57: LIVING WITH CHRONIC PAIN AND DEPRESSION? HEAL WITH EGOSCUE!

Chronic pain, posture alignment, healing, depression, faith, and practical tools for restoring balance in body and mind.

View all LINKS and supporting content mentioned in this episode HERE: https://imaquarius.com/living-with-chronic-pain/

In this episode of Depression Healing Tools for Followers of Jesus Christ, Jennifer talks with John Cattermole, a physical therapist and posture alignment practitioner with decades of experience helping people address chronic pain and improve physical function.

The conversation explores the connection between physical posture, chronic pain, depression, anxiety, emotional patterns, personal responsibility, resilience, and Christian faith. John discusses the importance of staying curious rather than becoming trapped in resignation or learned helplessness.  He and Jennifer also discusses sauna therapy, cold plunges, BPC-157, shin splints, proprioception, vestibular function, balance, and body awareness, along with important distinctions between supportive wellness practices and emergency medical care.

Throughout the conversation, Jennifer and John connect physical healing with biblical principles, including Jesus healing the bent-over woman in Luke 13 and the lessons of hope and restoration found in the Book of Job.

If you are struggling with chronic pain, depression, anxiety, physical limitations, or discouragement, this episode encourages you to remain curious, discover what you can control, seek appropriate help, and consider how faith and practical action can work together on the journey toward greater resilience and healing.

This episode of Depression Healing Tools for Followers of Jesus Christ is for You if You Want to Learn

• How depression healing and emotional well-being can connect with your physical body and posture.
• How to understanding whole-body alignment and work toward a pain-free life.
• How posture alignment therapy targets patterns that contribute to recurring pain.
• How to better understand your body through movement, balance, and proprioception.
• How to take greater personal responsibility for your health, build resilience, and move forward from depression, pain, and injury.
• How Christian faith can shape the way you approach pain and healing.

Transcript

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Today I am with my good friend John Cattermole, who has been practicing posture alignment therapy for the last 20 years in Phoenix, Arizona. Prior to that, John started out as a regular physical therapist, but after 25 years of watching patients struggle with unresolved pain, he began looking for other solutions because he could see that the conventional treatments he was using were not addressing the root of his clients'problems. That's when John became a student of Pete Egoskew. Since then, John has learned how to treat and heal the body as a whole rather than as individual parts, so that his clients now enjoy a holistic approach to pain resolution. And let me tell you, it really does work. And I'm so grateful I found you, John, because I know my life would have been a lot more painful without you. Let's just put it that way. Well, thank you. It's an honor to be here with you and to be able to talk about something that excites me, and I hope will be useful for your listeners. I wanted to start by sharing how we actually connected, because I was starting to train as a firefighter, of all things. I'm 5'3"and was being asked to lift sometimes 180 pounds, 100, 120 on a regular basis, doing stair climbing. It was a lot. I was in very good shape, but I was putting my body through a lot of stress, and I've always had kind of a propensity for injury. Even as an athlete, I would have aches and pains, and I started getting some serious aches and pains that were threatening to become an injury, and I knew it, and I didn't want that to get in my way. I was talking to a friend, and she recommended this book that she had been reading called"Pain Free"by Pete Egoskew. I felt the spirit confirm, like, yes, that is the thing. Go that way. And so I got the book off Amazon. I think I paid$4 for it, and I think it sold around 50,000 copies. I love having access to that book, but then I learned that there's actually a clinic here in Phoenix that could help me to cater exercises to my own body, because the book has some great exercises in it. But even looking at the exercises, I was wondering, am I even doing these right? Like, I kind of want some mentorship to hone these in. I visited John, and he got me started on this program. I had, like, zero money at the time, and I'm like, what can you do for me? He was so kind. He got me started, and I kid you not, I did them religiously. It was about a half-hour commitment every day, but the pain subsided. I was able to complete the entire program with the firefighting, did not get injured. Not only that, I graduated at the top of my class, so it was a lifesaver for me. And I've been able to go back to these exercises again because they're so catered to my own body. It's not like you just go in and then, okay, here's the program, one, two, three. It's specifically to help what's going on with you. And I think you said there's something like 1,000 different exercises you can pull from, and some of them I still use to this day that I'll be kind of sore. I'll be like, I know which one helps with this. It feels so good to have access to that knowledge. Yeah. There's really two points to highlight. You said we went through a program, and this isn't a short-term pain relief. This isn't like taking medication. This is about just teaching you how to take care of yourself, and you expressed that very well, that now you know how to take care of yourself. So I call it working myself out of a job. We teach you how to take responsibility for your own body, and then you're not as practitioner-dependent. So that's the long-term goal. Which is not a great business model. If you want people to keep coming back, you'll become a chiropractor, because you really do have to keep going back and keep going back and get realigned. And these you take them home, and you can always go back to them and realign yourself. Exactly. Exactly. So I think that's, you know, that's one of the key points is your ability to take care of yourself like that. The second one is it's not just, as I had said, this isn't it's looking at your body long-term. Like, how can we take care of it? You go, for