Part 1: Why Did I Wait So Long?

Last week we officially announced our 3-day retreat we will be hosting right here on the farm. We would love to have you join us. Email us with your contact information to register.

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You might be wondering: how do I know if this retreat is a good fit for me? What kind of things will I learn?

To answer these questions I will be sharing my own story of chronic pain and how I found a new perspective on my own body, my health, my family, my business and my relationships. 

Many of you know about my experience with back pain a few years ago, and yet only a few people know what really happened on the inside.  When I was in bed for 12 weeks with debilitating sciatic nerve pain I worked with my good friend and mentor Brian Trzaskos to help me journey through pain and distress to come out the other side seeing the world in a whole new way. I had long discussions with close friends who would come visit, asking me about what I was learning….

It's been three years since and I have now come to a place where I am able and want to share more about what happened with me on the inside.  One of the outcomes of this inward work is that Racey and I are so excited to be hosting a 3-day retreat right here at Reber Rock Farm. Throughout the retreat Brian and I will focus on reconstructing the experience of transformation that I went through in order to support other people’s healing journeys from stress and pain. 

So what exactly did I experience and how did I heal my acute AND chronic back pain? 

Over the next few weeks in a series of newsletters based on discussions between Brian and myself, I will answer this question. 

I was surprised as I sat down to write how nervous I feel to put my story on paper. I never feel reservations when sharing my experience. Perhaps the permanence of the written word holds more weight in my consciousness. I am grateful to actually have recordings of these conversations, I can hear the emotion in my own voice as I reflect on this period of time in my life, my marriage and my business. 

So here goes, here is part 1 of my conversation.: 

Why Did I Wait So Long?

Listen to our conversation here:

Brian: I'm really excited to chat with you today. It's been three years since you were laid up in bed and came to see me in a wheelchair in my office.

Nathan: Do you remember that walker I had?

Brian: Yeah, I remember the walker and having to kind of peel you out of your mom's car to get you into the office. I'm grateful to be here with you now and really excited about what's going on for you.

Nathan: Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to this conversation. Personally, I know that there's always growth in exploring what I've learned, and I'm excited to share this conversation with more people. That's why we're here right now. That's what I'm working on: sharing what I've learned and learning to step into my passion for helping others on a similar journey.

Brian: Yeah, you know what I think is really interesting, Nathan, is that I know you've sent newsletters out to your whole community about the journey you've been through. A lot of people asked you: how did you do that? How did you heal your back pain? How did you change your orientation to life and the world? 

In my experience, when someone goes through this journey, there's a public-facing experience that the broader community sees and hears about. Then there are people who are closer, like friends coming into your bedroom when you are lying in bed, having deeper conversations. The broader public doesn't know about those. I'm excited about your willingness to bring everybody into your bedroom with you, metaphorically, and have those kinds of transformational conversations with more people now.

Nathan: Yeah, I think that's been my intention all along. I've been searching for the courage and the format to bring everyone in even closer.

Brian: I’d like to take a step back a bit since we've known each other for a long time, Nathan. How long has it been?

Nathan: I met you in the late fall of 2010. You and your son Wyatt came to CSA pickup at Essex farm where I was working.  I was skinning a beef animal behind the CSA distribution pavilion and you came over with Wyatt to check out the fascia muscles that were still twitching and moving on the carcass.  I thought, "Oh, this guy’s interesting. What do you do?" You said you do bodywork and healing. “Whoa, cool I can’t wait to get to know this guy…” That was the beginning.

Brian: So quite a while, right? Let’s do the math. It’s been about 14 years. The recent episode three years ago wasn’t your first dance with back pain, was it?

Nathan: No, in fact, when we chatted briefly 14 years ago, I already had chronic back pain. I was stiff in the morning, I had already experienced a few episodes of severe pain that kept me from certain things and this was 2010. It wasn’t always something I talked about or sought help for, but as people and opportunities came in, I’d think, "Oh, you’re a chiropractor? Can you help with this? Oh you do body work? I would like some help with this…" So chronic pain was already something that was part of my life when I met you 14 years ago.

Brian: How old were you at that time?

Nathan: I was born in '82, so I was 28 years old.

Brian: 28 years old with chronic back pain. 

Nathan: Yah! What’s up with that?

Brian: Right?! What’s up with that?

