We’ve been busy little Painsters here at Dancing With Pain HQ. We’ve started nailing down (take that!) some days and times for a workshop series in the greater Bay Area — San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Marin, and Sacramento. Stay tuned for these upcoming programs! Also keep your eye posted for the media blast coming our way in the first week of October, and check out the new home page with a whole new feel. Let us know what you think!

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Wow. It’s been one hell of a ride recently. My mom says her mouth is still hanging open from the swift way I responded to the demolition incident down in LA and got myself moved out and resettled up north over the course of a weekend. I’m pretty damn impressed with myself, thank you very much, given that…

1. I was dealing with horrific levels of pain from the auditory injury — with everything from cars to dishes to voices setting nerve shots ricocheting across my head and retriggering the sense that there was a brick or some other kind of block in my ears
2. I was reeling from a series of unpleasant incidents – including my bike tire getting slashed, my car door getting kicked in, and the front bumper of my car getting reared into
3. I also was coping with a major emotional trigger from some friendly fire – a judgmental comment that had gotten under my skin, of the “why do bad things keep happening to you” variety, that really set me off
4. I drove 400 miles north in one shot (which I hadn’t done since before the onset of chronic pain about 15 years ago), transcending both physical pain (was pain-free till the last 30 miles, demonstrating how much I’d healed over the years, through dance) and the fear of driving that has been my shadow since the car crash in 1997
5. I found a lovely new house close to a park and bike trails (larger than my 2 br in LA and half the price), then rounded up friends, haulers, cleaners, and moving equipment, in as little as two days, to get me out of the old and into the new
6. On my way driving back down south, I picked up a friend 120 miles away, then drove down Highway 101 for about another 400 miles, much of it in the dark, despite mounting pain throughout my body (my friend’s license had expired and not yet been renewed, so she couldn’t help out with that), and despite the fact that for years, driving in the dark has been much scarier for me than driving in the daylight
7. With the help of said friends, haulers, and cleaners, I packed up, cleaned up, and moved out of my apartment and storage unit in the course of a weekend, then got myself (flying this time), my truck, and my car up north with all my stuff
8. With the additional help of one of those friends and another set of haulers, I unloaded and more or less settled into my new place over the course of two more days
9. I got to work immediately and within one week hooked up with a network of local recording engineers, video producers, newscasters, business entrepreneurs, and business and financial advisors, all of whom are excited about Dancing with Pain and eager to help me move it forward
10. I hired a marketing coordinator and began training her for an hour a day
11. Suddenly finding myself within walking distance of my father and sister, who are both super toxic to my well-being, I navigated through some High Holidays-related family drama, protecting my boundaries and emotional health
12. I successfully advocated for myself around some disability issues in my new apartment complex, despite being overwhelmed by all the other stuff I was dealing with, and despite some emotional backlash by one of the people on staff (more on that later)
13. I got over the mental block I’ve had for months – successfully writing the script for two downloadable audio classes
14. I scheduled a recording session (for said classes) in a state-of-the-art studio, for half the price of what I was going to pay for recording in a scrappy-ass home studio in LA
15. I started biking regularly, within two weeks biking as much as 22 miles at a shot (just shy of 35 K)– more than I’d biked since the late 1990s, when I could crank out 100 K

Whew!

When I started writing this post, I was feeling distressed about a couple of issues that are yet unresolved. And I was kind of beating myself up for not handling the situations 100%.  But now that I’ve written this post, I’m like, holy crap, I am a superhero!

So in another post, I’ll write about the stuff that’s bugging me. But my feelings about it have changed. Because right now, I am pretty damn pleased with myself. I am reminded that certain things are simply beyond my control and that there are many circumstances to take into consideration when navigating through challenging matters.

I am reminded that I truly am doing the very best that I can, and that I am effectively kicking some serious booty. And that, my friends, is enough.

