Podcast: Episode 68: If I Am So Smart, Why Am I Still In Pain?


So many of my clients are logical and analytical thinkers; they are incredible at pulling diverse pieces of information, making sense of it, and coming up with a solution. Yet when it comes to their own experiences, they are in a state of persistent pain and still can’t figure out how to fix it.

Your brain is powerful, and when you tap into what it’s actually capable of, your entire life can change. To do this, you have to recognize the brain's brilliance and learn how to use it as a tool to blend the cognitive amazingness with the mind-blowing awesomeness of the body.

In this episode, I’m sharing exactly how to do this and teaching you how to bring your brain and body together to decode your symptoms. Discover how to regain your power and reduce your symptoms and pain, and tune into the sense of knowing that your body provides you with.

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What You'll Learn from this Episode:

  • What you should know about your body and brain.
  • How to use your brain to cognitively assess your symptoms.
  • Why you should stop focusing on logic and start listening to your body.
  • A classic example of being able to use your brain to listen to your body.
  • The importance of paying attention to the sensations in your body.

Featured on the Show:

  • If the idea of utilizing your brain and body together to eradicate pain is interesting to you and you want to bring all this work together, I would be honoured to work with you at my If I Am So Smart, Why Am I Still In Pain Program this November. Email us for more information and to sign up.

Full Episode Transcript:

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.

I want to begin this episode with a posting that I did to Facebook and Instagram back in May. And the caption of that post is, “If I'm so smart, why am I still in pain?” And the reason I posted it is because so many of my clients are very logical and analytical thinkers. They are incredible at pulling in diverse pieces of information, making sense of them, and then coming up with a solution.

So they're in a state of persistent pain and they're really trying to figure it out as to why they can't figure this one out. And they're frustrated, they're annoyed, and they're agitated. So this episode is for them. And perhaps for you, if this is what you are noticing for yourself.

But the reality is, if I had a dime each time a client of mine said to me, “Susi, if I'm so smart, why haven't I figured this out?” I would be able to buy some pretty beautifully awesome soap. Because here's the thing about your body and your brain, your brain wants to solve for everything. Your brain thinks it should know.

It's predictive and if there are gaps it will fill it in with its own information. Typically, based off of the past and off of memories. Your brain will ask you to gather all the evidence, and to do all the things to solve for the problem. And while following this way of the brain will often give you a solution, it's often not the solution that gives sustainable results. It will be more like relief or a quick fix.

And then, in time, you will cycle about in and out of pain over and over and over and over. Because the reality is the solution doesn't reside solely in your brain. It's one of the craziest cosmic jokes going. Our brain thinks it's so smart. It may even right now be so annoyed with me and agitated that I'm not actually giving the answer right now. It might be saying, “Would you just tell me already what this is about?”

These next few sentences are specifically for your brain. You ready? Okay, brain, here we go. Brain, I need you to listen to your body. I know you haven't been trained to do much of that, but if you do, you will have all the evidence and information to make the most accurate and meaningful decisions ever. You will step into a rockstarness like nobody's business. But you need to listen and befriend your body, it's here to support you to be the very best brain and to give you, your human, the very best life. Are you ready to go?

See, here's the thing, your brain is fricking powerful, if only you could tap into what it's actually capable of. Which means you need to use it as a tool for listening to your body. You want to be able to blend the cognitive amazingness of your brain with the mind blowing awesomeness of your body.

So I want to share a little bit more about how to actually do this. And I'm actually getting more into it in my upcoming program of If I'm So Smart, Why Am I Still in Pain. Where you can actually practice this process that I'll be sharing with you.

You see, I learned early on in my career that a key thing that I needed to do with my clientele is to help them to feel. To help them to feel not only the sensations of their body, but also their emotions. This was a necessary component because I found that so many of my clients came in wanting to figure it out with their brain and shove aside the feeling of the sensation and of the emotion.

But they had to bring that back online because the body is a feeling sensing structure. It's a skin sack in a sense, I realize that sounds sort of crass. But inside of it there is communication and electrical impulses and fluid and tissue, there's sensation. It's a sentient type of being.

