pain is fuel for the journey

Tonight I sit here in intense pain from the most intense workout with my trainer yesterday that I have ever done in all the years working out.

My trainer had me do an intense “aggression” workout! She had me walk the length of the gym with a heavy ball, and SLAM it into the ground as hard as I could using every muscle in my body.

Come to find out I had a lot more anger inside than I ever imagined I did, and I pretty much left blue marks along the gym on the black workout floor, and I looked back at it and saw the marks and thought “wow, thats a lot of aggression”. I told my therapist about it, and he had wished he could have been there to see that!

As I sit here in pain tonight from every muscle in my body killing me, I am reminded that this is why I am getting fit again; enduring the pain as fuel for this journey.

This new strict regimen I have been on for 14 days now has me eating 1200 calories a day, eating clean, eating every 3 hours, drinking isolate protein shakes, 2 gallons of water a day, veggies, salad and my body (although in pain) is loving every moment of it.

I have had compliments at how thin and fit I am looking, I feel great, and yet I sit here in complete pain tonight with tears just trying to move my arms – but what I have learned in the past is that “pain is fuel for the body” and it’s good pain!

I have learned much about pain in my life – bad pain! It took me a long time to realize the difference. I have endured pain I had to numb, pain that anyone should never feel in their life-time, and I am still learning from time to time the difference.

In the past I have tried to cover pain with pills not realizing that it was causing me more pain than I was in – that was bad pain. I put up walls against any pain that would come towards me; not realizing it would be there no matter how many walls I put up, I just needed to face it and work with it.

In my healing in therapy pain hurts – but pain is also healing. pain is healing when you let it out, and let it go, let it be heard, allow it to be comforted, allow it to be seen.

One of the things I struggled with the most in therapy is allowing someone to see my pain, be with me in my pain, allow emotions to be there, and although I have really opened up more, there are still times I need to remind myself that pain is healing.

I may go home after a session and sit in the pain, but it’s much like body building and lifting weights, you come home, your muscles are fatigued, you can’t move, your exhausted, but then you wake up feeling amazing because you feel something changing and it feels good.

That is how my healing is in therapy. I come home, I sit with the pain I endured in talking about something hard in session – it hurts – I honor it and what it means, I connect with my therapist later and connect around the pain, and it feels better to move through that.

Right now my physical training with my trainers, and my healing in therapy 4 days a week is so parallel to the same pain, except one is physical, and the other is emotional – but both equal healing and growing.

So I sit here and wince, but I’ll wake up tomorrow and realize it’s one step closer to my physical goals.. and tomorrow I will show up in therapy and do the same .. heal and feel the pain.