Playing Injured
Playing Injured reminds us that life challenges us all—athletes aren’t the only ones who play hurt. Whether it’s setbacks or unexpected curveballs, our response defines who we are and how we grow. This podcast explores the universal journey of resilience and perseverance, inspiring listeners to face adversity head-on.
Ranked in the top 2.5% of podcasts globally, hosts Josh Dillingham and Mason Eddy—entrepreneurs and former collegiate athletes—deliver over 100 episodes featuring diverse voices. They explore mindsets, uncover strategies, and motivate listeners to thrive and play through anything.
Playing Injured
Rediscovering Mindfulness: Transforming Identity and Embracing Growth with Jonah Primo (EP 126)
Finding stillness amidst chaos is a powerful form of mindfulness that can transform pain into purpose. Jonah Primo shares his personal journey of resilience and self-discovery, emphasizing that awareness, rather than relaxation, is the true essence of mindfulness that can help us navigate life's challenges.
• Jonah's insights on the fluid nature of identity
• The significance of living in the present moment
• Common misconceptions around the practice of mindfulness
• Observing thoughts as a method to detach from emotional responses
• Practical mindfulness practices: meditation and journaling
• Jonah's personal struggle with chronic pain and long COVID
• The connection between pain and self-discovery
• The role of resilience in self-care and personal growth
• Encouraging listeners to confront discomfort for growth
• The transformative power of sharing personal narratives
Follow Playing Injured on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/playinginjured/
Welcome to another episode of Playing Injured. I'm excited about this one. I think this will be a very genuine episode. Here we have Jonah Primo, who is the host of Work in Progress on the Waking Up app and the Overexamined Life. Jonah, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Hey, thanks so much for having me. Man, you're a force for good, you're doing good stuff here.
Speaker 1:I appreciate that. I appreciate that Well, as I always do. I love starting the show off with. Who is Jonah? How would you explain yourself and how do you spend your time today?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that's a great question and a big question. I mean I think yeah, well, that's a great question and a big question. I mean I think it's hard. In fact I try and not think about who Jonah is.
Speaker 2:I'm actually quite subscribed to this idea of not having an identity. It's kind of like a Buddhist idea that the self is always flowing and always moving. And you know, if you would ask me this two or three years ago, I would have said I'm a composer, I'm a musician or I'm a podcaster, I'm a philosopher, whatever all the things that I study. But I actually find that if you give yourself too many labels, you start boxing yourself in and you try and become the label that you've set for yourself and then you have expectations for yourself best on those labels and it can get a little darker.
Speaker 2:You can even spend time trying to prove that you are one of these identities to people and I think that that is a way of making your life a little smaller and perhaps being a little less authentic. But I mean like, for example, I studied music at Sydney Conservatorium but then there was a time in my life where I wasn't writing music. So it would be disingenuous to say, at that time I was a musician as opposed to, you know, trying to prove it to people. So I guess right now I am in the mindfulness space and I work on mindfulness podcasts and philosophy podcasts and I compose a bit of music and I'd say that's who I am.
Speaker 1:No, I love that. Two things right. I love how you don't put yourself in a box, right, and you don't have a label, and it's a certain uniqueness with how we should be living, right, and everybody is different. Everybody has a different way of doing things. When you live in that way of, you know, just flowing with life, right, and not allowing to have a label kind of dictate what you do on a day to day basis, and so I just love ask. I like asking that question because everybody answers it differently, right, and the way you answered it, you know I love it.
Speaker 1:I love how you see yourself, as always, evolving never really being stagnant, hopefully evolving in the right direction yeah, in the right direction, but not always. So what folks don't know about you is that you know, obviously, if they can hear your accent, they hopefully they can hear that you're in Australia. You're in the future from where I'm at right now. But the world of mindfulness? Right, I want to talk about that because I think I've always had an interest in mindfulness, in the world of meditation. I've always had an interest in mindfulness in the world of meditation. I can't even say it right now visualization Help me out, brother Visualization, visualization, visualization and just quiet in the mind. Right, especially in today's world, there's so much going on, news a lot of creativity, social media and real quick for me quiet in my mind.