For us to simply logic our way through it all misses out on so much of the brilliance. The brilliance of it being a barometer, the brilliance of it being a battery, of really been able to tune into this thing of energy. How to tune into when that energy is fading, when it needs filling up, when you know to push yourself or when you need to rest.

When it comes just about the brain we miss out on so much efficiency and effectiveness that when we can tune into that, now we can actually use our brain for some really awesome stuff. These days, there is so much focus in on external electronics, whether it's our phone or our watches. And we can rely on those numbers that we see on those devices, to make it make sense to our brain.

But it doesn't necessarily help us feel much better. Because we need to tune in that evidence that we're seeing on the device to what's actually going on into our system. In fact, I had one client who bought a new watch and the watch was telling him about how his energy was draining, and it was really freaking him out.

And I just said to him, “I want you to consider something. I want you to consider that maybe the information on the device is wrong. Not that it is, but not that it's right. But maybe that it could be wrong. You weren't freaking out yesterday before you put the watch on. It's only since you put the watch on that now you're starting to freak out, because your brain is trying to make sense of the electronics.”

My next question to him was this, “What are you noticing in your body? Does your body correspond to the device metrics?” And that sort of blew his mind a little bit, where he said, “Wait a second, ha, I completely stopped listening and feeling my body.”

And so I said to him, “All right, so now you're seeing whatever it is that the device is telling you. Now, feel your body and notice if what you're noticing on the device is either validated by what it is that you're experiencing in your body, or that your body is validating what it is that you're noticing on the watch, or on the other device.”

This becomes really, really important because it can become so easy to make the data mean something and analyze it and put it through the filter of our brain, cognitively making sense of at all. But when we lose out and we miss out on what's actually going on within our body, we can trample over the sensation and miss out on something really valuable that could actually serve your brain.

A story that I sometimes tell about this is a client of mine that I've seen for a number of years. And it was only into about four years into our time together where he acknowledged that in the first year of our working together, he didn't really believe anything that I said.

He knew that I spoke about yellow lights, and listening to the whispers, and noticing your body as a barometer. And that your body had all this information that if you could start to really notice its patterns, then you can make a big fundamental difference. Because your brain could take those patterns and figure out and deduce based off of those patterns of feeling that your body was displaying.

He was nodding the whole time, but he didn't really believe me. And the reason was, is because he felt that his body had betrayed him. There was a promise of health and wellbeing. And for a lot of his life, there wasn't health and wellbeing present in his body. The way that he has had success in life, the outward success was by not listening to his body and pushing through.

And he felt that he had done such an amazing job, he was a genius at pushing through. And he also got sick regularly. He felt that his brain was cloudy. The clarity that he once loved about his system was no longer there. His ability to crunch numbers and really to deduce and problem solve wasn't there so much anymore.

He was starting to think that maybe it was just about him getting older. And then one day when he had another setback in his health, he lay in bed and then he acknowledged later to me, as he was lying in bed, he said, “You know what? Maybe I should listen to Susi. Maybe she's got something here.”

Now I didn't hear about that part of the conversation until a few years later, when he acknowledged that in that first year he wasn't really paying attention to what I was saying, he was going through the motions. But then he started to pay attention.

He started to pay attention to the feelings in his body, not the emotions part, but the sensations. The strain, the pain, the thing, the that, the this, the the. And I'm saying the this, the thing, the that because he named them however, he was going to name them. The point here is he started to be able to tune into it like a traffic light. He was able to tune into the reds, the screams, the yellows, the whispers, the greens.

The yellows were the indicators to let him know that if he kept doing what he was doing, the red was going to come. The yellows were another way of saying them were the whispers. Being able to pay attention to the reds and the red or the scream was going to come. So he could listen to the whispers and not have to hear the screen. He could pay attention to the yellow and not have to experience the red.

This is a classic example of being able to use your brain to listen to your body and to take that which you gather from your body and make an assessment. Initially, a lot of people poo poo this because where's the evidence to support this? And my response is, I'm not quite sure. I don't totally know, I don't keep up on all of the evidence and the science that is out there.