instance, you go to a dentist and he fills a cavity. You're not done, right? He's going to tell you to do two things the rest of your life. If you want to avoid coming in to me, you're going to brush and floss. So think of posture alignment as brushing and flossing for your body. Yeah, exactly. When I first started working with you, I was really curious, how did Pete come up with this stuff? Because some of it's kind of weird. Yes. The way I describe it to people is that it's kind of a combination of yoga, Pilates, and chairo, all mixed into one. Right. Exercises that stretch and align. How did Pete Egoskew come up with these exercises? And when you told me this, you're like, um, he doesn't usually talk about this, but he told us because we're his students. Would you be willing to share with our audience what you shared with me? I'd be glad to. I'd love to tell Pete's story, and then I'd want to tell our story too and how we got into it. But let's go into Pete's. The bottom line, Pete is 80 years old this year, and he was a field lieutenant in Vietnam. And while he was there, he got infractures and ended up getting shot. The bullet he took was not in a, let's say, a vital area. It didn't hit a nerve or it didn't shatter a bone or vital organ. But he ended up, as a result of that, getting his one-way ticket back to the United States and to the VA. So they extracted the bullet, but he found he was in a pain experience. And the way he describes it is over the next three months, he's 23 years old, he's walking on a cane, and he says, I get these blinding flashes of red. And so I kept going back and saying, Doc, I want to get back in battle and take care of things. And so he went back enough times that the doctors finally said, well, the only thing we really have to offer you is a psych consult, because maybe a psychiatrist can help you deal with this thing in your head. Well, at that point, this young man was just kind of shocked that that would be the answer to his problem. And that's what the doctors were offering in 1969. So he had a very dark-thinking walk back to his truck. He sat on his tailgate, and he pondered his options. He went from the darkest option, which is, I can just be done with life because this pain is so bad, or maybe I just have to figure this out myself. And so that led him to buy, believe it or not, a great anatomy book. And so he bought this anatomy book. He's a political science major, graduated from Utah State, no healthcare background. So he read Grey's Anatomy with fresh new eyes, if you could call it that way. And so when he came across the basic teachings at the front of the book, it would say something like, the body is a bipedal machine with all the same muscles and bones on the left side as it has on the right side. He was like, oh, that makes sense. And he looked at his injured side, and he'd say, oh, okay, yeah, I can see that doesn't look like it's positioned the same way the other side is positioned. Maybe if I get that bad side to start moving in the same position as the other side, I'll start feeling better. So he just twisted it back into that position and screamed out in pain. That is what started it. He got intrigued. It's like, how do I get my body to start becoming more balanced? And I think he was deeply curious. That's what I tell my listeners all the time. Get curious. Yeah. It's a path that has an open end. It's not a dead-end way to think. It's an open-ended way to think. The dead-end way to think is, could this be the end of my life? Am I going to be like this the rest of my life? This is just the way it is. Yeah. Yes. Resignation. There's all sorts of ways that we can walk down that dead-end street and just live in learned helplessness or disappointment with life. He stayed curious, and within about three months, he was feeling really good. So he ended up going back to Vietnam and finishing out his tour. He was on the battlefield, and other people had hurt themselves. He started experimenting on their bodies to see how it could help them, and they were asking him. And then he would come home on leave, and then it would be friends and family. He started developing this pattern of looking at the body, but he really got the idea just from those basic information in Grey's Anatomy that the body functions as a unit. It doesn't function apart. So if you have a wrist pain, that doesn't necessarily mean you have a wrist problem. It may be somewhere else. Which is a weird consideration for a lot of people. They're like, well, it's right here. Why are we working on the foot? Right. Exactly. Exactly. My wrist hurts. Maybe if I rub my wrist, if I put some salve on my wrist, I'll feel better. But we can't get away from the holistic approach to life. Your value proposition for your folks is that the body, soul, and spirit are one thing, not separate things that we need to put in other categories. So we believe that about this specific human body. And I think there's a good argument from scriptures that that's true as well, because Paul, when he's arguing about what the body of Christ is, he uses the body as an example. The seemingly parts aren't the important parts. Every part is important. And that's certainly true, and we find that true with the human body when it comes to treating people with pain, in particular in our area, chronic pain. To add to what you're saying, there's some people, especially when I worked at the nursing home, they might not have even had an arm. Like, maybe they had it amputated, but they would be getting painkillers for that arm they didn't have because they were feeling pain in their right arm, but they didn't have a right arm. It's just interesting because obviously they're still feeling pain, but there's no logical reason why they should be feeling that pain. Is it a spiritual one? Is it a mental one? It's certainly not a physical one. If they're feeling it in their arm they don't have. Right. You know, my physical therapy career, this was way before I thought about posture, but it puzzled me. So, for instance, most of your listeners will be familiar with the idea of sciatica. Sciatica is something in your pelvis or your hips that is causing a radiating pain, oftentimes to the foot. Okay. So even in medicine, they say, hey, there's a source of the pain, and then there's the effect of the pain. I would ask these doctors who I highly respected at the time, why wouldn't there just be pain where the disc was herniated or where the muscle tightness in their