Speaker 1:What I've started to realize is that I have an internal voice that is not necessarily being influenced by others. I'm able to really understand my unique voice and what I actually value and what I want, not by scrolling on my phone and seeing, oh, I should get this apartment. Oh, I should talk this way. Oh, I should do this for my career. Oh, I should do this with my money. Oh, I should do all these things that weren't my original idea in my mind, or even things that I valued in life. And so I've definitely realized that in the last I don't want to say like year or so really still pretty fresh for me I've quieted my mind so that I stay unique in my own way of living. But I would love to hear from you like mindfulness. What do you think it is?
Speaker 2:Well, that's really beautiful, and it takes a lot of introspection to get to where you've got, and it sounds like you're right on this journey already. But I mean, for me, mindfulness. The great power of mindfulness is that you don't have to become your thoughts or your emotions, and that's actually a bigger deal than it sounds. So like, say you're. You know you're going for a job, you and your coworker gets it, but you're better than them, you deserve it, you put in more work and they get it. It feels unfair, it feels unjust. Now, what you're going to end up doing is you're going to think about that moment, you're going to replay it. You might get really upset for weeks, etc. Etc. Etc. But when you're replaying something again and again and again, you miss out on everything that's happening in the present. And what might be happening in the present is you're having dinner with your kids, you're having time with your partner or playing whatever it is basketball with your mates and if you're just replaying something that's already happened, you miss life. You actually miss life, and we spend almost our entire life being lost in thought, either replaying something that's happened or thinking about the future and thinking about things that we want to happen and the fact is, life's ticking away and we're missing it, and that's actually really sad, that's really scary, because there's so much beauty in the world and there's so much fun to be had, there's so much joy to wrestle into your life, and if you spend your time not being present, you will miss it. You will miss it.
Speaker 2:So mindfulness to me is about getting back to reality, and reality is what's right in front of you. Reality right now is me having this conversation with another human being. I can feel the fan on my body. That's happening right now. I don't want to spend this time with you. This is, you know, a sacred opportunity. I don't want to spend this thinking about, you know, how many Instagram followers I have, or whether or not I'm going to do a good job on this podcast, or whether or not I'm going to have the lunch later, or what I should have said to the last question, or whether I misspoke I'm going to have for lunch later, or what I should have said to the last question, or whether I misspoke. I want to be in the moment, right now, all the time, and that's what mindfulness gives you yeah, and so it can be tough to be in that space, right?
Speaker 1:oh yeah, it takes practice, yeah to to get back to to Right and to actually see my current state. And so many times, especially when I'm laying down at night wrestling with certain thoughts about the day and tomorrow, you know, I found myself being anxious about things that aren't real Right, about things that aren't real right, and I think it's very common that we could be anxious about things that have happened, things that aren't even an issue, and I think it's so important to be present. What do you think most people think? Mindfulness is right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, and just with your personal example, you know, like lying awake anxious in bed, like, imagine if you had the power to, instead of feeling anxious, to recognize that you're anxious and recognize that those thoughts don't have to become you and that they might not be true, like being able to see your thoughts objectively, externally, as not who you are, is an incredible powerful thing to have in your arsenal, to have in your toolkit, because it will allow you to get that night's sleep that you need, because you're not thinking about how you're a failure or whatever it is. You're going oh, I have a thought about I'm being a failure, but it is. You're going. Oh, I have a thought about I'm being a failure, but that doesn't mean that that is true. Um, so you just, yeah, you step outside of it.
Speaker 2:But to answer your question, what do most people think mindfulness is? I mean it's a range. I mean I think some people think it's just, like you know, hippie bullshit. Some people think that it's, you know, requires this incredible focus, this intense ability to concentrate, and you know people go okay, well, I have ADHD or I have a short attention span. It's not for me.
Speaker 2:Some people think it's about relaxing. It's not about relaxing. Relaxing is something that happens when you're good at it. It's a positive externality of the practice, which means that you don't do it to relax, you do it to understand the meaning of life and reality and, as a result, you relax. So I think people have you know the results, the outcome, as the goal, and I think that's incorrect. The goal is to actually be able to be present and notice your thoughts and notice how to not become your thoughts and then all of those good things like a good night's sleep and relaxation and stress relief that comes as a kind of bonus on the side. So, yeah, it's just figuring out what the actual intention is of mindfulness that people don't quite understand.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love how you put. You said being an observer of your thoughts externally, kind of taking yourself out of the equation and separating yourself from your thoughts. How can you describe that to people Like? I mean, it sounds simple, right, but you also said it's a practice too. Have you practiced that?