And by the way, I can laugh along with you, Nathan, because one of the reasons I’m so endeared to you is that I have a very similar story in terms of healing chronic back pain. I've been a PT for 30-plus years and worked with many people with chronic back pain, especially men. I totally get your experience: 28 years old with chronic back pain, what’s up with that?

28 years old, chronic back pain…So why did you wait to do something about it?

Nathan: If you had asked me then, in 2010, I would have said, "What can I do about it?" It felt like the pain was happening to me, like an invisible hand was reaching into my body and causing the problem, and what could I do about it? Even to the limited capacity that I thought I could do something, the something was going to a chiropractor or seeing Brian for some body work. 

I suppose, looking back at my perspective on my chronic pain in 2010 and what I thought I could do, I am reminded of learning to drive a car. Before you learn to drive you see all these signs on the road and they're just pretty signs and then you go to driver's ed, you have to take the test, you start driving and you realize seeing the stop sign is really important because you need to stop at that intersection. If you don’t learn to understand the signs you might get creamed by the truck that's coming through the intersection. 

Then in driver’s ed you start to realize there are these signs out there that are really important and they mean something. As we learn to understand the signs and how they help us they can make driving a lot less stressful and a lot easier to navigate. 

I can say now, looking back, that I had no awareness of what my chronic pain, or my road sign was trying to tell me. And so I had no idea that there were things that I could learn about myself from it or even that there were things that I could do about what I was experiencing.

Brian: It's so telling, Nathan. If I could wave a magic wand and change anything about human behavior, it would be for humans to stop waiting until we literally cannot get out of bed to address a problem our body has been signaling for years, some times decades.

Nathan: Generations, perhaps.

Brian: Generations even. We just get used to it. I’m sure, coming from the farming community, you’ve heard that there might even be a badge of honor around chronic back pain. It’s kind of like, "You have chronic back pain? You’ll get used to it."

Nathan: Absolutely and I think the sentiment applies to pain in general. As if “Yah…That’s the way it goes” and enduring it is the solution.

Brian: Enduring it is the solution, right! That’s baked into our human behavioral systems. Just keep enduring it, and over time the messages that our body is sending us, that message to change something, we are actually just enduring those messages. Slowly the intensity grows as if our body has to hit us with a bigger metaphorical 2x4 to get you to pay attention to what our bodies are trying to tell us.

Nathan: It’s like that moment when you are in a car, maybe right before you’re about to rear-end another car, and there are little signs like brake lights up ahead, or a tire squealing that you do not notice and eventually the passenger next to you throws out their hands in sudden realization and screams: "Watch out!"

Brian: Exactly, right there at the end. Part of the reason we wait so long is that we think that's just the way it's supposed to be. We think that maybe pain is inevitable. 

One of my favorite sayings is, "pain is a part of life, but suffering is optional." We’re going to experience unpleasant things in life, but suffering around those things is optional. Chronicity turns into suffering, and that’s a choice. It sounds like, for you, you had pain, didn’t know you could do anything about it, thought it was normal and acceptable, and maybe it was part of your cultural environment, so why do anything about it? As long as you could keep plugging along and it didn’t hamper you too much, you kept going.

Nathan: Yeah, there was definitely an element of, "If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it." I sought help when it impeded my ability to do something. When the suffering reached a certain threshold, I’d seek help, feel better, and then go back to the status quo. That was the pattern for the 20 years it was going on.

Brian: I remember you coming in before the big episode three years ago. And did I suggest to you that there might be a deeper cause you might want to investigate?

Nathan: Absolutely, I came and saw you two or three weeks before the big episode. I was in a lot of pain but functional. I emailed you and said I was struggling, and you told me to come in. My mom dropped me off, and we had a great session. I felt a lot better afterward, but I remember you probing at the underlying cause. You talked about the physiology of the muscles and how you did not see a major kinetic reason for this pain so what did I think could be underlying the symptoms; what could be the root cause? 

I remember feeling, more than actually consciously thinking, something like: well, I feel a little better after a session with you, why would I go there? Clearly I wasn’t ready to go there. Then, three weeks later, I was back in your office with a walker, ready to go there, ready to investigate the root cause because I couldn’t even walk! 

I’ve reflected on that a lot. My resistance to probing and understanding the root cause of my pain was the last warning sign and I blew right through the red light until that 2x4 came in laid me down