Good Pain vs. Bad Pain: How to Tell the Difference

Wake-Up Call #40

2007.

I’m alone, which is probably dumb.

Running on a dirt trail on a hot summer day, in a pretty isolated section of woods along the Hudson River.

Cresting a short, spiky rise, I head down the other side—and disaster strikes.

My foot lands on a jagged root, and my ankle rolls violently. I hear a loud snapping noise as my body tumbles into the brush.

Everything starts to swell. I feel nauseous, dizzy, and sweaty. I take a deep breath, trying to steady myself until my eyes refocus.

No one knows where I am. I didn’t leave a message. The family is out.

I push myself up and begin to hobble my way back home, grabbing trees to support me. By the time I drag myself through the front door, a few hours have passed. My foot is now purple, engorged, and killing me.

The next morning, I make an emergency visit to the orthopedist. He’s a top guy at the Hospital for Special Surgery. I remember hopping down 79th Street on the West Side of Manhattan, my wife, Stephanie, serving as a human crutch.

X-rays reveal it’s a clean break, which sounds good but is actually bad. The cuboid bone is split in two. There’s a risk that the pieces will heal out of position if I continue walking on it, meaning permanent issues.

I leave with my foot taped, my lower leg in an air-cast, and crutches under my arms. The instructions are clear: For the next month, I can’t put any weight on that leg—not the slightest bit of pressure.

By the end of the month, I have triceps of steel.

Month two, I’m still on crutches but slowly allowed to weight the busted foot while the air-cast distributes most of the pressure into my shin.

At the beginning of month three, I return to the doctor. X-rays say I’m healed.

“Do your thing,” he says, “but be gentle. Let your pain be your guide.”

I go home, walking unassisted for the first time in months.

Problem is, every step still causes intense pain. I’m limping everywhere, convinced something is wrong. The doctor must’ve missed something.

I call. “Something’s not healing right. It shouldn’t hurt this much.”

“Everything’s fine,” he says. “The bone is healed.”

He then gives me a lesson on pain that has stayed with me.

He explains how my month on crutches, while necessary, also caused significant issues. The muscle atrophies, and the connective tissue becomes constricted and adhered. Sliding surfaces stop sliding and, instead, start sticking.

“I know it hurts,” he says, “but you’ve got to keep walking on it. The pain is real, but it’s not doing you harm. If you don’t keep using it, the tissue will never remodel. And the pain and limitation may be there for life.”

This, he tells me, is the only way for the muscle to rebuild and the connective tissue to become unstuck and pattern itself back into something more functional.

I’m skeptical. I mean, I know my body. But he’s a top foot ortho at the best place in NYC. And, I realize, I don’t know my body when it’s broken in this particular way.

I suspend judgment. And walk.

For weeks, the pain remains. It shouldn’t hurt this much. But it does.

Still, I keep walking.

“You are doing no harm,” he said. “And avoiding the pain might do more harm.”

Over time, the pain starts to ease. It takes a good six months before it’s gone. My mobility is back.

Damned if he wasn’t right.

I’m pretty body-aware. I’ve studied, practiced, and taught various forms of movement for decades and trained hundreds of teachers. I “shouldn’t” need someone else to tell me what is good or bad for my body.

But this was different. New territory. I couldn’t rely on my usual inner database for answers because I hadn’t experienced this before.

My study and experience didn’t equip me to determine whether the pain that followed my time on crutches was good pain (to be leaned into and worked through) or bad pain (a signal to stop).

Of course, this isn’t just about broken bones. It’s about life.

We all will experience pain.

Sometimes it’s rooted in physical injury or illness. Other times, it’s psychological or emotional. And, because the mind and body are, as legendary researcher Ellen Langer once told me, one unified system, it’s always both.

There will be times we have the knowledge, experience, and intuition needed to navigate through the abyss effectively.

Other times, we need to own our ignorance, fall on the sword of vulnerability, and seek guidance from those who know better whether what we’re feeling is good pain or bad pain.

Either because we’re too close to the sensation emotionally and physically to make an intelligent decision. Or because we simply don’t have the knowledge and experience needed to translate the signals.

One of the strongest moves we can make in every aspect of life is to own when surrender becomes strength.

Hell, these days, I’m fairly confident that I’m certain of nothing. Except love and death.

It’s actually kind of fun to not have to know it all (sorry, Mom and Dad, for the decades before this grand awakening!).

Life gets better—we heal, rise, connect, and thrive—more fully and quickly when we open ourselves to receiving guidance from those who can see what we’re missing and are qualified to offer insight we don’t have.

With a whole lot of love and gratitude,

Jonathan

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Wake-Up Call #40 | Good Pain, Bad Pain

Ask yourself, “Is there something I’m grappling with right now that is causing me pain?”

Physical, psychological, emotional, existential? It all counts.

Then, get quiet and ask, “Am I truly in the best position to discern whether it is good pain (leads to growth, healing, and expansion) or bad pain (leads to contraction, damage, and degradation)?”

And, if you want to get really Buddhist about it, you can even explore the notion that all circumstance is empty, and whether the pain is good or bad is about the story we tell to make sense of it.

Either way, if you have even an inkling that you might not entirely know which it is, find someone not named you, ask for help, and hold your big, bad, “I know everything” mind (just me?) open to receiving and acting upon it.

As always, think on it, walk with it, and if you feel inclined, share your thoughts and experiences in the comments.