Finding Inner Calm and Deeper Wisdom

I’m happy to announce that my years-long ordeal of lower back pain is already fading into history. Eighteen days ago, as I write this, a team of skilled surgeons performed an amazing overhaul of my lower spine, and life is already taking a new direction. Before that, I’d had several years of steadily deteriorating conditions in the L2-L5 area of my back. I used yoga, meditation, chiropractic, and anything I could think of (except pain medication) to get me through those years. When I reached the point that I could see further deterioration leading to irreversible damage, I told the doctor to sharpen his knives and do his magic.

And magic it is, indeed.  A few months of physical therapy and gentle exercise will be needed to help everything heal and get the muscle strength back to normal. But I’m already well into the program.

The primary form of physical therapy is walking. Now I’m up to about 40 minutes of walking per day. Next weekend I’m cleared to jump in the pool and take an easy swim. And with the greatly reduced pain level, I’m beginning to feel a lot more motivated to write.