Sarah Shockley on Living with Chronic Pain

self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks

for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Sarah Shockley, a multiple award winning producer and director of educational films, including Dancing from the Inside Out, a highly acclaimed documentary on disabled dance. Sarah is the author of a number of books on living with chronic pain, including the one we discussed today called The Pain Companion, Everyday Wisdom for Living with and moving beyond Chronic Pain. Hi, Sarah, Welcome to the show. Thanks Eric, it's great to be here.

I'm excited to have you on. We are going to discuss your book called The Pain Companion, Everyday Wisdom for Living with and moving beyond Chronic pain. But before we start with that, let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of

us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work

that you do. I'd be happy to speak to that in terms of pain. You know that the first thing we might automatically think of is, oh, yeah, I get that. The bad wolf is pain and the good wolf is not pain. So that makes sense. But in my work and the way I view it is to consider the wolves kind of the way we perceive pain, so we can look at pain and see it as the big bad wolf, as the enemy, as the thing to be destroyed, is the thing we have to fight. And that's often

where we start with pain. We think it as totally negative, totally bad, and we feed into that. We we respond to it that way. We fight it. We we try to kill it, we want to end it. It's natural, it's kind of you know, it's not the thing that we like very much, and it's very uncomfortable and difficult. But when we only perceive pain in that way, we're actually locking it in place, and it's harder for us

to heal where we're in that battle with pain. So I think of moving that perception over to the other side is one of the ways we can begin healing and perceiving pain, maybe not as something we want to invite into our life, but if we see the good wolf aspect of pain, we can begin to say, okay, let's ask different questions. Instead of fighting pain, I might say, alright, pain, you're here. I don't like you, but what are you here for? What are you bringing? What might be your

positive purpose? How can I perceive you and work with you in such a way that we're we're working together rather than me just fighting with you and out why you're feeding into healing, rather than feeding more into the battle with pain, which can be exhausting and sometimes seemingly never ending. That's a great, great way to look at it. Will you tell us briefly about your journey with pain, kind of what brought you to the point where you were living with chronic pain the boy. For me, it

happened fairly quickly. Um was a big surprise. I've been very athletic all my life and kind of a person who gets things done and had a background in business management and was considered myself very capable and somebody who just took care of things and responsible, and I'm sure many people can relate to that. And then almost overnight I contracted something called thoracic outlet syndrome. UM. I had

a few warning signals. It was some strange pains in my left arm that didn't seem to relate to anything, and then some tingling in numbness, in some place else, and it wasn't sustained, and I couldn't relate it to anything I was doing. But it turns out that it it was related to computer use, which should be warning to people to be really careful about having an ergonomic setup.

Mine was very nonergonomic, and I was using a quite a small keyboard, little tiny laptop, and I was working for somebody where I where I was in front of the computer quite a bit, and literally though when it came on, it was virtually one day I was active and the next day I wasn't. And it's quite a shock to the system to go from being somebody who's holding things together. I was a single mom. I had to work all the time. I didn't have a lot of benefits and things that would take care of me.

So all of a sudden, whoa. One day I'm okay, and the next day I'm in terrible pain and can barely move. And thoracic outlet syndrome is a collapse between the clavicles the color bones in the first rib, so there's a squeezing of nerves and arteries and um muscles on both sides of the body. So it's very painful it's very debilitating. Um it's not that well known, but it is unfortunately getting more prevalent from computer use. So wow,

everything just stopped. My life stopped overnight. And I'm sure there are listeners out there who have had a similar experience from different reasons perhaps, but it is a shock when you go from being active and capable to just full stop and you're in horrible pain. And I had a kid to take care of who was about eleven at the time, and so what do you do with that? And that started my journey of how do I work with this? And for me, I wasn't given a whole

lot to work with. I'm not really big on using pharmaceuticals to begin with, so that wouldn't be the first place I'd go. But I was offered some to try, and they had horrible side effects and the exercises and treatments I was given made things worse. So I was kind of left to my own devices, and that started my journey on how do I work with this? One of the things that you describe is how you come down with this condition. You're in a terrible amount of pain.

