“That’s the calmest collie I’ve ever seen!” commented the man in the shop. Finally, I thought, we’ve fooled someone. This dog was an out and out loon who spent her first two years attracting tutting and judgmental comments with her reactive behaviour. But then I thought about how much had shifted for Lani. Actually she’s mostly happy, […]
The sign off at the end of my backtoactive bites emails is “take it easy”. This isn’t me being quirky, it’s like a low level philosophy I try to imperfectly follow. It comes from having a history of more than a decade of awful back pain, and doing a lot of trying hard to sort it
I always think digging yourself out of pain hole needs a multi pronged approach. There’s rarely One Big Fix, unless you happen to have a good surgical option (and even then that’s not always the whole answer). I’ve been wittering on recently about check-ins… and they are one of my favourite ‘prongs’ because they
What have you already tried? Its a key question I always ask. By the time someone finds me, they’ve usually ticked off the list: Core exercises, physio recommended exercises, endless chiropractor sessions, yoga, Pilates, acupuncture. Of course – those are the big names in the pain world. Sometimes they help (though usually
A lot of what I teach in lessons is essentially: How to change muscle tension that’s hard to shift; reliably for yourself. How to get a joint or area moving that doesn’t like to move, that’s guarded from pain, past or present. What you are doing in these cases is teaching your nervous system. That
What helps most people out of long term pain are active strategies. The word active here means things people do for themselves, as opposed to treatments that are passive. A passive treatment is something that is done to you that can’t replicate for yourself, like massage or some chiropractic treatments. Exercise, or mindfulness would be
