Many years ago, I developed debilitating back pain that seemed to come from nowhere. It started gradually but then escalated quickly, reaching a point where I couldn’t sit or bend without excruciating pain.
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Driving became difficult. Putting on socks was nearly impossible. When I stood up from sitting, it took a minute before I could walk, and even then, it was slow, stiff and awkward, like someone three times my age.
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Like most people, I did everything I could to discover what was wrong and ultimately find relief. I had the tests: X-rays, MRIs, scans. The diagnosis? Mild disc bulging and some degeneration. Nothing dramatic. Still, it provided the ‘reason’ for the pain and was enough to send me to physiotherapy.

I booked an appointment with a physiotherapist who came highly recommended. From the moment we met, it was clear that he was the expert. He had a lot to tell me about what was wrong with me.

Then he did something I will never forget.

He pulled out a roll of duct tape and began taping across my lower back. He also gave me a single assignment: go home and notice when I felt the tape pull. His goal, he explained, was to help me become aware of how I was moving in ways that made my condition worse.

So, like a good little student, desperate to get better, I followed the assignment.
But here’s the thing: I felt the tape pull at least ten times before I even made it out of his office.

For the next seven days, getting dressed, reaching for something, using the toilet, getting into bed, standing up from a chair… everything I did to live a basic life pulled the tape. And over the course of that week, my fear, panic and despair spread like wildfire.

By the time I returned to see him, I was terrified of moving. He removed the tape, gave me a treatment and somehow, the pain was worse than it had ever been. I couldn’t understand how something that was supposed to help had made everything feel so much worse.

I never went back. And thank goodness for that. No shade on physiotherapists, but in this case, it was the best decision I could have made.

I think about that week often, not because of the physical pain, but because of how powerful that messaging was.

It shaped how I saw myself. I stopped trusting my body. I started bracing against everything: movement, rest, pleasure even help. I wanted to get better, but every attempt to heal left me feeling more broken.

I tried a few more practitioners. Some were gentler. They offered ice, massage and laser treatment. And all of them had a caring and positive intention to heal and serve.

But the underlying message was still the same:
You need fixing. And the fix will come from someone who knows better than you.

It’s subtle, but that belief that my body was a problem to be solved had stuck with me. It lived in the way I moved, the way I talked about my pain, the way I held myself when I walked into appointments. I was always waiting for someone to fix me. Always afraid I’d make it worse.

Years later, I was in a minor car accident causing whiplash, and my insurance sent me to yet another physiotherapist. I had my doubts that it would be helpful but I had nothing to lose by trying.

Fortunately, this time was very very different.
In fact, it was a pivotal moment with a ripple effect reaching much further than just my physical pain.

At my first appointment, they asked questions, lots of them. Not just “Where does it hurt?” but “What do you miss doing? What feels good in your body? How do you want to feel?”

And then they said something I’ll never forget:
You’ll get back to all of it. Yoga, biking, dancing, hiking, lifting weights, moving furniture on a whim… none of it is off the table. You are not broken.

I didn’t realize how badly I needed to hear those words until I heard them. I felt something shift inside me, like someone had cracked open a window in a room I didn’t know was suffocating me.

That one sentence gave me hope. And that hope was powerful.

Hope invited me to try something radically different: to stop approaching my body with fear, and start approaching it with trust.

Instead of asking “What’s wrong with me?” I started asking, “What do I need right now?”
Instead of waiting for someone to give me the green light to move again, I began to move gently, curiously and even joyfully.

I wasn’t trying to beat the pain. I was learning how to be with myself within it.

I started swimming regularly and resumed my yoga practice, just skipping the poses that weren’t accessible. I started making plans again and showing up to activities accepting that I may need to modify a bit, and that my friends would be okay with that.

Most importantly, I stopped telling myself the story that I needed to limit my life. I stopped labelling and defining myself as someone with chronic pain.

And slowly, things changed. My pain began to ease. My movements became more fluid. But more than that, my relationship with my body shifted.

I stopped seeing it as the enemy.
I stopped treating it like a fragile object.
I stopped outsourcing my healing.
I started partnering with myself.

In hindsight, the real shift wasn’t just physical. It was relational. I had spent years living in a split between my mind and my body. My mind was always trying to manage, control, and “fix” what my body was doing. And my body, under constant scrutiny, was stuck in survival mode.

That fracture between my thinking self and my feeling self was where so much of my suffering lived.

What helped me heal wasn’t a miracle treatment. It was realizing that my disc bulging and degeneration are normal abnormalities that lots of people have without experiencing pain. But the thoughts I was having about it, that is where I was truly limited.

That experience didn’t just help my pain. It also changed the way I relate to others. I don’t see people as problems to fix. I see stories. I see complexity. I see the wisdom that already lives inside them.

I often return to these questions now:
What if our bodies aren’t broken, but brilliant?
What if pain isn’t a sign of failure, but a signal?
A signal that asks for slowness, gentleness, or change?

We live in a culture obsessed with fixing. We’re encouraged to seek fast answers, quick relief, and external authority. But healing, in my experience, has more to do with coming home to ourselves than escaping our symptoms.

And sometimes, that “coming home” starts with someone simply holding up a mirror that says: You are already whole.

If you're in pain, whether it’s physical, emotional, or both, I just want to say: I see you.

I know how disorienting it is. How lonely. How easy it is to believe the story that something is wrong with you. And I know that your experience is yours and can’t be compared with mine or anyone else’s.

I’m also not saying that the pain isn’t real or that the diagnosis is meaningless.

But I want to offer the possibility that you may have more agency in your healing than you’ve been led to believe. And that another story could be true. Not the story of overnight recovery or perfect health, but one where you move from fear to trust. From helplessness to partnership. A story of hope and infinite potential…

And maybe that starts not with a treatment, but with a question:
What might change if you believed your body wasn’t broken?