You start trying to do everything that you can to make it better. You're seeing doctors and you're following all that advice and it doesn't go away, and you say that we start to feel that our chronic condition is a negative reflection on us. There is something wrong with

us for continuing to experience pain. Yeah, that's a very common response, and I've talked to many people, and particularly of course we're talking about chronic pain when it just won't go away, And chronic is the label we put on something that a lot of people say, three months whatever, it's just not getting better. And first you have the pain to deal with itself, and then you've got this horrible feeling of, oh no, it's not leaving. What do

I do with that? And sometimes, as in my case, everything I was given to make it better made it worse, and it's terrifying. And one of the things we don't talk about a lot when we talk about living with pain is the other aspects of living with it. Besides the pain itself. We focus on that a lot, but there's also all this other stuff that comes in. And part of the other stuff that comes in that we have to deal with is the feelings of what have

I done wrong? Did I screw up? You? Know, we've got all kinds of answers that come in from from New Age things to it's your karma and you must have had you know, you must have been terrible person in a in a past life too. Oh I must have made bad decisions in this life, or am I

a bad person? So we have to contend with these questions that when you're not in pain, it might be easy to say, oh, no, no, you don't want to think like that, But when you're in pain and it won't move, you can't help but begin to wonder what's wrong with me? Right? And this book is really your path for how you primarily worked with these more emotional components of pain. You know, you describe things like victimization, powerlessness, isolation,

silence of his ability. There's all these things that come along with the pain. You've got the physical sensation, which God knows is bad enough, and then there's everything else that comes with it. And this book is, you know, from my perspective, is really about you learning to deal with all those other components of pain beyond just the

physical sensation. If you can't make the physical sensation change, can you work with all these other things that make the overall experience better and then sometimes ironically, the relaxation that comes from dealing with those emotions better it starts to lessen the pain. Yes, exactly, it's twofold. One aspect of looking at it this way is that a lot of times the emotional aspects of living with chronic pain aren't recognized, they aren't addressed, the doctors aren't equipped to

really do that. But also if you're not, if you haven't lived with physical pain over time, it's hard to imagine what it's like. So we kind of feel very alone in our pain and very isolated. There are millions of people in pain right now, just in this country alone, in the United States and all over the world there are many many more, and yet we feel very alone, and we feel very much like I'm in my own world of pain here, and it tends to take over our whole sense of self. And one of the things

that's not being addressed. And when we look at chronic pain, which is a big calling calling it an epidemic, really we look at the opioids, we look at the use of pharmaceuticals and what that's doing, but we all but we aren't really addressing how does this affect the person,

how does it affect how they feel about themselves? And, as you were saying, when we can begin, as people who are working with pain to look at that, and hopefully the medical community can begin looking at those aspects as well, if we shift our focus onto ourselves sort of away from the pain, not not to push away from it, not to ignore it, but just kind of begin to say how am I doing in this? Who am I? Now? Where am I and begin to look at how it's affecting ourselves. At first, it can be

kind of shocking. It took me a while to realize, Wow, I'm in a lot of emotional pain here too, because the physical pain takes up so much attention that you kind of lose sight of yourself. So I'm trying to help people see what what's going on for them and

to begin to work with those aspects. And as you you said, what I found was that if I began to recognize what was going on for me emotionally and began to take care of that a little more and began to be more present with myself and and create a different attitude towards working with pain, which we can talk about, then the pain itself started to lessen everything. You can think the body relaxes, but I also kind of think that pain relaxes. It feels like all of

you starts to feel a little bit better. And when you're in a lot of pain and you can feel a tiny bit better, that's progress. And for me, I've made significant progress over the last years in working on this kind of level where I begin to address how can I feel better about myself? First, and then paradoxically, the pain starts to feel better too. It starts to lift a little bit. And I think there's physiological reasons for that too. I think we do begin to relax.

I think we breathe differently. I think the blood flow begins to release, we contract less. There's lots of things that go with that. And so where do we start. Let's get into some of the things that you found that we're helpful for you. There's a number of ways to start. One is to begin to see pain a little differently. As we started out talking about, to allow yourself to think, Okay, I'm in this, I'm already here

in pain. Fighting hasn't helped, you know, fighting is helping, and you're moving out of pain by fighting it, keep doing it. You know, if that works, a lot of people find that they end up locked in a battle. But you know, pain is pretty strong and it's like it's not releasing. So if that's not working, then began to see pain different, to allow yourself to step back a little bit, just take a little bit of a breath and say, okay, what if, just what if instead

of treating pain is the enemy? I asked it a different question. I said to a pain let's say he turned towards pain in a sense and say, well, what could possibly be your positive purpose here? There must be a reason you're here beyond just torturing me. So beginning to relax a little bit around that, just the whole concept of pain. And that sounds like a tiny thing, and it is sort of a subtle change, but it's also very profound. When we're when we're head on with pain,

we're locked in this battle. We're kind of we've drawn our lines and pains on one side and we're on the other, and we're using our medications and we're using our treatments, and we're gritting our teeth and we're getting and we're going to get through it or and we're pushing, pushing, pushing, and you know that old saying what you resist persists, is it can be really true with pain too. So it's not about um giving into it, not at all.