Speaker 2:in theory, okay. Well, let me give you an analogy. Say you have this annoying neighbor and they're knocking on your door. They're constantly knocking on the door. Now you have two options. You can either let them in and let them, you know, screw with your decorations and change the thermostat and put on their music and connect to the Bluetooth and just get all up in your life. Or you can ignore them. And it's the same with emotions. And if you ignore your annoying neighbor, eventually they get bored and walk away so say there's some sort of emotion and it's knocking at your door.
Speaker 2:It keeps appearing in your mind. Now you can go all right, my life is worth nothing. Maybe that's the thought. If you let that thought in, you can start building your whole life around how your life is nothing. You can just become really miserable, you can lose all your self-esteem, you can make these knee-jerk reactions and changes to your life, but if you are able to ignore that thought, it will eventually go away. Everything that arises does pass.
Speaker 2:So it's this idea of saying I don't have to let every thought in. And the fact is, your brain is not always on your side in terms of your brain has evolutionary goals and it's a mess and it's ancient technology, it's prehistoric technology and we're trying to shove it in this modern world where there's so much going on, there's so much chaos and, yeah, frankly, you don't always want to think it has the best intentions for you. So the way to practice it is to start off with just a little bit of meditation. And meditation isn't this, you know, really difficult thing that requires you to do it perfectly Like meditation is something that you can do for five minutes and if, at any point in those five minutes, you notice that you weren't meditating, that is meditating, so you don't have to cancel your brain from all thoughts to feel like you're doing it right. And this is what people don't understand. They go oh, I can't meditate.
Speaker 2:I tried it for five minutes. I just thought about, you know, all the football and this and that, and I, you know, I never got any moments rest. No, you're doing it. If you realized you were lost in thought at any point, you're doing it. You're actually pulling off meditation. All you have to do is notice what's happening in your mind or your body, and the more you do it, the faster you notice these things, the great superpower you end up with after you've done it for enough time is noticing those thoughts so quickly? I'll notice very quickly that I'm having this sensation of sadness and depression without spending an entire day being sad and depressed. So I can just go oh, this is a feeling that I'm having, that's okay, that's normal, that's how the brain works. We have emotional ups and downs instead of spending days, weeks, months before I recognize I'm low.
Speaker 1:I love that. Yeah, it's powerful. Yeah, Because the more you practice it, the more you get used to that sensation, maybe in your chest right and it's connected to your body, physical sensations.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you're like, wait, why am I feeling this way? And what's going on here? Like, how am I thinking, right, and I know, um, it's a lot of different things, right, that you can do for mindfulness, right. Um, journaling right. When I get a chance to journal my thoughts, I naturally feel like an observer of my thoughts, right, that's a really good way of putting it. Like, when I, when I journal, I'm talking in. It's almost like I am talking to myself. From another person I'm saying you, I'm, I'm not using I right a lot of times and so, yeah, I don't know. Do you have experience with that? Do you journal at all? What does that look?
Speaker 2:like yeah well, I mean, my podcast is kind of a journal yeah it is just talking about literally the emotions that I've felt and the philosophy that I'm using to navigate them. So it's been a very powerful source of uh reflection for me. But what you said was really really clever and kind of subtle too. Just changing the I to the you is the big deal there, because you're not embodying these emotions. You're going okay, these are a little removed from me, yeah, and that's it. We're all happier when we just are not completely stuck in our own sort of ego, right, and our ownism. It's okay to just take a step back, take a breath and just go. This is just things that happened Neurons, that fire, as opposed to you know, problems with how my life is structured 100%.
Speaker 1:I love it, and you said something earlier. You said your mind is not on your team, and when you said that, it made me think about a quote I heard it's your mind is a beautiful servant, but a dangerous master, right? And so what I've learned, though, is that there are things you can do to not put your mind on your team, right? What do you think is things that people do on their like day-to-day that causes their mind to work against them?
