When the Way Out is In
I remember a leg cramp once hauling me straight up out of the deepest sleep — the kind that folds the whole calf in the dark and leaves you gasping at the ceiling. Every cell screaming make it stop, make it go. For most of my life, that was my only relationship with pain. Get rid of it. Get out.
So here’s the strange part. Sometimes the fastest way through isn’t away at all. It’s in. Not by gritting our teeth — by getting curious. We follow the ache back to the tender place it came from, lean a little closer, and more often than you’d believe, it begins to loosen its grip.
What if the way out isn’t out?
And it isn’t only the body that flinches. We brace against far more than that:
a hard conversation we keep postponing,
a grief we step around like furniture,
a worry we feed instead of feel.
What’s brewing in your life right now — something stirring, maybe even aching, because it wants to move?
And how do you fully embrace the discomfort of it without losing yourself in the process?
You might consider this — a simple practice — that moves you towards the thing that hurts. Just an inch. Curious, not heroic.
Because pain, it turns out, is mostly energy — a wave, a signal that something in us has clenched and held. Not even all of it is ours to carry; the body picks up so much that radiates around us, and we tend to claim it the moment we feel it.
So this week, we practice turning towards. Gently. The way you’d approach something small and frightened — not something you’re bracing to defeat.
And be kind to yourself in it. There’s no medal for white-knuckling, and no shame in needing real help when you do.
What might soften, if you stopped bracing against it?
Ahhh 🌬️
Continue the Journey
Below, there’s a practice for the next time something in you clenches — a way to meet the ache without fixing it or fleeing it.
This reflection is part of Journey to a Lighter You, inspired by my book A Year to Clear.
If you're new here, welcome! This is a slow, weekly space for letting go of what weighs you down — one week at a time.
This week’s practice meets pain where it actually lives in the body, and the prompts ask what it might be trying to teach you.
A way to catch the flinch in the moment. Prompts for the ache that’s been quietly calling you inward. A gentler way through.
Join us.
Easing Pain by Turning Towards It
This week, our clearing focus is simple: we stop treating pain as an enemy to defeat and start treating it as a signal to follow.
Most of us have one move when something hurts — get rid of it.
Numb it,
distract from it,
push it down,
wait it out.
And sometimes that’s exactly right; some pain needs a doctor, a treatment, a phone call made today. (More on that below.)
But a great deal of what we carry isn’t an emergency. It’s a contraction — a place where we’ve clenched and held, sometimes for years, around something we never quite let ourselves feel.
Pain Marks the Spot
In the body, this shows up as the ache that flares when we’re stressed, the jaw we didn’t know we were holding, the shoulders up around our ears. Pain marks the spot where the energy stopped flowing freely. It isn’t punishing us. It’s pointing.
The emotional version works the same way. The resentment we keep rehearsing. The fear we’ve organized a whole life around avoiding. These, too, are contractions — and they, too, begin to ease when we finally turn and look at them with something other than dread.
The shift is small but it changes everything: instead of fixing, we observe. Instead of forcing the feeling away, we let it be felt. We move from willing things to happen to allowing them to.
Pain eases when we move towards it, not away.
None of this replaces real care — if something persists, you pick up the phone.
But alongside that, there’s this quieter practice waiting: the willingness to get curious about the very thing you’d rather flee. That’s where we’re headed below.