It's not about acquiescing. It's just about kind of stepping away from the battle line and thinking of pain rather than in front of you as something that you have to kill get rid of. Stop thinking of it as sort of moving to the side in the sense of, okay, we're going to become partners now, and beginning to imagine that pain is in fact the voice of something in you that wants to be healed. It's trying to heal

you even though it feels really bad. But changing that perspective, all of a sudden begins to relax just a little bit, and I think of pain almost kind of weird. It's almost like its own entity, but it isn't. But it is part of you, but it's also feels like it isn't. So when you can imagine pain as a positive force, a positive being that's trying to get your attention, it's very unpleasant, but it must be saying something really important, because it's really using a lot of jews to get

your attention, so you kind of turned toward it. So that's the f thing is to begin to try to create a different relationship with pain and on a more positive level. What we resist persists. I use this phrase all the time, you know, suffering equals pain times resistance, right, And I have I'm not going to call it chronic pain. I have back pain that is around a lot of the time, and sometimes it's more severe than other times. Sometimes it's pretty bad, and most of the time it's

pretty manageable. And I've just really realized how when I actually, like you say, turned towards it a little bit, it gets much better. My brain seems to take these shortcuts where I get a twinge of pain and my brain then goes off into all the stories about that pain. I can't take it, how it's going to happen, I mean,

all this stuff. And if I can stop that and for a second and go back to it for a second, I I often realized that, yeah, the sensation is there, and it's unpleasant, but it's not nearly as unpleasant as the whole mind state that I have gotten myself into as a result of feeling those physical sensations. And I feel that when we go there, when we go into the fear and we go into the resistance. Yeah, I mean it's easy to do it as a natural response, but if we can kind of let go of that,

then we're helping pain move on. We're helping it move when we you know, we lock it in place when we get get into that resistant mode. And again, it's so easy to do because it's like there that is again, uh. And one of the first things we do. You may have noticed when we feel those twinges or much bigger than twinges for some of us of pain, and some of us are in pain all the time, there's there's just sort of levels that kind of go up and down,

but it doesn't go away. The first thing we often do when we feel into the pain is we we pull our breath in, we hole we we try to stop it and and often one of the ways we try to stop it is by not breathing. And this is one of the things I discovered when I thought, what can I do with this pain? If I can't really do any of the treatments and I can't really you know, help it with pharmaceuticals, and I'm trying to eat right and nothing's working. What can I possibly do?

And I thought, well, I don't know. I can try to meditate with it or something. But sitting still and trying to breathe deeply actually made me much more pain because my condition doesn't work well with sitting in the same position for too long, and deep breathing wasn't so great. So I thought, well, it doesn't work. But it did put my attention on breath and how I was breathing, and I started to notice that, and I thought, oh, I'm holding my breath a lot in fact, and I'm

breathing very shallowly. And sometimes we feel like we have to almost, you know, because if we breathe deeply, will feel more pain. Sometimes that's true, but we also want to notice not to hold our breath too much because that restricts the blood flow, it restricts the oxygen. It's we're you know, We're we're tensing up. We're also contracting a lot. There's a lot of ways we respond to pain and we don't even realize it. We're responding physiologically

by holding ourselves in. So if we can begin to say, okay, I'm just gonna be with pain, then I can I'm gonna begin to breathe just a little more easily. It doesn't have to be deep, just breathe a little bit. And one of the things I experimented with was asking myself, what if I let pain relax? What if I let

pain breathe? What if I imagine pain was, you know, sort of all contracted and weird, and I just kind of with it, just started to breathe differently and just relax a little bit around the pain, and the pain was still there. Didn't automatically fix everything, but just kind of relaxing around it. And then I moved into a space of Okay, what if I let pain have a little more space instead of contracting and trying to stop it, what if I let it kind of breathe outward and

just take up more room. Which sounds like the worst thing you can do, And yet if you try it and you just kind of imagine, okay, pain take the room you need, it's strangely starts to relax a little bit. And and I have found dissipate and a lot of people that have tried this. It's not that pain is going to go away instantly, but if you can find these ways of being a little more relaxed around it, of breathing a little bit more freely, of letting it

