You will love hearing the story of how I handled healing different back injuries at 24 years old versus 39 years old, because it's not going to be at all what you'd expect. It'll give you a lot of hope for what you can do and the power you have over your health. I know it sucks to be powerless and to be injured, and that's exactly how I felt when I injured my back when I was 24 years old.
The First Injury at 24
Back then I was a police officer. I was arresting a lady who weighed more than I did, and she wasn't cooperating. In the course of getting control of her, I pulled something in my back, some kind of muscle strain or spasm or pinched nerve. I'm not exactly sure what it was, because the doctor didn't take too thorough a look, but I felt something kind of snap in my back and then progressively cramp up more and more, until I could barely move within a few hours.
After standing around at the jail with her for hours, I went to the doctor right afterward, and they gave me a muscle relaxer and a couple of minor pain medications and sent me home and said to rest. I immediately took all the medications, played video games, and then went to bed. I had a difficult time sleeping because the muscles were tensing up so much that every time I rolled over, it woke me up from the pain. Then when I'd take the muscle relaxers, they would force all the muscles in my body to relax, and as soon as they wore off, the muscles would all tense back up even more than they were before.
This led to a cycle that took about two weeks, where I kept taking the medication they gave me, the muscle relaxers and the pain relievers, all day, every day, just as prescribed. Three times a day, when I got up, in the middle of the day, and right before bed. I was stuck for almost a week doing nothing, having bad nights of sleep, unable to exercise, feeling really sorry for myself and alone, and off of work. After about two weeks, I stopped taking the pain pills, and while my back still hurt a little bit, I was able to walk around and function normally again. That was at 24 years old, and a few times since then I had similar, smaller versions of that injury come back up.
The Same Injury at 39
Then a week ago from today, I had just spent 30 minutes jumping on the trampoline, and my wife's parents' dog went to run in the house. I bent over funny to grab her, and she crashed into my arms when I went to grab her. It put this weird horizontal or diagonal stress on me, and I felt that same muscle snap in my back again, the exact same way it had 15 years ago when I was a police officer. This time, I handled it totally differently, and the outcome was totally different.
This time, I had a yoga class scheduled immediately afterward, which I went to anyway. I did my yoga almost exactly as I normally would, which might have actually made this a little bit worse. By the end of the day, even after the yoga class, I had pain, and my muscles all over my entire body were getting tense, because the muscles around the one that was pulled were then compensating. So, the same as when I injured my back as a police officer, I was having muscle tension and pain all over my body.
Now I'm in a place where I avoid taking any kind of pills or medication unless absolutely necessary. Sure, maybe if my whole body were broken and falling apart, I'm open-minded to it in the most dire of circumstances. But short of that, no. So I just went to bed normally, and I rolled over in my sleep and woke up a couple of times, similar to when I was a police officer. I woke up and my entire body was miserably tense the next day, and I thought about camping, and I thought about canceling my yoga. I actually canceled my power yoga class in the middle of the night when I woke up from my back one time. Then I went to my power yoga class anyway at 9 a.m., because after all, the poses are just suggestions and you can modify your yoga.
Something Amazing Happened
That's when something amazing happened. As soon as I walked into the yoga studio, my body started to feel better and relaxed, and after an hour of yoga I had a massive release of tension. I cried some and released some. I had some emotions, and I felt much better physically afterward as the muscle tension let go. See, when this little muscle has its spasm, all the muscles around it start tensing. You start walking different. It brings all these other muscles into it. And without taking any muscle relaxers or pain relievers, I was able to feel very accurately exactly the limits of my muscles and not push their boundaries. When I took the pain pills before, I couldn't feel anything. I couldn't feel when I was adding additional strain to the already strained muscles, so I kept hurting it worse because I couldn't feel it.