glutes were causing the problem? Why wouldn't the pain just stay there? They would give kind of an opinion, but they would eventually get to the point of saying, we don't know. We know that it is, but we don't have an answer on why pain or a problem can be located at one part of the body and show up as pain in another part of the body. So even then, I was wrestling with that thought, like, why does this work this way? It wasn't until I saw posture alignment that I thought, okay, now I see what that's all about. Awesome. So what is your story? What got you into all of this? You kind of touched on it. I've been married going on 46 years. She had gone through some cancer experiences, and one, her cancer was in her throat. And one of the experiences, they had to extract 45 lymph nodes. They did what they called a red echo neck dissection. And after she had that, she ended up with horrendous pain in her ear and in the top of her head and down her arm. It was unrelenting. Fortunately, she married a guy who's in physical therapy. And so I did the best I could. I pulled out all the tools I had to try to support her. And the best I could do with those skills is give her some temporary relief for an hour or so. But this pain kept coming. And Jennifer, she's a lot like you. She would not take any pain medication if she could avoid it. She just doesn't do that. So that's her. But she was in pain that made her cry. She literally couldn't sleep the entire night. So we realized we were going to have to look for other resources, that physical therapy wasn't going to take her to the next level. And I was talking to a vendor who provided us electric stimulation units in the clinic, and he said, well, you know, if that's your situation with her, I was going to have to retire from sales because I had this back pain and it was going down both legs and I couldn't drive, and my job required me to drive hundreds of miles a week. And I said, well, what did you do? He said, I met this guy named Pete. And I said, is he a doctor? Nope. And he was elusive about it. Is he a therapist? Nope. Is he a chiropractor? Nope. He's just this interesting guy. And I said, what have I found? Those are the people that I find. So that's why I'm always telling people, look outside of what you think you know or what society is telling you you should do. The answers that God has for you are usually not the ones that man does. Yeah. Just keep an open mind. Yeah. The people that have the answers that you need may not be a doctor. Right. Right. And they can be both subtle in terms of finding those people and obvious at the same time. It's very interesting. Yeah. So that's the way it worked for us. And so we found out about Pete. He lived in the Los Angeles area. Pete was in the San Diego area. So we drove down there and we were a single-income family with six kids. But I said, I don't care. We're going to pay the price time-wise and money-wise and get Billie back to where she needs to be. So we went down there once, and on our first time, she started getting very significant changes. And that doesn't mean she was out of pain right away, but she could tell that the exercises themselves were making a change. And that was enough to motivate her to stay in the program the entire time. So I do remember, and this is part of the story I wanted to lead to, is she had a bad night. Like you, she's in pain and she's still painting the ceiling and painting the walls. And I happened to be on an education event with this method. And so I come back and said, okay, let's use the exercise and create some balance. And she was way off balance. I could see that pretty easy. And I'll insert right here for your clients, if you want to know if you're on balance, a simple test is get on a hard floor, take your shoes off, close your eyes, and pay attention to your right foot and left foot. It's a very simple test. And it's amazing what you can discover in terms of how the weight works from right to left. And remember, since you have all the same muscles, bones, and tendons on the right and left, they should work the same. And if they're not, then you've got a clue. So anyway, took Billie through this process, figured out what was wrong in three exercises. Like, oh, finally, I can get to sleep tonight. So we woke up in the morning facing each other, and she says, you have to learn this method. This is awesome. Nothing you've done with me so far has made me feel like this has made me feel, and I slept through the whole night. So that's our story on how we ended up getting into the method. We came to Phoenix to start a franchise. And so our first clinic was in Phoenix proper. Now we're in the Scottsdale area. But yeah, that's how it all started. When you worked with me, there was a specific exercise you asked me to do that was very difficult. And I was sitting on the floor with my back against the wall, and I had to put my hands up against the wall and keep my wrist up against the wall too. And at the time, I literally couldn't make my body do it. I can do it now. It's still a little bit of a struggle, but back then it was my wrist will not touch the wall. My arm comes off, or vice versa. And I said, well, which was more important, the arm on the wall or the wrist on the wall? And you said both. And I remember I just did one of them. You have to reach your hand up above your head and try to touch them together and then bring them back down with them touching the wall the whole time. I got one done and it was like, oh, and you go, okay, 29 more. And I remember rage. And this was after I'd overcome a lot of the anger and depression. You know, I was in a pretty good place, like as far as that was concerned. Rage, feeling my body like, you want me to do what? And I remember giving you a look and you looked at me back like, whoa. And it shocked me. I was like, what was that? What was that? That was kind of weird. You had said that when Pete was developing these exercises, he could tell they were working if he saw darkness leaving a person's body. And that was the part that he really didn't talk about much to anybody. Right. He didn't want people to think he was crazy, but whatever spiritual gift he was given for this particular purpose, I felt that. I felt that darkness come up in me when I started doing that exercise. It was like, don't make me do that again. Don't make me leave. I mean, that's kind of the vibe I got. Yeah. Yeah. It was a little shocking at the time. That's the only time I remember