just be where it is. That's the path to healing you mentioned earlier, sort of seeing that pain is sending us a message or it's there to do something for you. What were some of the I don't like this word lessons that pain taught you, because it's not like, you know, I don't believe that, like we get these awful things in life to teach us lessons. I agree, However, there

does seem to be truth that I guess. The phrase I like is, you know, it's not that things always happen for the best, but we can try and make the best out of what does happen. Um, you know. And so for you, what what are some of the things that you felt like pain brought to you? What were some of its messages. There's a couple levels of messages. One is, of course, the almost obvious physical level of Okay, you need to change something physically on what you're doing

in life. UM, And that's often one of the first things we look at, is what do I do differently? And sometimes we don't even listen to that. It might be slowed down. It might be rest more. It might be I need you to just you know, be more relaxed, be differently with your breath, as we were talking earlier.

So there's there's the levels of how we are with our body that it might be sending messages about absolutely what we're eating, what we're you know, imbibing, in whether we a lot of us don't rest enough, we stay up too late, we're on screens all the time. There's a lot of things that pain from a condition that might seem not related to those things might be benefited by if we really listen and we can even turn Sometimes I imagine pain is sitting in a chair and

I say, okay, what do you need? Which is also a question we don't often ask pain what do you need? We we usually say how can I get rid of you? But you might surprise yourself and imagine pains that in there and it might say, wow, thank you for asking.

You know, I'd love you to just take me to the beach, or you know, I need your toes to be in some sand and some earth, and these things that we kind of forget about in our rush rush life can be incredibly healing, and we overlook them because they're not giant, big things, but a lot of things that so so a lot of times pain might be telling us to do a lot of small things that add up in terms of changing how we are in

life physically. But it also if it's chronic, if it stays around, it kind of for says you to look at yourself, to be with yourself, or you can maybe you don't have to go that direction, but for me, I had to start asking questions about well, who am I now? I can't do all the things I used to do. Is pain sort of part of me needing

to change who I am in life? Is that part of what's going on here or whether it was meant to be that way or or you know, I agree with you, I don't really into the Oh, it must be here to teach you a lesson or it's some kind of punishment and I don't. I don't go that's not what I see at all. But it may be asking something, and it may be that on a soul level, perhaps something's been asking you to change for a while and the only way it could get your attention was

to come through through pain. Again, it's not a punishment thing it's more of a if you can think of it as a a as a directive or a signpost or okay, look over here. Oh well, maybe I need to change how I am in life. Maybe I'm way too critical on myself. Maybe I um for me. It had a lot to do with learning how to be with myself, which sounds sort of like an oxymoron. How

can you not be with yourself? You're always with yourself, But a lot of us go through life kind of being here for other people, especially for parents, or we don't really notice how we are. We run from ourselves. We're always on movies, or we're running to work, or we're out doing something. And I found that when I was with my condition, I couldn't go anywhere. I was stuck in my little house for a lot of the day.

And then I was stuck with me, and I couldn't even you know, I couldn't read books, I couldn't watch movies. I was in so much pain. I was so limited that I could barely do anything. And there I was me and me, and and it's just you, you know, learning how to be with you. It may sound like a small thing, but it's really huge. I had to face loneliness. I had to face who I thought I was. I had to come to terms with how I was

uncomfortable just being alone with myself. And I didn't really want to learn those things particularly, and I certainly wouldn't have want to learn them through pain. But they now feel like very rich gifts that I was offered ultimately. And again I don't know that we have to go through pain to get those, but I have them now. I have a different way of being with myself that is much more self accepting. It's much calmer. I feel at home with myself in a way I never did before.

So there are very unexpected gifts if you look for them. And so what is your experience of pain? Like now, So how long ago was this that this happened? So this was eleven years ago, So I've been in it for a long time. And that I'd say about the first five years I was in very intense pain, which I mean it's a long time. And um, I found that things didn't help. So I stopped doing all the things we're making it worse, and I learned to live

very restricted life. It was always really painful, but i'd keep it from spiking too much by just limiting what I did. I did that for a long time. Plus I had to be a mom, so I kind of had to be able to get up in the morning for someone and get him off to school and then collapse for the rest of the day and then go go get him at school. And you know, that was my life for a long time. And then I kind of went, wow, I can't. I can't live like this. You know, it's kind of a stoic just putting up

with it thing. And so that's when I started looking at more closely at what pain is and how I could be with it. And so it took some number of years for me to kind of develop this process and figure out because I wasn't a lot of pain, so I wasn't sitting around every day wondering how I could do this differently. It was just every so often I go, Okay, well, what can I try now? And so it took me quite a while to get to the places where I realized that I needed to be

