You Had to be Strong For So Long; Maybe You Can Let Go Now?

Being a fighter helped you survive; now, however, it's costing you your freedom.

You’ve been through a lot.

Most of the people in your life aren’t aware of the heavy burdens you carry in your heart, or the battle scars hidden deep inside your body; a body that aches every day for something you have no idea how to give it.

Keeping the pain mostly to yourself, you’ve chosen to focus on fighting the good fight. You find something to be grateful for every day. You keep moving, learning, and trying new things. Refusing to let the pain win, you wake up every day (well, almost - you’re human, after all) determined to do whatever it takes to feel better; to heal; to find the remedy or protocol or practitioner who will finally help you mend the mangled pieces back into a healthy whole.

For as long as you can remember, your silent mantra has been:

“I will not let this pain break me.”

You’re exhausted, but you’re afraid to give in to the bone deep fatigue. Maybe consciously, but definitely in your subconscious mind, an ominous fear whispers in your ear to keep you from collapsing: what if this tiredness consumes me, and I never get back up?

So you keep going.

You’ve had to be strong for such a very long, long time.

Maybe you could let go now?

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What helped us survive won’t help us heal.

More often than not, the things that helped us survive the unbearable pains of our past are the very impediments to our freedom now.

When it comes to chronic pain - physical and emotional - most of us embody energies of antithesis to the pain; we put ourselves in opposition to it; we reject it, and - signaling our rejection loud and clear - we “fight” it, every day, with everything we have.

This attitude, and everything that comes with it - the barely acknowledged (or totally suppressed) fear that we’ll always be in pain; the mantras we repeat about how hard we’re trying; the feeling of futility we have to constantly keep at bay; and all the actions we take in the forever-war against pain - is the #1 impediment to healing and freedom.

I’ve worked with thousands of people in my private practice since 2008, and most of my clients are struggling with chronic pain. Only on very rare occasions does a new client seek me out for an acute injury. Most people go to doctors, or hospitals, or adopt a “wait and see” attitude when it comes to acute injuries like a sprained ankle, twisted knee, skiing accident or sudden lower back pain. People tend to find me after they’ve been in pain for years or decades; after they’ve “tried everything” for pain that doctors, massage therapists, physical therapists etc haven’t been able to help them resolve.

Since chronic pain is also what set me on this path, I know exactly what to do with these clients.

Stubborn, prideful and determined not to let anyone or anything break me, I was a damn good fighter. And thank god, because these attributes helped me survive some very dark experiences during childhood that I may not have survived otherwise (including psychological manipulation, emotional abuse and sexual violations for 2.5 years by an adult male neighbor).

After a decade of daily gut pain, intense jaw pain, knee pain that stopped me from running and hiking, and systemic tension that caused my whole body to ache in an untouchable place deep inside, I stopped fighting.

I turned towards the pain - all of it - and felt it fully for the first time in my life.

Paradoxically, instead of breaking me, when I allowed myself to feel the pain fully, my body finally let go of the tension necessary to mount such a relentless war of resistance; AND I FELT MYSELF RELAX.

I was finally done fighting myself; done fighting my body.

Tears of relief welled up in my eyes, and - for the first time since I was ten years old - the floodgates opened, and I let myself cry.

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If you are anything like myself, or my many clients (we humans are far more alike than we are different, including how susceptible we are to believing that we are the defective one while the rest of humanity is lucky to be so “normal”), I suspect you will relate to [most] everything I’m sharing today.

Throughout my life, I’ve been willing to do anything to help myself. Here are just a few of the ways I “tried” - so hard - to mend the brokenness I felt inside:

• Hypnotherapy

• Meditation, affirmations, visualizations

• Juice fasting, bone broth fasting, water and dry fasting, the master cleanse…

• Gallbladder flushes, salt water flushes, vitamin C flushes…

• Colonics and enemas

• Massage therapy

• Chiropractic

• Acupuncture

• Naturopathic doctors and supplements

• Functional medicine doctors and more expensive supplements

• Talk therapy

• Exercise and personal trainers

• Somatic psychotherapy

• Authentic relating groups

• Raw foods diet, paleo diet, wise traditions diet…

For years and years I used to wonder in exasperation:

“How is it possible that NOT ONE OF THESE THINGS produced a result?
What’s wrong with me?!”

Nothing was wrong with me.

Nothing is wrong with you.

The answer is simple:

None of the above protocols addressed the true root cause of my misery:

Suppression of pain; otherwise known as trauma.

Pain is [a request for] protection; the suppression of pain is called trauma.

Every time we reject our own feelings - the feelings of our soul, and the feelings of our body, which become more and more twisted up and entangled together the more we resist them - we reject ourselves, and we reject our body.

Pain denied is pain multiplied.