Speaker 2:That's such a fantastic question and, just to clarify, I don't think that your mind is always not on your team, because your mind does wonderful things, like help you experience beauty and love and all of these things, I feel like it always comes from a good place, a place of protection right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, I mean, I think, I think it's a great question. I mean, if you, if you like, say you're at a dinner party and you spill soy sauce all down your shirt, now you have options, right, like you can. If you're mindful, you go okay, this happened, you change your shirt and you move on. If you're not, you keep replaying the soy sauce on your shirt and you think about how embarrassing it was, and then you systematically go through the opinion of everybody else and you create all these false realities about how you looked, how you people think of you, all these different pinpoints, and it can basically take up all your energy and all your time, and I think in that way, your mind cannot be on your team, because there's actually no benefit a lot of the time to our thoughts. And I mean, what if your thought is replaying an event again and again and again, an embarrassing event that's already happened?
Speaker 2:You know, how is that serving you? How is that helping you reach your goals? How is shame, guilt, embarrassment, anxiety about things you can't control? How are those actually making you the person you want to be? They're not. They're just noise in your head, and I think you know my, my all of my work. It's about helping people get some sort of freedom from that noise, just because, because the mind yeah, the mind's going to keep on shoving it in your face. It's kind of like you know annoying advertisements or like you know social media algorithms. They go you take this, take this, take this, and you don't have to.
Speaker 1:You don't have to, I guess, practical things right, like things that most people do. They get up First thing they do is look at their phone. Right, I'm guilty, right, I'm sure most I wouldn't say I would say a lot of people can be guilty of that right, first thing you do is check phone. Right, last thing you do is check phone of the day. It could be diet, it could be a lot of certain things that um can kind of get those wheels turning in a negative way.
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know well, I mean, I think the social media one is is a little tricky, like obviously, I think people are designed differently around social media, like some people are really attracted to this sort of short form stuff and some people get really obsessed with their social media presence and then others don't. It's hard to know exactly what the effects of social media are from. From what I've read, it tends to not be good. At the same time, if you're a creator, you kind of have to be on social media, which is this painful irony, especially in the mindfulness space. But like, yeah, broadly speaking, I don't know if it's about necessarily taking too many practical life hacky type steps.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think meditation is a good one. Or, like you said, journaling, like having some kind of practice around what you're doing. I think that really helps condition your mind, I mean, and you're obviously an athlete or an ex-athlete, and so you know how training works and you have to do the work in order to have the benefits on game day. And that's why meditation is such an excellent starting point, because game day is every time you feel something you don't want to feel, when you have these negative emotions, but you need to do that practice when you're feeling okay. So yeah, even if it's five minutes, 10 minutes of just thinking about what you're feeling as a third party, just sit anywhere and go. What am I feeling right now? And you can start physical. So you know, I'm feeling the wind on the hair on my arm or whatever you can start mental, you go. Okay, I'm feeling the wind on the hair on my arm, or whatever you can start mental, you can go. Okay, I'm feeling a lot of different thoughts. They're just kind of all over the place. You can look at the back of your eyes and see the colors that are sort of sparking there, and then, when you do that enough, when you meditate for long enough, everything just becomes a meditation.
Speaker 2:You're just sitting on the bus and you're experiencing life in real time. You're just sitting on the bus and you're experiencing life in real time, and that's kind of the goal is to not actually sit on a chair meditating forever, but to just be in this state of open awareness. Wherever you go, whatever you do and whatever you're experiencing, actually experience it. If there's a beautiful bird, see the bird and don't think about tomorrow's work day. You know, like engaging conversations just be what you imagine being a human is like, instead of just going from thought to thought. So yeah, I think, like you said, there's hundreds of practices. I think meditation is a good one. I think journaling is a fantastic one. Um, you know, you can do these things like all this, like e-media hygiene and stuff gets some blockers, you know, but that's that. Stuff's all good too, I mean, I I definitely found myself deep in a youtube hole at some point in my life and that would be my.
Speaker 2:That's my personal vice. Like the reels and stuff, don't get me but YouTube. Oh my God, that one sucks me up. So, eventually I was like I can't do this on my own, I just need a blocker.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can definitely watch YouTube all day if I'm not careful. Yeah, so many different types of videos, but you said something very interesting because you've talked about, you know, being an athlete in training and, um, and a lot of people don't think about. A lot of people think about training physically, um, running, lifting weights, um, I don't think a lot of folks think about the mental fitness, right, the, the reading, the, putting good things in your mind, the, like you said, meditation and journaling, and like ways to make your mind stronger, ways to get more mentally tough, yep, doing things that you're afraid of, right, these are all things that are kind of that stretch you mentally, that make you stronger longer, and so I actually want to go back to your story a little bit, because I want to understand how you even got in this space to begin with. Right, I can tell and I know folks can also hear how passionate you are about mindfulness in the mind, right, it wasn't always like this, though, right?
