believe that the pain is in your head and that you’re seeking attention and we wish you a nice life and it took all of my power not to burst into tears, but I felt like I was shrinking sitting in that chair and shrinking. I went home and probably for the next 3,4,5,6 months. I didn’t realize it then that I was in a depression and I believed that I just pulled the short straw and that this was just something that I would live with and I started questioning a lot of things I was newly engaged with. I wondered if I should go through with that. I just, I really wanted to be a mom one day. I wondered if my body, I thought how can I, how could I even have, could I even carry a baby, Could I get pregnant? And then once that baby is born, how how do I do I leave it for my husband to raise that little baby, if I couldn’t even get out of bed in the morning for myself, never mind for another little beating heart and then growing up in an entrepreneurial family, I just wanted to have my own business one day, I wanted to have the freedom of being an entrepreneur of impacting the world in a really unique way and all those dreams seemed to be crumbling like a house of cards beneath me and I just believed it.

I believed that I wasn’t meant to heal, that there was just some phantom disease that had overtaken my body, that doctors couldn’t figure out and then I had my Madonna moment and I was a big Madonna fan back in the day and I still am now and so I saw Madonna on the cover of a shape magazine and when I took that magazine home I read it, I read the article over and over and over because the words I was reading did not make sense in my mind, this form of movement that was about spinal alignment, that was about posture and breathing with a muscle that I thought was the diaphragm. I didn’t even know how to pronounce it, which I know when I was the diagram, it didn’t make sense how all these pieces could make the body look fit, feel fit and have a high quality of life. And so I found the Pilates mat class and I went and in that very first class I realized within less than a minute that I didn’t know how to breathe, I didn’t know how to move and if I wasn’t in the front row, center of that class, I would have rolled up my mat and I would have run out of that studio, but because I was in the front row, right in the middle, I stayed, I stayed and I lingered after the class was over and you know, throughout the class, I would look in my peripheral vision, I would see these people moving so effortlessly and breathing. 

They would make this noise when they were breathing and I couldn’t, I felt intimidated by the noise, like I couldn’t make that noise. What was that noise doing? And so I think that’s why I lingered because I had more questions than I had answers and I wanted to learn more, but I didn’t know how to ask for that. My instructor walked up to me and as she approached me, I burst out crying and she just put her arms around me and hugged me and just said, come back on Thursday and I came back on Thursday and then every Tuesday and Thursday after that. And by the 16th week of going to my twice a week, Pilates mat class. I had weaned myself off all 11 medications. I had no idea how I didn’t even tell anybody. I didn’t even tell my, I didn’t tell my um fiance at that time. I didn’t tell my mom at that time because I thought it would jinx it and I didn’t realize that while I was looking outside of myself and believed that the healing was something I had to seek outside of myself, really I was completely wrong is that the healing was inside of me and I had to reconnect with me and I had to fall in love with me and I had to find my voice again and once I started bringing my body and my mind and my spirit into alignment, that’s when my healing from the inside out started to happen and it literally shifted my entire career. 

My goal at that point was to break through the glass ceiling and be the first female CEO of fill in the blank corporation. And I knew that that wasn’t my passion anymore. I knew that I wanted to take what I had learned and help other people because I knew that there were people like me out there that felt like they were falling through the cracks that felt like they weren’t being understood that they were not being taken seriously and were told that the pain was in their head and our physicality of our body connects into the emotionality and our mindset and our spirit and our frequency and energy and vibration and all of that. And it’s taken me a long time to understand how this puzzle all feeds to get fits together and it’s not really that challenging to become a connoisseur of your body and your mind and your soul. It just takes a step back sometimes or hitting the bottom of the barrel or rock bottom, whatever phrase you want to use before you learn to seek a different path and I hope this week for you is a different path.

You’re not here by chance tomorrow, we’re gonna take this experience of my pain journey and we’re gonna put it into action. I want to start teaching you some of the fundamentals of that diaphragmatic breathing and of the five spinal movements that completely can change the health of your body from the inside out. This is going to become like a lab and every morning or every afternoon or every evening when you come to watch the next day of the summit, we’re going to start it together and we’re going to frame it and we are going to just continue to fill your cup with all of these great skills and knowledge and tools that you can then use in your own lives or the life of someone you love. So I want to thank you so much for being here on day one of these many sessions with me. We’re going to get to know each other a little bit better throughout the next seven days, enjoy day one of the summit and we will see you tomorrow.