So I brought it to my physical therapist, as I normally do when new pain shows up. I was expecting some neck strengthening exercises and to be on my way. I did get the prescribed exercises, and after a few weeks of consistency the pain improved, but it kept flaring every time I pressed overhead.

I relayed this to my PT and got a conversation I wasn’t surprised to be having, even if it was a major wake-up call.

He asked about my training load, something no medical professional had ever asked me before. He wanted details: how much I was pressing, how often, how recently I’d increased volume or intensity. As soon as the words left my mouth, I already knew what he was going to say. I had done too much, too soon. He was quick to reassure me that this is common in people who have been strength training for a while. I wasn’t ego-lifting or skipping warmups, I had just added load without giving my joints, tendons, and nervous system enough time to catch up. More always feels like progress (it’s literally called progressive overload), but we talked about how progressive overload is so much more than just more weight or more reps.

The reason this pattern is so sneaky is because it doesn’t look like a mistake while you’re doing it.

New lifters get hurt because they don’t know what they’re doing. Experienced lifters get hurt because they know just enough to push harder. I had built a strong foundation, solid form, good core strength, body awareness, but the stabilizer muscles and nervous system adaptations weren’t ready for the load I was adding.

Tissue adaptation doesn’t care about your PR. Tendons adapt slowly, much more slowly than muscle. You can build strength faster than your connective tissue can keep up with, especially when you’re consistently adding load without adequate recovery. The shoulder is particularly vulnerable because overhead pressing demands a lot of coordination between the rotator cuff, the scapular stabilizers, and the surrounding soft tissue. Push that system past its current tolerance and it will eventually push back.

When you have a chronic health condition at any age, you learn a lot about what’s wrong with your body. Looking at x-rays, being told all the things that aren’t working right, that does something to a person. Children tend to blame themselves for things that go wrong. And while that experience also built real resilience, self-advocacy, and emotional intelligence in me, there was a cost.

The body stops being just the thing you live in and becomes something you manage, monitor, report on. It becomes an object of scrutiny — yours first, and then everyone else’s.

When you’ve spent years learning to be suspicious of what your body does, any new change doesn’t read as normal. It reads as one more thing to manage. More evidence of a body that won’t behave.

I’ve never spoken openly about my struggle with an eating disorder. My earliest memories of food restriction were around age 11, coincidentally when the scoliosis was diagnosed and I first became acutely aware that my body looked “wrong.” Puberty arrived on top of all of that: more changes, unsolicited, to a body I was already trying to control.

Eating disorders are not, at their core, about food. They are about control. And when your relationship with your body has already become adversarial, when it has been a source of pain and unwanted attention, when you have been poked and prodded and examined, the logic of trying to control it yourself is almost inevitable. I turned to food restriction and overexercise because I was terrified of what my body might do next. Of losing control of it again.

There is a logic to it. A disordered logic, a harmful one, but a logic. The body is the problem. You will fix it. You will make it smaller, quieter, more manageable. You will stop it from surprising you.

This is what I want people to understand, especially those trying to support someone they love: it isn’t vanity. It isn’t a phase. It’s a coping strategy that made sense once, in a context that was genuinely hard, and then kept running long past its usefulness. Chronic illness, injury, any experience that puts your body outside your control — these create conditions where disordered coping can take root. Not because something is broken in the person, but because the mind is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: looking for safety.

Healing wasn’t linear, and it wasn’t a revelation. There was no single moment where everything clicked. What it looked like, mostly, was slowly learning to be less at war — therapy, time, and eventually enough distance from the acute years that the hypervigilance I’d carried since childhood started to loosen. That vigilance had protected me once. Eventually I got to let it rest.

What I’d want someone who loves a person going through this to understand: the body stuff is almost never really about the body. You can’t logic someone out of it. But you can refuse to treat their body as a problem in your presence. You can model, quietly and consistently, that bodies are just bodies — not measures of anything, not projects to be fixed. That, more than almost anything else, is what helped.

For me, the gym has always been a non-negotiable. Not in a healthy, sustainable way but in an all-or-nothing, miss-a-day-and-spiral kind of way. I’m really exposing myself here but if I don’t train, I don’t feel like myself, I feel myself start to unravel. The logic, if you can call it that, goes something like: momentum is everything, and the moment you stop, you start losing what you built.

