How to Use Pain as a Teaching Tool with Emmanuel Manolakakis

Full Transcript

0:00:03.7 S1: Hello is Bill The Knee Pain Guru. Welcome to the Pain Education Podcast, brought to you by the Comella Foundation. Today we have a special guest, he’s actually a good friend and mentor of mine, manual monologues out of Toronto, Canada, and I would just like to jump into it and have many as he’s now affectionately know him as Manny… Would go introduce yourself.

0:00:34.1 S2: Yeah, man. Hello, Bill, first, thank you for having me on. It’s wonderful to see you. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you. I’ve always found very knowledgeable and lots of great insight as it comes to pain and just rehab in general, I found you a wonderful resource for the last 15 years, so it’s been amazing, and I’m happy to be on the podcast and share some of my experiences and knowledge with everybody. Yeah, today we’re gonna focus on the value of using physical pain as a teaching tool, and.

0:01:06.8 S1: I know in our past experience, we’re coming at it from a martial arts perspective, so there’s a lot to look at pain coming at it from the martial arts perspective. That it’s part of training. However, what I’d like to pick your brain on today in terms of the podcast is how a person who has been suffering with chronic pain, which many martial artist suffer with chronic pain, but there are also people that aren’t in martial arts that suffer with chronic pain and how we could begin to dovetail that together to use physical pain as a teaching tool.

0:01:53.6 S2: Well, yeah, 100% bill. No, listen, yes, I’ve done martial arts for a long time, but the painting was almost separate of it, so I did martial arts, I was younger, and then I was also a competitive athlete, and I did a lot of pretty rough sports, rugby being one of them, and that’s where I actually ended a damaging myself in my 20s, I had busted up my right knee pretty bad, and basically at that time, back in, let’s say the late 80s, early 90s, the surgery for me was… I would say barbaric, it’s not as fine-tuned that it is right now, now a days, the enhancements and refinement is much more than what it was for me, for me, you’re basically six months, you were in a cast after the surgery and then you had another six months of rehab, which seems long, but that’s what it was like from the beginning of the surgery til the end, was quite extensive. And as you can imagine, there was a lot of pain. There’s obviously pain and then there’s pain in the initial injury, and there’s pain after the surgery, and then there’s pain and rehabbing it, so there’s…

0:03:03.5 S2: One of these stages at different pain… The rehab pain was the one that taught me the most… Okay, like pain, they’re just paying, it hurts and you’re gonna get through it, but the rehab pain, you had to actually do something, you actually… If you wanted to get the range of motion and the flexibility back, it was gonna hurt, and that was par for the course. Every day it was pain, and when you go through pain as a necessary thing for that long, you become a better friend with it, you realize that I have to go through this, and you start to understand the difference between good pain and bad pain. And you really could, and I could feel it without a doubt, I could feel that even to this day, we go to dot, and I had that lens even before I started my second half of my martial art career, and when I started that and I started training I had, because I had started more before I stopped and then I started after… When I started it the second time, after my year-long break, it was with a recovered knee, but you still had the memory of that injury, it was still…

0:04:10.7 S2: There was still a lot of psychological trauma, and that’s when I had met you shortly after that, and you were so gifted, seeing how… Pain has a memory like, yes, you can get through pain. But the memory is almost like an Echo in the body that doesn’t end, and so I could heal my knee, I could feel great, but then somebody could kick in or wacker trip my biopsies, and all of a sudden the pain and the memory comes back pretty quick. You never forget that pain even, and then somehow you get over it, you never forget it, so it was a six-month process of understanding how to listen to pain and follow it, so I would have to straighten my knee, it was the gift… Or my knee was bad, a 90 angle, I had to get it flat, but I also had to get it the other way, I had to get it this way, so it was like this… I had the straight in, but I also do it in the back end, so there was… So that range of motion took six months, that was a long time. And that process of saying, Okay, this is the pain I want, this is the pain I don’t want, this is the pain that’s too much, this is the pain I’ve gotta go through.