feeling that in particular, but I do feel energetic things going on when I do the exercises and definite relief. In my book I'm writing right now, I describe that in great detail so that people understand what we're talking about. I think the easiest way to understand that is to use a metaphor like people coping with life, right? And there are ways that people cope with life that don't serve their long-term interests. It's not a benefit for them. And we keep holding onto it. Yeah. And so the alcoholic, I have someone very close to me who's been an Alcoholics Anonymous now for two years, and she's done so well coming out of that lifestyle. But she and I have had many, many conversations about her perceptions while she was in that alcoholic phase. And so she was telling me that she could not cope with two particular stressors in her life. She didn't know how. She would come undone, and she found alcohol, and it gave her relief. But on the other hand, she knew that being an alcoholic was a self-destructive thing to do. So on the one hand, she found relief. On the other hand, she knew this was self-destructive. In the human body, God's design is that we're balanced and functional, but we can use whatever muscles are available to hold ourselves up so we don't fall down or walk in weird ways to get the process done. It's not the right way, but we can get so entrenched in that process that actually coming back to design, like you were describing, feels almost like an alcoholic recovering from being an alcoholic and getting clean again. There's a lot of resistance. Exactly. And it's amazing that that exercise that I was doing, I can do it now. No problem. But I could not do it at the time. It was incredible to me. I asked my son, can you do it? And he could do it, no problem. But there was something in me that would not allow my body to do that. Yes. We've had the opportunity to treat a lot of sports people, NFL, major baseball. They're not as gracious. You say I felt dark and anger toward you. I mean, these guys would be dropping F bombs and telling me they hate my guts until they got the results. So it comes up often, not everybody, but it comes up often where people's bodies are changing so much. You're like, what is going on? And it feels just like you described, like, is this good for me or is it not good? Imbalance is kind of ugly. It's not pretty. You look at anybody who's imbalanced in any way, and it's not attractive. So whatever ugliness is leaving doesn't want to go. And there's a part of us that's comfortable with this, even though I'm in pain. It's like repentance, like the atonement in action. Yeah. And these are the extreme examples. Of course, most people, they're sort of a little bit more subtle, but I did treat a lady from church one time. She's a young girl, put her in a particular position, and while she was in that position, she's like, I can't breathe. I can't breathe. And anybody who's feeling breathless, you know, it's a panicky feeling. And I said, just hold it 10 more seconds. Come on, you can do 10 more seconds. And when she did, it was very interesting to watch because she kind of did a, and then her whole body relaxed. Talked to her a month later, she said, I never would have held that position if it wasn't for you. And that's how I know this works. If I can get to the other side and find that, but sometimes bridging that going from one to the next can feel a little bit panicky. But how many of us that are in the midst of depression or anxiety are able to push past that without a coach? I know I couldn't have in some cases. It's just too hard. So we really do need other people. And this is talking very widespread anything that you're trying to move past. And it's people like John, so many of the people that God brought into my life that I needed at the time, who I let in, who I absolutely wouldn't have been able to overcome said obstacle without them. Coaches can tell us very helpful things, but they can also tell us very hard things. And those hard things are the hardest things for us to face sometimes. And instinctively, the best things we can do to take our lives to the next level. Yeah. And choosing the right coach is paramount, really making sure that you're being led to the person that God wants for you. The next thing I kind of wanted to cover was how does this happen to us? Why do we get so out of alignment? You look at babies and they sit up straight. I mean, I don't think I've ever seen a baby slouching. And most toddlers, same thing. They have great posture. And then there comes a point where you, I even watch my kids, like you'd watch them and you're like, oh gosh, they're starting to kind of hunch. They're not standing up as straight as they used to. What's going on? There's the obvious answers, like the phones. You're always looking down at the phone or the sitting in the classrooms, emotional expressions and anxiety and depression that manifest in the body. And I've talked a little bit about that in episode 28, where my structure of my body, things I couldn't do, and this was even before I met John, I couldn't stand up straight. I couldn't, like literally could not make my body do it. And then one day, years down the road of healing, I looked in the mirror, kind of did a double take and went, wait a minute. And I went back and went, oh my goodness, I can stand up straight. And sometimes I'll kind of hunch over when life is hard or I'm not getting enough sleep. And then as I heal again, I'll straighten back up. But it's not that I can't pull the shoulders back and make it go straight. I could not do it before. My body was not structured like that. I was literally like an ape. Like that's what it looked like. And the fact of the matter is my body structure changed as I started to heal. I looked different. Yes. Well, there's a couple of things related to your question. Number one, discovering things that we can control, if you could say it that way, things that we can make choices about are the most important. And sometimes I encounter this kind of comment. Some of these walking, we do gait evaluation and they're walking and I say, hey, your right toe is pointed way out to the right. And they say, yeah, I inherited that. Both of my parents do it and it's been a problem. And both of them are hunched over and I'm hunched over too. That's what's going on. I said, interesting. Do you have kids? They say, yeah. And I said, tell me about them learning words. And they said, oh yeah, they