It’s a perfectionist’s logic. And like most perfectionist logic, it’s actually very illogical.

The body doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t care about your streak, your program, or the fact that you were just hitting your stride.

Last week I got really sick. Not the kind of sick where you can push through a workout feeling slightly sorry for yourself. The kind where you are horizontal. Fully, completely horizontal, no movement, no gym, no steps tracked, no anything. Just the couch, bad TV, and the particular misery of watching time pass while your body wages some internal war.

The first couple of days, I was more upset about missing the gym than I was about being sick.

Here’s what the all-or-nothing brain does when you’re forced to stop: it catastrophises. It starts running calculations. Seven days off. That’s strength lost. That’s muscle lost. That’s consistency and discipline down the drain. It makes rest feel like regression. As if the body is just dismantling everything you’ve worked for.

But that’s not what happened.

My first day back in the gym I was still a little shaky, still not 100% and was one of those sessions where I more just showed up and went through the motions. Despite all of that, it was a session I won’t forget because my body was able to go through the motions, by that I mean that my body remembered. The weight felt familiar. The movements came back. The engine, which I had been so convinced would have failed me, ended up working just as well as it had before being sick, albeit a little weaker.

It turns out the body is far more forgiving and resilient than the perfectionist voice in your head gives it credit for.

There’s real science behind this, muscle memory is not a myth. Neural pathways built through consistent training don’t dissolve in a week. Your cardiovascular base, your strength, your coordination: these things are far more durable than we tend to believe when we’re in the grip of all-or-nothing thinking. A week off, even a week completely horizontal, is not a reset. It’s just a pause.

And sometimes, more often than I like to admit, a pause is exactly what the body needs anyway.

What I took away from that week wasn’t just that rest is survivable. It was something slightly more uncomfortable: that my relationship with the gym has developed some unhealthy conditions. That I had made consistency the measure of my worth, and that any break felt like a personal failing rather than a physiological necessity.

Being forced to stop removed my agency from the equation entirely. In a weird was that was clarifying. The world didn’t end. My body didn’t forget itself. The gym was still there when I came back.

Balance is one of those words that gets thrown around so much it starts to feel hollow. But I think what it actually means, in the context of training, of movement, of how we treat ourselves, is simply this: knowing that the whole thing doesn’t collapse the moment you step away from it.

If you’re someone who struggles with rest, who treats a missed week like a moral failure, who has to be flattened by illness before you’ll give yourself permission to stop, I see you. I am you. And I’m telling you from the other side of a very boring, very horizontal week: your body is more resilient than you think. It’s been paying attention this whole time. It will meet you when you come back.

Let it rest. Let yourself rest. The comeback, when it comes, will remind you what you’re actually made of.

I started seeing my body differently. Not in a weight loss way, not in a performance way. In a way that I struggle to find the words to explain but feels so important to talk about.

The NASM CPT course covers a lot of ground. Anatomy, physiology, biomechanics, program design, nutrition, behavior change. It is a dense course and I foolishly underestimated just how impactful it would be.

What I did not expect was to spend hours reading about how the nervous system communicates with muscle tissue, how the body prioritizes energy differently depending on the intensity of what you are asking it to do, how certain muscles compensate when others are not doing their job, how posture and movement patterns develop over years of habits your body does not even think about.

At some point I realized I was not just learning how to train people. I was learning a language for something I had been living in my whole life without being able to read.

Here is the thing that has been so freeing about this: the body is just biology.

I know that sounds obvious. But I think a lot of us, myself very much included, have spent years relating to our bodies as moral objects. The body as something to be managed, as evidence of discipline or the lack of it, as something that reflects on you as a person. The body as a project that is either going well or failing.

Learning the actual mechanics of it has been a pretty big wake up call.

When you understand that muscle soreness is literally just inflammation from micro-tears in the tissue that repair and rebuild stronger, it becomes harder to attach any greater meaning to it. When you learn that fatigue during exercise is your body responding to changes in oxygen and fuel at the cellular level, it starts to look less like weakness and more like biology doing exactly what it was intended to.