0:05:25.0 S2: And at the time, I was upset at that, right, like you’re angry, but now I see it as a good, it taught me so much about how to follow pain, it really taught me a lot of open… And hence the nature of this podcast, and since then, no matter what problem I have, no matter what pain I have, I follow that, I understand the sequence that I have to go through and I vote… I think it was five years ago, I had busted this form, I remember that I wanted was just a fluke thing. And the bone had broke, it was complete brews, the crack, it was what they call a night stick fraction, so it was completely… The arm bone [Radius and Ulna], it was gapped, and the doctors at the time wanted me and there was a lot of pain as you gotta imagine this build… I break this in the first 10 minutes of a martial art class I am teaching, nobody sees it, was that the moment it happened? I knew something was not right. I finished the entire class, nobody knew, I went home to finish this… I’m still teaching. This is completely broke.

0:06:34.7 S2: Nobody knows I am not walking around, I am active in the class, so I am dealing with the pain as it’s happening ’cause the pain is intensified, but I’m working through the pain and using my training to get through that, then I get home, but I don’t go to the hospital right away, Bill, I go home first because I know from my experience that me at a hospital when I’m hungry is not a good thing, so I have to get home, I open the door… I see my wife, I said, Hello honey, how are you? I think I broke in my arm, I was really… I say, yeah, aren’t you gonna go to the hospital? Let me have some dinner for us because I could be there for a while and I don’t wanna be one, ’cause if I’m hungry then by the decisions is I finished my dinner. I went to the hospital and found my injury is as to what it was, and it’s such a funny story because how I handled the pain the second time with this arm as compared to my mind was a night and day. I was so calm, I talked to the doctor, the surgeons wanted to operate and put pins in…

0:07:34.3 S2: I say, what are the other options as well? There’s a 20% chance you can heal this on your own, but we don’t really recommend that… I said, Hello, would price. Try that, I’m just curious to see if I care I willing to do through. I knew the difference, been good and bad thing, and I followed that along. And believe me that every time… Not to get talking ran terrible, but it was really funny because it was the same surgeon that met with me through the whole process, and every time he was scratching his head and I was like, Okay, well, I’m willing to try it if that’s what you want, and when I came back, he did an extra after three weeks and looked at me, he said, I actually do see some healing here, I actually see that. I can actually see, I got the X-rays to prove it all… I got that. So then he goes, Okay, let’s give it another couple of weeks, I come back in a couple of weeks. So yeah, no, no, it’s healing up, he goes, You know what, I’m gonna put you in a half cast and he goes, but it goes to be prepared, your arm is gonna be to 90 degrees and you won’t be able to straighten.

0:08:41.0 S2: He goes, So what I want you to do is for an hour a day, exercise it, a half hour, twice a day, take it off and just try to straight… And he goes, Don’t force it. He goes, I want you to try to get to 45 degrees in the next two weeks. I said, Sure, two weeks for 45 ’cause yeah, I go slow. Would be super careful. That’s no problem. I got home and of course it’s stiff. Right. It’s staff, of course, and I’m ginger with it. But I said to myself, I go, I gotta speed this up. And I know this pain, this is not the bad pain, this is the pain that my arm wants to stream… Right, yes, I fall asleep at night and I say to myself, I wonder how I could do this, I wonder how I could make the most of my sleep, so what I did was I propped up pillows here, I propped up pillows here, and I slept like this bill, you guys could see my… I slept like that on my bike with my arm up, and in the morning when I wake up where I raised the next morning it was here, and in two weeks, I show up to my surgeon’s office ’cause, Okay, how was it going? I was…

0:09:45.8 S2: Did you get to 45 degrees in? I took it out. Do you mean like that? And I just straight my arm, I was like, How did you do that? I did a while sleeping and I go, Do I know the different good and bad pain. I wasn’t hitting my food, I wasn’t hitting the bone, I was just stretching the muscles, he was beside himself to the… Was really, it was an experiment. And I guess what I’m encouraging everybody listing is, it’s not gonna happen overnight, and understand this, but try in your everyday life to understand the pain that is guiding you and the pain that I should stop you, and that’s a normal… Right.

