Stress Calls Potential Into Play
To create meaningful change that lasts, we must do something that results in not knowing what will happen next; for the human being, the unknown is inherently stressful.
One summer day in 2020, while hiking in the Colorado mountains, I fell into a river and twisted my left knee so badly that my MCL (an important knee ligament) ruptured. The pain was excruciating.
The moment this injury occurred, latent human potential was activated that was both personal and unique to me, and something I share with every other human being, including you.
Unlike earlier in my life, when chronic physical pain prompted me to shrink my world in reactive self-victimized defeat, this time I was bound and determined to harness the potential for regeneration and freedom on all levels.
Stress calls potential into play.
As you may know if you've been hanging out with me since early 2020, this injury happened while I was lounging by a river on a rock after taking a swim.
Barefoot and luxuriating in the peace and quiet of a beautiful summer's day, instinct turned me around where I locked eyes with a giant black bear that was very close and walking straight towards us. My body flooded with adrenaline as I went into shock (two of the necessary ingredients for nervous system rewiring, by the way!) Meanwhile, my legs acted autonomously from any conscious will on my part, stepping backwards in slow motion into the swift moving waters below, where my foot slipped on the slimy stones in the riverbed and then wedged itself between two unmovable rocks.
The stress of locking eyes with a massive black bear - beautiful, and terribly wild - called into play the human potential for unconscious stupidity, fueled by fear.
Simultaneously, the moment my body experienced itself in an injury process was the moment that my physiological and psychological potential was called into play in an altogether different fashion.
You've no doubt heard about stress resilience, or the fact that in order to stimulate muscle growth, muscle fibers need to be sufficiently stressed. Strength is built in the human body as a physiological adaptation to a stimulus (like weighted squats, running sprints, or lifting heavy things overhead) that reveals weakness and vulnerability. We get stronger in order to meet the potential challenge of a similar future stimulus.
Stress calls potential into play.
Whether the stress is emotional, physical, psychological, relational, financial or otherwise, when we experience challenges that sufficiently test our capacities to meet those challenges, opportunity presents itself.
As human beings, we carry within us potential for strength, courage, compassion, equanimity, love, reverence, forgiveness, adaptability, regeneration, evolution, optimization...to name a fraction of possibilities. We also carry within us potential for injury, degeneration, malevolence, fear, violence, aggression, dangerous passivity, self victimization, blame, procrastination, resistance, and getting stuck in loops of behavior that are self destructive by nature.
How do you meet life's challenges?
Without stress in all its manifestations, including physical injury and pain, we wouldn't (most of us) volunteer to become the kinds of human beings we are capable of becoming; we would be content to remain as we are.
If you're even remotely honest with yourself, then you - like me - are intimately familiar with your ugly parts.
You no doubt long to become that which you are not yet: more patient, loving and kind (especially towards yourself); less fearful, more courageous; less ashamed, more secure; less helpless, more competent; less hurt, more free...
For these reasons and more, I call myself a pain advocate.
Pain calls human potential into play.
Specifically, physical pain and injury activate our latent potential for aging gracefully, optimizing our fascia, regenerating and adapting to life in ways that make us physiologically and psychologically more intelligent, less susceptible to injury, and far more capable of rapid recovery.
The only way to avoid pain or injury is to live a relatively small, risk-free life.
In order to harness our potential for aging gracefully, optimizing our fascia, regenerating our bodies and adapting to life in ways that make us physiologically and psychologically more intelligent, we need to turn towards pain, not away from it. Pain is that what calls our potential into play.
What we do with the potential called into play as a result of stress is up to us, just as we are free to choose what kind of potential we harness.
As soon as we reach for anything - from painkillers to a foam roller - with the intention to get rid of pain we don't want to be feeling (our energy is one of moving away from pain, instead of moving towards it), we miss the opportunity for calling our higher potential into play; instead, what plays itself out are our fears, which become even more deeply ingrained.
When I ruptured my MCL, within moments of the injury I was reacting from a place of old familiar fears and stories.
My mind was a cacophony of fear-based "what if" questions. Like:
"What if I never hike again? What if this is it, and I'm going to be housebound until I die? What if I can't even walk around my house? What if my leg is so mangled and messed up that I'll need someone to take care of me for the rest of my life?"
Immediately, I pushed those thoughts out of my mind because I knew exactly what they were: temptations to go back the way I came and reinforce all the trauma-based patterns of thought and behavior that imprisoned me for nearly 20 years earlier in life.
This time, I would call into play a new kind of potential:
The potential to learn even more about my body, the human body, and our potential for rapid recovery and regeneration from these kinds of injuries; the potential to untangle my emotions from sensations from the stories created in childhood that were no longer serving me; the potential to know the objective truth about my body's capacities, separate from modern medical consensus about what's possible or not possible; the potential to show other people how to do all of this too, if I succeeded; the potential to permanently evolve myself beyond these old programs from my childhood, into a level of emotional and spiritual maturity I did not yet possess.
All of the above and much more came to fruition as a result of how I met the stress of that injury. You, too, have these same potentials within you. Read this 5 part series if you want the full story.
What kind of human being do you long to become?
The stressors you face today, and every day, are calling that potential into play. Take stock of both aspects of potential: that of evolution, and that of de-evolution.
Allow the pain and stress of your life to call the highest version of yourself into being. It won't be easy, but it will be the adventure of a lifetime and it will be worth it.
The only alternative is to fold, refuse to play and shrink back into the shadows of your life.
You owe it to yourself, I believe, to find out what it's like - inside your body, and out there in your life - on the other side of playing the cards of your highest potential. You already know what your life will be like if you don't.
With love,
Elisha