Welcome to Episode #75 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Talk to Your Body.”
Question—how well do you know your body?
If you’re like me, you probably think some parts are strong and healthy… but you label other parts as weak, stiff, or just plain “bad”.
You gotta stop that!
Whether it’s due to old age or old injuries, if you accept a limitation, you are giving away some of your power. Be careful with that! Because every time you reduce your capabilities, you are willingly taking one step closer to death.
In this episode, I’ll share my history with a couple of injuries that turned out to be both physical and psychological. I’ll also let you know how I restored my confidence and capability to get back on track towards success.
Let me know if you’ve fallen into the same traps that I have. Then let me know how you found your way back to regaining your power!
To LISTEN to “Talk to Your Body,” you can either:
- Play the show below… or download to your device.
- Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Podcasts or Spotify.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
Subscribe to Podcast: RSS
To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below.
If you’d like to support this show, share the link with a friend or leave a quick review over on iTunes. Thank you!
Oh—and don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you can get new shows sent to your inbox the minute they’re released.
Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life!
Talk to Your Body
Here’s the video! If it won’t play, try this direct link.
TRANSCRIPT
Howdy and welcome to episode #75 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. I’m Ando and listen to me…
If you clicked on this podcast today, you’ve made me very, very happy. You probably noticed, if you look at the number of views on YouTube, and you can just guess about podcasts in general, that these shows get far fewer listens and watches than some of those fancy, flashy videos that I make. But I still love doing the podcast.
The podcast, I think, gives me a chance to go deep into some big ideas that are crucial. Techniques are nice, quick little drills and exercises, that’s fine, but it’s the big guiding principles, the philosophy behind all this stuff that I think will guide you to success.
So, if you’re here today, you clicked on this, and you’re going to hang in here with me, I think that just proves that you’re not only dedicated, but you’re wicked smart.
Okay, so what are you so smart about today? What are we going to talk about? I want to talk about talking to your body.
Now, I’ll tell you right up front, you know me, I’m not a medical doctor, I’m not a physical therapist, so when I share these kinds of tips today, I’m not coming at you as a scientist, or a priest, or a psychic. I’m only coming to you as a human being who’s had some experiences and I’m sharing them with you. So take them for what they’re worth.
Specifically today, I want to talk about some of the injuries I’ve had in the past and how they affected me, not just physically, but psychologically, and how I’ve come to make peace with them so that I don’t find myself getting boxed into a corner and limited. I think there’s a danger in that for all of us.
I think pain can really corner us and take away our power and our ability to make ourselves happy.
Let’s take a big breath and get to it. Question, how well do you know your body? Now, you probably think you know it pretty well, right?
You’re a martial artist, you work out a lot, you push it to the limits, so I’m sure you have a pretty good knowledge base of what you can do and what you can’t do. But at the same time, do you find yourself saying things like, Oh, my back is tight?
Let’s say that’s what you believe. Let’s say you think, Yeah, my whole family’s not very flexible. Or, Yeah, my back’s been tight for a long time now. Yeah, I gotta go get a chiropractor. I gotta go get a massage. I need to warm up for 20 minutes. I just have this tight back.
Well, do you see how that’s a limitation? Right off the bat, before you even started working out and as you walk around in your daily life, if you have this belief in your head that you have a tight back, you’re giving away some of your power.
Or maybe it’s an old injury. Oh, I hurt my shoulder, like I have in the past. And now every time you lift weights or hit a bag or you spar, you always have some of your thoughts linked into that shoulder, like, Oh, be careful, that’s my bad shoulder.
You’ve labeled that part of your body as “bad”. Obviously, that’s also giving away some of your power.
Now, to me, it’s funny because when I was younger, I had two injuries, if you like, before the age of six or seven. I fell out of bed, and I broke my collarbone. Don’t remember it. And I also had my elbow dislocated. Thanks, Aunt Judy.
Now, both of those injuries, actually, I’ve totally forgotten about. I knew I was going to talk about the body today, so I kind of reviewed my own history with myself and said, Oh yeah, that happened. But I don’t even think about those injuries, mostly because I think I was so young that it didn’t occur to me that you would have to hang on to pain like that for the rest of your life. I really didn’t reflect on anything at that age.
It’s also possible, I believed in the authority figures around me. The doctors were taking care of me. I had a mom and a dad. Everything was being paid for. I had slings. I had time. A couple of milkshakes. I seemed to heal up just fine.
