A Trip Into the Labyrinth

Welcome to 2022! Emily and I have enjoyed a little winter’s rest and we are ready to get back to our weekly newsletters with energy, inspiration, and purpose as our guides. “Illuminate” will be the new theme for our Blog Newsletter that comes out the first week of every month. The purpose of this newsletter is to “shed light” on topics that we find essential in achieving true health and wellness. For this month I would like to take you all on a trip into the labyrinth.

By definition a labyrinth is “a complicated irregular network of passages or paths in which it is difficult to find one's way; a maze.” (Oxford) I often use this analogy with my patients during their initial evaluation. They are already in their own labyrinth. At SHW we consider it our job to go in and find them, to recalibrate, and to then figure out how to get them back out. Some of it is simply reversing direction and some of it is finding new pathways.

If one can imagine standing at the threshold of this labyrinth, one can get an immediate sense that the journey is about choice.  Do you go left? Do you go right? Straight Ahead?  The one thing about this health journey is that it is often not a choice to go backwards.  Or at least we can’t usually go back and be the same physical person we were when we started. So with this concept of “choice” comes many moments of great importance.  In order to make these choices we need to gather accurate information and we need to know exactly where we are starting from and where we want to go to.  Unfortunately for many, this choice is tinged with pain and desperation, internal belief systems, and an overwhelming amount of inaccurate information in the world.  

The client that eventually finds us at Sakash Health and Wellness has very often traveled deep into their own labyrinth.  They have been living with chronic pain for years and “they have tried everything”.  For good reasons they have lost faith that they will heal and they also have trouble hearing and jumping on board for yet another “plan of care”.  To give you all a clearer picture I would like to present an example story of a client who we will call “Alice”. (Rabbit holes and labyrinths are similar are they not?)

Alice has heard from a friend that doing phyiscal therapy and Pilates at Sakash Health and Wellness has helped a lot and she is wondering if it can help her. She states that her pain first began off and on in her right hip almost three years ago. It was very mild at the onset and she can’t remember anything specific that started it. At the time she didn’t want to make a big deal out of it and thought it would go away so she didn’t do anything about it. This pattern continued for one year until one day the pain became constant and she was no longer having painfree moments. She’s not exactly sure when that happened but it did. Once this started she was having difficulty sleeping and it was waking her at night. She noticed that going up and down stairs was painful and harder and that her walking was different as well. Overall her activity level had gradually decreased because of it.

Alice decided to talk with her primary care doctor about it at her next wellness check which was 3 months later. Her doctor decided it was best to get an x-ray. The x-ray showed mild arthritis in the hip but nothing that warranted concern. The doctor referred her to a specialist and told her to initiate physical therapy. She was able to get into physical therapy two weeks later and was prescribed a plan of care lasting 2x/week for 8 weeks. Alice reports that the physical therapy did seem to help a little but at 8 weeks her insurance benefits were exhausted and she was given a home program to do on her own. Alice admits that she did not keep up with her home program once she was discharged.

Alice finally saw the specialist a little while after her physical therapy ended. She was told that the pain might be coming from her back and an MRI was ordered. The MRI showed spondylolisthesis and degenerative disc disease and the specialist recommended that she get a series of injections. Epidural steroid injections (ESIs) are a common treatment option for many forms of lower back pain and leg pain. This involves injecting a local anesthetic and a steroid medication directly into the epidural space that surrounds the spinal cord and nerve roots. Alice didn’t want to do this so she decided to seek alternative treatments and initiated care with a chiropractor and a massage therapist. She admits that when she saw them she seemed to feel better initially. However, as the weeks passed the improvement never seemed to hold and her pain would always return. Alice tried this for 6 months because it kind of helped and she could kind of get by doing what she needed to do. Eventually the pain began worsening and became intolerable. Alice decided to try the injections as she didn’t have any other options. The injections worked to reduce her pain for a short time period and then she was back to where she was, if not worse. The specialist next recommended an ablation. Radiofrequency ablation is a procedure that uses heat from high-energy electromagnetic waves to destroy nerves that carry pain impulses. This procedure is often the next treatment option for people who have already tried therapeutic injections and found that they only provided temporary relief. For Alice, the ablation did nothing.

Alice is in more pain now, she can’t stand up straight, she really can’t stand long, and she can’t tolerate walking which is what everyone tells her she should be doing. She can’t even tolerate the exercises she used to do in physical therapy. She has put on weight and she is concerned that this is the way that she will have to live long term.

This story is one example of many.  I am sure that there are quite a few of you out there wondering if you are in fact “Alice”.  And you might be.  To be honest, this is the same story we hear whether someone is talking about neck pain, knee pain, hip pain, foot pain, or shoulder pain. 

So why am I telling all of you this?  What is the point?  To try and stimulate a different pattern of choice so that more people can achieve better results. With that said, at what point do you think that Alice could have made a different choice?  

I believe it starts as we’re standing at the threshold and looking into the labyrinth, before we even take that first step. It is the moment in time when pain first creates the need to make a choice.  In Alice’s case, it was mild, infrequent, small - nothing compared to her day to day responsibilities. So she made the choice to wait, to go about her life and hope that it would go away. She took her first step into the labyrinth without really knowing where she was going.  The problem is that even while she heard the subtle signal of pain, she didn’t fully understand it.  What if, instead, Alice turned away from the labyrinth door and gave her pain her full attention?  What if she took the time to learn if there was more that she was not seeing, feeling, acknowledging so that she could understand why the pain had come into existence. What might happen differently from that point forward? 

Looking behind us helps to identify the true cause of any situation placed before us. Taking the time to learn about the “why” of things can give us the tools to more effectively influence and improve our present state. Listening to our bodies will always establish a better mind/body/spirit relationship than if we don’t. 

Regardless of where in the labyrinth patients are when they come to us, the first action is to hit the “pause” button.  We sit down and have a very long, much needed conversation with their pain. We look at it as a part of them that they need to get to know inside and out.  Most clients will start by telling me that they know all about their pain.  However, when I start to ask the questions they seem to have a very hard time finding the answers.  

I believe that it is essential to have help in this process.  Someone who can be an outside observer with the education to understand the body’s language and the history that has influenced it.  Someone to help you “make sense of it all”.  Someone who knows that no two people are the same and therefore should not be treated as such.  I would encourage you all to find the health care provider in your life that will take the time to do this.  A provider who will start and direct your care from the right foundation. It will make all the difference in your outcomes.  

Pain is part of our life journey.  Whether it be physical or emotional, it is a part of us that we must learn to accept and listen to.  We can not and should not ignore it. It is the language of the body and if we listen we will come to learn much more about ourselves.  If we come to know it, we will understand better the sources of it.  From there we can start to unravel it and redesign it into a better state of being. We will be continuing along this thread of illumination over the coming months.  Please feel free to reach out and share your own thoughts and feelings as you read this.  As you all know we love hearing from you and talking with you. Be well and enjoy the day!

Shellie