But one thing I know is true, is that the evidence of someone getting better is the evidence that I need. The evidence I've seen what works for someone and what doesn't work for somebody is the evidence that I need. And that ultimately, what I'm helping someone do is to utilize that smart brain of theirs to cognitively process that which they're experiencing in their body.

Being able to blend the power of their mind with the profundity of their body, the profundity of feeling. So they can tap into what I think is some of the most important and powerful information that we have in ourselves, our inner authority, our inner wisdom. And tap into that perceptive state of ourselves to know exactly what it is that we need. And whether that exactly is a trip to the chiropractor, or to our physician, to our massage therapist, or to get out for a run.

We can tune into that sense of knowing based off of the evidence that our body provides us. Not everything is measurable in a way that a hospital monitoring system can measure. Not all of what we can perceive can show up on a scan or even on our device. That's why what is so important to be able to tune into is the vibe, the ebb and the flow, the tension, the grip, the freedom, the sense of being grounded, and noticing when those each exist.

Yes, I know, it might seem like a lot of things to do, of paying attention, it might even seem narcissistic initially. But what I can say is true is the hard work of doing it over a couple of weeks, opens up the door to a new experience. And out of that new experience shows you a very new belief of what's possible.

That you actually have got this. That the objective reality, perhaps the facts that show up on your watch and the opinions or the subjective reality of what is going on in your head, being able to discern between each. Being able to experience what you notice in your body and how all of that correlates.

When you're able to untangle that and see clearly what comes off the device, what your opinion is about the matter, what it is that you're feeling. And start to see how these things are all related and cognitively process that data, you will be amazed at the changes in how you feel.

You will be amazed at the way your pain drops and not just your pain, although this particular episode is about pain. But I have seen the same thing happen for people who experienced clinical depression, who experience anxiety, people who have autoimmune conditions and have flares on a regular basis.

My husband, for one, has done it with his psoriasis. We did a whole episode on psoriasis and how if you were to see him today, you would have no idea he has psoriasis, because he was able to use his awesomely smart brain to cognitively process all the variety of sensations. And what he noticed when he ate certain things, when stress went up, and how his body responded, how his skin responded to that experience.

And out of being able to do that he was able to make better choices for himself to the point now you would never know he has psoriasis. His skin does not express it anymore because he is so tuned in to those whispers and to those yellow lights. It's a powerful, powerful process that if you're willing to go there, if you're willing to experience that which you're feeling and unlock a power inside of you, that inner wisdom, that inner authority, so much will become available to you.

And not only that, when you go and visit a medical professional, when you go to visit any alternative professional, anybody for that matter and you're talking about what's going on in your body. If you can outline it in a way that is logical and makes sense to them, then they can use their expertise to help you even more. So now you're not simply a condition, you truly are a human having an experience and they can support you to help you get better faster.

That's what I do with my clients. I ask them to pay attention. I teach them some more stuff. They go off and do the stuff. They experience their body as a result of doing that stuff. And then they come back and say, “This was my experience. Here's what's changed, here's what's not changed. Here's what worked, here is what didn't work. Here is what I started to do more of.” Because of what they are cognitively processing and making sense of.

I'm teaching them the skill of listening. I'm teaching them the skill of self-care. I'm teaching them to recognize that their body has had their back all of this time. And that while yes, it may have felt like it has betrayed some promise of health, it was trying to get the attention, your attention, your brain's attention all along.

And so now, now it's there, the signs and signals are there, you, your body, and your brain can come together and process this material. Power then is yours. Profundity is yours, because you can clearly connect, make some decisions and support your way forward.

Now, if you want my help with this, if this is compelling, if this is interesting to you that you can utilize this brain of yours that is super smart, a body that is definitely displaying some characteristics and some sensations that might be something like tension or pain or grip and you really want to resolve them. And you're someone who tends to be intuitive and perceptive and you want to bring it all together, then I am likely your girl. And I would be so honored to be able to work with you in my upcoming program, If I Am So Smart, Why Am I Still in Pain.

I would love for you to email me at [email protected] and I or my team will talk to you about how the program works. We run it this November. It would be such a pleasure for me to help you bring your brain and your body together so you can decode your symptoms and there is just way less stress with what's going on. So come and join me. I look forward to working with you.

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