So I moved on, I would say, at full power. Never once did I say, Oh, careful of my collarbone or Watch out for that elbow. Never occurred to me.
But all that changes as you get older, I think, if you’re anything like me. As I got older, injuries seemed to linger longer. I didn’t just bounce right back. And let’s flash forward here a little bit…
It’s amazing how you can meet someone who’s 90 years old, who’s spry and lively and they still take yoga. Maybe they’re mountain biking or something. You just think, Wow, look at you go. You just must have good genetics or something like that. Or what, Do you take cod liver oil still, old school?
And it’s easy to just sort of brush that off like, Ah, it’s just a fluke. Because typically, you don’t see that. What you normally see are old people who have given up.
Now hang on, I know degeneration is natural. And of course, we’re all going to lose some powers as we age. But I hope you know what I’m talking about here. I mean the people who are hunched over. You can’t touch them. They need help putting on their pants and getting up. They’re using a cane or a walker, or now they’re in a wheelchair. They really have just given up all of their powers.
And when you back up through their life history, you wonder, Well, where did that start? At what point did you finally just say, I can’t see anymore. I’m done. When did you say, I can’t sit up straight anymore? At what point did you say, that’s it, my knees are done. I’m never going to walk again.
I believe that as we get older, if you allow each of these injuries and effects of aging to linger in your head, and you just accept them, they each become a little blind spot. You give away that little bit of power.
When you’re younger, it may not seem like a big deal. But as you get older, it’s just adding one more step closer to death.
So now, we’ll back up into more of my personal history. I had a couple injuries when I was young. Never thought about them again. When I got into my early 20s, you’ll recall in episode 15, it was called Injuries Are Good For You. And I told you this story about how I separated my shoulder trying to show off for the girl, woman, who would later become my wife. So I did a big forward roll on a racquetball court. I popped my shoulder.
Now at the time, that injury was serious enough that I had to put it into a sling, and it caused me great pain. But it wasn’t so serious that I needed a surgery, just so you know what level of injury we’re talking about.
Now this is very different from when I was younger. I didn’t have health insurance. I only went to the ER. I never saw another doctor or someone to tell me how long these things take to heal or a picture of what this looks like inside. I had very little information. They put some ice and the sling on it. They said, bye-bye, and that was it.
So because of that, I think that’s part of it, the idea that I’d been hurt, the idea that I was weak, just lingered. Now it’s true that I was kind of compulsive and I kept trying to train with that injury. So I would take it out of the sling and I would do some French presses or triceps pushdowns just to keep my arm muscles.
So I wasn’t maybe the perfect patient, but I also wasn’t stupid. I knew that it was trying to heal. But that went on for over a year where I was still nursing this thing, which is crazy. If you know anything about shoulder separations, no, that’s not normal. But I let it linger with me for like a year and I finally kind of, most of the pain had gone away, but it transitioned into becoming my “bad shoulder”.
So now I move ahead a couple of years. I was 25 and I found Kung Fu. And in those early months, every time I’d get my arm jacked up into an armbar or a kind of a Kimura-looking type of lockup, I’d always just say, Hey, watch out, that’s my bad shoulder.
Now keep in mind, I’m still a young man who had no surgery and has been limping around with this mental block for years. And at the Kung Fu club, there was a guy who. I said, I got a bad shoulder. He said, Oh yeah, what happened? And I said, I separated it.
Right away, he came back with, Oh, I separated my shoulder when I played football. I said, Oh, really? And he goes, Yeah, it was a really bad one too. They had to do a surgery on it. But you know, five, six weeks, I was back, I was playing again.
That was like throwing a bucket of cold water in my face. I’m like, What? What are you talking about? I’ve been suffering with this thing for years. And he’s like, No, what are you talking about? It’s not that big a deal. It heals and you get back in the game.
And it made me angry, is what it did. I realized I needed to talk to my body. We needed to sit down and have a little talk. Because that shoulder had been holding me back big time.
So I did. We didn’t share a cup of tea, but in my own way, at the time, I was like, What’s up with you? You should be healed by now. That’s it. No more. You are not hurt anymore. You’re no longer my bad shoulder. I’m done with it.
And very quickly thereafter, as these stories go, my arm felt much, much better. I didn’t think about it that way anymore. And of course, there had been some atrophy and loss of flexibility because I’d been babying it for so long. So in that way, you kind of start buying into the bad shoulder routine, right?