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I used to have a magic car. A burgundy-colored 1988 Pontiac Sunbird. I could drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles on ¾ a tank — about 6 gallons of gas. The car never broke down, never needed repairs. I remember driving from LA to Lake Arrowhead with the guy I was seeing at the time. We pulled a round trip, and the gas needle had barely budged. “Does this car ever need gas?” he asked incredulously. “Nope,” I replied evenly.

Then the radiator overheated. Then I got the radiator replaced. Then my car fell apart. One thing after another broke and needed to be fixed. Suddenly the car was a gas guzzler. And finally, it broke down completely – coughing out its last sputters of little car life right in front of my house. (Which was really quite thoughtful of it, I might add.)

I remember waving to my car, as it was towed away by some children’s non-profit that was going to put it to good use. I thanked it for all the mileage we’d cranked out together.

Cars and bodies are not that dissimilar, I have found. When you’re healthy, you’re healthy. Then when something happens that destabilizes your body, whamo! The domino effect: One thing after another after another gets all bent out of shape – making it quite overwhelming to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Which is why I believe my life turned around when I stopped trying to diagnose and fix every little thing on my body, as my doctors would have me do, and began pursuing overall health – ie, implementing in my life anything and everything that promoted a sense of wellness: good nutrition, good sleep habits, good relationships, feel-good movement, you name it.

As I came to understand intuitively over the years, my nervous system had been thrown out of balance, leaving me more vulnerable to injury. With each successive injury, my nervous system got even more bent outta shape, and the cycle continued.

So as your own human radiator, transmission, windshield wipers, gas pedal, and carburetor crap out on you, and you yell in desperation, “What the f*** now?!;” and as you race in your jaggedy little car from doctor to doctor, holding it together by your bare hands, as the driver’s side door falls off and the right rear tire rolls away, remember this:

Maybe what your car needs is to stop burning fuel, sputtering from mechanic to mechanic who throws his hands up in the air. Maybe your car just needs to point its front bumper to the ocean, to a friendly face, or to a deep green salad. Maybe it just needs to do a little car dance to music playing over the one channel still working on the damn stereo. It’s not a quick fix, but over time, it just might get your car back on the road again.

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Did you ever want to look up at the sky and go, “Dude. WTF?!”  Yeah. I hear ya.

I’ve flown down a flight of stairs and landed on my ass. I’ve been in three car collisions of varying degrees of intensity. I had two skull fractures in a single fall off a bicycle. A drunk guy pulled out my back while dancing with me at a nightclub. An art center director squashed my wrist while I interviewed her.

A dentist caused me TMJ. A chiropractor tore my rotator cuff. A massage therapist injured my ankle. A general practitioner splashed liquid nitrogen in my eye.

Need I continue?

There was a stretch where it seemed that every time I hoisted myself back out of the gutter, something else kicked my ass back in it again. In bed, out of bed. In bed, out of bed. I became afraid to leave my house. What next, I’d think.

Pop culture and acquaintances encouraged me to feel really, really shitty about the way things were going. As if those things defined me. As if something was wrong with me. As if the occurrences were my fault. As if making me feel like crap did a damn thing to help.

Late August was a shit month for me in many ways. My ear was damaged by the demolition and construction in the apartment beneath me. I was abruptly dislodged from my apartment because not only did that construction continue, but demolition in the apartment building next door began. My bike tires were slashed. My car door was kicked in and dented (to the point that rain drips inside the car now). A Mercedes backed into the front of my car (as I was walking away from it).

Sounds like bad luck?

How about the totaled car – frame smashed, windows shattered – that I saw on the side of the road, as I drove 400 miles from Los Angeles to Northern California. Did the passengers live? If a person gets one fatal blow, is that better luck because only one thing happened? In other words, which is worse: A million hits, and you keep on trucking, or one blow, and you’re down for the count?

What about all the homeless people, the people in abusive marriages, the people living under oppressive regimes, the people living in war-torn countries?

