Day 1 From Woo to Whoa!

Two years ago I experienced chronic lower back pain from deadlifting. Not awful pain but lingering and never letting up. The kind of ache that takes the edge off your day. Over time, the pain crept down to my hips, first the right, then the left. Then the pain found its way to QL muscles and the front of my hips.

As an active person, every type of training I did set the pain off. I stopped wrestling. I stopped boxing. I stopped living. But I did start researching.

I started looking how to fix myself. Osteo, physio, foam rolling and stretching fixed nothing. Every investigation let to contradictory advice: "don't stretch" / "do stretch"/ "strengthen your abs" / "strengthen your glutes" / "bridge every day" / "use a lacrosse ball every day on sore points". The list went on, including the numerous stories that others shared of living with back pain for decades: er, no thanks.

The fix never materialized. I was spending two hours a day performing a bunch of exercises to feel normal, and yet, the pain never felt beat.

Around this time I came across the first mention of Dr. Sarno in a Youtube comment. By this stage my mind was as fatigued as my body. I leafed through his ebook of Healing Back Pain and dismissed it as woo-woo. There was no mention of exercises, or stretches or relatable concepts. (Bah!) Plus, I'm a chill person, so I clearly haven't got any rage and I don't need therapy.

Right?

The pain continued.

Interestingly, I started to connect that the pain was worse when I was doing tasks I didn't enjoy. Grown up stuff, like work, meetings or mundane tasks. Hmm.

A friend of mine randomly recommended the Sarno book again. I was about to dismiss him with an "Ackchyually...I've read it and it didn't work" but I listened to myself.

I figured to embrace the woo and consider that the very Universe itself had put this book in front of me twice, in as many weeks. I ordered a copy, read and kept my mind very open. Some concepts didn't absorb straight into my brain and other parts of the book I had to re-read; but I reckon that by about page 70 my pain was starting to subside:

Two years of pain diminishing...whoa! How can that be?

This was a week ago. My pain has reduced by 95%. I have re-enrolled in my boxing classes. I have stopped telling people "I have back pain". I have stopped worrying if training will send me into a spiral of chronic misery.

I caught the video lecture by Dr Sarno to reinforce the teaching. (It was taped back in 2000 and feel wonderfully retro, which also terrifies me because 2000 wasn't that long ago...)

Anyhow, I've decided to take the program in wiki, step by step, to see if I might vanquish the final 5%.

I'm excited: with no pain I can become the strongest version of myself.

 

Thank you @JanAtheCPA! I'm glad to be here and looking forward to documenting my progress in a way that is hopefully useful for others!