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In January I had something that felt like a muscle pull in my tush; right where my wallet sits. I didn’t pay much mind to it, I switched my wallet to the other side or carried it in a pocket and told myself it would work its way back to health in time.

Well, the pain lingered and then started to feel electrical in nature. I knew the sciatic nerve runs right through that area and asking a few friends in the medical field diagnosed me with sciatica. The pain can come from an inflamed piriformis muscle pressing on the nerve or from a disc in the back doing the same thing. A disc irritating the sciatic nerve can cause the muscles in the leg and bottocks to spasm, thereby opening the sciatic nerve to secondary irritation from the spasming muscles.

My first look at this pain came in the form of reflection. Reflection is taking the current moment and making it a mirror of yourself. Here I’m looking at my body and asking what am I showing myself in the mirror.

When using reflection, first try to be as literal as possible:

I have pain and it is where my wallet sits.

So what does wallet represent? Money.

I’m showing me I have pain around the issue of money.

Then this struck me:

I’m showing me money is a pain in my ass.

At first this is what I went with for an issue to work on. Later it all changed when my pain got worse and I incorporated my painful movement (oops forgot that one) in with the reflection.

Now if you’re thinking I irritated my piriformis muscle by squashing it between my wallet and gluteal region or irritated a disc, think again. That’s the easy cause and effect explanation. Seeing it in that light will not bring me any higher consciousness or growth. I would be treating symptoms and hoping for the best; which is what most everyone does.

I am creating all my experience now. That’s the underlying theme of this blog. You are the creator. And if you read this blog and apply it to your life situation, you will grow into a more conscious creator. Now, I didn’t consciously give myself this pain. Who would? If you’ve read Creatorship in the Now, you know that most all our choices are unconscious, so getting pain from nowhere doesn’t surprise me one bit.

So what’s the purpose of pain?

I have to wrestle with this a lot. When I get pain I immediately go into denial — “I must have done something wrong” or “I’m punishing myself for something I’m not understanding”. This kind of thought adds more denial to the denial I already have in place. I have thoughts such as:

“I shouldn’t have this pain.”

“I wish it would go away.”

“This is not right (so I am wrong).”

Pain is a messenger, a late sign as an EMT would say. What would the early signs be? This particular dis-ease started in the mental body and I totally missed it. If it is not caught in the mental body (it is not received so it gets stuck), I will have an emotion about it. Call it fear or a general unease. If I still do not respond to that it will show up in the physical body, which is historically when I actually listen to myself. I am quite devastated when I get pain in my body and all systems go on alert when it’s really painful. All the tools, like reflection, come out of the woodwork and I do things I should have done earlier. My pattern is I wait until I get a serious ache or pain.

So I’m trying to tell me something about me. It is something I’m trying to get a grip on and it is holding me back from what I want to do in life. I have to cross this bridge to get what I want. I go back into reflection a bit deeper, this time with the help of friends and I uncover more information about my pain.

It is in the sciatic nerve.

It is in my lower back, left leg, and buttock.

It makes moving very difficult.

I can’t do any of the things I want to do.

(all this is the reflection of myself in the moment)

One thing I didn’t realize initially is the sciatic nerve is connected to the spinal cord and thus the brain. The brain is the place where the mental body interfaces with the physical body. My pain is coming from thought. That’s pretty simple and I overlooked it.

One of my teachers said”, “you know what physical pain feels like, right?

“Yes”.

“And emotional pain?”

“Yes”.

“Do you realize there’s mental pain?”

“No. I never even considered all the thoughts running through my head could have such a consequence.”

My teacher also said physical pain is usually a reflection of non-reception on the surface. I was working this thing at 20,000 leagues below the surface of myself when it was floating right on top. I dove right by the obvious and went after the deep seated denials.

Mental Pain

At first mental pain was weird. I mean, what is it and how is it experienced? For me it is all the thoughts I have which do not support me. It is all the self-judgements and self-deprication that I don’t even hear myself doing.

A real life example: say I’m building a wall in my house. I will have this mental commentary going on about why I’m doing it a certain way. Not that I’m doing anything wrong… I’m building the frame, making sure it’s square, secure… I’m making sure there’s enough nailers for sheetrock, etc. But I’m running this story in case someone asks me why I’m doing it the way I’m doing it. Ok, well that’s a story around justification, so I must be thinking I’m wrong, and to think I’m wrong, somewhere I have to think I need to be right.

In the moment I’m just building a wall. The reality of it is I’m not right, I’m not wrong, I’m just here, now. But, I’m instantly telling me I’m wrong from the get go and devising a story to prove how right I am. That is mental pain. The thoughts do not support me in the moment. If you are a student of the Subjective Reality model you could call what I’m doing incongruency.

Thinking of the future, another favorite pastime, also diverts my focus away from the here and now. Being out of the present moment allows all these thoughts to ramble on in the first place.

Bringing it all together

To relate this more to my life I need to bring all the pieces together to make a picture. My back represents support of self. I’m having trouble moving. I’m not doing much of anything except lying down. My issue involves the mental body since it involves a painful sciatic nerve. And way back this also had something to do with money. I’ll see if I can work that in here too.

So, I want to do things, but I cannot move. My self support (back) is faltering because of the painful thoughts in my head. How does that relate to my life?

What are the things I want to do that I believe I can’t or will not move on? That’s easy, I have a whole list on my wall. When I look at some of them I say to myself, “I’d love to take the one month class around the world with Vywamus, but I just don’t see where I’m going to get the money”. Same with hiking the PCT in 2008. I also want to create a unique website/community for hikers… The list goes on and on.

And where is my mind with these things? What does that low-level chatter say that I do not consciously hear? I’m focused on how I can’t do it or how hard it will be to do it. Even before I start working on them! There’s the mental pain of non-support. I’m focused on what isn’t instead of what is. It took a lot of physical pain to get me to look at myself close enough to hear what is going on in the background of my mind. I slowed down my physical movement almost to a stop so I could not focus on any other activities besides the message that was trying to get through.

My process of this goes even deeper and I learn new things about myself each day. I will continue that process with you in another post and also talk about what I am doing as far as recovery goes. I am up and around these days but I need to be very conscious of how I move to prevent muscle spasms; which goes hand-in-hand with being very conscious of my movement within my creative flow.