Story #10 - Wil Carlos, Recovery from Chronic Shoulder Pain
Hi, I’m Wil and I am excited to share with you all about my experience of shoulder pain, and the impact of reading Dr. Sarno’s book Healing Back Pain has had on my experience of my pain.
First a bit about me: I am a Success Coach living in Toronto. I have really found what I love to do as a Coach in that I support people to do what they’ve never done, or thought possible. My mission is to help people get clear on who they really are and what they really want to create in this life. I coach people past their barriers and help move them towards the success they’ve always wanted.
Most of these barriers (if not all) are actually in people’s minds. It’s not the circumstances of their lives, but what my clients make up about their circumstances that impedes their success. The same event could happen to 5 different people, and each would have their own interpretation of that event which would cause 5 different actions. Some would see loosing their business as terrible and go into depression, whereas others would see it as that opportunity to travel the world they’ve been waiting for.
The physical pain that I have had since I was a child was one of those big barriers to living a life I love all the time. The only thing was that I couldn’t see it for what it was, a mental barrier. The book “Healing Back Pain” by Dr. John Sarno really opened my eyes to that.
Specifically I have had shoulder pain all my life, as long as I can remember. It’s been a dull aching kind of pain, never sharp. It was the worst in my right shoulder underneath the flat bone on the shoulder blade. Right in that place you can’t really massage easily. It would also come on the outside muscle of my arm and on the front of my peck muscle when it got really bad. It would always come when I stood up for a long time, went for slow walks, or did a lot of downward dogs in yoga.
When I was about 15 or so the pain became really noticeable because I was in a lot of theatre productions where I had to stand up for long periods of time. My mom always said that I must have something physically wrong with me somewhere. We had lots of possible explanations; the imbalances in my muscles caused it, the slight deformity in my chest bones caused it, (I didn’t have a lot of space in the womb as a baby and this was my mom’s favourite explanation), I wore my back-pack on one side too much (which I only did because of the pain), I fell out of trees a lot when I was a kid that could have impacted my spine, various accidents I got in as a kid (I was a little hellion as my mom described me), etc.
I went to doctors: nothing. I only had physical examinations for the most part. They didn’t seem to think that my pain was that important so as a kid I didn’t even get referrals to specialists. So the pain just continued and I curtailed my activities accordingly. I wouldn’t go for long walks as often, I would sit down as much as possible when standing up for long periods of time, I would massage my shoulder constantly and get others to massage it. Sometimes when it got really bad I would throw my shoulder into the wall or door or corner of something to try to dull the pain. I knew mentally that this probably wouldn’t do anything, but I can remember the sheer desperation of trying to make the pain stop that I would literally hit my shoulder with anything and everything to try to make the pain disappear.
As I got older and started going to the gym and doing different activities as an actor, I just modified exercises to fit to my shoulder’s pain threshold. I didn’t do overhead lifts for example. I also started going to see osteopaths, massage therapists, Chinese meridian therapists, physiotherapists, energy healers of numerous backgrounds, acupuncturists, bio-feedback healers and past life healers. They were all eye opening for other areas of my life (like how to manage my energy and not be so sensitive to my life circumstances). They taught me all about eating properly and actually resting when I needed to (I have always been a little stubborn). I learned that the whole world is really a flow of energy and that I’m part of that energy. This was all combined with my intense curiosity about life and how I would use this information to make a difference for others. This all eventually led me to my work as a Success Coach.
What they told me about my shoulder ranged from troubles in past lives, to the idea that my shoulder was where I stored all my negative emotions, like an anger and failure receptacle. I was told to do specific meditations every day, visualize, get regular energy healing sessions, go for walks with specific intentions, take specific herbal remedies and supplements from the essence of different flowers or herbs that had been blessed by different saints or spiritual gurus. Again, all of this opened my eyes to a whole new world I had never known before and it all has been a part of informing me about who I really am and how I want to contribute to others, but in terms of my shoulder, none of it did anything.