Your body is not judging you. It is running a system.

What surprised me is that understanding the body as a mechanical system did not make me feel detached from it. It made me feel more in control of it. Before I started studying this, I had a lot of vague anxiety around training and movement. Things my body did that felt mysterious and sometimes scary, like warning lights on a dashboard I did not know how to read.

When I learned about how the body’s energy systems work, specifically that your aerobic system is trainable and responds predictably to consistent stimulus, it changed how I thought about cardio. Not as punishment, not as something I was either disciplined enough to do or not, but as an input that produces an output.

Same with sleep and recovery. Same with nutrition. Same with the specific muscles that are tight or weak from years of sitting at a desk. All of it is cause and effect. All of it is adjustable.

The body is something you have a lot more agency over than I think most of us believe.

I have had a complicated relationship with my body for most of my life. I think a lot of people have, for a lot of different reasons. Bodies are personal but also public, and most of the messages we receive about them are not neutral.

What has been validating about this process is not that I have achieved some new level of strength or anything physical. It is that the information itself is clarifying. Every time I read about a new system, every time I understand a mechanism I had only experienced without explanation before, I feel like I am meeting my own body. Not as a problem to be solved, just as a body. A physical system that I live in, that I have real influence over, and that is doing its best to keep me functioning.

That reframe has been worth more to me than anything I expected to get out of a personal training certification.

Turns out there was a lot I needed to learn about something I have been living in for almost thirty years.

Two years ago, if you had told me that nervous system regulation was going to change my pain levels, I would have smiled politely and assumed you were about to sell me something.

The wellness industry has a way of taking real science and wrapping it in so much aesthetic packaging and vague language that the actual substance gets lost somewhere between the pretty photos and the $1,000 online course. I was a skeptic. I had a background in therapy, I’d read the research, and I still thought the way it was being sold online was mostly noise.

I have had a spinal fusion since I was a teenager. T3 to L4, hardware in my spine, chronic pain as a baseline fact of my life for over a decade. I have seen more doctors, PTs, and specialists than I can count. I have done the work, like all the work. Between physical therapy, X-rays and MRIs, and pain medication, I figured something would have to work.

When I started seeing nervous system regulation everywhere online in various forms, the breathwork accounts, the somatic healing courses, the influencers talking about their parasympathetic response over aesthetic footage of themselves in nature, I was skeptical in the way that only someone who has been in structural pain can be skeptical. This felt like wellness content for people whose problems were mostly stress. My problems had hardware literally attached to them.

I have also noticed that nervous system regulation has become an industry. There are supplements promising to regulate your nervous system. Courses for hundreds of dollars. The more commodified it became, the less seriously I took it. When something gets that aggressively monetized that quickly, it usually means the science is thin and the marketing is thick. So I kept my distance.

This past year was hard on my body in ways I wasn’t prepared for. Weeks of pain that were affecting my sleep, my training, my work, my ability to be present in my own life. I was doing everything I was supposed to do. More physical therapy, medication, imaging, and rest. And I was still suffering.

My therapist chose her timing carefully and started to suggest looking at the stress load I was carrying not as a separate issue from my physical pain, but as part of the same system. She wasn’t the first person to suggest this. She was the first person I trusted enough to listen to.

I didn’t start because I believed it. I started because I had run out of reasons not to try.

What I actually did

I want to be specific here because vague wellness advice is exactly what I have always hated, and I am not going to do that to you.

I started journaling every day. Not gratitude journaling, not manifestation journaling, just twenty minutes of writing whatever was in my head, normally at the end of the day when the stress had weighed heavily enough on me. Unfiltered, not aesthetic, and sometimes boring. I just practicing just sitting with myself.

I started leaving my phone in different rooms than I was in. This felt uncomfortable at first in a way that told me something about how dysregulated I actually was. The need to be stimulated constantly, to never be alone with my thoughts, but also to always be available to people.

I started acupuncture. I had tried it years ago and dismissed it. This time I went consistently and paid attention to what happens in my body during and after sessions. I noticed a shift in my physical body, like someone turning down the volume on my stress.