mimic my husband or I. I said, do you ever think that those little critters are watching every step you take? And they're going to imitate your patterns as well. Perhaps they've learned their patterns from you. That's your family culture. And they've just fallen into that pattern. So if you start with that premise, it's like, oh, then there's a possibility of a change and to start thinking beyond it. But I would like to talk about this idea of either genetics or disease. A man came in and he was struggling. He could barely walk. He was probably your age, a young man. He said, I honestly, I don't think you can help me. I said, why not? He said, well, I have multiple sclerosis and you know, you can't cure multiple sclerosis, so how can you help? To get to the conversation I wanted to have with him, I asked him this question. What if you could be the healthiest, the most balanced, and the most functional person with multiple sclerosis? How would that feel to you? And it took him back. He was like, I guess I'd like it. And so instead of focusing on the multiple sclerosis, we focused on what he could do. And it was very bound and tied to his diagnosis. Now, did we get him to the point where he was like somebody who didn't have that diagnosis? No. He got so much further than he would have gotten if he just stayed, I'm not going to cure multiple sclerosis. There's nothing I can do about it. And so that just little mindset shift made a big difference for him and he got busy. So that's one of the things when it comes to origins, we can lock ourselves into limits without realizing we're doing it. How far can you go? Like sometimes people say, I'm never going to not be depressed as an example. Yeah. I was there just to think that. How healthy can I be as a depressed person? Starting there. Is it possible that I could take a more empowering step toward my health and healing as a depressed person instead of thinking I have to just let go of depression? Finding our way to that first step can be so empowering and really get the process going. I love that. So anybody listening, rewind and listen to that again. If you're not ready to fully believe that you can overcome depression, just imagine what your life could be if you were living the optimal life as a depressed person right now. What would that look like for you? If you do enough of that, you may eventually get to the point where you wake up one morning and go, I don't think I'm depressed anymore. But it takes that faith and that hope and that seeing that light that, hey, my life could be better than it is right now. It could, even if I was depressed. So thank you for sharing that insight. Yeah. And that came from a conversation I had with Pete. And we were actually talking about being a soldier. And I asked him the question. I said, what was it like for you to be a field lieutenant? And he said, you know, it was interesting because a lot of times this 18-year-old young man were with me and all of a sudden the bullets start blazing over their head. And he said they cry and they put their helmet on and they cover their heads and they just go down. And he said, I knew I only had one thing I needed to do to get them to the possibility where they could survive this firefight. I said, what's that? He said, I would tell them to lift their heads. Get your head up right now. Just that one act of movement started the whole process so these guys could preserve their life. And I thought, you know, there's something for me with my clients that way. I've got to remember that some people are at a place where they just need to take that first step. Someone I sent to you, they were kind of feeling frustrated and they expressed that, well, he keeps asking me how I feel about the exercise and what exercise I think works better. He's the expert. He's supposed to be telling me what to do. And like I get what you're doing. You're trying to get them to intuitively tune in and be their own guide. But so many people just want to be told what to do and led through every little step of the process. Sometimes it's lift your head and see, what do you see? What do you see? Because he can't like micromanage every step of their way. You really do have to take personal accountability for your health at some point. And sometimes people don't like that wean-off process. They just want to continue to be dependent on someone else and have someone else be accountable for their health. And yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So there's a metaphor that I use when I'm training new therapists. We're hiking with our clients and some people need you to be the guide and be in front of them and they will let you know, just like she was probably complaining and concerned. Some people want to be shoulder to shoulder with you and they want to be making decisions together. And then there's a certain point where the client actually wants to be in front of you and they just want affirmations that they're moving in the right direction. Does this look good? Does this look right? Yeah. Yes, exactly. And there are many times people come in here in excruciating pain. They can't even think straight. They couldn't sleep. And I don't ask them, hey, what do you think would feel good right now? I just get them in a position, work with them until they can get their wits about them. Because when pain is that unrelenting, it's hard. You need somebody on the front of the trail guiding you along. But long term, that's the only way I can work myself out of a job is for them to have that deeper awareness. And people still come back. I've been here for over 20 years and people still come back regularly. Number one, because they want exactly what you said. Hey, am I doing this right? Is this the best way to do this? But number two, they want to be reminded. Oh yeah, I'm on this trail. I can do it. I'm okay. And they just need reminders of how capable they are. Absolutely. Do you mind if we just bump back to how Pete developed the exercises? I would like to answer the question. Sure. If you could say you have assumptions, for instance, some people in the medical field, not all people, but some people in the medical field have this assumption about the body is very fragile. And if you don't protect it, you're going to be a mess. That's their assumption. You can also have the assumption the body is brilliant and capable. And if we can nudge it in the right direction, we can move toward health and healing in a much better way just