I did have one 3-month period of being pain free after seeing a great specialty acupuncturist who was also an M.D. and an Osteopath. It was one of the best 3 months of my life because I had no pain at all. It was unbelievable. I felt like I was on cloud 9! I didn’t have to think about it anymore, modify anything or make all those changes I used to. But slowly the pain came back. I tried addressing the issue with postural analysis, corrective Yoga and other exercises. They all helped me get stronger, but I still had pain.
Slowly I was getting more and more hopeless with my shoulder pain. I assumed I would always have it and worse I would always have this huge emotional attachment to it. Like I was being punished, picked on mercilessly and without just cause. The pain often triggered minor depression, huge anger and outbursts of different kinds that I usually internalized, as well as melancholy and withdrawal from the world and others. I got a lot of sympathy from the people closest to me, and not much sympathy from people who had no experience of it.
Then I met Will Sacks and he told me a similar story about back pain he used to have. Then he told me that he read this book by Dr. John Sarno MD and 6 weeks later the pain was gone. Although I was very skeptical because of everything I had already tried and all the unfulfilled promises I’d had over the years, I ordered a book by Dr. Sarno online. I thought “well, I’ll just read it, can’t hurt, probably won’t work, but it worked for one other person and that is enough for me to try one more thing.” Thank God I did.
Reading this book was at first just like any other. I read it, understood it and started to apply it. I decided I would come at this book like I came at anything, open and hopeful. There is no point in reading something new if you just bring all your past with you to prove it all wrong before you really try it. I tried it out, applied it to myself, and didn’t even finish reading the whole book. I just did what the book said and had the realization of what my pain really was.
I realized that my pain was a physical response to emotions I was feeling. You see, in my family growing up, it wasn’t acceptable to not do things for emotional reasons, you had to have physical ones. Like it is for most of the world, I was allowed to stay home from school if I was sick, but not if I was scared. Some of us even had to be deathly ill before our parents would let us stay home. So I created a physical limitation that I could always use when it was really for emotional reasons that I wanted to back down, not more forward, or not do something.
Although I may not be pain free like I had always imagined I would be, I am pain free. It looks different in that I do still get pain sometimes. It’s just as random as it ever was: still following some patterns like slow walks or standing up for long periods of time. The difference is that I now know what that pain is. The pain is emotional baggage that I’ve carried around for so long that it’s become un-conscious and as a result un-expressed.
For me this emotional baggage is the feeling of not doing enough. That’s why the long walks used to kill me, or standing up for too long. I was usually waiting around if I was standing up and if I was on a long walk, even with friends or my fiancé, there was still life purpose stuff that I “should” have been doing.
I’ve decided to apply what I apply to my coaching and business life to this phantom pain. That is the simple lesson of “Don’t listen to your brain, it likes to lie to you.” I’m trying to exist in this awesome place of “no mind” where you just do what you said you would do, cause you said you would do it. Or you enjoy the present moment cause you choose to. Like my walks with my fiancé, I accept in the moment that I could go back to my office and work on my Coaching practice and making a difference in the world, or I could accept that right in this moment of being in love, being with my love and enjoying the moment, I am making a difference.
Now when the pain comes up, I remind myself what the pain really is and why it’s there. It’s all in my mind. For a good reason: it’s a reminder of the power my mind has over my body. It’s a reminder that I really do want to have a huge impact on the world. Most importantly it’s a reminder that I can live my life and create what I create, and I can choose to suffer about it, or not. It’s my choice. I’m not at the mercy of some cruel God who takes pleasure in giving me pain, I don’t have an incurable disease. What I have is a choice. To live with constant incurable pain and be a victim, or to live with a mind that likes to trick me and sometimes gets the better of me and reminds me the power of my past beliefs.
Knowing I have the choice has made all the difference in the world. I hope you make the choice to keep looking for the answer, to never give up. Nothing is written in stone except your epitaph. But you’re not dead yet!
Will Carlos
Toronto, Canada
(647) 214 1848
www.thegroupofonethousand.com