I added cupping, both with my practitioner and at home between sessions. I continued talk therapy. I became, in my own words, extremely serious about protecting my peace, which sounds like something you’d put on a candle but it means making real decisions about what I let into my nervous system and what I don’t.

I called this my wellnessmaxxing routine, partly as a joke and partly because committing to it fully felt like the only option left.

What happened

About two weeks into taking this seriously, I woke up on a Friday and my pain was a 2 out of 10. For context, I had been waking up at a 6 or 7 most mornings for the better part of a month. I did a movement that had been making me audibly wince for weeks, and there was no pain reproduction.

My first reaction was not relief. It was confusion, and then guilt, and then something that felt uncomfortably like grief. If stress and nervous system dysregulation had been contributing to my pain this whole time, and the evidence was now suggesting that they had, what did that mean about the months I had spent suffering? Could I have done this sooner? Was I somehow responsible for my own pain?

I caught myself before I went too far down that spiral, because I know enough to recognize it as a distortion. Chronic pain is not a character flaw. The mind-body connection is not about blame. But the experience of watching something I had dismissed actually work in my own body in measurable ways was disorienting.

Here is where I landed. I was right that a lot of what gets sold under the nervous system regulation umbrella is noise. The supplements, the expensive courses, the vague promises. Skepticism there is warranted.

But the underlying science is real. Chronic stress and chronic pain share neurological pathways. Your nervous system does not distinguish between physical threat and psychological threat, it responds to both with the same cascade of hormonal and physiological changes. Cortisol, inflammation, disrupted sleep, heightened pain sensitivity. They are one system behaving exactly as it was designed to.

What I have learned is that you do not need to spend a lot of money to work with that system instead of against it. Silence is a nervous system regulation tool. Boredom is a nervous system regulation tool. A walk without your phone, twenty minutes of writing, choosing not to consume something that spikes your anxiety, all of these things are free and they work.

The wellness industry did not invent nervous system regulation. It just found a way to sell it back to you. The thing itself is real.

The last month I’ve been in pain pretty much every day. Pelvic pain and back pain simultaneously, which if you’ve never experienced that combination, is a particularly brutal one. For about two weeks I’ve been doing what I’m now officially calling my “wellnessmaxxing routine,” and I genuinely feel like it’s working, though I honestly can’t tell you why. Is it the relaxation techniques? The talk therapy? The acupuncture? The pain medication? Probably all of the above.

Either way, waking up on Friday at a 2/10 pain level was bizarre. I had a lot of conflicting emotions about it. On one hand, thrilled. On the other, completely puzzled. What out of everything I’m doing actually moved the needle?

I was telling my therapist this week that there is something unsettling about experiencing the mind-body connection firsthand. Sure, we all know about it conceptually. I do a lot of reading on it both for myself and for my patients. But living it threw me off in a way I didn’t expect. I started feeling guilty, like was my inability to relax causing my stress, which caused my pain? I caught myself before I went too far down that spiral, but the feeling lingered. There’s something humbling about waking up and doing a movement that’s had you audibly groaning for a month, and suddenly nothing. No pain. It makes you question everything.

The idea that stress, tension, and past trauma can live in the body isn’t new. But it’s getting a lot of attention right now under the umbrella of nervous system regulation, and the wellness industry has fully caught on. There are pills and courses and programs promising to “fix you”. To each their own, but I believe the most effective nervous system regulation tools are just the ones humans were always meant to use. For me it started as just leaving my phone at home on walks, being consistent with 20 minutes of journaling and meditation, and protecting my peace from the things that disrupt it. Now I have definitely added in the extras, acupuncture and hypnotherapy but I don’t think those are necessarily required. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to feel like yourself again. Silence, boredom, and time spent with yourself are some of the most underrated tools we have, and I’m not stopping anytime soon.

Takeaways from this week for me have been the following

1. When you come out of a flare, practice gratitude and start living your life again

2. Tell people, don’t be afraid to jinx it

3. Write down what you did or didn’t do that week. Learning from your body is everything

4. Celebrate every small win. Every lower-pain day is a drop in the bucket of recovery

5. Don’t let fear of pain stop you from living. We can’t stay in survival mode forever

I genuinely didn’t know the man knew what the “-maxxing” trend was. But there he was, and honestly it left me thinking for days.

