Male Announcer: You’re listening to From Pain to Possibility with Susi Hately. You will hear Susi’s best ideas on how to reduce or even eradicate your pain and learn how to listen to your body when it whispers so you don’t have to hear it scream. And now here’s your host, Susi Hately.

Welcome and welcome back. We are in the middle of a getting out of pain mini-series where I am digging into some of what I do to help my clients reduce and eradicate physical pain and how I train my trainees to have the same results.

So far we’ve been speaking about the relationship between you and you and the art of doing nothing. And it’s quite possible through these two episodes that some obstacles have shown up for you. Or perhaps you’re a health professional and you’re noticing obstacles that you’re seeing in your clients, or perhaps even in yourself professionally as you’re working with these clients.

So before I get into the upcoming episodes in this mini-series, I want to address some of the key obstacles that can get in the way of getting out of pain and some considerations to support yourself, or again, if you’re a health professional, how you can support your client.

To give context to the obstacles it’s really important to be able to understand what they are obstacles to. What’s the relationship? Because really, the idea of getting out of pain is all fine and dandy, but what does it actually mean for you or your client? What is the amazing possibility if you or your client had much reduced or eradicated physical pain? Do you know this for yourself? And if you’re a health professional, do you know this about your client?

Now, I’ll be getting more into this in an upcoming episode on compelling reason, so I’m not going to dig into it too much here and now. For now I just want you to consider this question, wouldn’t it be freaking amazing if… Or now what would life look like? Wouldn’t it be freaking amazing if and what would life look like if you did not have physical pain or the physical pain was greatly reduced?

And again, if you’re a health professional, can you answer these questions for your client? Do you know this about your client? Can you hear it in what they’re saying? Have they specifically said it to you? Or can you hear it in just what they’re saying to you day to day about what they can or can’t do in their life? Because clients say it to us in some form or another, can we pick up on it? Do you know what makes you tick or what makes your client tick?

Why does getting out of pain, why would it make a difference for you? I want you to feel that. I want you to imagine that for a moment or two. What does it feel like to imagine being out of pain or your pain being significantly reduced? How does your life open up? How is it less restrictive? What’s freaking possible?

Now, oftentimes when someone is considering this there’s something else that shows up, and these I affectionately call the yes buts. Here are the common ones I have heard. Nothing else has worked, so why would this? I won’t be able to stick with it. It’ll be too hard or confusing. I will suck at it. It will take too much time.

So let’s consider each of these. Now, some of them are related, I’m going to bring some of the statements collectively together because they are something similar about a common underlying thing. So let’s begin with the first one, nothing else has worked so why would this?

Now, a lot of times when I meet people who are lamenting about the results they’ve received elsewhere, it’s mostly because of a key factor. And it’s that surface symptoms are being addressed, but not what’s going on underneath those surface symptoms. Rarely is the pain the actual problem. Yes, the pain, the signal, the sensation is the thing that is getting people’s attention. And yes, it does need to be addressed. And why is it expressing?

The reality that I’ve noticed is it’s expressing because there’s an underlying dysfunction. So then the next obvious question is as well, how do I freaking figure out what the underlying dysfunction is? Clear and obvious question. The reason why you haven’t solved for that yet is because that dysfunction is often not in our field of awareness. I like to say that it’s under or out of the radar of our awareness. And that’s why it hasn’t been solved yet, because you can’t change anything you are not aware of.

So it kind of makes sense that it has not been solved. So what I hope that you’re hearing is there’s actually good news in this because it can’t be solved if you don’t know what it is. And this is the benefit of working with somebody who has a well-trained eye and a compassionate heart and ear, who can see underlying movement patterns that you might not be aware of, or at least not yet aware of. And they can explain them to you in a way that really lands in a meaningful, effective way.

It’s a skill set that needs to be honed by a professional. And the effective teachers will also be able to hone the skill for yourself so you can continue to grow your ability to be aware of what’s contributing to what’s going on in your body. It’s the ultimate nature of becoming your ultimate body whisperer. Your body has communication signals, what do those signals mean to you? They are unique to you, and only you, only you can discern them.

This builds into the statement of well, this will be too hard or confusing. In my experience, when something is confusing or if it feels too hard, there hasn’t been a connection made to why it should be meaningful for me to do whatever it is that is being suggested. It’s a big reason why templates often do not work, because they’re geared towards symptoms and not to the human being with those symptoms.

If we’re only going after symptoms, the symptoms live inside of a human body. They live inside of the human system. So that whole system needs to be kept in mind, not just a subset of this thing called a human being, which are the symptoms.

And this builds into I will suck at it, I won’t be able to stick with it, and it will take too much commitment. All of these are related. So when, as a health professional, we’re working with our clients, we need to understand who this person is, what drives them, what makes them tick, and why they’re even embarking on this process of reducing or eradicating their physical pain. And for the client who has physical pain, you need to understand this for yourself.

So often, I will hear health professionals say that you need to do the exercise program that they’re giving every single day. But how do you know that’s actually going to work for your client? And to make a judgment around whether they have kids or they don’t have kids, or whether what else is going on in their life, like be conscientious of interpretations of what’s going on in a client’s life about whether or not they will or they will not.