0:10:22.6 S1: Right. I wanna back up ’cause you brought up God knowing the difference between good and bad pain a couple of times, and I’m familiar with it, but how would you make that distinction between good and bad pain, how would someone that’s listening to it… That’s been in pain for a long period of time, or they just had an injury, they’ve maybe had similar conversations with their doctor, how… How do you make that distinction between good and bad pain that they could begin to translate into their lives into their bodies? So great question, and this is gonna be hard, but I’m gonna try to explain it in different analogies.

0:11:08.1 S2: How do we know when food is bad? But sometimes you can look at it, sometimes you can smell it, and sometimes you can even taste it, that something is really wrong, it just things to… When you have to look at pain and luckily, through our lives we have enough experiences, so touching the iron, you pretty much know that that pain… The burning pain is not a good one. That’s not a pain I think I’ll ever be able to kind of understand. Is good, right? This is something that’s inherent to us that we have in the wild, an animal is born, there’s nobody teaching it that that animal eats it and that animal doesn’t… You just… It’s a feeling that I gotta run right now it… Nobody said, That’s the wolf. And you got timespan, the pain of that, I’m cold, if I feel cold and I put on a jacket. And it’s kind of like that. I find that the good pain is milder and the sharper pain is the one that you can’t kinda get through, right. So if my back locks up, let’s say over what to all sleep wrong, I can feel… There’s pain in my back.

0:12:21.9 S2: I know that’s a pain. It’s not severe, it’s just pain that I need, and if I start moving slowly and follow the pain, I can release a shirt that I know I can’t release, get some mentor or get a good parent to work with me. That just takes time. And I all propose this as a question to all about people watching, what else do you have to do with your life? Other than know yourself, other than I understand, ’cause pain is how we learn things, we learn through what pains you and what pleasures… Those are the two extremes. Not avoid it. It’s not to understand it. Just get curious. How did that happen? Remember, why have I told you about martial artists should be like scientists, we should not be so judgmental as we get older, we should be less judgmental and more curious… When I see a bad thing, I’m not mad at it, I like a little bit, but generally I’m curious, how did this happen? How did you get like this… And you realize that the reasons are kind of sad sometimes when you see that, they’re not like… I’m sure when you see a person, you’re not sitting there, go…

0:13:43.7 S2: You’re more curious as to how this happened. You wanna understand the root causes of it, so everybody listening… And that’s where Bill is really gifted. You ask really good questions and you get interested rather than judgmental, we hold all… When you’re painting your body, be interested ’cause it’s a warning sign, something is not right. And that’s how you gotta approach it. That it’s not, Oh, don’t do it. I don’t know if you have that pain… How did that happen? What were the things… Much like a doctor, when you show up with a problem there, they just ask you questions ’cause I’m curious as to how that would have happened.

0:14:25.1 S1: That’s something when I work with clients, it is, we have to switch the mentality or the paradigm of looking at pain as being bad and looking at pain as being information, what is our body trying to tell us, what are the codes and the signals in the clues like you were saying, I really love the analogy about food, if it’s bad, you could tell if you smell it or if you taste it, or if you just look at it… Those are different distinctions. And this is what I hear you saying exactly about pain, we have to instead of shying away from it, be curious about it and begin to pick it apart. And they’re like, Well, how does it feel when I move this way or that way? How is this connected to other parts of my body?

0:15:13.3 S2: So that was brilliant, I love it. It’s also good too, for somebody to see if you go to get a really good massage, a sale, if your listeners and are wanting a way to understand this, go to get… What some people call is a deep tissue massage, I go get a massage, and massage therapists, especially a really good one, understands where your tension is and we’ll start to kind of go into that, and you’re gonna feel pain… Okay, when my massage therapist works on me, anybody to listen guys, I am trying to crawl off the table, it is so painful, and my therapist is great, he knows exactly the pain that I need to feel ’cause I don’t… If it doesn’t hurt for me, I’m not doing anything ’cause my attention will be quite deep, and so I wanna work at this, I don’t wanna just feel good, I wanna work at getting rid… And you know how good I feel after Bill? I feel like I’m 16. It’s amazing. And so you wanna understand the difference, the good and bad pain, go to a good massage therapist, one that really… Especially deep tissue stuff. And you will feel pain, and that is the good pain because they know they’ll push into that pain and you need to deal with it.