I definitely do the most in the name of wellness — and while that is something I’m proud of, it can also be quietly discouraging. Because despite all of it, I’m still in pain most days. I still carry the emotional weight of not fully knowing what’s wrong with me.

I was talking about it with my husband this morning. I’d woken up on the wrong side of the bed and he asked where the pain was — but that’s the thing. It’s not really about where the pain is, or what number I’d give it on a scale. It’s about the fact that the pain is ever-present. It’s not one specific thing but a multitude of things going “wrong” in my body, and I put wrong in quotes intentionally, because I know my body is perfect because it’s mine. I accept what I cannot change, including the rods and screws that keep my spine straight.

When I explained this to my husband he said, “oh, it’s like whack-a-mole.” And that’s exactly how it feels. I nail down the shoulder and rib pain and then the glute pain flares up, which traces back to limited mobility, and the pattern just continues. I often think it would be easier to have one diagnosis, one thing to focus on — but the reality is it’s the totality of my body, and I constantly feel like I need to stay one step ahead of it. That is exhausting.

My therapist recently brought up the idea of “managing” pain rather than fighting it, and I’ve done a lot of reflection on that. I really have shifted my relationship with pain — I try to approach it with curiosity now, to resist the pull toward a negative mindset, especially because I believe so much physical pain has an emotional component. But sometimes you just want your body to work. You want to be active, to feel capable, and when that isn’t available to you, things get a little blue.

I’m trying to let myself have the blue days when I need them. But the wellnessmaxxing is hard in its own way — it can make me feel like I’m doing everything and nothing at the same time. The body is a mystery to all of us, but it’s one I would really like to solve, at least when it comes to my own. Every time I feel like I’ve found a piece of the puzzle, something else surfaces. I keep chasing a kind of perfection I already know doesn’t exist.

Tips for the “Wellnessmaxxer”

1. Build your team and don’t be afraid to rebuild it. Finding the right doctors, PTs, and specialists is hard. The right provider isn’t just someone who’s technically good at their job — it’s someone you can be fully honest with about what your days actually look like. Don’t settle for a practitioner you feel like you have to perform okayness for. The right ones exist. Keep looking.

2. Perfection doesn’t exist, and your off weekend is not a setback. Forgot your mobility work for three days? Skipped the breathwork? It happens. Being hard on yourself about it doesn’t just feel bad, it actually makes the physical symptoms worse. Progress in chronic pain management is not linear and it was never going to be.

3. Let yourself have the bad days. Pain fluctuates. That’s just the reality of living in a body that’s doing its best. Resisting a hard day, trying to logic your way out of it, pushing through when you really need to rest, yeah none of that helps. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is let yourself exist in it without making it mean something about your progress.

4. Stay curious and keep trying new things. Meditation, mindfulness, therapy, acupuncture, hypnotherapy, pain medication — I have tried a lot of things. Some landed, some didn’t. But every single one taught me something about my body I wouldn’t have learned otherwise. Wellnessmax with genuine curiosity rather than desperation, and you’ll be surprised what you find.

Even knowing he doesn’t resent it, and that it’s one of the many ways he shows love, I’m human. And the middle seat on an airplane really does suck.

During the flight, I noticed an older man sitting across the aisle from me. He was wearing a back brace that extended all the way up to his neck — one of those metal ones that looks impossibly uncomfortable. As someone who wore a back brace for much of my adolescence, I immediately felt for him. His wife was sitting beside him in the middle seat. It was hard not to notice the parallel.

He and I moved through the flight in similar ways. We both stood up multiple times, walking slowly up and down the aisle, stretching our backs, lingering a few seconds longer than necessary. When I fly, I often find myself silently begging for the flight to end, and I noticed him engaging in something very similar. We never spoke, but the interaction stayed with me. It made me think about how important our partners are in the journey of chronic pain.

My husband is one of my biggest supporters — not just in life, but in pain. I often think about how lucky I am, not only to have him, but to have surrounded myself with friends and family who care deeply and never treat me like a burden.