by being in alignment with our body. I'm talking about those chronic pain experiences where you just wake up every single morning, that shoulder's bothering you, or you went on that hike and your knee is killing you and it's been killing you now for three months, that kind of thing. Those are the things I'm talking about. There's simple things like I was treating one of the girls who was on the WPGA. Her elbow hurt. And so when she was swinging through on the club, every time the pain in her elbow would cause her to pull the ball one way. And she was frustrated and the pain wasn't horrible, but it was enough. It really affected her game. I asked her to do a functional test. I said, would you just stand pigeon toed with your thighs tight and your stomach relaxed? And so I put her in that position and it was a very difficult position for her to hold. We held it for about a minute and a half. And then she stood back up. I said, okay, swing the club again. And she said. That took care of the elbow pain. Because our assumption is that the body is resilient and it works as a unit, then I'm looking for places in her body that we see these energy leaks or these imbalance leaks. She had an elbow pain, but she had a pelvic imbalance. Once we got her pelvis balanced, then the downstream problem that led to the upstream effect resolved itself. And so that's part of how we find the exercises. People will often say, can you give me those back exercises you gave my husband? They really seem to help him. I want to have those same ones. I said, well, you're not bringing the same body in that your husband had. So let's see what's going on with you. And you don't have to get a CT scan or X-ray for you to hone in on what's going on either. So it's a lot more cost-effective. And it doesn't take as much time as you think it will. And people say, well, wait a minute. If I take a medication from the doctor, that doesn't take me any time at all. Yeah, but it costs you in the long run because when you stop taking the medication, you don't feel better. So you have to go back to the doctor. It becomes a complicated process until you say, well, maybe I can just live with this pain. And then you hobble around because of it. The side effects of the medication alone, I would not want to sign up for. I mean, the truth is most of the medical modalities that Western medicine has to offer, you could not pay me enough money to do them. And yet people tell me all the time, well, I'm paying for insurance and it's really great insurance and it pays for all of this. So this is what I'm going to do. So foolish. So foolish to just do it because your insurance is going to pay for it. Get a more skeletonized plan, pay a little less and use the money you're saving to do things that are actually good for you. It's not like you or I want to abolish medicine. I'm glad there's an emergency room. Oh, heck yeah. If I break my arm or I'm hemorrhaging, please take me to the emergency room. I don't know if I told you, I was riding my bike and a lady pulled right in front of me in a big truck and I smacked right into her. And what did I do? I went to the emergency room, of course. My wrist is killing me. My knee is killing me. They did a CAT scan. But how much can we take care of ourselves or in cooperation with coaches and not need to take the next step up? I often tell clients, I say, look, if you walk into a room and you switch on the light switch and the light doesn't go on, you have options, right? You can call an electrician and have him come in and troubleshoot the whole thing and have him start at the panel outside and do all this stuff. Or you can change a light bulb. Yeah. Or screw in the light bulb. I had that problem last night. Why isn't this light working? It wasn't screwed in all the way. Right. Right. So take those simple steps. And sometimes posture can be such a simple step. When it works, you're like, bang. Yeah. Another story I tell in the book is about this sweet girl. She was from Hawaii, 36 years old, and she had six failed back surgeries. That's a lot. She was on 18 medications and she was sleeping about 16 to 17 hours a day. She came in, almost looked drunk from the medications. Yeah. She knew she was in a sink or swim moment in her life. It was either I'm going to take care of this or I'm done with life. She was on the ground in my clinic every day for six weeks, every single day. And there were a lot of days where she was crying and she would struggle. One day she called and she said, I'm not coming back. I said, why not? She said, well, I'm off all my medications, but one, I'm hiking three miles a day and I'm going back to work full-time. Why do I need you? And I said, you know, you don't. God bless you. Have a good life. And I'm here if you need me. Firecracker. Yeah. But she had gone down that medical path and found out what was the end of the road for her and realized, I have to do something different. She moved beyond it all. I've only heard from her parents, not from her. Anyone listening, let's keep you from getting to that point. Absolutely. So what I would really like to do, if you're interested, email Jennifer and she will forward it to me and I will send you over the first chapter of the book, which is going to explain these things. It'll also give you some functional tests so you can start testing your own body to try to discover what exactly is going on. There's two assumptions that I'm going to make about you, the person listening and watching right now. As helpful as experts can be, you know more about your body than anybody else in the whole world. You've had the opportunity to live in this body and nobody else has. So there's things you know about your body that can help you with your healing process. That's number one. And number two, you're smarter than you realize. Don't underestimate yourself and what you can do. And that may be finding the right practitioners, just like Jennifer said, but your ability to discover is so paramount. And as we had talked about at the beginning, to stay curious and not just live in frustration, disappointment, or resignation. Those are the things that are going to lead you down the path so that you can become your more authentic self. So you're not distracted by the pain. The name of our business is Resilient APS, Aligned Pain Solutions. The name of our website is resilientaps.com. And what is your book called? It's called A Resilient Way to Live in Chronic Pain. C-A-T-T-E-R-M-O-L-E. Can you