In our stoic, stubborn attempts to “do whatever it takes,” we neglect to do the one thing that would truly make a difference:

Allow pain its rightful place in our lives.

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Let your hurts hurt.

Let your pain break you open; openness heals.

Your soul longs for acceptance, with all of its messy and painful feelings, stories and secrets.

Your body has been waiting for you to turn towards it, learn its language, and befriend the painful and pleasurable sensations in equal measure.

With an open mind, an open heart, and an open body, you can begin to fight for freedom, instead of fighting yourself.

Let your hurts hurt.

Let your pain break you open.

Resistance closes you off to truth, and your freedom depends on knowing what is true.

War takes a heavy toll.

Lay down your armor; put away your weapons.

Turn inwards.

Meet yourself, as you are.

Meet your body, as it is.

Open your body and your mind to the truth.

Being a fighter helped you survive; now, however, it’s costing you your freedom.

Maybe you can let go now?

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When I work with clients in my private practice, I step on them to release fascia and use my methodology of “mapping” - Kinetix - to discover the root cause(s) of pain and/or dis-ease.

Kinetix involves actively releasing fascia, while - at the same time - naming what we notice during the session. This is a collaborative process, and my clients have to be willing participants to get anything out of it. What we notice is far more important than the fascia release itself (though without it, we wouldn’t have anything to notice).

In my 15+ years of stepping on people, this is the #1 pattern I’ve noticed:

We’re afraid to feel our feelings.

Feelings occur in the body.

This is equally true for emotions as it is for sensations. Emotions are felt - and thus experienced - in the body.

When I step on you and you react with resistance to the feelings that instantly flood your senses when my weight sinks into your body, this tells me - tells us - that you are stuck in a pattern of fighting (rejecting) your feelings.

With Kinetix, my primary job over all these years has been to encourage and support my clients to feel their painful feelings.

No talk therapy needed.

All it takes is me stepping on you, and there is no more hiding from the truth:

All the suppressed sensations (physical pain) and emotions (soul pain) are right there waiting for you inside your body. And, for reasons that are above my pay grade to explain, they must be addressed first before you can physically benefit from fascia release.

Fear of pain, and suppression of pain, are the primary impediment to healing; acceptance of them opens to the door for regeneration (and freedom).

The human body regenerates rapidly when there is nothing (no one) in the way.

Pain is not synonymous with damage, and damage is not synonymous with pain. Pain is in the brain, or more accurately - the nervous system (the labyrinth, as I like to call it). The nervous system is entirely made of subjective meanings, stories, beliefs and feelings. Pain is almost entirely a matter of subjective perception (until we learn to separate our subjective self from objective reality). This doesn’t mean pain isn’t real; it’s very real. Without our senses (which we use to perceive ourselves and our world, including sensations like hot and cold, pain and pleasure), we wouldn’t even know that we exist!

Pain is [a request for] protection; the suppression of pain is called trauma.

In the case of chronic pain, we are dealing with the psyche; we are dealing with the nervous system; we are dealing with The Gatekeeper. The Gatekeeper stands guard over the entrance to the world of fascia, denying entry to anyone unwilling to reckon with their subconscious self. Fascia won’t change just because we want it to.

Seeing ourselves as we [sometimes] are - helpless, afraid, ashamed, angry, tired - takes giving up the fight that has distracted us from the pain we haven’t been ready to feel up to now. Healing takes tremendous courage, because it requires that we open our eyes to the truth and stop swinging between the self protective poles of denial and delusion.

Feeling pain is, ironically, the best antidote for pain.

(Not to be confused with wallowing in it, or brooding, which are equally self sabotaging; pain, when felt in a real manner, disappears almost as quickly as it comes).

By befriending pain, we can learn the language of our body and how it communicates its needs to us; when we know what our body’s needs are, we can meet those needs (and see fast results!) Much of the time, however, it’s actually our needs - our emotional and relational soul needs - speaking to us through the body.

As I wrote about last week, acceptance is step one; but it’s not enough to help us create the meaningful change we seek.

Real freedom is about moving towards a higher ideal; a nobler aim than fighting reality (which is impossible, anyway); when you’re in resistance to pain, you will seek deliverance from it.

Motivated by freedom from pain, we fight our feelings.

Motivated by true spiritual freedom, we let our feelings guide us intuitively towards the truth: about ourselves, our body, the people in our lives and the whole cosmic universe.

May you find the peace and wholeness you seek by turning towards whatever pains you the most today.

We mend what’s broken - in ourselves, and our world - by restoring our ability to sense truth.

With love,
Elisha

P.S. We will be opening the new membership soon. If you’re seeking freedom and ready to learn how to sense and feel truth, and/or you want to learn Kinetix inside the new Kinetix Academy…stay tuned for the announcements! I’ll be teaching a few free classes on Zoom to celebrate the grand opening and show you around the membership platform so you can decide if you want to join us.