Speaker 2:No, no, josh, man, like you, have to learn some of this stuff the hard way and I I, you know, I've meditated for a while but I didn't get this into it. Um, until I got to a very dark place in my life. And just to give you a sense of the story, you know, in my sort of mid-20s I was doing a ton of sports. I was running, I was playing soccer three, four times a week. It was my whole life really, sport, and I know obviously you relate to this in a very deep way. It was the only thing I wanted to do when I finished work and you know, I found myself got, I got COVID, and it wasn't a big deal. I got a bit of headaches, a bit of dizziness, um, and they just never went away. That was the problem. So, even though they weren't that bad, they never went away.
Speaker 2:And then I went to, you know, a couple of doctors. I was taking a bunch of you knowrofen and Panadol, and I went to a few doctors and I was just like what's going on? It's been four weeks, six weeks and I'm still sick with these headaches. And they were like well, there's this thing we've been exploring called long COVID. We don't really know what it is, maybe do some blood tests, we'll try and figure that out. So I went and did all these blood tests. They said, referred me to some neurologist, neurologist diagnosed me with long covid and then I was like, okay, what does this mean? Because I was, you know, I'd spent my whole life in a very good physical space and this is my first sort of experience of the medical system and all of a sudden people were telling me I had this like you know condition and I was having these terrible headaches and I was having this terrible dizziness and I started getting all these different medications from the neurologist to kind of fix it.
Speaker 2:Nothing worked and my headaches kept on getting worse, to the point where I had to start cutting things out of my life. So, obviously, I quit sport, I quit running, I started going okay, what else can I do to try and free myself of these headaches? They were all day, every day, like from the second I woke up till I went to sleep and I cut out okay, I'll cut out alcohol, I'll cut out caffeine, I'll only eat, you know, vegetables. I tried all this different stuff. And then, you know, I had doctors and they're like well, just, you need rest, you need rest, you need rest, you need rest. Okay, well, maybe I'm working too hard. So I started cutting out work and then I started to stop socializing and all of these different things and the headaches got worse and worse and worse. Like I was basically just this homebody. I was just this guy who woke up, took a bunch of meds and sat in a chair watching TV all day and like I'm condensing this.
Speaker 2:But this took a year and a half for me to get from here to here Really just regression of this condition and my life getting worse. And the fact is, nothing was actually coming up on the scans. So I had the long COVID for a bit. I had some bloods that weren't that great that's why they gave me long COVID but after six months all of that stuff was gone and yet my condition was still there and I started getting really depressed because it felt like I was never going to be free. I was just never going to be free of this condition and all the doctors, all the best neurologists I could find, didn't know what to do. And I got to the point where I was engaged at the time and I was like I'm just this depressing mess. Life's not really worth living. I'm a burden to everybody, can't socialize. I'm going to call off the engagement, um, and just you know, live alone, watch tv, whatever it is, smoke, weed, who cares? Just my life's a waste of time, and yeah it's.
Speaker 2:And then eventually, um, I my lowest point was I woke up one day feeling excited and I was like I'm gonna walk around the block just to show that, show myself that I can, because I've become so unfit, I've become so sick and I was in so much pain that I couldn't move. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna walk around the block. And I walked down the hill near my house and I got to the bottom of the hill and I looked up and it looked like mount everest getting back up. I was like I can't do this, I can't get back up this hill. So I tried and because the dizziness was so bad, the migraine was so bad, I fell over after a few steps and I crawled on my hands and knees up this hill through in broad daylight, in public, and then like into bed and I decided I was never going to leave my bed again.
Speaker 2:But the amazing thing is the human spirit doesn't. Let you give up that hard. It just doesn't. And so, even though I gave up for, like you know, weeks, maybe months, one day I was like, nah, I'm going to keep researching. I didn't find anything, give up, keep researching. I didn't find anything, give up, keep researching.