talk a little bit about the peptide therapies, cold plunge benefits, and the sauna? I just bought a sauna. I was really struggling after the years where everybody was getting sick. You know what I'm talking about? And I was having a lot of wheezing even several years after. And I was praying for a solution. How can I heal my body so that it can recover from this? Because this is not good. I felt inspired to buy a sauna. And there's a whole story behind how I got this sauna because I didn't have the money for the sauna and the money just showed up. So I'm really grateful that I now own a sauna and it has helped a lot. This infrared sauna that I have, it's not a wet sauna. It's a dry sauna. I started looking at some of the studies out of the Northern European countries and it was absolutely amazing. Saunas that are between 175 and 190 degrees. If a person is in those for 20 minutes a day, five days a week, they have a likelihood of 50%less heart attacks. Interesting. Since the sickness that was going around is causing a lot of those lately. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. No wonder I felt inspired. I had no idea that statistic existed. Right. Right. And 30%decrease in all-cause mortality by doing that. I would limit it to adults in general. No babies. Exactly. But back to the point of posture, a lot of times muscle tension can melt away because of the way it helps circulation to be in a sauna. It can help support the process of doing your stretching exercises. Cold plunges are an interesting, they don't have as much science on them as they do the saunas. If there's anything cold plunges do for me, and I recommend them to clients if they're the right candidate, when you get in water that's the studies say at 60 degrees or less and it gives you that shock and you get the feeling, I want to get out of this water right now. It teaches us to resist that feeling. And what happens when we resist it is just like I had talked about before. Within minutes, your body goes from freezing and shivering and realizes, oh my gosh, we better increase circulation to the extremities because we don't want cold exposure problems. And you end up being able to move away from workout stiffness. Really, I highlight this as a tool of learning to do hard things. And honestly, one of my dear friends who just left this earth from cancer after a 12-year battle, he had horrible symptoms from the chemo and he was plunging every morning in 37-degree water. And I was like, Kyle, why do you do that? And he said, because I know this will be one of the hardest things I face in my day. And if I can get through that, then I know I can get through other things. Yeah. It's like the worst is over. Exactly. Exactly. So cold plunges has plenty of medical benefits, but that's one of the hidden benefits that most people don't think about. And I just submit this to your listeners for their consideration. BPC157 is a peptide. They have been doing more and more studies on this particular peptide and it helps with healings of tendons. Now, tendons are the end of muscles. And when people have problems right at the junction between their muscle and their tendon, sometimes those problems can linger. So look up BPC157 and the science on that. That can be a simple compound that you can put into your body and accelerate the healing process if you're dealing with an injury. Is there any benefit to taking it as a preventative? There is some benefit to taking it preventatively, but generally speaking, if people have hypermobile joints and their tendons or ligaments are overstretched, folks in that category might benefit very much from it. What happens in that context is that their joints end up absorbing too much of the shock that the tendons and the ligaments are supposed to. So it can have a long-term impact on protecting your joints. What about shin splints or those kind of issues? Where does that come from? The common thing is that people from 14 to 18 that have shin splints, that's a different cause than someone who's older. Yeah. So in general, everything needs to grow at the same time. And 14-year-olds, they remind you of baby golden retrievers because they've got the body, but they don't have the coordination and the physicality to embody that body. And that's what happens to people and they end up with shin splints because their muscles haven't learned to support the size of the bone structure. But there are things that they can do. For, let's say, you and I decided to hike the Grand Canyon, we both come out of it and you're saying to me, John, my shins are killing me. I got these shin splints now. This is a simple vascular problem. And to deal with that isn't as hard as most people would think. So once you learn about the way your heel strikes the ground when you're walking and figure out how to move the toe position better, you're going to resolve the shin splints. The other thing that I thought was really interesting that I wanted to cover today is that there's actually more than five senses. Like other than sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing, and then there's vestibular and proprioception. Can you tell us what those are? Most people have never heard of that. Yeah. Proprioception is one of the most critical things for gymnastics, soccer. You lose your proprioception where people have been drunk and they fall over in the bush because they can't sense where their body is in space anymore. With relation to just all of this, like the air, the gravity. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So a lot of times a person won't be able to put their foot down solidly on the ground because their brain's not perceiving the solidness of that foot. I call it grounding for them, but it's proprioception. They have a proprioception problem. Interesting on the vestibular point, oftentimes when a person has an imbalance problem, their brain can't feel it. Like they're obviously leaning one side. I say, stand up, check the weight in the bottom of your feet and they feel like, no, I'm perfectly balanced. Everything's fine. What I'll have them do, and you can do this, Jennifer, is close your eyes and march in place for 30 times. When people have a component of vestibular dysfunction that's actually making them tilt and they don't know it, when they finish marching 30 times, quite often they start out facing me and then all of a sudden by 30 times they're facing 90 degrees away. They don't know that they've changed. They have their