0:16:26.5 S2: We can’t just ask people to deal with pain, how are you gonna deal with it? And we approach it the same way, how are you gonna deal with payment if you’re not gonna drink, if you’re not gonna do drugs, if you’re not gonna take pills, how do you deal with pain as it comes… For me, I’ve always taught breathing and relaxation, so when I feel pain years ago, when a woman was going to labor before the epidural, they talked to the nurse was breathing and relaxation techniques, and around the world where there is no medicine for paying… That’s the way they handle it. So we need to look at those things and everybody needs to say, I don’t want you just to suffer and suffer senseless-ly, I want you to understand that when you feel pain, try to breathe it out, try to relax as much as you can and take it from a 10 to 10, or 8 to 10 to like a six. On a 10, you’re not gonna get rid of it completely. It’s just gonna be more bearable, and that’s a gateway to understanding how to deal with pain, and that when it’s bearable, you can see like you explained, Listen to the signal, listen to the frequency and to that signal, it’s telling you something, it’s not just saying…

0:17:36.9 S2: It’s saying this is a potential wrong, this is a potential long sense if… I made some notes for the call today, and.

0:17:49.5 S1: There’s some… The background that we both share is in the Russian martial arts, Systema and the breathing background, that is what we use to begin to reduce the pain in our training or personal life or what… Life in general, one of the things that came to mind when you were speaking before, I was learning how to suffer well, and I don’t remember where it came from, I just didn’t know, we draw back on decades of experience and all of a sudden it’s like, where they come from, but I know there’s this understanding of suffering, well… Could you expound on that a little bit?

0:18:38.6 S2: Well, listen, it comes down to a philosophy, it can be… I guess if I could try to dig as far back as I could have seen it in store belief systems where… So what… What are you scared of? You’re scared of being hungry, fast a little bit, are you scared of being cold… Go into the cold. If you’re scared of not having or being poverty goal, we’ll live in the street for a day, I just go see what it is, right. And by going down it, you take the mystery out of it. Right, and there’s also many spiritual beliefs and religious beliefs that will tell you that life is suffering, that’s not to be sad, it’s just that you’re gonna suffer and you’re gonna be happy, so when things are really good, don’t be overly happy, just be happy, and when things are really bad, don’t be overly sad, just kind of stay close, but… And understand that everybody suffers, there’s something… It doesn’t matter how much money or what you are… Everybody has problems, everybody… And when we take that approach, we realize that suffering is just a part of life, it’s just part of it.

0:19:46.3 S2: It’s just like life and death. It’s a part of it. It is a part of it. And today on that level is echoes to me for sure. So these are things that are important for people to understand, not to push away from or high… Just accept them that I try to be good guys, but things happen to me too, I do wanna use up my bed, I can do like this. I didn’t want that. We all have our trials and tribulations, and when they have been just suffer good, does it mean… Pretend it doesn’t exist. Acknowledge it, you know like on your side, it’s okay to say, I’m sad, it’s okay when you’re angry, it’s okay, you say you’re angry. It’s just a form of suffering and you’re trying to get through it, so I guess by acknowledging everybody suffers and just make as much as you can get, I take the lesson from it, you know, what did this teach you? Rather than, why did it happen? And then maybe you can reduce repeating it again, and then I always accept in life that the things don’t make sense at that moment, like When I hurt my knee, I was so angry that it happened to me, I really was, but then…

0:21:03.0 S2: Now, let’s say five or 10 years later, I say to myself, if I didn’t have that injury, I wouldn’t have learned these 10 things, and they’ve been invaluable to me in life, so when things happen to you like a suffering, say to yourself, they’re trying to teach us something for the future. That will be invaluable. You’ll be absolutely invaluable. So if you take that approach or that methodology, a very SYSTEM, I guess, where you embrace suffering rather than dammit, you try to take the good from it, which is for those listening, probably advice I give my kids… It’s very personal advice. It’s a very personal advice, it’s not something that is… It’s easy to talk about with everybody, but it is still a very important advice to get people and to suffer.