Speaker 2:Eventually I found some literature on the mind-body connection and that was saying that not all pain is helpful and not all pain is indicative of a physical problem. There can be this mismatch between pain and reality. And I started looking into all of this and I started trying to understand what pain was for. And pain is about protecting us. Pain is this ancient mechanism of saying you know, don't stand in a fire. But when the signals get crossed, when it's not doing its job, it's just about saying, hey, stay in the safest possible environment, close off your life so that you can be safe and keep procreating, or whatever it is humans are supposed to do. And what I started understanding was I could, actually I'd been training my mind to think that giving me pain signals was protecting me really well. So I had been training my mind to form this habit of pain equals safety.
Speaker 2:And then, when I started flipping it, when I started trying to tell my mind. No, these pain signals don't lead to the behavior that you're trying to get me to do. Things started changing, so I was like, okay, I'm going to go to a party and just have a migraine the entire time. I'm going to walk and I'm going to fall over, and that's fine, I'm going to do everything I want to do in pain and just see what happens. Because there are some people saying that you can train it the other way, and I kept on doing this. I had to go two steps forward, one step back. So I'd go okay, I'm going to try and go up the stairs. I'd go up the stairs, I'd feel huge amounts of pain, but I'd get up the stairs. And then at least I've proven to myself I can get up the stairs.
Speaker 2:And I started proving to myself I can actually do a lot of stuff while in pain. Like pain doesn't mean I don't have to do everything I like doing, and if you do that enough times, the most magical thing happens the brain realizes that the pain signals that it's sending aren't actually impacting your behavior, and so it stops sending them. And so, in the course of about six, nine months, I went from having pain all day, every day to no pain at all. But I had to suffer a lot and had to do a lot of stuff in pain in order to train my mind to stop sending those signals. And that was where I was like, okay, the mind is a big thing, it's, it's actually it's. It's leading everything. It's leading everything from. You know, I knew, I already knew it was a big part of emotions and all this kind of stuff. But the fact that it could impact pain, physical stuff happening in the physical body, that's next level.
Speaker 2:And so I really want to get this message out that if you're in chronic pain and I'm not talking about acute pain, I'm not saying you can heal a muscle tear or a fracture or cancer or anything like that but if you have this pain that you've had for years and doctors don't know what to do, maybe look into the fact that it might not be indicative of an actual physical problem. So, like, you can start going. You know you can start running in pain. You can start, and this is back pain, neck pain, doesn't have to be headaches. It's all like. There's stories, thousands of stories in this space, of people getting over long-term chronic pain, particularly unexplainable, unexplainable pain, by just exposing themselves to new situations and pushing themselves a little bit. And this is the terrible thing. We're always told to rest by doctors. We're always told to medicate. Actually, that, not, that's not always right. That's not always right.
Speaker 1:Sometimes you have to fight, yeah so you had to because I was going to ask you that, that that was going through my mind. The whole story was what was causing it, like what was the root cause of it, and it sounds like the pain was sending pain signals to keep you safe, to keep you from pursuing a life that was better, or even just thoughts that were better.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, you're right, because I mean, if you think about it, if you're like, oh, I have a back pain, so I'm not going to go to this party, you know that you might spend that time feeling sorry for yourself, being like, oh, if only I didn't have back pain then I would have gone to that party. But, to be honest, you've still chosen the easy route. Parties are a little they're a little scary. You know you have to see people, you have to socialize and a lot of sort of anxiety and you know fear of failure and stuff. It actually gets built into physical pain To the body, like exactly exactly. And so you think you go oh, if it wasn't for my pain, I'd be there having fun.
Speaker 2:That's not always true. Sometimes you need to take a hard look at yourself and be like am I closing my own life and using pain as an excuse? Ooh, yeah, I mean, I don't know what was your experience with your injury? Like, was there ever a point where you were healed and yet you were still a little nervous of of of going back to going back to?
Speaker 1:what? Well, here's the thing, right, the reason why we came up with playing injured and it's very unique to your situation was we wanted to understand the mind of an athlete, right, and it's kind of crazy that you the example that you're giving the mind of an athlete when they do hurt themselves. What makes them want to push through it? Right, and it is a lot of cases where it's you know, hey, it's a big game and I am hurt to some degree, right and um, I have to be out there because my team needs me. Right, and I could take the easy route and just sit out, but knowing that I have to play through it, it is a feeling of confidence that you gain, right, that's amazing. And then, over time, over time, right, yes, you do play with pain and it does hurt and you do suffer. Right, play through it. And then, all of a sudden, what you realize is that your mind is the mindfulness of it. Right, you are so present that you don't even necessarily feel the pain, right?