with pain and with myself very differently. So now what's happened as I still have pain twenty four hours a day, but it's way more reduced. I couldn't be talking like this when I first started out. I mean, I would have been exhausted by now and the first five minutes, and my brain would have gone off to I wouldn't have known what I was talking about, or I couldn't remember what I just said five minutes ago, because you don't have much of a brain when you when you

have a lot of pain. And so for me this the changes have been significant. I'm still limited in what I can do. I'm still working with the physical restrictions, but my energy levels are much better, and my ability to think is better. In my ability to of course, I wrote a book which took me a long time, but the process of writing it helped me kind of

express which is another thing I talked about. I think it's important to express pain, find a way to express it, and that helped release more and more so so my process has been pretty slow. On the other hand, I was told I would never get better. I would nothing was ever going to be better by the doctors, and

in fact, it was going to get worse. So you can even when you're in a pretty hopeless situation and the doctors say nothing's going to work for you, there are ways you can work from the inside out, I think, and make things improve. Do you think that had you had the skills that you now have earlier, that your

journey through pain would have been less painful? Absolutely? I. In fact, I wrote the book I wished I had been given when I first got in pain, because I was looking around for like, what what do people do? What do you do? How do you deal with this? And how do you live? How do you get up in the morning? And you know, when you when you're waking up in terrible pain? And some days I felt worse when I woke up than I went to bed. I don't know how that could be so, but I

would just I would toss into an all night. And I know people that have terrible pain recognized this. You wake up feeling like you've been hit by a freight train and you've been you know, boxing with a gorilla all night and you're like, oh man. And the only way I could get up was because I had a child to take care of, so you know, that kept me going. But I was slogging through my days, just barely able to you know, maintain And I'm not the

only one who's gone through that. And I looked hopefully for something out there that would help me make sense of it, help me at least feel like somebody else knew what was going on. And that's when about five or six years in, I started, well, maybe I can write about what's going on. And writing was very painful. I could barely hold a pencil, but I thought, well, I'm going to write a sentence a day, and that

began to release things. So yes, if I had I think something similar to the pain com pain and some some similar ideas when I started, I really think it would have helped a lot. And and people have written to me and called me and said, wow, just knowing that somebody gets it, that they read it and they go, ah, you get what I'm going through is a relief, and a relief is healing. So being seen in your pain and being recognized and being acknowledged can also be the

beginning of healing too. It's really important. I A. That's the other part of the book we haven't really talked about is the first part of the book is very very practical. It talks very much about ways to organize your life and interact with others and and you know, some very practical ways of dealing with pain, and then the second half of the book tends to go more into deeper ideas of non resistance and allowing pain space.

And then eventually you have a bunch of meditations in the book that are also intended for people who are in chronic pain. Yeah. I sort of developed these for myself. I think I have about eleven different, very easy, simple practices. One of the first things that I did too, you know, I didn't know I was developing these ideas and sort of meditations, but I when I was thinking, Okay, I'm really stuck in this and I can't go on like this. I cannot imagine my life going on for decades more

in horrible pain and even getting worse. I just can't deal with it. So I thought, what what can I do in my little you know, in my little house with you know, I am so limited. I've got to go inside to find the answers. And that's when I started asking about, well, what if I looked at pain differently?

And so one of the things I did was I said to myself, well, all right, let's say pain is that it feels like it you know, it feels like an invader when you're when you're in a lot of pain, it feels like something else has shown up, and like, you know, your roommate you never wanted. Only it's a bodymate you never wanted. You know, what are you doing here? And I can't go anywhere without you? It's it's everywhere, you know, Like, could you just leave me alone for

a while? But it won't, you know, there's no vacation. So I thought, okay, well what if I started to use sort of an active imagination process um with it, And I thought, what what would pain look like if if if it kind of was outside of me and I met pain, you know, my pain specifically, what would it looked like? And I had a lot of nerve. Pain is a lot of what I have. It's very pins and needles and stabbing stuff and a lot of burning. And when it was the worst, it felt like my

whole body was on fire in my brain. So I thought, well, okay, I'm gonna imagine that I'm gonna meet pain and we're gonna have a talk. So this is when I thought of pain is a horrible, you know, negative thing. But I imagined, okay, I'm gonna let pain come to the door. Which in itself is kind of scary if you're if you're in a lot of pain, you don't really want to look at it. But I'm going to open the door. I'm gonna take a glance at what pain looks like,

and then closed the door again. You know that that's about all I could handle. So in my mind, I imagine going to my real front door of my little house that I was in, and I imagine opening it and not letting pain in, but just kind of taking a look. It's already here, but so you know it's I've already it's already in, but I wanted to metaphorically

look at it. And I opened the door kind of cautiously, and I expected almost like a fiery demon out there or something really really awful, and then I could slam the door on it again, but it would have started some kind of process, I imagined. But I opened the door and there was this very nice looking young man out there wearing silver with silver shoes and the silver hat and wings on his head and wings, little little wings on his shoes, and he was just very friendly looking.