And what about all the people who never had anything “bad” happen to them but never had anything particularly good or interesting happen either? What about all the people living perfectly ordinary, pleasant lives who hate themselves and would slit their wrists, if only they had the courage? What about all the people who have never had the guts to say what they think? Whose dreams were never realized? Who are so dead internally that they do not even know how to dream?

There is a scourge of New Age psychobabble advising us that everything should go perfectly for us – as defined by a lack of pain and suffering – if only we have the right thoughts, if only we “listen to the Universe.” What a crock. What a control-freaky thing to say.

Look at the ocean on a stormy night. Watch a tornado rip through the plains. Feel an earthquake shaking and breaking everything in site. This is Life: Fierce. Bold. Wild. Arbitrary.

Seize it. Relish it. Ride it. Dance with it.

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I feel your pain. No really, I mean it.

I’ve been wheelchair-bound, bedridden, and housebound. I’ve lived through years where walking four blocks made me want to run through the streets and shout about my accomplishment. (Or, you know, hire someone else to do it.) I’ve suffered from arthritis, degenerated discs, a torn meniscus, joint pain, chronic fatigue, spondololis thesis, plantar fascitis, insomnia, neuroma, tendonitis, vocal nodules, sciatica, a torn rotator cuff, and (according to two doctors) possibly bursitis and fibromyalgia.

Then there’s the host of mysterious sources of agonizing pain that made suicide seem like a rilly, rilly fun option. This latter category, in fact, almost always seemed to be the one in which my pain fell – the cause undetectable through X-ray, MRI, CT scan, blood test, eye exam, ultrasound, EMG, or any of the other hi-tech gadgets I was poked and prodded with, hooked up to, shoved in, peered at through, or otherwise ineffectively evaluated by.

The more I received medical care, in fact, the worse I got. I was electrocuted by an MRI and left with a back that completely went out every day for the next six months (so much bed, so little booty); splashed in the eye with liquid nitrogen and left with recurrent and horrific eye pain for the next three years (bye-bye contact lenses) injected in my trigeminal nerve for a simple crown procedure and left with debilitating headaches and TMJ (carrots: bad); and otherwise injured in my ankles, shoulder, psoas, wrist, back, and knee, by a parade of conventional and alternative medicine practitioners across two countries.

You could say I developed trust issues with healthcare.

Those trust issues, combined with a pinch of serendipity and a woman I’ll forever think of as my angel, led me to flip the bird at the medical system and set off on a path to rehabilitate my own damn self, thank you very much. At a retreat in the Israeli desert five years ago, I discovered that by reconceptualizing dance as more than leaps, twirls, and fancy footwork, I could use it to self-heal. Practicing the rudimentary steps of what would become the Dancing with Pain® method, I went from barely being able to walk to tearing up a dance floor, in the span of four days.

That pivotal experience, followed by my journalistic inquiry into the science behind it, catapulted me into the burgeoning fields of mind-body medicine and energy healing. I began writing about drug-free remedies for chronic pain; leading training seminars for healthcare practitioners working with chronic pain patients; facilitating lifestyle management programs for chronic pain patients; and teaching the Dancing with Pain® method to people with a diverse range of pain-related conditions – in the process discovering that, based on preliminary trials, the method had a 96% rate of efficacy, no matter what the pain condition.

As I received external validation of my intuitive discovery, my confidence in it grew stronger, and I personally began practicing the method more rigorously. The more I danced, the stronger I became; and the better I felt. Today, I lead a mostly pain-free life and am very active – hiking, biking, swimming, and of course, dancing.

As someone who has been through it all – suffering from pain, healing from pain, working with people in pain, and training practitioners who work with people in pain – I now offer a 360° vantage point from which I can discuss the pain experience. From this vantage point, it is my goal to help increase understanding of, sensitivity to, access to resources for, and treatment of chronic and debilitating pain.

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