Speaker 1:So my last year playing basketball, I broke my thumb. I was out for 11 games and I rushed back. I had to get back and I was playing through it and I wasn't fully healthy and sometimes I couldn't catch the ball, but eventually I got to a point where I was so present that the obstacles of playing didn't matter. Matter of fact, it got to a point where I didn't even feel it anymore, because I was just so-.
Speaker 2:This is exactly what I'm talking about. This is exactly what I'm talking about, right.
Speaker 1:So you expressing yourself of like, hey, the pain actually was keeping me safe and me using it as an excuse to keep me from playing through it and being able to kind of grow through the obstacles, right?
Speaker 2:um, yeah, very unique stuff, man well, I mean, it's interesting what you say, right, like you could have been like oh, I have this broken thumb, that means that I can't play. And if you had said that, you know what else is tied up in that decision, is it that you don't want to fail on the court? Are you worried about, you know, the girl you like seeing you fuck up, like it's just like. You know you have to figure out where's this coming from. And you chose the hard route, which is going out there anyway and, as you said, all of a sudden you're not thinking about, you're not spending the whole game thinking about your thumb. You're actually spending the game, engaged in the, the joy of the game. You know you're free, flowing through it. It's because you chose the hard route.
Speaker 2:And I think, like this is the other thing that people don't really realize in the mindfulness and mental health spaces. They think it's very sort of soft and all about self-care and all of this stuff. You know it is some of that stuff, but some of self-care and all of this stuff, you know it is some of that stuff, but some of self-care is doing tough things, doing hard things and having someone say get up off your ass and be brave. That's self-care too. It's not always about just you know sweet little flowery chat Like. A lot of self-care is actually being strong, being tough, being resilient.
Speaker 1:I agree with you and I think a lot of of self-care is actually being strong, being tough, being resilient. I agree with you and I think a lot of times self-care like traditional, you know, just lounge around and it makes me feel worse, for me personally, right, and I can say, you know, during those holidays, you know during the Christmas time and I don't know how things are in australia, but I know for sure here in in the states um, those two weeks of christmas, new years, right, nobody is doing anything and you can just easily watch christmas movies all day and not work out and eat whatever and relax. Right, you tell yourself that you're relaxing, but it does not. I'd never feel great like after those times, and I do, you know. I'm not saying never rest, never take time and relax and watch movies and do all that. But when you start to do it for a week straight or three days straight, um, you become um, it's not self-care anymore.
Speaker 2:You know I'm so with you, man. It's actually so interesting to hear you talk about this because I completely subscribe to this space, um, and and the ideas that you're talking about. Like you know, we often get told we need to rest and people think they're doing us a service by saying you're burnt out, you need to rest, and sometimes you do. Sometimes you get there and you do need rest and you need to switch off, like that's good stuff. But you have to know when to stop, and sometimes stopping is a little sooner than people want to tell you. And it's okay if you get a lot of energy and joy from working hard. It's okay to work hard.
Speaker 2:Like every people are different. You're a hard worker, so when you rest for too long, you actually feel, you know, jittery, you feel frustrated. Not everyone's like that, so it's fine wherever you are on the spectrum, but I don't think that everybody should try and put their own feelings on other people. So it's like if you're, if you're not a hard worker and there's nothing wrong with being not a hard worker, because some people are just good at enjoying life for what it is and if you're one of those people, then you have to understand that there's some people who just don't rest while they're resting. I don't rest while I'm resting either, like I am happier when I'm working. It's just the fact.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%, brother. We have to go back to pain right, because I know there's some emotional, um, pain can be felt in so many different ways and I think it. It like me, I'm thinking about it. It's like taking a moment to really think about what the pain is holding you back from and see, at least try it right. At least try, hey, what pain is holding you back from and persevere through it and see if it helps. See if it helps the pain.
Speaker 2:Like you're so right, like what have you got to lose If you're already in pain? What have you got to lose? And this was already in pain, what have you got to lose? And this was what my I have to credit my neurologist, who's like the third neurologist. I tried and I remember I told her that story about me going up the hill Real sob story. I was feeling really sorry for myself. And she was like tomorrow you're going to try again. And I was like how dare you make me go through that again? I had to crawl in public and she's like, yeah, and it didn't kill you, so do it again and it won't kill you again.