0:21:52.2 S1: Goodspeed well, and this ties in well with… And I’ve seen it in myself. I’ve seen any clients that I’ve worked with, people will say, Well, I’m in pain, they’ll lump it together, they’re not looking at it as a learning tool, and they look at pain is like the self-abuse that I feel pain and they can go down that path of just, well, I’m just gonna use myself because while I’m gonna feel pain anyways, and then you have the other of people that never wanna go near pain, it’s what you were talking about, if you’re afraid of being impoverished, live on the street for a day or hungry, not having food, go hungry for a little bit, so this was a lesson for me in terms of strikes with the step. There was this… When I first started, I always wanted to get hit and I realized that it was… The teaching that I got was it was more out of wanting to get hit for self-abuse to see how much I could take, not that I was using it as the movement that I needed forward in my own personal evolution. So I think it’s a rich topic because it also ties in with going to the massage therapist and having them kinda get in there and do that, there’s a distinction with Good pain and bad pain, self-abuse and the fear of never going towards pain.

0:23:43.2 S1: And I know that that’s a lot of different thoughts in there, but there’s gems in that that I’d like you to speak to you, so.

0:23:54.8 S2: I think what you’re talking about is it’s very hard to self-analyze yourself, it’s very hard… You can self-teach yourself a lot of things, but you do need to strong to put some good mentors, people that can guide you because… I’ll give you an example, can make a martial art video and I can look at it and say, Wow, we all amazing. This is a blah, blah, blah, and then I show it to somebody as how they are doing it. It’s really funny, I have… Students will send me videos all the time and about some work we’re doing, and I look at it and I grab my daughter and I was… How does this look to you? I sure look at as girls that look stupid or it looks bad, and I’m like… I’m sorry to tell you. She is my filter or other friends, I filter… Anything I ever think about doing is I always… I always try to bounce it off people that I really respect and to guide me down this row and surround myself with mentors and try to understand the different pre-mentors and tormentors, and you wanna stage itself with mentors and they’re very close together, those two…

0:25:05.9 S2: And if you can look at the definition, people can research it as all, but the mentors that I have, the people that truly are happy for me when I’m successful. These are the people that you need to surround yourself with. And guys, if you don’t have them. People listening, go find them, they’re out there. They’re out there, and those are the people that you follow. So the strikes, it was very natural for me to like you, Bill, I wanted to take the strikes, it was like a right of passage, it was like a bravado and ego, but fast forward, 10, 15 years after that, if somebody punched me towards a stomach or chest, I just went away, I took ’cause I realized, what can an strike teach me? What does 30 strikes teach me that one camp I can learn from one right away, I don’t need to have 30. I don’t need to be buckled over… Rolling around in pain. We do, we need to die to understand… To take care of our health. No, you can just say to yourself, I wanna be healthy, but that motivation of like, Oh my God, you’re gonna die from the doctor, and then I delete saying, no, sorry, I was wrong.

0:26:16.0 S2: I was reading the wrong chart, if you… If that made you realize all important, that was been great, but you don’t need that to improve yourself, so I would encourage people to surround yourself with good mentors because if it doesn’t sound right… It’s no good, right? Strike is one way. Another way I use pain, if you guys understand good pain is the cold water dosing right here, that’s not gonna kill you. Just go outside. The neighbors might think you’re a little crazy, but even if you go outside in the cold, like say some real cool temperature and just for two minutes at night in shorts, don’t start moving your line, that would be to really think you’re crazy. But if I just go outside in the cold with, let’s say a T-shirt and shorts, and again, we’re talking minus 100, so it’s pretty cool by and just stay out there for two minutes, you won’t die, you’ll be called, and you’ll get inside and guess what will happen is, your body will respond positive and guarantee you for those you to think that fasting for one day, not eating anything for a dates, not being some water, maybe a tiny bit of juice or how much more energy you’re gonna have…

