I am very hesitant to give advice to someone who hasn’t asked for it by him- or herself. In general, that is just not how you provide advice that creates an impact. The person needs to ask for it. When it comes to injuries this can be tragic. But I have noticed that people will not work on the injuries or ailments if there isn’t a strong wish to heal coming from themselves. Even people who ask me for advice with their injury or pain often end up not doing what I tell them, because I don’t have any magic spells to give them. We have been working with healing injuries through movement for many years. It is work that can be done in parallel to or after going to a therapist, or even sometimes make a therapist obsolete completely. You might want to listen to my conversation with Jonas Parandian, a Swedish naprapath, on that topic. It strikes me that people walk around with injuries for many years, even 10 years and more, and seem to have lost any interest in and belief that they will be able to move pain-free in their full range of motion ever again. If you want to heal you need to invest time, energy and intelligence to heal. And you need to wish and believe that you will be healed. If you have a strong incentive to heal, if you need your health for something, you will heal much quicker and better. People think that the body is just doing its thing and the mind can do something else, but this is not the reality of this existence. You as a whole have to decide to heal. Many people lose the patience and focus to heal their injuries and try to be healed with methods that do not work.
A common bias is to think you can just continue on like before and everything will be okay. That is not how it works. Imagine you injured yourself doing yoga and now you want to heal your injury with yoga. That might work, but it would be much smarter to introduce things that are missing in your yoga practice to help the healing process. Taking a one-sided approach and disregarding or not even being aware of other ways is a huge mistake. Look at how Steve Jobs died. Injuries are mysterious. I always say that most of the time I do not know exactly what the person should do. Actually, I never feel one hundred percent certain. But we provide material and principles that will provide the tools for self-exploration and responsible work on the injury. Be an explorer. Try things out, investigate, be aware, feel. Do not shy away from pain or discomfort. Get to know it well and understand what it tells you in that particular situation. Sometimes pain is bad, sometimes it is the path to health. Get to know yourself. Everyone and every injury is different.
Take notes:
Talk with Jonas Parandian about Health
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Joseph Bartz 2019