Maybe the Mountain Was Never the Point | What the Pain Cave Is Teaching Me

Anna McBride (0:02)

Welcome back to SHE Asked, Tools for Practical Hope, the podcast where we explore the stories we carry, the questions we're often afraid to ask, and the tools that help us move from simply surviving our lives to consciously creating them. I'm your host, Anna McBride, a therapist, coach, storyteller, and a woman who continues to believe that healing begins when we give voice to what we've lived. And today, it's just you and me. I want to talk about pain, but maybe not in the way we usually talk about pain. Because lately, I've been wondering, what if pain requires a vision? What if one of the reasons it can be so difficult to move through painful experiences is that when we're inside them, pain becomes all we can see? What if we need a vision of something beyond the pain? Not to bypass it, not to pretend it doesn't hurt, but to give us a direction through it. I've been thinking about this a lot lately because as many of you know, I am just less than one week away from something I have spent months preparing for. In fact, by the time this episode airs, I will be in the Tahoe area days if not one day or maybe the day of the 29029 trail in Tahoe. And this training has taken me somewhere I didn't expect to go. Let me tell you what I mean. As you know, in this podcast, we like to begin with a story. And today I wanted to tell you about the story, about the pain I've gone through preparing for Tahoe, the 29029 event. You know, here I am, days away, and I thought by now I would feel ready. I thought I would feel ready months ago. I thought all these months of training, and I have been training for this since the end of last year. Yeah, it's been that long. And I thought with all that training that it would have given me certainty. You know, I've hiked for 5 hours, 8 hours, back-to-back days. I have strength trained, climbed, tested gear, learned about hydration and nutrition and recovery. And I thought by now, I would know, yes, I can do this. Instead, my body has been giving me questions. My calves, which had been worrying me, are actually doing okay. But my gut? Until just recently, it had decided it wanted a starring role in this story. You know, for the last month and a half, I have been dealing with digestive issues. And when you're preparing to repeatedly climb a mountain for three days, an unpredictable gut is not exactly the draining milestone you're hoping for. So I did what I tend to do. I tried to solve it.

What am I eating? What am I doing differently? What supplement should I take? Or what supplement should I eliminate? Right? And how do I make this stop before tajo? Because that's what I know how to do. I solve. I fix. I prepare. And I push. Yeah. But somewhere in all that fixing, I began wondering whether there was another question available to me. Not simply, how do I make this go away, but what is this experience asking me to pay attention to? It reminded me of an experience I had during an ayahuasca ceremony the end of last year when my body went through an intense physical release through my gut. At the time, I experienced that as part of the ceremony, my body releasing alongside something emotional. Now, I'm not suggesting every stomach problem is a spiritual awakening. Bodies are bodies, symptoms deserve physical attention. But I also tend to see life through symbols, metaphors, and mirrors. So I became curious. What if my body wasn't betraying my training?

What if this was somehow part of it? What if the injuries, the doubts, my ego, the fear that I might not finish even this experience with my gut were taking me somewhere I hadn't realized I needed to go?

And then I recognized the place. I had been there many times before. It was in the pain cave. Yeah, I was in that pain cave.

That phrase comes from my spiritual business coach, Derek Graham. Recently, our coaching group was talking about pain, fear, and what happens to our level of consciousness when life gets difficult.

Derek teaches that difficult experiences can take us in one of two directions. We can descend, contracting into fear, old beliefs, and familiar patterns, or those same experiences can invite us to ascend, to expand our consciousness, and become capable of seeing ourselves and our lives differently.

The challenge is that expansion rarely feels like expansion while it's happening. When you're grieving, you're probably not thinking wonderful. Look at all this growth. When a marriage is ending, when the business isn't working, when your body isn't cooperating, when someone leaves, or when the future you expected suddenly disappears, you generally want one thing. You want out. Derek calls that place that we want out of the pain cave. I love that metaphor because caves are dark. Our vision becomes limited. Sounds get distorted. You can lose your sense of direction. And pain can do the same thing. When we're hurting, the place we're standing can begin to feel like the entire landscape. Our instinct becomes, how do I get out of here? But Derek offered us different questions. He asked, why is this so hard? What am I afraid of? What is this teaching me? And what is this inviting me to do? And then, who is this inviting me to become? That last question changed something for me. Because maybe the purpose of the pain cave isn't simply to escape it. Maybe we're supposed to emerge differently.