What if it’s all easier than I think?
A couple of months ago, I got off the plane in Mexico City with an inflamed knee. The flat we were staying in was 3 floors up. Our family norm is to walk everywhere we can. So I did. For those 4 days, and the next 4 days in another Mexican city, and for the 2 weeks after we got home, my knee never really improved. I iced it when painful. I ate a lot of ibuprofen.
After 5 weeks of this, I finally sucked it up, went to a doctor (with “what the heck can they do about this?” written all over my face), who sent me to a wonderful Physical Therapist who told me how to fix it.
The key, he said, “was to get ahead of the pain.” I was waiting until my knee was inflamed and painful to give it Ice & Ibu (which, btw, is also the favorite drink of women in their 60s) when icing it and medicating it early and often turned out to be the key to reducing the inflammation and allowing the knee to heal.
The other key was not doing any PT exercises in a painful way. What? Surely most of the athletes (definitely those in the movies) come from the “no pain, no gain” school of thought. Why would I want to avoid pain?
Because the PT said that when my knee is in pain, it can’t heal, and it certainly can’t get stronger. By subjecting it to more and more, I’m working at cross purposes. It turned out we could tweak each PT exercise so that there was a pain-free version of the movement that built the muscle power instead of depleting my will to live.
After 3 days of aggressive I&I and a couple weeks of a pain-free version of PT, both my knees feel stronger than they have in years.
It got me thinking? Where am I forcing myself to do it the hard, painful way in life when the easy, pain-free way would not only be much sweeter, but much more beneficial?
To answer that question, I’m going to teach you another favorite tool.
Tool: New Conclusion (invented by Maria Nemeth, author of Mastering Life’s Energies)
Purpose: Engages us to change the focus of our attention to gather evidence for a new conclusion (or belief, if you will) mostly about someone else.
Best used for: The perfect time to use it is when you’re feeling really frustrated with someone and wish they would change, and have gathered a lot of evidence to support your conclusions about that person. This works especially well with beliefs about the people around us, but it can work with something just to do with yourself.
How to use it: First, identify a firm belief (that plagues you) for which you’ve gathered evidence: Here’s one I periodically have:
“All change must be hard and painful”
There’s nothing I can do about that belief. I’ve gathered mental file cabinets full of evidence that all change has to be hard and painful, so what can I do?
Craft a new conclusion for which I am willing to gather evidence. I’m tired of them showing up that way. I’m tired of experiencing life, healing, growth as hard and painful. So, I try gathering evidence for a new conclusion: healing is sweet and easy if I prioritize treating my body lovingly.
Begin to gather evidence for this conclusion. This does not seem true to me, but I’m just am going to pretend that I’m a spiritual detective and that I have a new client who’s paying me to gather evidence to support this conclusion.
This evidence affects how I show up. As I gather this evidence for the new conclusion (healing is sweet and easy if I prioritize treating my body lovingly), it affects how I show up: I begin to be sweeter to my body.
Which affects how my body responds. As I gather this new evidence, it begins to shift my perspective on how I think and how I show up (even just energetically) with my body even more. This, in turn, can affect how it shows up (or responds) with me.
This strengthens my new conclusion
And generates additional evidence for that conclusion
And so it continues
Reflection Questions
- Where am I pretending that the only way to change is difficult?
- Where am I actively allowing or even causing myself pain as a misguided strategy to heal (something/anything)?
- What prevents me from gathering evidence for a new conclusion?