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I don’t talk publicly about my chronic pain very often — not because it’s a secret, but because it’s simply part of who I am now. It’s the background hum of my life. And it’s also become one of my greatest teachers. I’ve always had tight shoulders. As life got more stressful, my body followed suit. In 2018, I was in a major head-on car collision. A driver crossed the median, I swerved down a steep hill with the airbag in my face, and a clump of tall grass stopped me before I went over an embankment. I walked away bruised and shaken, convinced I was “fine.” I wasn’t. Between 2020–2023, a cascade of personal stress and trauma caught up with my nervous system. At one point I couldn’t eat, breathe through my mouth, hold my head up, or stand without help. I had white-lightning pain in my face, jaw, and neck — relentless and consuming. I eventually left a toxic work environment that was actively harming my nervous system, and when my body finally had space to rest… everything surfaced. I was diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia, arthritis in my neck, C-PTSD, and later Paget’s disease affecting my skull. I live in pain 100% of the time. Medication didn’t give me a life — it took one away. So I got curious. What actually is pain in the body? Why can pain be very real even when there’s no clear mechanical reason for it? I began mapping my sensations, emotions, stress patterns, and nervous system responses. Somatic work became the only thing that created meaningful, lasting change. What I discovered changed everything: each specific way my body hurts is directly tied to a specific emotional state — whether I’m consciously aware of that emotion or not. Often, the pain shows up long before my mind catches on. My body feels first. The sensation is the message. Certain stressors make my jaw feel like flashing red warning lights. That sensation reliably tells me something personal feels threatening, overwhelming, or misaligned. Other sensations point to different emotional states. Over time, my body and I learned how to speak the same language. I’m genuinely grateful for this clarity now. My pain has become an early warning system. When a person, conversation, or situation isn’t safe for me — my body tells me immediately and unmistakably. I can slow down, orient, choose differently, and often prevent real harm instead of pushing through and paying for it later. I still have pain — but now I can walk independently, my daily pain levels are significantly lower, and my relationship with my body has completely transformed. The pain isn’t just noise anymore. It has purpose, information, and intelligence. Pain isn’t fun. It hurts like hell. But now it’s no longer my enemy. It’s my barometer, my personal “lie detector”, and also my protector. I am still working to figure this all out and as the layers peel away, the pain lessens each new awareness. And this is why I do the work I do — helping people learn to listen to their bodies, decode their signals, and trust the wisdom already living inside them so they can move through their lives with more agency, clarity, and aliveness.
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