Speaker 2:Like just go and fail, go and suffer. If you make progress, you'll have learned so much about yourself. If you don't make progress, you're only in the exact same spot you were yesterday. It makes no difference. So you only have upside right spot. You were yesterday. It makes no difference, so you only have upside right. Like you can't lose from exposing yourself to something hard. You just can't lose failure. What's the what's the problem if you're already sitting around in pain, closing off your life? You know what's so bad about it not going well yeah, 100 and I.
Speaker 1:And one more thing is but the amount of confidence that you gain from having that pain and not letting it be an excuse for you, yeah, and what you get on the other side of it, it's, it's, it's tenfold, it's like time grow yeah it's times 10 of what it would be if you didn't have that pain or that excuse right, spot, spot on, spot on.
Speaker 1:So that's huge and I love your and and man. I just love that story that you share of the pain was holding you back from from doing things in life and, um, with the pain, you were able to now be in this space of mindfulness, right, without that chronic pain, you wouldn't have learned about the space of being mindful and helping others do it right, and your journey has been amazing. And I think that journey, uh, has been amazing and I think that, um, it's just so many different ways that you can, um, use mindfulness to help your life, right?
Speaker 2:I mean, yeah, it's, it's one of those. It's one of those things where, like you know, anybody who's gone through a lot of pain often looks back on it and be like that was the best thing that ever happened to me in terms of in terms of how much they grow, like that's, like it's the same with you, right, you wouldn't be here if you hadn't gone through, you know, various injuries and suffering and like now, all of a sudden, you're helping thousands of people. Like it's transformative stuff. It really is, and it's a good lesson that when you're in pain right now, don't be scared. It'll probably end up making you a stronger person.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%, and that's why we have this. We have this platform so that people can see pain as an opportunity. Right, beautiful, and it's hard to see it in the moment.
Speaker 1:It's very hard to see it in the moment, right, you don't realize it until you look back, once you've gone through it, um, but I don't think, I don't think anybody has ever regretted not um, persevering through pain, through a tough time, um, you always gain more right as opposed to letting it defeat you. So, uh, no, I love it. Jonah, where, where can people find you? Where can people listen to the podcast that you host both? Yeah, I would love to open it up for that.
Speaker 2:Well, I think the best place to find me would be on the Overexamined Life. So that's my podcast. You'll find it on any podcast app. Overexamined is one word, the O, one word, the over examined life. And we do two episodes a week. They're only 10 minutes long and they just look at a different emotion or problem or anything. It's bite size and you just, uh, could get a few of the world's best teachers telling us about, uh, how to sort, how to sort out certain emotions and navigate certain everyday life struggles, things that we all go through. Um, and we, you know, we draw from neuroscience, psychology, buddhism, whatever it might be I love it.
Speaker 1:10 minute. 10 minute shows um. I know people can appreciate that that's right with it.
Speaker 2:With this short, short attention, short attention span, it's good for all of us.
Speaker 1:No, I love it. I love it. Well, jonah man, I appreciate you making this happen. This was a really powerful show and I think in today's world we can definitely use more mindfulness, and you made it very simple for folks to really understand what it is and kind of take the pressure off of it as well, and so, um, I appreciate that's right, yeah, it's.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's just if you want to do it, just have a have a go. By trying, you are succeeding, and I mean I think that's. You don't have to. You don't have to perfect it on day one. There is no perfection anyway. So just just have a go and your life will be better for it. And, josh, thank you so much for having me on your show and for, as I said, doing what you're doing, because you know, like you said, you have grown so much from you know understanding life struggles and from you know building this resilience, and people just need to hear that. People need to hear that. People need to hear that they need to hear from people like you who are pushing through tough times and coming out with a good attitude, because we only have one life and we want to spend it happy and joyous and there's no point wallowing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And if you have one life, it would be great to be present right, it would be great to be present in right. It would be great to be present in it, as opposed to living in the past or in the future. Then you have a chance to live life right.
Speaker 2:That's right, that's right. Life's happening right now. Right now, yeah Well.
Speaker 1:I love it. Well, brother, thanks again, and everybody follow Plan Injured.