The unfortunate thing about chronic pain is that it’s incredibly boring to talk about. My husband and my best friend could tell me a million times that I’m not a burden, and I’ll still ask that million-and-first time just to double-check.

It’s hard not to feel like one when a pain day is particularly bad, or when it falls on a day that really matters.

I know chronic pain doesn’t just disappear. I’ve let go of that hope. But my journey now, and probably forever, is making sure the pain doesn’t get in the way of living my life, or allowing the people I love to live and enjoy theirs.

Feeling like a burden is a terrible feeling. What I’ve found helps most is gratitude. I thank the people in my life constantly, even when they tell me to stop. I show up for them in every way that I can. And I make sure they know I’m always in their corner.

My husband also lives with a chronic illness that he’s very open about. One of the things I admire most about how he handles it is that if he’s not in a hospital bed, he’s showing up for the people in his life.

I try to take that same approach and make it my own. Because as anyone with a chronic condition knows, when you have a good day, you take that day and ride it for as long as you can.

My good days are amazing. My bad days are still good, because I try to fill them with things I can enjoy depending on what my body needs.

On a high-pain day, that might mean walking to get a matcha, doing a quick stretch, watching movies, or catching up with friends.

On a low-pain day, I’m lifting heavy weights, cooking meals from scratch, and running all over the city with the people I love.

This is how we find balance — by learning how to ride the highs and lows of each day.

I’ve found that writing this Substack has been challenging because it’s forced me to sit with my pain and really think about the things I do every day that contribute to lower or higher pain levels. My goal with this space is to share a glimpse into the life of chronic pain, but also to offer tips — small things I’ve noticed that help me.

Today’s tips are about traveling with chronic pain. Some are practical items you can purchase to make life easier; others are mental tools I use to get through a long-haul flight, car or train ride.

Tip #1: Find the right travel pillow for your body.

I personally hate neck pillows. Truly. But my inflatable lumbar support pillow has saved me on numerous long-haul flights. I love that thing. It gives me just enough support to reduce the constant shifting and bracing that usually happens when I sit for too long. The takeaway: don’t assume the standard travel gear will work for you — experiment until you find something that actually helps.

Tip #2: Have a plan for pain relief.

Figure out what works for you ahead of time. Sometimes it might mean layering strategies. This isn’t medical advice, but for me that might look like a gummy or a muscle relaxant for longer flights. The key is not waiting until you’re already miserable at 35,000 feet — have your plan ready before you board.

Tip #3: Bring distractions for when you can’t sleep.

For those of us who can’t sleep on flights, having activities is essential. I watch my husband fall asleep before we even take off, while I’m twisting around trying to find a comfortable position. This is when my Kindle comes in handy. I’ve been on flights where I’ve cleared three books because it’s the only thing that gets my mind off my pain. Coloring books, reading, a great movie, or even listening to an entire soundtrack can help. (Personal experience confirms that the full Hamilton soundtrack is an excellent distraction.)

Tip #4: Don’t be a hero.

Do not sit there pretending everything is fine when you’re in pain. There’s power in telling at least one person. Not necessarily because they can fix it, but because two people holding the reality feels very different than being alone in your own head.

My therapist recently told me that writing this Substack is helpful for that exact reason — even if I’m just screaming into the void of the internet, at least I’m not alone with it. And when you’re traveling in pain, that small shift can make a big difference.

I am disciplined—and it’s something I’m often complimented on by the people in my life. I take responsibility for my health seriously; it’s never been something I approach lightly. I do my physical therapy exercises, track my pain daily, adjust my movement patterns and sitting position, and pay attention to my breathing. I am constantly aware of my body, and I’m very good at it.

But I am also very, very tired.

Managing chronic pain is something that takes up a significant portion of my life.

There are no true “off” hours. Even in moments that are supposed to be restful, there’s often an internal dialogue asking, “Should I be doing something right now?” A stretch, a corrective exercise, an adjustment in posture, or a change in my breathing pattern.

It always feels like there is something more.

And that’s the paradox I keep running into—this idea that while I am deeply grateful to have tools, knowledge, and some level of control over my pain, I don’t always know where the line is between supporting my body and overdoing it.

That moment forced me to admit something I’ve known for a while: I don’t really know how to stop. Or even more accurately, I don’t know how to trust that stopping is okay.

