the CRAIG VAN cast
Hey, I’m Craig. I've dedicated more than a decade to understanding the human spine. Now I’m sharing what I’ve learnt. Get started with my SPINE STRENGTH project - Part 1 is free. Subscribe and you’ll receive my work as I release it.
the CRAIG VAN cast
51 | A Method to Transform Pain into Potential - The Pain Teacher
In this episode, Craig delves into the principle that governs our entire life and how it relates to overcoming back pain. Through personal experiences and insights, he explains how pain and injury serve as teachers, redirecting us to change our actions and behaviors. By taking responsibility for our actions and understanding the chain of causality, we can access the power to change any situation in our lives. The host emphasizes the importance of self-reflection and self-improvement to overcome back pain and create positive changes in our overall experience of life. If you're interested in mastering spinal cord health and exploring the journey of healing back pain, check out the Kinetic Keystone course on craigvan.com. Share this podcast episode with someone who may benefit from the valuable insights shared.
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To properly overcome back pain, we need to come to grips with a principle which governs our entire life. By working with this principle, I have personally accessed the power to change any situation in my life. I'm gonna explain this principle to you now through the lens of back pain, because back pain has been one of the most beautiful teachers of this principle to me and to my clients and patients. Back pain both demands that we come to grips with this principle, but also serves as an impeccable teacher of this principle. Let's get started. Back pain is a broad term I've used because that's what we're familiar with, but it covers a whole range of deteriorations of pains and injuries that we experience along our spine. But all of these present first initially as a discomfort, as pain. Pain is our first teacher here to show us imbalance or excess. She's showing up because she's here to redirect us, to steer us Clearly away from something. This is the purpose of pain To tell us not to go there any further any longer. This is what pain is here to show us that something we have been doing has led us to this point and if we don't assess, analyze and redirect, make some change, then we will continue to move in this direction. For us to change the pain, for us to remove the pain, we need to change our actions. This is what pain is here to teach us. Hold back, recover a bit more, figure out where there is an inefficiency, where is the opportunity for improvement. This is all she asks and this is the lesson for us in every single pain that presents itself. And if we do not listen and our pain must persist until eventually pain becomes injury, some minor deterioration becomes a full breakdown in the structures. Injury is a much stricter teacher because we haven't listened and the stakes now become higher. And injury is here to remove our freedom because we haven't intelligently listened, we haven't paid attention, we haven't improved our actions, we haven't changed for the better. And this is where injury comes to force us into lesson. It may seem unavoidable that we learn it at this point, but I can assure you many people almost everyone that I've seen still doesn't learn the lesson.
Speaker 1:Most people who have injury believe that by some stroke of misfortune they have now been forced to experience some random punishment or bad luck, without recognizing that this experience can only have arrived through a long chain of causality. But the conditions that exist now are the result of conditions that have led up to this point. For us to experience pain, we must have done the things which lead us down the path to pain. For us to experience injury, we must have behaved in a way that leads us down the path towards injury. None of these appear randomly or from nowhere, but most people I've encountered experience these as glitches, random misfortunes that they just need to persevere and persist through until they're gone, and then they can get back to their lives. Do you see yourself in this? I see my previous self in this, and again I have to thank Professor Stuart McGill for doing the research, for providing the evidence.
Speaker 1:This phenomenon actually occurs and he has shown that most of our spinal injuries are the last straw which has broken the camel's back, that, even though many people ignorantly think that when they have a back injury, that there's some incidents their sneeze or when they picked up that one box or when they slipped on that one stair or whatever happened at the moment where most of their pain was triggered Stuart McGill has shown that this is not the cause of the back pain. This is but the last cause of the back pain at the end of a long chain of deterioration, degeneration and that the structures of our spine are actually so inherently strong, for good reason, that it takes a hell of a lot to take these structures from healthy to dysfunctional, to injured, and that most of us wouldn't go from healthy to injured unless we in one fell sweep, unless we were in something as severe as a motor vehicle accident, or if we fell a few stories, a few, something significant For the rest of us. When we lift something heavy, when we sneeze, when we bend over and pick something up in the wrong position, the only way our spine has become susceptible to injuries in those minor circumstances is because, under the hood, because of inefficient behavior, inefficient recovery, inefficient movements, excessive stress, not enough healing, too much harm Under the hood. All of these things have been happening for a long time, and he likens it to the process of breaking a paperclip. How do you break a paperclip? Well, you don't just try and snap it in one go. You bend it back and forth enough times until it essentially snaps on its own. This is what has happened to most of us. So our own actions, our own movements, our own behaviors lead us along the path to pain and then injury.
