My Journey with Chronic Pain (Part One - Low Back)

Discovering the Mind's Influence on the Body

11pm — Agony. That is what I feel with the slightest movement. My back is pressed firmly against the floor, knees bent and resting against each other.

I have not moved for the past 8 hours except to drink water and use the bathroom. My spine is completely frozen, straight up and down.

“All of this, from a measly 30lb”, I think to myself.

Earlier, I had been doing a light workout in my apartment with a homemade sandbag and some light kettlebells.

I had slowly worked up to this routine over a few months. Before that, I had taken a year off the gym, and my muscle had slowly eroded.

I was feeling confident in my new progress and momentum, until that afternoon. In the midst of a few warmup sets — I felt a small twinge. Moments later, deep pain. I dropped to the floor, and stayed there.

Had I injured my back performing light kettlebell swings? Maybe, but I don’t have the MRI to prove it.

My back eventually healed from this “injury”, although my spine was frozen and I remained on the floor for several days. Finally, I was able to start moving again and resume exercise.

Back to the Beginning

Years earlier, I had gotten an MRI done. I injured my back one day, ego lifting as a teenager in the gym.

Funny enough, the pain that day was a fraction of what I felt in the first story I shared, and in later scenarios.

I, fueled by puberty and teenage angst, trained through the injury. The first few weeks were painful, but I seemed to be improving.

However, when I told my parents, they made me go see a doctor. I was lucky to see a knowledgeable sports medicine physician, who ordered imaging, despite my improved state.

The results came in — I had a bulging L4/L5 disc.

Life Changes

Initially, I was mortified.

“You’ll never squat or deadlift again”

“Lifting weights is dangerous”

Doctors, physical therapists, and family quickly filled my brain with ominous statements like these. Fortunately for me, I was too hardheaded to listen to them.

I completed a full 12 weeks of Physical Therapy. It helped, a little. I now believe that my injury had already healed, by the time I started PT (around 2 months after the initial injury).

I would stretch my glutes, hip flexors, and hamstrings and perform abdominal stabilization exercises, and I would feel relief and be temporarily pain-free in my low back.

But I still had regular, aching pain in my low back and shooting pain down my glutes. It came and went, and I forgot about it some of the time.

However, I would always feel it creep back in when I was at the gym, particularly if I started doing heavy leg movements. Sitting also aggravated it, especially while studying and in class.

Taking a Break

I continued to train around the pain for the next few years, while researching solutions.

I tried yoga, which helped, and experimented with meditation. In hindsight, meditation helped significantly, but I did not make the connection to its effect on my back pain at the time.

I fantasized about purchasing fancy weight lifting machine like the reverse hyperextension and belt squat machines — claimed to “decompress” your spine and with myriads of weightlifters on the Internet talking about how it healed their backs.

Years later, I would get access to these machines and even purchase one myself. They are great training apparatuses, but using them did not magically heal my back pain.

Frustrated with my lack of progress in permanently healing my back and with my perceived “lack of progress” in the gym due to not using heavy weights (I was actually still in great shape), I decided to take a long break from exercise.

My goal was to let my back “fully heal”, and yet, I ended up writhing on the floor in the most back pain of my life, after I resumed exercise one year later.

Moving Forward

I’d like to say this was the end of my journey with chronic pain. Unfortunately, my struggle with pain continued, but it “moved” to a different area…

However, that day on the floor was a metanoia for me. I realized, in an unsophisticated fashion, that my back pain was not just being caused by my body.

“It is irrational”, I mused during my ample time stuck on the floor, “for my back to be causing such an extreme amount of pain from such a little amount of weight, and for the pain to be lasting for so long”.

There must be some element of my mind purposely locking my back up and causing so much pain, to avoid repeated injury at the same location I had injured it years earlier.

The pain, in this instance, never went away on its own.

After 3 days lying on the ground, only moving to eat, drink, and use the bathroom, I had to muster up the courage to face the pain myself and start moving through it. It hurt, worse than any back pain I had ever experienced, but I kept reminding myself:

“You are not injured, you must work through this and get blood flowing again”

I started with walking across my apartment, then down the street, next with bodyweight squats and good mornings. When my movement restored, my pain quickly disappeared.

This was the last of my struggle to date with back pain, but I hadn’t discovered why. I hadn’t learned about the Mindbody Syndrome or read Dr. John Sarno’s books.

But, I was able to lift weights again, even using heavy weights for squats and deadlifts, without regular back pain and with the conviction that I had no current injury in my back.

Pour Conclure

Today, I know more about pain science and how the mind influences the physical body. While it was not realistic for my low back to be injured after such light movement; the pain that kept me frozen on the floor was very real.

The Mind can send the Body real pain signals like this, to distract you from facing certain threatening thoughts and emotions. These are unconscious feelings that, if the Mind successfully distracts you from, you may never know the context of.

Maybe in that moment, my threatening thought was “Gosh, this kettlebell feels so light — maybe I have been wasting my time and missing out on potential muscle gains from taking the last year completely off”. I can’t know for sure though, because I gave in to the pain in that moment. I let it distract me for days.

If you have screened out any serious injuries with a medical professional —

And are still feeling pain in a certain body part, then you are not feeling pain from an injury. Your Mind is distracting you with pain signals from a deeper emotion or truth, that you do not want to face.

Pain caused by an injury does not typically last more than 3 months. Any chronic pain left over, is caused by the Mind.

This is the MindBody Syndrome (TMS) as coined by Dr. John Sarno, and we will explore what is is, how to recover from it, and how to use it to propel your life to bigger and better.

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