This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Symphonies. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
Early in this series I described a time in my life when I was breaking a lot of bones in bike accidents and ended up on a psychic losing streak.
The improbable road from that period to this one runs through some of the formative experiences of my adulthood, many of them wildly lucky: a (not drug-induced, totally unexpected) psychedelic reset at a symphony performance in Prague. A decision to ignore the advice of some ideologically medication-averse therapists and resume use of the antidepressant bupropion, which turned off a year-plus of binge eating like a light switch. The physical therapy after my accidents that gave me enough balance, flexibility, and core strength to make yoga accessible, and then the luminary teachers who brought me into it. A great boss at The New York Times who saw my potential and invested in me as a leader. A tender and spectacular love affair. And then the revolutions of the pandemic: the wrenching loss of that love; the hours of isolated, stress-release strength-building that finished rewriting my attitudes toward food; and the decision, ultimately, to leave behind my career in news and move toward a still cohering future as writer, teacher of movement, musician, and nurturer of other creative people.
Any few words of that paragraph could be a whole entry in this series, and in time perhaps they all will. But today I actually want to talk about a force that was on the scene alongside all of it, working against the progressive arc I have described. That force was pain.
I’ve had a lot of health issues: overexcretion of calcium resulting in weak bones, diagnosed only after much damage to my skeleton. Recurring intestinal parasites. A partial retinal detachment. A leaky tricuspid valve in my heart. A proclivity for near-constant sore throats that inauspiciously overlapped with the first year and a half of Covid. This list is abridged.
But the big one, made prominent by its contest with my discovery of athletics, was pain. For years after that 2013 accident, it would quickly get excruciating to walk even normal New York City distances. Cycling, mercifully, remained more doable, and the introduction of yoga—not just the stretching but the breath and mobility and meditation components of it—had a profound therapeutic effect. Hundreds of hours of physical therapy and acupuncture and massage, and consultation with physiatrists and rheumatologists and endocrinologists and spinal surgeons and ankle surgeons, and MRIs and CT scans and ultrasounds, and long-term anti-inflammatory drugs and gabapentin and physio taping and electric stimulation and ice and heat and nerve-block injections, did not work, though, and for a long time, my primary experience of my right leg was that it hurt.
What helped me (over several years, culminating in 2019) happened to be a bit woo-woo: the pseudoscience created by a doctor of rehab medicine named John Sarno, discussed in his book Healing Back Pain, which I am not the only otherwise rational and skeptical person to swear by. The book describes specific mechanisms behind chronic pain that mostly have not been well validated, but if you take it all more seriously than literally, what it says is that a lot of pain we understand to be structurally caused (through chronic inflammation or spinal degeneration or what have you) has, also or instead, psycho-emotional roots. The pain is real, but it has sources that can, without careful scrutiny, remain hidden from us. Once we’re aware of them, though, it is possible to free ourselves from some physical hardships—not just pain, in fact, but also other conditions that tend to challenge conventional treatment: gut issues, fatigue, allergies, chronic infection.
The thing I love most about that last sentence is the ourselves part—that when it comes to certain kinds of infirmity, we don’t need anybody or anything else to make us whole. Part of Sarno’s approach is to reduce fear and empower the patient: It’s OK to start running again even if someone has told you that you have tendinitis. Herniating a disc doesn’t mean you have to go the rest of your life without lifting a box. He was so committed to this approach that he asked patients to cease other therapies—and when I followed that advice, it was a decisive moment in the receding of my own pain.
This perspective may or may not work for you; I hope it does, but that’s not why I’m writing about it. Rather, this is another case in which reality is more susceptible to our interpretation—our narrative—than custom and culture encourage us to believe. I spent a long time convinced, by myself and New York City’s medical finest, that I was helpless in the face of my pain; and that turned out to be false. If these emails are about anything, they’re about this kind of revelation: In matters large and small, personal and global, our own power is good at evading our notice. But it’s there.
Coming Friday: Yoga.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.