“I once asked an athlete to guess the percentage body mass of his aching knee. He guessed around 5% and yet, when I probed further about how often he thought about his knee, he confirmed 100% of the time.
I suggested this wasn’t fair to the rest of his body, and we began working on moving attention elsewhere.
The goal is to better understand the body-mind connection, and to think outside the box.”
~ Luke Bongiorno,
NOI group educator and co-founder of NY Sports Medicine
This is 100% true for me too!
Whenever I hurt, every last bit of my attention goes to where it hurts, and stays there – ALL OF THE TIME.
What about you?
Even though I have been working on the skill of moving my attention elsewhere, I still find it rather challenging to disengage from the pain when I am feeling yucky. Part of it is that pain is a trigger for me, and when I’m triggered and panicked, I forget. So then I tend to roll with the well worn-in habit of believing that all the pain issues are only in the tissues, and to rely on someone else to fix my hurts for me.
This is why I get so excited about NOI group trainings.
Not only I am reminded to use the body-mind tools I already have, I also get to learn from and be inspired by scientists and professionals that work at the very front edge of contemporary pain science to devise new strategies and more-than-ever holistic methods of treating pain.
Last week’s NOI training has been hard and heavy.
I’ve been both up and down, running into my fair share of road blocks and brick walls. Nervous-system informed learning for sure is a different beast, and my experience with this last course had forced me to – yet again! – re-evaluate what and how I teach. Here is to a new year – and a new set of new beginnings!
Hey, my name is Julia
Living with chronic pain has taught me to look for solutions in unlikely places – places where most people see only problems.
Over the years I’ve gotten to be pretty good at this problem-solving and silver-lining finding thing.
So good that I felt compelled to share what I’ve learned and help others to find their sea legs while navigating, living, and winning their battle with chronic pain.
