Staying Curious
When an old injury says hello . . .
On Sept. 25th I did something in a training session that caused a flare up of an old knee thing. The flare up included eventual swelling behind the knee, some tightness around the knee, and a kind of dull pain that was randomly sharp with certain movements.
It’s interesting when things come back because you have a previous experience in your back pocket which automatically informs your current experience. This can go one of two ways. You remember how horrible your last experience was, how limiting, painful, and scary it was. Or, you can remember that you got over it, that there was clearly a period of time during which that pain had completely disappeared.
My very first few thoughts that day after my training session fell under the first category of using my previous experience to inform my current one. I was pissed, nervous, and had a lot of fear-based thoughts about my knees and the type of training I was doing. My last knee episode nagged for a few years and I was nervous my new situation was going to limit my current progress in training and running. But. I was able to backtrack because I was aware of these thought patterns (I write about this in detail here). One of the best tools I use in these moments is to separate my new experience from my previous one. I remind myself that: my current experience is totally new. It’s a new body (think cellular turnover, changes in training, changes in stress and diet, etc), a new time, new circumstances in my life. Nothing is predetermined here.
Using this tool invites me to be curious about my experience. Curiosity is being interested in something without having an attachment to a particular outcome. So, once I can stop assuming that my current pain experience will follow the trajectory of the previous one, I have an opportunity to ask questions about my current pain experience and really listen to my body for some objective data collection.
Once I have that thought process under control, I can bring back my previous pain experience into my mental story and reflect on it positively: my old pain experience came and went – my pain was once there and then it stopped. Well, if it went away once, it can go away again. Now I have a previous pain experience as evidence that I will be ok. Additionally, I personally have a lot of supporting beliefs around the capability of my body and its ability to heal that really help boost this way of thinking.
For a little more than two months, I’ve been slowly working back up to the movement I was doing at the onset of my pain. While I’m not quite there yet in terms of the depth of the movement, I’m currently 100% pain free with only about 5% discomfort doing certain things. I attribute most of that to staying curious.
Our mindset and our physiology are part of the same system – they work together. I write more about this in a previous post here.
The next time you experience a recurring injury, notice what thoughts come to mind. Are you using your past experience as evidence to be fearful, annoyed, angry? Or can you use it as evidence to be hopeful, patient, and appreciative of your body’s healing capacity?