Speaker 1:And if we are able to look at pain and look at injury for what they are events, consequences which have occurred, lack all situations and consequences at the end of a long chain of causes for which we have been responsible. If we're able to look at it through those eyes, then all of a sudden, our ability, the way we can engage with this experience changes completely. And this is where the two major lessons within this teaching lie. First is understanding, before I move on to the two lessons, before we can comprehend and appreciate the two lessons. This rests on the foundation that we understand the chain of causality, that we acknowledge that any consequence we are experiencing can only have arisen because the necessary causes came before. This is the root of the teaching of karma, or cause and effect, that nothing in our existence can appear randomly or from nowhere. The conditions and the causes have to be present before the consequences can, and we really don't like to acknowledge this. In my experience, and once we do the two profound lessons, well, let's call it one profound lesson and one massive gift that we can access once we start to look at life through the lens of this causality.
Speaker 1:Firstly, we are responsible. This is the first lesson and you may have picked up on this already from what I've been saying that if I look at the consequence or the situation that I'm experiencing now and I acknowledge that my actions either led me to this point or failed To help me avoid this point, to go somewhere else, fail to get me somewhere else Then it's completely my actions which are responsible for where I am at now, for what I am experiencing. I am all responsible for where I am at. The gift that we get from this, the means to access all of the power to change any and every situation, is that because I am all responsible. Everything I need to change anything about my situation depends on me changing my actions, my behavior, all of the causes that I am sitting in emotion in each moment. I Am all responsible, I Am all powerful.
Speaker 1:How back pain is the most beautiful teacher of this principle is because the only way to overcome nasty back pain on A day-to-day basis, when someone is navigating their way out of it, is to brutally and honestly Reflect on what they have been doing the day before and with the week before that has led to them experiencing this pain. And it's what, for example, one of the common, one of the tools we use is when waking up in the morning to Notice what kind of pain and what degree of pain we are experiencing in our lower back and To reflect if there has been any change in that pain compared to the previous day. To reflect, what did we do yesterday? What did we do the day before? What was changed? Did we do something different? Did we do more of something, less of something? And how does that relate to what I am experiencing now? And Through working with this self-reflective, taking responsibility for weeks and months, we start to get a very tangible understanding that our actions are producing these consequences and Reality, physics, cause and effect cannot lie.
Speaker 1:We will not be able to move out of the back pain experience without understanding our actions or perpetuating it, and Without figuring out how to change our actions to move away from it it's impossible and then to extend this understanding beyond and into our broader experience of life. The implications are so completely profound I have Managed to shift my thinking completely in all situations, as far as I can tell. Now, more and more over time, it feels like almost every situation. I am now the creator of my experience, not the victim. I am the cause of all consequences, and I remember Having the first penny drop with this and I thought, if I believe that even 10% of Of the power needed to change my situation, if I believe even 10% of it is Existing, that person over there or in some situation changing or anything beyond my control, then by definition I have just stated that I do not have access to 10% of what is necessary to change the situation.
Speaker 1:I only Can access Some power to change the situation. Some of what is needed to change this is out of my control, ie this situation, my experience of the situation and my ability to change the situation is out of my control. That's not how I choose to experience life and even if it were Physically incorrect, it would still feel better to navigate life feeling like a creator rather than a victim. However, through personal experience and and confirmation in friends and teachers of mine who practice this perspective of absolute Responsibility to access absolute power, it's truth, it's fact. We can become absolutely powerful if we become absolutely responsible. If you're ready to start learning this lesson through the journey of Spinal core mastery, perhaps healing back pain or Enhancing the rest of your movement, and head over to craig van dot com, go check out my course kinetic keystone. Maybe you know someone else who would benefit from this information? Maybe one of these discussions or the course? Do your good deed for the day, share it with them and, and until next time, I wish you wisdom and wellness.