Because right now, this constant awareness is tipping into hyper-vigilance and making it almost impossible to actually relax.

It brings up a bigger question for me: when does healing start to take away from the very life it’s meant to support?

I’ve built a life—and even a career—around understanding the body. Around helping others feel more connected, more empowered, more capable in their own skin. And yet, when it comes to myself, I sometimes feel like I’m chasing a moving target—trying to optimize and stay ahead of discomfort in a way that doesn’t leave much room for just existing in the present.

Just living.

And I don’t think this is talked about enough.

As a society we celebrate discipline and consistency. The phrase “doing the work” is big in wellness spaces and while these things do matter, they also aren’t the only things that matter. There is a deeper question underneath all of it that I keep coming back to:

“What is the point of all this effort if I don’t actually let myself experience the life it’s meant to give me?”

Maybe the answer isn’t doing more. Maybe it’s knowing when enough is enough, and just being here.

The funny thing is, I never let it dissuade me. I went on to get certified on all apparatus and learned the appropriate modifications for my body. Having a physical limitation makes you acutely aware of your strengths and weaknesses. That awareness is something I’m constantly navigating. Sometimes I need to tune in deeply and other times, I need to tune out and just let my body do its thing.

Early in my teaching career, before I found my voice and learned verbal cueing and imagery, I relied heavily on demonstration. As a visual learner, it felt natural. But that meant I avoided teaching spinal articulation—flexion, extension, the very movements that are foundational in Pilates. I stayed in the safety of neutral spine.

Over the past few years, I’ve pushed myself out of that comfort zone. It may not sound significant, but every time I cue a crunch, roll-down, or chest lift, I feel like an imposter. These are movements I can’t do, never will be able to do, and don’t actually know how they feel in my own body. I can imagine the sensation of articulating each vertebra onto the mat. I imagine cat/cow feels incredible. But I will never experience it.

I find myself sometimes in awe of clients with full mobility. But I’ve learned to ask questions and be curious about how they experience certain movements. As both a student and a teacher, I’ve become deeply aware of how language shapes experience. Cues like “this is easier” can unintentionally create a sense of inadequacy. I never want a modification to feel like a lesser option.

What I’ve learned, through my own practice and through my clients, is that those who modify are often the strongest in the room. Walking into a class knowing you’ll need to adjust movements takes mental strength. And anyone who’s held a plank in my class for minutes on end knows that’s as much a mental battle as a physical one.

Programming crunches or roll-downs doesn’t make me an imposter. It reminds me that my job isn’t to perform every movement, it’s to empower my clients. People will do what they can. My responsibility is to help them choose movements they are not only physically capable of, but mentally proud of. Sometimes that means modifying.

In the past six months, I’ve been more intentional about reframing modifications. Often, they aren’t easier, they’re more effective, more controlled, sometimes even more challenging, and most importantly, safer. For example, during high-kneeling arm series, I remind clients that choosing to sit may actually increase the challenge. Sitting removes the ability to rely on momentum or lean back; it demands control. When I frame it that way, even my strongest clients choose to sit so they can move slower, build precision, and find a deeper mind-muscle connection.

When I teach, I constantly filter my cues through the lens of how they would land on me. I’m acutely aware of each body in the room—low backs, sensitive wrists, shoulder injuries, poor sleep, life stress. My job isn’t just to instruct movement; it’s to create an environment where people feel empowered to honor what their body can do that day. Because capacity ebbs and flows.

Being in tune with your body is the most important part of any fitness class—at least the ones I teach.

I’ve definitely improved in how I manage these flares, though I’m far from perfect. Some days when I flare, I fall into the blame game, trying to trace every action that could have led me here. The blame never helps. In life, blame rarely produces positive results and I’ve noticed that’s especially true with chronic pain.

I’m trying to build a solid routine for when my pain flares because, for better or worse, the pain clearly isn’t going anywhere. One thing that helps is telling someone. It might be my husband, my physical therapist, a friend or my mom. Simply saying the words out loud makes me feel less alone, like I’m not carrying around a big secret.