I said, what And it had a little like a postcard. It was herm's or otherwise known as Mercury, the mess and Year of the Gods. And I was so shocked. I sort of jumped out of my meditation. I thought what And that's when I started thinking, Oh, pain isn't just the enemy or just a horrible thing. Pains a messenger. Oh pain has something to say. That's when I really shifted the way I was with with with it and

looking at it. So a lot of these, like many meditations that I have at the end of the book, are about how we can create a different relationship with pain. Because that's when it really started to shift for me was I went, Oh, my gosh, pain is something you know, to offer me? What does that mean? Pain is a message? Pain? Is it? And then I really started thinking about it. Well, of course it's a signal from the body, so of

course it's a messenger. And then I began to think of it as it a messenger on other levels of the being besides physical, which is always I've always been somebody who looks at the other side of things, kind of mystical sides of things, and and so I've always going to ask the question, Okay, what else is there? What else? What else do I need to see. So the meditations aren't particularly deeply mystical in nature, but they allow you to look at the other side of what's

going on. They allow you to work with pain as something that you could actually have a conversation with. You could actually write a letter. That's one of the things I m talk about as writing letters to pain, and I have some of them in the book. But it's a way of Okay, I'm going to start a dialogue with pain. I'm going to start interacting in a more positive way, and then you begin to see, oh, something's

coming back. I'm getting a few little instead of just pain sort of shouting at me in the sense of that that sensation of horrible pain is to me in my mind like pain shouting. You know. It's like pain can can calm down because you're finally listening. It doesn't have to shout so loudly. And it actually for me had physiological effects as well as as emotional and psychological

to do these things excellent. Another analogy that you used in the book, a metaphor you used was to imagine pain as a wild animal injured and a own mm hmm. That was one of my imaginings that I thought wow, you know what if it's like because you kind of go into the space off, Okay, what what does pain feel like? I finally realized one day, well, pain is in pain, which is weird, but it's like your your body's in pain. It's not against you, it's not trying

to fight you. It's trying to heal. So pain is the feeling of healing in a way. And that helped a lot, and I thought, well, what if I imagine, you know, what, what if pain is I don't know, scared or or you know, what if all of this horrible feeling is not something so big and powerful and scary trying to get me, But what if it's what if I think of it differently? So I just sort of spontaneously got this imaginary idea of there's a wild animal. It's say it's a tiger or a lion or something,

and it's in your house, but it's wounded. So that's what pain felt to me one day, was like this thing with claws and it's literally scary and that and then I then but it itself is in pain, So I thought, well, what if it's a wounded animal? What if it's this big, scary thing but it's it's actually trying to heal. And so I I did this thing of imagining, well, what do you do Let's say you

have a wounded animal in your house. I mean, do you run up and try to hit it, that's what we do with pain, or do you kind of slowly, kind of get a little bit closer and a little bit closer because it is kind of scary. I mean, pain is really scary and it can be um, it feels very dangerous to get close to pain. So using that kind of metaphor as a way to kind of move toward it when it's really scary, because some pain is really big. It's like people say, you're crazy, I'm

not going to get close to that. So when you imagine it as the animal that's wounded, you can begin to just really gently get a little bit closer, a little bit closer, and you develop a trust relationship, which also again sounds sometimes strange. We don't talk about pain

in these ways, and yet that's part of it. You're beginning to trust the part of you that is trying to heal, that's really what's going on, and then you can get a little closer and a little closer and then you can begin to breathe a little differently and maybe just sit down next to that painful thing, and then you begin to notice, Wow, it's not quite that scary.

This thing is in pain too. How can we help each other move out of this wonderful well, Sarah, it's quite an extraordinary journey you've been on and a gift that you've given to people who are in chronic pain. So I want to thank you so much for taking the time to come on and talk with us. Oh, thank you, Eric, and thanks to all the listeners. Really appreciate it. And we'll have links in the show notes to your book and all of your other work. Great,

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