You Don’t Have to Quit Your Passion to Heal From Chronic Pain

Photo by Etienne Boulanger on Unsplash

Symptom flare-ups often happen during periods of big expansion in your life: Stepping into a new leadership role, becoming a parent, gaining recognition for your art, starting a business, falling in love.⁠

But it’s not the expansion that causes the symptoms. It’s the tension that happens when fear rushes in to constrict the expansion. Because expanding into new and unknown levels of your life energy can be scary! Especially if you’ve been taught all your life to stay small or to fear “failure.”⁠

When flare-ups happen in the midst of a life-expanding experience, our impulse may be to step back: Maybe if we quit the job, decline the award, break up with our new love, delay the new business — maybe then the symptoms will subside.⁠

But when we do this — when we make our life smaller — our passionate life energy becomes more and more suppressed and constricted. The tension grows more intense. The symptoms are prolonged and they take over more and more of our life.⁠

Instead of trying to dampen our life energy, what if we instead turned toward the fear that is constricting it? What if we offered the fear these three ingredients of healing:⁠ Acknowledgment, empathy + love.⁠

With time, patience and consistency, those healing ingredients will eventually soften the fear. We may need extra time and rest to ease our fear, but that does not mean we’re shutting down our life and our passions. Because when fear begins to loosen its grip around our life energy, our energy begins to flow again, and life begins to feel a whole lot better.⁠

With love, empathy and encouragement — cheering for you,

💖 Anna