I recently started reading (or listening to) Healing Back Pain by John Sarno and learning more about the mental aspect of pain. While I don’t fully believe my pain is all “in my head,” I don’t discount the mind-body connection. When we keep things in, they tend to get louder.

After I tell someone I’m struggling, I usually cry. Not a “feel bad for me” cry, but a cathartic one, a release of whatever anger or frustration toward my body has been building up. The cry often brings some relief. That’s why they call it a “good cry.”

So step one: tell someone.
Step two: cry, yell, or release the feeling somehow.

Step three is the physical component and this is admittedly the part I tend to get stuck on because I lean toward an all-or-nothing mentality. But I’m working on that.

Last weekend I had a nasty flare. My SI joint was irritated and inflamed, and even walking hurt. My husband said I winced with every step. The gym was clearly out, so I laid down. It was hard to do, but my body was screaming for something I wasn’t giving it.

So I guess step three is to listen to your body. Simple, right?

I went back to my basic physical therapy exercises: pelvic clocks, windshield-wiper knees, small step-ups, and an SI joint reset. I’m still hovering around a 5 on the pain scale, but I know my body is responding. I’ll ease back into movement as it allows.

It’s hard when it feels like your body doesn’t want to cooperate with you. But what I’m beginning to learn is that I have to cooperate with it, too. This is a symbiotic relationship. I can’t just push my body past its limits and expect it to keep up.

Step four is to keep progressing and not give up. This is actually the step I’m fairly good at because I love building strength. I love challenging my body. What I’m learning, though, is how to do that in a way that’s safe and appropriate for my body.

Identifying your limitations and modifying movements is so important, and it’s also really hard. I think our default as humans is to resist modification. I used to see it as proof that something was wrong with me. But day by day, I’m realizing that modifications don’t mean something is broken. They mean I’m making what I’m doing better suited for my body.

The final step is one I think everyone should practice: never stop learning.

I try to take something from every flare, some lesson I can apply not just to my rehab, but to my everyday life. This time, the lesson feels clear: I need to stop doing the absolute most in the gym. I need to respect that rest is not laziness. More specifically, I need to ease up on single-leg movements when my pelvis feels even slightly unstable. That’s the takeaway from this flare.

Other flares teach different lessons. Some remind me not to bottle up emotions, like when my trapezius lights up after I’ve been holding too much in. Others are more mechanical. But there’s always something to learn if I’m willing to look for it.

I once heard someone describe pain as the body’s check engine light, and that metaphor really resonates with me. Sometimes you just need to pull over, pop the hood, and see what’s going on. And sometimes, you simply need to let the engine cool down.

I underwent spinal fusion surgery at 15. I am now almost 30. My life changed in many ways that day, some positive and some negative. The surgery helped shape who I am today and is the reason I take my health so seriously. I’ve spent countless hours researching my condition, trying to understand the connections between the different sensations in my body. I’ve come to believe that our bodies are one large puzzle, and I’m simply trying to piece it all together. Through this platform, I hope to share what I’ve learned along the way to help others who experience their own versions of pain, especially those who have undergone spinal fusion.

For years, I clung to the hope that my pain was acute. I told myself it was just a flare-up, a pulled muscle, an injury that would pass, or slight nerve irritation. I tried to convince my body and mind that it wasn’t serious, that healing was just around the corner if I could push through. When the months turned into years, I shifted the blame inward. Maybe it was all in my head. Maybe if I thought more positively, meditated harder, stretched longer, or prayed differently, the pain would disappear.

It didn’t.

After nearly a decade, I’ve had to face the truth: pain is a daily presence in my life.

The strange thing about physical pain is that it can be completely invisible. My body doesn’t announce its struggle to the world, yet I feel it in every step, every movement, sometimes deep in my bones. It’s a presence others can’t see, and I can never escape.

The physical sensation itself doesn’t bother me as much anymore. I’ve learned to live with it, the way you get used to a shadow following you down the street. What’s harder is the emotional toll. Pain makes me question my body, doubt its loyalty. I wonder if it will be there for me when I need it. Over time, that uncertainty creates distance. A disconnect forms between you and your body. And in that gap, the mind spins as it searches for answers, for reasons, for a logic that never quite arrives.