eyes closed. I say, open your eyes. And they're like, what am I doing over here? That's the vestibular stuff that's going on. Which is from a very simplistic definition is movement and balance awareness. Yes. Your body has this compulsion to keep your eyes on the horizon. And it's going to do it through your sight or it's going to do it through positional sense with your head. And the vestibular system is the positional sense with your head. I do have a sacrum that fused differently on one side than the other. So it's a birth thing. I remember I went to a consultation with a chiropractor because I wanted to get insoles for my feet before I did my firefighting program. And he offered me a free consult and free x-rays. And I was like, sure, why not? And I had done my agoskyu that morning. I go in, we look at the x-rays and he's like, wow, you're hit. Like you could see my hips were perfectly aligned. But you look down and there was some wonky stuff going on. And he's looking closer. And I'd had chiropractic x-rays prior, years prior, and they'd never caught this. Because he's like, what's going on? Like your hips are perfectly straight. Because I'd done my agoskyu. And he's like, oh, your sacrum's just kind of tilted because it didn't fuse. So there's only so much I can do to completely obliterate that problem. But the fact that when I did my exercise and the rest of my body aligned the best that it could, even with that issue in place is significant to me. And maybe someday by some miracle that will no longer be the case. Maybe my body will fix itself. I'm not closed off to that possibility at all based on what I've experienced up to this point. I haven't had an x-ray since. I really don't know. But this stuff works. And I want to emphasize that even if you have a birth defect, this can still help you mitigate and remove pain from your life. Yeah. Quotes I wanted to end with, one from Peter Goskyu that says,"Pain is not meant to be feared. It wants to be understood."Pain is a message, right? It's trying to tell us something. Don't shut it up. With drugs, they figure out what it's trying to tell you.

And then Luke 13: 45:03

10 through 13, and this is about Jesus. He was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. And behold, there was a woman which had a spirit of infirmity, 18 years. Interesting, they call it a spirit of infirmity. And was bowed together and could in no wise lift up herself. So she was hunched over. And when Jesus saw her, he called her to him and said unto her,"Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity." To me, that's suggesting he's casting this out, right? Yeah. And he laid his hands on her and immediately she was made straight. How many times in the scriptures do you hear,"Make your path straight,"the straightness of the way? That's our bodies too. If we're not in alignment, something in us is not straight. And that doesn't mean you're a bad person. It means you're human. Yeah. But you don't have to wait until you're dead to be healed. There are things out there that can help us to live straight and pain-free. And she glorified God. Can't leave that out. It's important to thank God for everything that we experience. The journey even towards that thing, to even thank him for the pain that's trying to tell us to go in a certain direction because it's going to change our path. Everything. Give the glory to God. When you start to heal, give thanks. And I feel like when I give thanks, I get more. And that's not why I do it. But it's an abundance mindset. Yes, thank you. I will take it. I will take whatever you want to give to me. Thank you. Don't set limits on God and what he can do for you. The book of Job, everybody knows the book of Job in this story. But when you dig deep into that book and you discover the spirit that led to the boils and him sitting and not standing, the things he discovered by the end of the book about God through that pain experience and the restoration, it's really a book of hope. It's a book that helps us to realize what it's like to be upright spiritually and upright physically. So I think it's a remarkable book that reinforces the lesson there that you just spoke about in Luke. And Job was not a bad guy. Remember this, guys. I think we all want to believe we're good people and that we couldn't possibly be doing anything to cause the pain in our bodies. When you start to take personal accountability and you look and say, what am I doing that's causing this pain? Even if it's something you've inherited, what have I inherited and what am I perpetuating that is causing this pain? That opens the doors to healing. You've got to see it. It's just because you're a good person, we all want to be good people, right? Does not mean that you are free of pain or sin or mistakes or things you're holding onto. And that's okay. It is completely okay. It's natural. It's part of the life experience to be astronomically imperfect. And it's a journey. So thank you again, John, for meeting with me this morning. I know your time is valuable. And I just want to again emphasize that anybody who's interested can reach out to John on his website. If you have questions at all, or if you have questions for me, reach out at jennifer@imaquarius.com. If you've reached the end of this podcast, bravo. You are amazing. And if you're listening to this years down the road, there's a book. Tell them again what the book's called. That's right. It's a resilient way to live in chronic pain. Awesome. Resilient way to live in chronic pain. So with that said, we will see you next time. Thank you for joining us on the Overcome Depression podcast. Bye. If you are new to this podcast, please go watch all of the hashtag introduction videos first and then consider downloading the Overcome Depression workbook. Links in the description. The content in this podcast is based on my own personal beliefs, is for informational purposes only, and is not intended to substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please refer to the full legal disclaimer in the description. If you are new to this podcast, please go watch all of the hashtag introduction videos first and then consider downloading the Overcome Depression workbook. Links in the description. The content in this podcast is based on my own personal beliefs, is for informational purposes only, and is not intended to substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please refer to the full legal disclaimer in the description.