Hot Takes on Healing + the Medical System

This is shoulder week in all of my yoga classes 💪

I have absolutely loved nerding out with people about the shoulders! What a cool joint! It can move through a greater range of motion than any other joint in the body! This makes it a pretty complicated space and also an easier joint to mess up and also a more difficult joint to heal if you do mess it up.

I, unfortunately, have injured my shoulder in the past.

I was not training in a smart way. I was pushing too hard, doing risky things because I was dead set on achieving my flexibility goals. I went to many doctors, saw many physical therapists, got cortisol shots and none of it healed me.

I have been so disenchanted with the medical system for a very long time. I’ve had 3 ACL + meniscus reconstructions, injured my shoulder, ankle, wrist, you name it. I’ve always found doctors to be

• Insensitive (they don’t understand what my body means to me)

• Not understand my circus/aerial needs

• Closed minded

• Unhelpful

In physical therapy, I have always found my physical therapists to be

• Uncreative

• Give cookie-cutter solutions

• Also have no frame of reference for the demands I put on my body for my sport/art

Yoga has been the only practice that has actually been helpful and healing for me, because it’s taught me how to understand my own body, and also rewire the mental patterns that kept bringing me back to injury.

No one knows your body better than you do.

Doctors may know “the body” better than you do, but your body is unique, and what you’ve been through is unique, and every physical and emotional experience that you’ve ever been through combined with your ancestral and genetic lineage has contributed your unique physical expression.

No one in the world moves in the exact way that you do.

This is a double edged sword, because that also means that the onus is on you to figure out what it is that you need to save yourself. You have to put in the effort. And a lot of people don’t! We are sold the idea that someone else can heal you. But the truth is, healing can never come from outside of you.

Doctors and “healers” can give you substances that change your experience, that can reconstruct you in a way that will make healing easier for your body, but as far as the actual mechanics of healing on cellular level and putting your body back together?

That’s all you.

So you have to decide: is it worth it to you to put in the required focus and effort to really listen to and learn from your body what it needs to not only live pain-free, but also love the physical sensations of being in your body? Is your experience of being in your own life worth it to you?

By Aleena Glinski