0:27:36.1 S2: Suffering things only will make you stronger, so start small, fast for 16 hours, and if that goes Good, try a day you want… ’cause I know people that do my grandma used the is from 40 days, 40 days, no Shelby fruits and made tools for 40 days, and many days she didn’t be healthier than you could believe called water does go on… This is a win half, look at what he’s doing with cold water, there’s nothing but health benefit now, I wouldn’t start that extreme thing, you could progress something to go to that both those things. Hunger, pain, and pay. It’s a pain. It doesn’t matter. Right. Where I really find my training goes to a different level is when I go to the dentist, that’s an interesting one, guys, because oral pain, like when the dentist is picking with needles and pins, that is really hard to stay calm and it’s amazing. I’m sitting there and I’m that hour that I’m at the dentist and he’s cleaning my teeth and punching sensitive parts, I’m lying there and I realized I’m relaxed but my toes are like this, you realize how the pain is bouncing the other parts of my body, right? So I use that time for training, that’s by pain training, ’cause that’s the pain I really don’t like, even though I know it won’t kill me, so take every opportunity for those listening, there’s gonna be pain in our life and try to kinda get to know them and find the root causes of them and the ones that won’t kill you, try to go deeper in from…

0:29:14.9 S2: But take that benefits, don’t do it for ego, like you were saying with punches, right? You’re like, What is the source of this? If the source makes you a better person, you… You don’t know because when I fast the next day, I’m like, I have so much energy bill, I feel great when I go through the cold, cold water or cold exposure. I feel spectacular. I feel so healthy, I don’t feel angry, I feel calm, I don’t feel sick, I feel healthy. So I use my body as a barometer of sensing if I eat something like guys, anybody, if you have a really shitty pizza, next day, you feel shady, it’s just how it is. If you’re around a person that’s annoying, you know, because you flagged just your body is communicating, pain being may be an extreme version, but it’s so communicating with you, so our…

0:30:07.3 S1: A lot of times, I think by the time we’re at the pain point, we’ve ignored… Yes. Or a long it. For me, well, you know my story, I just located in my left knee four times, I did get at the first three, so it was that continuing to push and ignore and stick my head in the sand, and it’s like, Oh, I’ll be fine. And then finally, it gets to a point where it’s like my body couldn’t be ignored anymore, it’s going to knock loud enough until you’re having that crisis in your life… Or it has to be paid attention to.

0:30:52.1 S2: Well, it was only in system that the gift of self-reflection was given to me, like other arts talked about it, but they never delved into it deeply, so the real gift of systemic to me is that it asks students to kinda get to know potholes and when you do that, you can listen to Pride and you go, anger in law and hate and pain, what some people watching it, it might seem maybe barbaric or confusing to people, but in real life, you need to be ready for the good things in the ugly… You need both to survive, you can’t just be surrounded with good things… Life is not like that. You need to understand how it really works. It has its ups and downs, and we have to be ready for the ugly stuff, we have to read it, the beautiful stuff. And both are evident. Both are evident. So I encourage people to make sure that they’re looking at those things and seeing it from the big picture, pain is just… It’s no different than joy. It’s just a different expression. It has joy, has many things to teach you, and so his pain, maybe not one you like, but it’s still teaching you something…

0:32:05.1 S2: This is important.

0:32:09.0 S1: I have a note here about examples, you’ve been teaching martial arts for decades, and was curious if there’s anything that in your observation of students, how they trip themselves up when training with pain… Well.