If early on you say, Oh, that’s my bad shoulder, and then you allow it to be the bad shoulder, then it becomes the bad shoulder. You made that happen. But once I broke through that– Okay, shake it off. That’s not your bad shoulder. There’s nothing wrong with your shoulder. Other people are doing stuff with their shoulders that were hurt much worse than yours— then I was on the road to recovery for real.
In very short order, I was back in business. I was strengthening it again. I had fuller flexibility. I could punch. No problem.
All right, so now let’s zip forward a few years. You think I’m done with that issue? Ha, hardly. I think I’ve spoken also in different podcasts about when I tore my labrum in my other shoulder, throwing hook punches. At that time, I ended up falling into the exact same trap. Same deal.
I don’t recall having multiple doctor visits when that injury occurred. I had the initial visit of like, Oh my God, what’s wrong with my shoulder? They did the MRI, whatever they did. Same situation. Gee, it’s torn enough that we should take it seriously. You got to let that heal. But it doesn’t require a surgery, which is supposedly a good thing.
Except in my head, nothing had been fixed. That’s all I could envision. It was still busted. So I fell into that same pattern again. This became my “bad shoulder”.
That went on for over a year. As I recall, maybe around a year and a half mark, someone I worked with, thank you Sensei Dorene, suggested that I check out the physical therapy place right next door and have them take a look at it, because I had been complaining about it. I was referring to it as my bad shoulder. It was holding me back again. It was another blind spot.
I go to the physical therapist and she looks at it. I explain what happened. She says, Okay, well, you know what’s going on here. She goes, This is really psychological. And of course, you don’t want to hear that, right? What are you talking about? No, no. There’s something actually torn in there. I can feel it. It’s wrong. See? And she’s like, No. What’s happening here is that you just don’t trust your shoulder anymore.
That was the first time I had really been hit with that concept. That there was the psychological injury in addition to the physical injury. The physical part had long since healed or at least as well as ever it was going to. But she suggested that psychologically I didn’t trust that shoulder.
In effect, I had stopped talking to it. I had just said, No. Whatever you need, I’m not interested. You’re hurting me. You’re holding me back. I hate you. You’re my bad shoulder. So we’re done. And I gave away that power. I was willing to give it up.
So she just blew my mind with this concept that I just needed to build trust again. My brain literally needed to see me using this shoulder again, so that my brain would say, that’s a good shoulder. There’s nothing wrong with it. So here’s what she did. And I swear, this is exactly how it went down. She gave me one of those rubber tubes– not even a very thick one, probably the first level of strength– and she said–
Okay, go lie down over there and first, without the tube, just make snow angels on the ground. Just lie down and make snow angels. Do that a hundred times. Then take that tube and just stretch it across your chest and open it and stretch it. Do that a hundred times. And then finish with putting one up over your head and then one down to your belt and just alternating raising up and down. All laying on the floor with my spine on one of those foam rollers. So I’m suspended, my scapular can kind of drop a little bit.
So, I’m making these kind of full range motions with my arms. For the snow angels, a hundred of those, I was wincing, I was nervous. I hadn’t done this, ever. So, you know, my face looked like, Oh, this is a struggle, right? I’m talking to myself like, Oh, this is not a good idea. This is making it worse. She’s crazy. What the heck am I doing down here?
But in set number two, you ready? I start with this tube thing going across, opening and crisscrossing, opening and crisscrossing. It’s a little resistance. And somewhere, I swear to you, around 68, rep number 68– as I’m sitting there going, Oh, gosh, this is awful. Poor me. My shoulder is so bad— suddenly, the pain that I usually held in my shoulder just went, it was as if it just melted. It had been frozen and it just gave way. It just let go.
I was stunned because I hadn’t felt that relief in, like I said, probably a year and a half. So I’m lying there and I kept the reps going. You know, I’m thinking that it’s a mind game or I’m on some kind of endorphin high. I don’t know what’s going on. I finish up the third set over the head and I walk out of there feeling like an idiot.
I’m angry because I cannot believe that I was tricked once again into believing that I had something bad in my body, and that it was my fault that it had stayed that way, and that I had given up power all this time by just simply not talking to my arm and saying, Hey, what can you still do? Really, what can we do?