There’s multi factors that I’ve put into there, but the key thing is, what works for the client? And to the clients, the person who has the physical plan, I say the same thing to you. What will really work for you? And so often, the first program that I provide a client has four exercises in them and it takes maybe seven minutes, maybe. Because what I’ve noticed is when I give something super small, a little appetizer that actually has a result of reducing pain, that opens the door of someone’s brain to think, “Ooh, this is actually working.”

Now it’s not as much of a struggle to do more. And it very, very organically happens that more movements, more stimulus, like movements or breath or stillness practices are added into the program. But it’s quite easy because it naturally opens up to being able to do more because it can.

Whereas if we ask them to do more than they actually can at the front end, there will be a whole bunch of resistance that needs to be pushed against. And I don’t know about you, that rarely works. So let’s keep it easy. Let’s keep it simple. Let’s keep ourselves and the way that we operate in mind because that is the very best way to be able to support someone in success. We’re not trying to change a person. We’re trying to support them in reducing and eradicating pain.

Now, one thing that I’m thinking you might have noticed as I went through these is that with each of these statements I addressed, while they can be referred to as obstacles, and that’s what I started this episode with, is these are obstacles. I also want you to recognize that they can be guideposts illustrating what is not working.

They’re indicators. They’re signs, just like physical symptoms, but simply in the mental realm. So when I hear a client tell me any of these or anything that’s related to these, I’m like, oh, here are opportunities for me to refine what it is that I’m doing, how it is that I’m teaching, to hone this process for my client to make it more simple, straightforward, more meaningful. To really work with who this person is and their support.

They’re letting me know these things because they care about their own progress, so to dismiss them would be ineffective. These are opportunities. Just like I see a movement pattern that might be contributing to poor function and pain, these thought patterns, they’re giving me an indication about what is not working.

Do you see where I’m going here? There’s nothing wrong with these statements. I’ve simply called them obstacles, but I can also call them opportunities. Ultimately, they’re expressing an unmet need and a desire for something different or something better.

If a program has been designed for you and it’s actually not working for you, it’s not going to work. Of course, you’re going to have your symptoms persist. So here’s to acknowledging and embracing the obstacles I’ve mentioned, or any obstacles that show up for you as guideposts and perhaps milestones on the way to less or no pain.

Here’s an interesting indicator that I’ve noticed, I run three month series for my one to one clientele. Many of my clients will actually re-up their series because they have made such gains and they see greater possibility for themselves that they want to continue to move toward. The reason why I chose three months was because over the period of time that I’ve been teaching one on ones, when I was just doing one-offs at a time I noticed that it took about three months.

And those sessions usually happen not on a weekly basis, but on a somewhat weekly basis at the beginning and then every other week near the end. People needed the upfront connection more often. It’s also why I instituted a Slack process. So Slack is a messaging app, just like any of the other ones like Discord or Telegram or iMessage, it’s just in its own format. But it’s a way for me to connect with someone, post videos, we can post audio, we can ask questions.

It’s a private confidential space for me, and they have me in their back pocket for the whole three months. They can message me as much or as little as they want. Sometimes I receive five messages a day, sometimes I receive none. But here’s what I’ve noticed is when there is that connection, people get out of pain quicker and the results are more sustainable. That is why I chose the structure of the programming that I did.

And with that structure, I’ve noticed that it takes about an hour to reduce pain. And then it takes five weeks approximately for some sustainability of those results, for that habitual pattern to really start to groove so a new neuromuscular pattern is formed. And then it takes another four weeks to really groove in those patterns. And then that’s what starts to open up in terms of possibility. And then people would like to have some more.

So if you want to hear some stories on this, about how this worked for people, here are some episodes that will be great for you to connect with. And I’ll list them off in order. Episode 140, 165, 167, 169, 175, 187, 194.

Each of these episodes are about a client, or a trainee who has been a client, or a trainee who has worked with a client, and explaining how this process of becoming more aware of what’s actually going on – And you’ll hear in each of these episodes the obstacles that they actually recognized, and really how those obstacles were really opportunities and what that led to in terms of shifting and changing for them.

These episodes, 140, 165, 167, 169, 175, 187 and 194 are all listed in the show notes. And I’ve actually titled them as well, so you can look at them and say, “This is the one I would like to look at,” or look at a few of them. But you’ll get a really good feel of what I’m talking about here and what’s possible for you, and if you’re a health professional, what’s possible for your clientele.

And if you want to do this for yourself, if you would like to enroll in a private session, then do email me at [email protected]. And if you’re a health professional or even a non-professional, and you want to join me for six days and really dig into the fundamental concepts for helping people reduce and eradicate physical pain, I invite you to join me at the online therapeutic yoga intensive.

We begin October the 28th. It’s six days so it runs until November the second. We run from 8 am Mountain Time to 2:30 Mountain Time and I walk you through those fundamental concepts I teach every single day with my clients. You can read more at learn.functionalsynergy.com/intensive. We have a three pay installment payment plan that’s available until September the 25th. You can email me at [email protected]. Happy exploring and we’ll see you next time. Take care.