0:32:28.0 S2: They do it to themselves. Like you said, like you said, the signs are there, they’re just not listening. Before something, there were signs that my knee was not stable before, because the way I was working out was I was over-developing one part of my knee, and then the perfect storm happened when there was a collision and the knee was forced to support all my body weight, and at which point it wasn’t stable and it blew the way that it was lacking support, so think of your body as a bridge… I think of the suspension bridges, if you go and loosen one of those cables, the bridge is not secured now that your body is full of muscles, and if you are not equally stretch equally stretching and strengthening all those that under some pressure that’s gonna break… That’s just how that works. So training should… What I love to when I’m teaching students is when I put them through a series of exercises, not just to get stronger, but so that they see where the weaknesses are and their body, and then now, and I talk to fixing those weaknesses and you give them some solution, so a good teacher should kind of…

0:33:40.0 S2: I guess I’ll tell you what to do, but kind of shine a light in those dark spots where you might wanna look at… You can’t force somebody to do something, but talking about my journey and the pitfalls opens up for other students as well to feel that way, so making sure that we communicate that nobody comes perfect to martial arts, nobody comes perfect for life, we need… It’s a constant refinement process, so training should not just be about bettering another person, that doesn’t make me happy. Yeah, okay, sure. I can wrestle with somebody and beat them a little bit, but that might not be my main goal, my main goal might be an arrest in extreme to realize that I’ve held my breath and I’ve upset myself. The main goal… About two years ago, I love riding my bike. I like getting out and doing some cycling, and I realized that I really love cycling for an hour and a half, maybe two hours, anything after that bill? I just get a nose, I get mad at myself, I don’t know why, I just get it. I’m like, I feel like there’s gotta be something better to do with my life and this…

0:34:50.7 S2: Like, Why am I… So I love it, and I realized because a lot of the road cyclist, they love, Oh, I’m going for three hours or four hours, I’m gonna do 100 kilometers, I’m like, but my body is happy at an hour and a half. Why do I wanna push into this uncomfortable place, I love wrestling with somebody to understand movement and breathing and effort and squat and feel healthy, if I get to the point where I’m trying to beat another person, it upsets me a little bit ’cause I don’t need it there’s no purpose for this… To me, I have no purpose, I’m not trying to win the US and I’m not trying to… I don’t wanna do the ego because I find when I start doing that, you build ego, I would send her train and push myself in a different way, then do that, so everybody makes their own decisions and you wanna make sure that whatever you’re doing, whether it’s cycling or martial arts, or tennis or go… How many golfers have I seen angry? I can’t believe it, because they’re just so trying to be the next PGA Star, I just need to tell me I’m gonna be the next PJ star guy.

0:35:54.0 S2: Why don’t you take golf as a wonderful walk, a fresh air and a skill that takes a long time to develop and just enjoy it, enjoy that process and start being happy when you make a good shot inside when you make a bad shot. How about you just be… How about you just enjoy the outdoors, and that perspective takes a while to fix, so I try to look at students to make sure that I’m shaping their perspective. Not necessarily a specific skill set. If you’ve got the right perspective, I mean, life is easy, I don’t need to tell you what job to do, it’s like the perspective that you need to have it, make sure… And this comes down to mood, because if you’re happy, you’re probably more likely to do it, right, if you’re agitated, you’re probably not gonna do it for long. So this is a real tricky point when you’re teaching students and when you’re guiding people, is to… What makes them happy? Yeah, that’s really important. It’s really important.

0:36:54.7 S1: It almost… And what I resonated with with myself is finding that calm base line, like creating this calm baseline in your life, and a lot of times, we aren’t surrounded by those people that create dot com baseline, that are surrounded by people that are actually instigating and causing discomfort or disharmony in our baseline, and then we’re acting out, and I’ve seen that in my life in the past, acting out ways that are working out that irritation in the neurology in our nervous system in our body. Yes, the pain is a result of figuring out that… That doesn’t work so well. Sometimes.

