that fear of losing control of the competitive body or the fear of losing control over your reputation as an achiever, or as an athlete that at some point we have to learn to let go of that. Because we are more than athletes, we are we are humans, and that means being multifaceted and having multiple identities, and it means closing the chapter, and starting a new one which is a different mixture of the different parts of your personality.

When you live with chronic pain, there is nothing about your life that is not affected when you live with chronic pain. And that is an aspect that the people around you can't quite understand so it's difficult to share the experience. You know, one of the most challenging things I think for most people is their sense of identity their sense of self often the things that they did that they identified with as being them, are things that they are no longer able to do and then you have this whole identity crisis moment of figuring out well who am I?

Physical pain is no different than feeling abandoned. It's no different than... our nervous system doesn't recognize emotional pain from physical pain, it's all the same. So whether you're someone who's dealing with anxiety, depression, PTSD, trauma, chronic pain, acute pain, if you can learn how to tune into your nervous system. Become aware, learn to titrate, give it what it can accept, and keep trying to give it just that little bit more and then always bring it back to the safety when it's at a point where it can't quite handle it anymore. And then go there again. It's amazing the changes that you can see.

if people listening get no other message I hope they get the message to meet yourself with kindness and compassion, because these are subconscious responses that are happening outside of your awareness. 

Now the good news is, and that we'll talk about that in a moment is, you can start to bring in your conscious awareness to start to pull yourself out of those states, but your system is doing that for you at an unconscious level to protect you. You're not making that choice, so free yourself from any judgment and guilt and meet it with kindness and compassion,

Perfectionism is an insidious kind of infection that destroys the ability to set healthy boundaries and over a lifetime cuts you off from any kind of friendly connection with yourself. That includes physical armoring, undermining our own emotional integrity and creating an internal toxic state of mind that leads to confusion and paralyzing self doubt.