If you've ever found yourself lying down in a yoga class, you may have been challenged to place one hand on your heart and one on your belly. Then the cue follows to "breathe air into your belly" so that your belly hand rises towards the ceiling and your heart hand remains relatively still. Other than perhaps frustrate you or cause some confusion, what is the purpose of this? Belly breathing, or diaphragmatic breathing, means that as you inhale, your diaphragm moves down to

Pain. It's a complicated thing. Thank goodness, a lot of research goes into figuring out pain. What is it? Where does it come from? Without going too far down THAT rabbit hole, I'm going to focus on one aspect of pain. Due to pain's complexity, it is not completely useful to only focus on getting rid of it. Why? Because pain is so contextual. Let me give you an example. Last week, there was a rainy and all around glum day. Over 75% of the patients that came in the

Wow, this is some heavy stuff. It's a great "chicken or the egg" paradox. Which came first? Did the injury/pain jump start some tough mental thoughts and emotions or were the mental "habits" already there? Although I am not a counselor, psychologist, or psychiatrist, I am a witness to these mental states in the clinic on a daily basis and so I wanted to talk about them. When we understand our minds and bodies, we shed fear and gain compassion for ourselves, which is param

This is a post I wrote in Wordpress in 2017. I was a little more blunt (possibly crass) then, but it still holds true. Since I don't use my Wordpress account anymore, I would like to share this post here: "I'm thankfully over the hump of my injury and starting to see improvement with significantly decreased pain and increased tolerance to jogging some slow miles.  When we are in a slump, we don't "see" clearly.  So I wanted to write about this now so that if this ever happen