So this, I think, is not unique to me. I’m pretty sure this happens to lots of people because all the time I run into people who tell me about their injuries and their setbacks and their genetic flaws. And when I watch them, I just have that little bit of doubt. I’m like, You don’t look like you’re hurt. You seem to be okay. Or Are you sure?
I’m not talking about clinical injuries where you can see someone’s bone has been snapped in half and they need implants and steel beams put in. Of course, there are legitimate injuries that you need to take care of and respect if they’ve really given you some kind of setback. If you’re missing an eyeball, okay, you’re missing an eyeball. But I’m pretty sure that most of us give away too much. We just give away too much and too easily.
I don’t know what that is. I think there’s something dark in human nature where you almost want an excuse to not have to work as hard. Is that just me? I’m being very honest about that. It’s nice when you can just say, Oh, thank God, I don’t have to practice full splits anymore because you know what? I pulled my hamstring. That was eight years ago. And ever since then, I’m just not that flexible. Therefore, I don’t have to practice high kicks anymore. My stances don’t have to be as deep. I can really take a smoother, safer, lazier path to my next accomplishment.
Come on now. Does that sound familiar at all? I really think we have to fight against that, whatever that is, that characteristic in human nature to almost desire being powerless. We’ve got to train ourselves to challenge our bodies at all times to be giving us back everything we can, all of it.
It’s bad enough that the world out there might be trying to take things from you. Take your money, take your confidence, take your spot in line, take your job, take your life. That’s bad enough. For you to be taking things away from yourself, to be giving them away, when you don’t have to, I almost want to classify that as sinful behavior.
I’m not getting religious either. I’m not a priest. But you know what I mean? It’s like that’s the greatest attack you can face– you attacking you. You sinning against you. You hurting you.
Now, again, if I’m not careful, I still fall into this pattern. I was at a private lesson the other day with Martin Wheeler doing some Systema and he was doing the normal torture session that I’m used to now. And I said, Oh, hang on. That’s my bad toe. Be careful there when you twist that. And he said, You have a bad toe? And I said, Yeah, yeah. It’s been like, I don’t know, 20 years.
Oh, no. There it was again. And he just said, You might want to take another look at that. He knew. And guess what? I started doing some like frog squats. I started sitting in seiza and rolling my feet, which I had avoided for decades– I had hurt it way back. I kicked and jammed it, something like that, but I’ve been holding on to it.
It’s a small injury, I thought. Eh, not that big a deal. That’s just a bad toe. And here I am. That was a couple months ago. Did I say it the other day? I’m getting old. It was a couple months ago. I’ve been working it, just putting it into my workout. And if I’m sitting watching TV, give me five minutes. I’ll just sit in that frog position, kind of bending my toe, and my foot’s so much better now.
It’s not perfect. It still hurts. I’ve got decades of neglect there. But I really feel like it’s thawing. It’s breaking up. It’s somehow becoming stronger and more flexible again.
So, I’m beseeching you, because you’re probably a good person– if you’re listening to me right now, odds are you’re a really good person– and I do not want you to give away your power. Think about, as you get older, how many items are on that list for yourself. Write them down if you have to.
When you work out, what do you hear yourself saying?
How often do you say, Oh, yeah, my neck is stiff. Oh, that’s my bad shoulder. Oh, yeah, my knees are shot. How often do you say that? How many parts of your body have you stopped talking to? How many blind spots do you have where you don’t even look anymore?
Really take a look at that list and understand that if you’ve trained yourself to react to pain and react to limitations in that way– where you just give it up and say, Okay, that’s it. I have a bad knee. I have a bad shoulder— the very process of doing that, that habit is bringing you closer and closer to death. Not necessarily death in your coffin, but you’re the walking dead.
You’ve given up your power. You can’t defend yourself. You can’t fight for your happy life. You’ve just given up. Please don’t do that.
Whatever you have on that list of injuries, old or new or forthcoming, think of it as investments. Imagine you invested your money, all of your money, into 10 different businesses, let’s say. And not one of them has paid you back a dollar. You have a zero return on every one of those investments.
So at this point, you just think, well, I’m a terrible investor. These businesses are all terrible. I would never do this again. I’ve given away my money and I’ve lost it.
But now let’s switch it around. Let’s say you took another look at those companies, and one day you woke up and saw that one of them was giving you back a 2% return on your investment. Another one suddenly started giving you back 8% on your investment. This one surprisingly shot up to a 20% return. This one, 50% return.
