If you’ve been watching my videos in July, you’d have noticed I have some skin marks on my left hand. Those are… Warts. For some reason I’ve been having lots of warts and since I’m about to leave my job soon I thought it would be good to go to the dermatologist and get them taken care of now.
The procedure to remove warts is to freeze them. Holy crap! They hurt a lot more than you’d expect. It’s always interesting to observe my reaction to pain, this tendency to lock up and freeze in tension.
The first freezing session removed a bunch of warts but some of them stayed. In the follow-up session I had the past Friday, we did a second pass on the remaining warts. It hurt a lot, but I had expected the quality of pain and I was able to force myself to move a little bit in between the freezes.
Now, on my foot there is this thing I thought was a corn but the doctor said it was also a wart. He froze that too. You’d think the foot would hurt less, but actually the foot hurts a LOT more. That was the case on the first visit, and it was the case on the second visit as well.
Then come today, there is this excruciating pain on my foot because the freeze must be thawing and recovering. It formed a giant blister and I can’t put the slightest pressure on my foot because it hurts so much. So I started walking with my foot curled outwards.
But after a few hours of walking like that, my knees started to hurt. Then after a few hours, my hips started to hurt. Now my entire back feels frozen and I’ve just been in agony with my entire body, all because of a wart on my foot.
Injuries tend to have a cascading effect. Over time your entire body becomes a coddling vessel for the injury even at the expense of its own comfort.
This must be respected.
The body does this so the injury can heal. When you burn your fingers, your earlobes are happy to take the heat off. When your hands are cold, your armpits gladly provide the warmth. Although your body parts may be separate, it serves one body.
This selfless tendency of the body and mind is usually framed as a problem. “I’m too sensitive”, “I feel frozen all the time”, “I can’t make that kind of a big leap”. We take these problems and want to solve them so that we can become someone better.
But we have to be careful with the nuance here. There IS definitely a chance that you are too sensitive. There are some less than ideal things about feeling frozen all the time. The inability to make big leaps sometimes are problematic. It is the unilateral labeling of inner experiences as “bad” that we have to be cautious about.
We must respect the body and mind as a teacher. Taking it back to me, instead of looking to solve my knee pain and hip pain I must tend to my foot. I need to listen to the individual pains of the other parts and ask it, “how did you come to be? What are you protecting? How can I help you” to get to the root.
By engaging with our cascaded pain points we can achieve two great reliefs: relief of their own pressure, and helpful wisdom about how to heal what the pain point is protecting. Working to amplify and compound the healing process following the natural process will give you a powerful blueprint to follow in discovering yourself.
So today, I spent the day mostly reclining and doing compresses. What will the body teach me tomorrow? I’ll find out by learning from it.
Billy Seol
July Life Coach
julylifecoach.com
