Dancing with Pain® is going unplugged for the rest of the week! That’s right, folks: I’m getting some sorely (as it were) needed down time. I’ll be back in blogging action on Monday. Until the, feel free to check out the archives by clicking on the “archives” link above, to search by date, or by clicking on any of the topics to the left over there (<—). Until then, remember to take your dance medicine, and keep on keeping on!

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“Success is often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.” ~ Coco Chanel.

I used to ask healthcare practitioners if they thought I could heal. I was so lost, so overwhelmed, so bombarded, running around the seemingly never-ending chronic pain maze, desperately seeking the exit, that I just needed some reassurance that yes, the exit door did in fact exist, and yes, I had the capacity to find it.

From my vantage point now, asking someone else whether I can heal seems silly. Almost dangerous — handing over some of my power, allowing someone else to determine my capacity.

I think people with chronic pain want some kind of a guage on where we are in life and where we are heading and how to manage our expectations. But seriously. What the fuck does anyone else know? Airplanes and email and running water and antibiotics. They said it was impossible. But it wasn’t. They said the inventors were crazy. But they weren’t.

I remember reading a story a while back, something I really held onto. Something that changed my thinking and opened the door to me taking charge of my healing and deciding that yes, I’m going to heal 100%, despite the fact that the medical system is actively thwarting my efforts and no matter what anyone else tells me.

I’m fuzzy on details about the people involved, but the story goes like this: A patient with some chronic condition asks a doctor, “Doctor, do I stand a chance at healing this?” To which the doctor replies, “If you were a prisoner in a concentration camp, would you ask the prison guard, ‘Hey, does anyone ever make it out of here alive?’ Or would you just go for it?”

When I was a little girl, we had a family friend who was in fact a prisoner in a concentration camp in Germany. When she herself was a girl, the Nazis loaded her and other starving Jews, naked, onto a cattle cart, packed like sardines. Then the Nazis fed them. Candy. To make them even weaker and sicker.

At some point, days into the trip to the death camps, this girl, with whatever strength was left in her, jumped off the train and ran and ran and ran deep into the forest. Not knowing if she’d be shot to death. Not knowing if she’d starve to death. Or freeze to death. Or come across Nazi sympathizers and be thrown back into the camps or gas chambers. She just leapt from that death train and went for it.

She made it. All the way to California, where she got married and had two kids and lived in a beautiful home.

So who is to say, whatever the diagnosis, however grim the prognosis, that you won’t make it as well? Keep looking. Keep searching for your portal to wellness. For your healing nectar. Get educated. Read books on self-healing. Listen to CDs on guided imagery. Watch DVDs on how to maximize your health through nutrition.

Just you go, chronic pain mountineer. You go as far and as fast as you can.

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Tonight I shared with a fellow chronic pain mountaineer some of my thoughts on healing. Then I thought, hey you might like to hear this as well:

1. If you want to believe you can heal, then tell yourself you can. That is step one: Believe in the possibility. Embrace it with your heart, mind, soul, and body. Envision it. Taste it. Tell yourself you can do it.
2. Never, ever allow someone ’s opinion that you cannot heal yourself affect your determination that you can. Why should it matter whether someone else says you can or cannot heal? You get to decide that, not a doctor, clergy, friend, therapist, parent, or bum on the street. You are in charge. 
3. Find people who have healed themselves, and surround yourself with them. Find books, CDs, DVDs, lectures, and classes that teach various approaches to self-healing, and pay attention to what resonates for you. Hell, make up your own stuff – I sure did! To support the self-healing journey, I have collected recommended resources on the company’s natural pain relief store.

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The DANCEformation™ class series starts tomorrow! I’m totally pumped, becuase it’s in this great space, MuDo Integrated Martial Art, in Santa Monica. The floors are well padded, so people can lie, sit, roll, or jump around comfortably. Plus it’s on the ground floor, which makes me happy, given all the portable dance studio equipment I have to shlep! If you’d like to attend the class, pre-register on the company store. Class is limited to 12 participants, in the interest of keeping it safe for people to dance freely without getting into each other’s body space.

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A pain setback comes not only with a physical symptom, but with a chain reaction of events that can cause emotional distress as well. I just had a bad experience tonight which left me with bad pain in my ankle. This ankle has been a bitch to heal in the past, and when I’ve had a setback in my ankle since then, it has lasted up to several months. Meaning several months of inability to shop for groceries, do laundry, go outside, and so on.

Here’s how I have handled and will continue to handle this setback:

1. Process it:
   I called my mom and a 12-step phone line. My mom gave me love and support, and the phone line helped me gain insight into what was going on for me and what spiritual juice I could get from the situation.
2. Lay low:
   I had plans not only to do business networking at the largest local business networking event of the year but also to spend my birthday whale-watching with my mom — something we wanted to do for almost a decade but never managed to pull together. If this ankle doesn’t heal, I may not be able to do that. But I have to accept circumstances as they are and take care of business. So I’m hunkering down until this pain episode passes.
3. Find shopping alternatives 
   Fortunately, I live in a big city. And more fortunately than that, there is a store that delivers food. Yummy food. For just a $5 delivery charge. So I gave myself some TLC and ordered from them. I also jumped online and discovered that I can have an organic produce box delivered to my door for less money than I pay each week to take the trip out to the farmer’s market. Kewl. I’m signing up right away.
4. Find a way to luxuriate in the down time.
   So yeah, I’d really like to be rubbing elbows with other business owners tomorrow night. But instead I’m going to see tomorrow as an opportunity to catch up on all the administrative meshugas I have not been able to get around to, because so much has been going on. I’ll sort my mail, file everything, pay bills, sign up for some training progrmas, and otherwise take it easy tomorrow. I’ll see it as a mini-vacation.
5. Write
   Writing is the way I communicate with the universe and with other people. Tomorrow I’ll write about the incident and why it upset me so much. And tonight I’m writing about how I am handling the situation. That’s my catharsis in action.
6. Dance
   Tomorrow I’ll have a session working intensively with the energy in my ankle and exploring, through dance, how I can master the healing process.
7. Practice gratitude
   Yeah this setback sucks. And yeah it brings up all kinds of crap from my life — how I ended up in chronic pain with a super sensitive body. But in the scheme of Life, this setback is nothing. I acknowledge and offer gratitude for what I have in life — including shelter, an income, access to healthy food, running water, a successful company, work that I love and that I can do from bed, being my own boss, having dance as a tool at my disposal 24/7, being myself, and on and on and on.
8. Use the experience to surge ahead
   I have taken this experience as motivation to get back into physical therapy and work with a specialist who can help me get buff again. I also have taken it as motivation to collect stories of people with hypersensitivity who have insights into the matter of navigating space in an often-insensitive world.
9. Take herbal meds
   Certain vitamins and supplements give my system an extra boost that helps reduce pain — MSM, fish oil, multivitamins. I’ll be taking these again for a while, until the pain goes down.
10. Meditate and give myself healing energy
    Wherever I am at any time, I can use the energies in my body to my advantage — channeling them into raw energy and then transforming them into healing energy and feeding the power back into the place of pain, recycling the pain to heal itself!

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