On Pain and Wellness

I apologize to my one or two faithful readers (I know there must be a couple of you out there who read this) for my lack of posting. I am a programmer by trade, and when things get busy, I spend 8+ hours a day in front of a computer. So when I'm not working, the last thing I want to do is be on a computer.
When I last posted, I was complaining about a pain in my shoulder. It got much worse as Friday went on, and stayed worse over the weekend. Whereas before it would go away once I relaxed, by the end of the day Friday no amount of deep breathing and meditation was helping. I was thinking "what did I do to cause this?" and could come up with nothing.
I made an appointment with my chiropractor on Monday. He made some adjustments in my spine, but nothing too drastic. But his diagnosis was a revelation. What he said was that I hadn't done anything; my problem was in my lower back, not my shoulder. As my body returned to proper alignment, the old injuries began to resurface. And when I thought about it, duh!
There was a reason my body shifted into the misalignment in the first place. It was the body's own palliative effort to mask the pain from some long-forgotten injury. As I began to correct myself through chiropractic intervention and my own attention to posture, the old injury could no longer hide. It's a basic tenet of holistic healing.
Sometimes you can't help getting caught up in the mindset of allopathic medicine and it's emphasis on palliative remedies. And while allopathic medicine can do amazing things, the great failing is that it too often confuses the symptoms with the disease.
The lesson to take forward here is that in all things, we hold metaphoric postures for certain reasons. What Coach Ilg refers to as the ego is really your spirit's own efforts to spare you from pain. But as we move back along the continium towards cure, there are roadblocks to work through, which manifest themselves as pain.

My shoulder still hurts a little, but I recognize it for what it is: a sign that I am moving in the right direction. It is more important now than ever that I remain mindful of my posture, to rewire my body into alignment. I am back in the gym this week, and I plan on a very challenging run on Thursday. I am looking forward to it.

Namaste