0:37:48.3 S2: Yeah, so the way I might explain it to people that maybe they can into you take a piece of paper and just look long way and draw a line down the middle, that line should represent… You’re not happy. Not side, right in the middle. That’s like, so I’m just content. I’m not overly happy, I’m not overly side, I’m just content, and our life, for the most part, should go above that, sometimes below it, a little bit above that, but my compass is always towards the middle, if I get too happy that things are good, I always kind of look towards the middle. I don’t get too happy and when I start to get sad, I don’t go to the… IT always guides me to the middle because the middle is, I find that make my best decisions in the middle, when you’re too happy, you kind of do things that you shouldn’t do, and when you’re two side, you do things you shouldn’t do to… Right, so it’s kind of like I think of eating guys, I always come back ’cause eating is one of these subconscious things, right, when everything is just fine in life, you don’t crave the sugar, you don’t create those comfort foods and you’re just in a good place.

0:39:00.3 S2: I don’t overeat, I tend to eat the right foods. Now, that doesn’t mean that in life, I can’t get overly excited, like let’s say up is really happy. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I don’t stay there. It’s not that I don’t like being happy, but I understand that you don’t live there, you was kind of in the middle somewhere. I really enjoy that. I just find that the middle ground is where you make your best decisions, you make your sound is decisions, and vice versa, whenever I go real down and pain or maybe get angry or upset, I might be there, but I’m always looking to that middle, I’m always… That’s kind of… So think of a car that’s kind of got a of control, I’m not looking at the ditch, they tell you in driving to look where you wanna go, and the car gets pointed there, right. So it’s like I’m always looking to the middle because I find that that’s the place that you can make an honest reflection of yourself, but this is who I really am, I… This is really good. Great, so try to gear yourself that life will move left, it will move right, it will move up and we’ll move down, but look in the middle, that’s really where you wanna…

0:40:10.5 S2: Your compass should be kind of always lead you back, I always kind of… So we can go off this course, but we’re always kind of pointed down that growth, this way, you find you, you’ll be in better harmony with life. So it’s real harmony. It’s like, What do we preach? Give and take, I get an energy. But I don’t hold it, I get it. That’s what we’re doing right now, it… I’m sharing my energy and my time with viewers, and hopefully they get some energy of sorts and that they wanna give it up to people, we live in harmony in this world, we give and we take… We don’t just give… Or we don’t just take it so important to be in it, if that might help people understand it, you’re always guiding into that middle direction, so I’m just content, which is so good, just so perfect, I don’t… It’s so, so important to have… That helps.

0:41:07.4 S1: Yeah, no, I think it’s fantastic, and I think it’s a good place to tie this up. Many day. Do you think we can get maybe a breath training or something that we can put up on the site?

0:41:24.9 S2: Oh, of course, yeah, yeah. I’ve got a video, I’ve got a series, but about five or six, 10 or 50-minute clips of me kind of walking somebody through some basic breathing that is… It’s a starting point. It’s just a starting point. It’s not meant as something you do for the next 10 years, you don’t try it, let it guide you. And I tell people, If we change to happen, 90 days is a good amount. Like three months and 30 days, they say, to change a habit, but you need to start another line and it… You know what, easily look at it like if I was a body builder, I would need 12 weeks to see an adaptation, that’s the amount of time that a muscle can tear, repair, and you can start to see your result, so that’s the psychological and the internal stuff I will take that long to… So what’s 90 days in relations to your life? You can just practice breathing for 10 minutes a day, that’s all… Just 10 minutes a day. It’ll make a huge difference. I can definitely. Sure, that’d be great.

0:42:46.2 S1: Perfect. And Manny, how could someone get in touch with you… Well, I’ll have all this information in the show notes of this. But how do I hate? Reach out to you.

0:42:57.2 S2: By website, has my phone number. It has my email address. That’s probably the best way to start. I mean, hot. More information is there. There’s just never been a time in our history. It’s easier to connect with people, so they should take advantage of that. For sure. Yeah, definitely.

0:43:14.9 S1: I’m definitely reachable. Okay, well, I’ll include all of that in the show notes. Many, I wanna thank you so much for being here. It was great having you here and… So we’re gonna wrap this up. This is Bill Parravano, the Knee Pain Guru, going to end this edition of the pain education podcast, brought to you by the Comella Foundation.