If you go down that list and you add up all of these incremental increases for all of the things that were losing you money, I think you find suddenly you’re not just making money, you might even find yourself becoming rich.
Now, the metaphor here I think is pretty clear. You can apply this to all parts of your life. Those relationships that you thought were dead– I don’t talk to my dad anymore, that guy burned me once, this guy I don’t think likes me anymore, whatever– if it’s already dead and you’ve broken off all contact, but there’s some part of you that still sees something valuable in having that relationship, write the email, make the phone call, knock on the door, make the effort to talk to that person again.
If you’ve given up on a business, don’t just say, This business is terrible, the market’s awful, things have changed, I can’t make money here. That means you’re just giving up talking, it’s become a blind spot. You don’t even want to look at it, you don’t want to talk to it, so it’s only going to get worse. It’s just going to atrophy.
Whatever door you shut, now it’s just getting dustier and dustier and darker inside. Instead, knock on that door, open it up, walk in, challenge your belief about that business being dead. See if you can breathe even a little bit of life back into it. Who knows where it’s going to go?
And of course, right back to your body. Take that list of injuries, your old ones, and whatever’s going to happen to you next and let’s train ourselves– me, I’m talking to me here, you understand that. And perhaps you– train yourself that when you get that injury, when you get that diagnosis that scares the hell out of you, that your reaction is not to just say, Oh, well, that’s it. I’m out. I’m done. Can’t do it. Can’t do that anymore.
Instead, say, Okay, well, that’s where I am today. Let me challenge myself to see what I can get out of you tomorrow. Let me see if I can still stretch a little bit farther. Let me see if I can get a little bit stronger, move a little bit faster. Let me see if I can get a little bigger return on my investment.
Again, nobody wins the game of life. We’re all gonna die. Nobody gets out alive. But the condition you get to your coffin in is largely up to you.
So please accept this challenge. Do not accept your limitations the way they seem to be today. Whatever beliefs have brought you to your feeling of power and capability right now may largely be in your head…
You think you’re not funny. You think you’re not smart. You think you can’t start a business. You think you can’t start a new relationship. You can’t move to a new town. You think you can’t kick high anymore. You think you can’t get out from mount. You think you can’t defend someone who’s bigger and stronger than you.
Every one of those beliefs needs to be challenged. Every one of those beliefs needs to be brought out into the light. You need to talk to them, get in their face, and demand more from them. Demand your power back.
And it may be difficult at first. Like I said, there is real atrophy that has taken place during these years or months where you have allowed it to be less than. Where you have allowed it to be something that’s hanging you up. But it doesn’t have to be that way tomorrow. Nope. Just start the conversation. Get to know your body better than ever.
As you get older, you should know it better than ever, right? It’s like an old car. You know, when you get into your old car, if you’ve had one, you know exactly the little futzing you have to do with the radio knobs and what you have to do to get that window down.
My old car, I mean, I know new cars are all so computerized. In the old days, I had to pop the hood and hold open the carburetor and a little paper clip, all kinds of tricks. And if someone drove your car, you’d have to sit them down and go, Okay, look, here’s how you work this car.
You should have the same knowledge about your body. Not just because it’s old and beat up like some jalopy. No, it’s a fine motor car. It’s being babied and nurtured and polished and waxed and tuned up. It’s a fine machine. That is your body.
It’s going to get older, that’s right. But if you go to a car show, you’ll see some cars that are in terrible condition, and some from the same era, they’re in amazing condition. And some, restored condition. So if you can’t get to the coffin line, the finish line, with all of your original parts and all of your original power, then at least get there as a restored version, as close as you can to the original model.
Replace the parts, replace the beliefs, get it all in line so that when you walk in, people go, Wow, look at you. Be the example to everybody else that says, Hey, you don’t have to take that pain into your heart and into your brain and then hold back everything that makes you special.
Alright, so that’s the point today. The more you talk to yourself, the more power you’re going to have to fight for a happy life.
Okay, that’s enough of me talking to your body. Now it’s time for you to go talk to your body. But before you do, would you be so kind as to leave a review for the show, a positive review perhaps, on your favorite player, and maybe share this episode with a friend? That’d be very nice of you.
Until next time, smiles up my friend. Let your smile be your shield and your sword. Keep fighting for a happy life.