So I went through another day, and this happened again. Yoga released the tension massively, and then by the end of the night I was still hurting. I walked my dog with my mom, and my whole body was tensed up. I was walking funny. My spine, my whole body, was leaning to one side. I went to bed, had a slight difficulty sleeping, and woke up a time or two. The next day I was very sore and all strained, and I went to yoga and had a massive release, and I cried for the entire yoga class.
During that class, I could see the purpose of my back injury. I could see that my body created the back injury to give me what I wanted. My family was on vacation, and I was trying to do without any kind of sexual gratification, nothing from myself and absolutely nothing from anybody else, and I had put that as a very high priority. The night before my back had been hurt, it had been difficult because my head was full of sexual thoughts. So the next morning I saw that the back injury was a gift from my unconscious mind to stop my focus on all those sex thoughts, because with my back hurt now, I could hardly get in the mood to be horny.
I also saw that this back injury was an opportunity to review all the previous traumas from my back and to release them, to break the habit of having this particular injury, and to learn and understand that the body will cause injuries and allow injuries to happen to itself in some circumstances for specific reasons. I could feel that as soon as I walked out of that yoga class there was such a massive release. All my muscles felt better, and I was able to walk more normally again. Basically 48 hours after it had happened, while I still had some muscle tension, I was able to operate more normally. Then, doing yoga every day, two or three more days later, every time I walked out of the yoga class the pain had been reduced by at least 50 percent. There was a significant healing that happened during the yoga class, and it happened every single time I went.
Your Choices Matter More Than Your Age
Now it's a week later, and I'm amazed how much easier it has been dealing with the exact same thing at 39 years old versus 24. A lot of us have been programmed to think that our bodies, once we're young, can just do anything and are amazing, and then as you get older they start to function worse. What I hope to have communicated is that it's the decisions each of us make that have a huge impact on how we deal with life, and they can make a huge difference in what kind of experience we have. When I dealt with the exact same injury with pills and medications and trips to the doctor, I spent weeks in pain, unable to function. This time, when I went to yoga and kept going, I was able to continue functioning the entire time. I'm going to cry right now.
I have not been on the trampoline in a week, to give my back some more time to heal. But I was able to have my life almost completely undisrupted. It wasn't nearly as bad, and I would be surprised if I ever have the same injury again, because of what I've learned. So the goal here is to help you see how much your choices matter, and to help you see there are other ways to approach things. If you've been very heavily conditioned into believing medicine is the only solution to everything, it can be hard to even conceive that there are things you don't know and don't understand that can make life so much easier for you.
And there are books you can read. I was reading a book by Gay Hendricks called The Big Leap, which I reviewed on my main YouTube channel. In The Big Leap, it talks about how injuries often happen once we've hit some new high, some new level of living that's very joyous and we've really gotten what we wanted. On an unconscious level, our bodies injure us and punish us because we believe we shouldn't have life too good, and then injuries come up to essentially bring us back down. But they also offer us the opportunity to elevate and to go beyond that next time.
I am very grateful to have this experience to share. If you look for the best, if you expand your mind and expand your learning, almost anything is possible. If you'd told me 15 years ago that there was a way to handle this back injury where you'd feel so much better, it would heal way faster, you wouldn't need to spend hours in a doctor's office, you wouldn't need to take any pills, and you could really have fun going to yoga and learn from it, that would have been completely foreign to me. So I hope this gets you curious and excited about what's possible.
I've made a whole bunch more videos on my Jerry Banfield recovery channel talking about the books I've read and the other resources I've got for you, along with all the different stories and things I've learned about, like how to get over a breakup, how not to take things personally, what I've learned being sober and quitting alcohol, how I stopped overthinking, and more. You can find much of that same journey in my Life playlist as well.
If you want to chat with me, ask me any questions, and go deeper on all of this, the best way to do that today is to join the Jerry Banfield Family community — join the Jerry Banfield Family, where we get to talk directly and I answer as much as I can.
I really appreciate your love and support here. Thank you so much for being with me all the way to the end. I love you each, and I'll see you in the next one.