How walking helped me get rid of the pain

When my age was about twenty years, I had back problems. The problem began when I was a teenager, but a few years after yoga management and massage, I realized that conventional pain relief strategies suddenly did not work.

In those days I have had pain, from my skull supporting my spine to my heels. I can’t move my head too much to the right.

In the mornings, when I wake up, I took a few minutes bending and moving my ankles, knees, hips and lower back, at least enough to walk to the kitchen to make tea.

When I reached 28 years of age, the pain was so severe that it affected my ability to walk and sleep. At the time, my wife and I lived in a house in a remote suburb for a year and a half.

There was a wasteland in the garden and the birds were singing every morning. That was beautiful, but that place specially designed for cars. We have nowhere to go but the post super market a mile away.

Before we bought that house, we only lived in cities that were fit for walking (or suitable for people with a healthy body to walk on), and we walked around on our feet, supplemented with quality or ordinary public transportation, depending on the town.

We first bought a car when we knew we were moving to the New York countryside, right on the border of my husband's new office in New Jersey. At this time, walking was no longer my most important activity in life, and the pain was getting worse.

For many years, I solved this by driving a 45-minute one-way ride to a yoga class or doing a video of pilates in morning time, but these things were not enough.

The unique thing that really helps, and that I can rely on, is to walk. I was walking on our country road, where people were driving too fast and there were thousands of poisonous plants hidden in the ditches.

I walk as much as possible in the heat and cold, and when I get home, I feel like there can be a relationship with my body, not just with pain.

It was the impact of walking on my pain that made me realize for the first time how inaccessible it is to walk in our lives. We were living our life in a four-hectare suburban house, and there it had no sidewalks, and even if it does, there is no access to the city.

Each and everything made for cars. Although this lifestyle did not cause me pain, it did aggravate the pain so that some days I can only think of the pain in my lower back, neck, buttocks and shoulders.

As I walk, my body stiffens and I begin to resist, and to the end the pain begins to subside. It did not leave completely, but as long as I walk regularly, it can be controlled.

After 12 years of relying on cars, we moved to Montana, my hometown, which is very suitable for hiking, where I recorded not my daily steps, but my physical feelings.

In this pandemic year, when I stopped sending my kids to school or went to a meeting in the city center alone, I strongly remembered the unreadable life in New York.

My body was stiffened again; again, even when I typed, pain came from my shoulders, buttocks, ankles and neck.

Now i want to connect to double-blind peer-reviewed studies that show a link between pain relief and walking. But I know nothing. To walk has been found to help treat osteoarthritis, it may be because exercise signaled the brain to relieve pain and it seems to relieve pain in old age people with chronic muscle and skeletal pain.

However, I do not have osteoarthritis, and i am about 39 year of age; actually I have no diagnosis at all. I just feel pain, and apart from my own experience, there is no evidence that walking helps.

In this small and single life, I understand one point: if I lead a life of walking, I can control the pain. I cannot find out what produces the pain, maybe several car accidents in my teens; untreated spinal fractures when i was a child; tension; a desk job or why it did not want to leave my body, but I know that to walk can prevent my despair and immobility.

As I walked, my body became relaxed and my spine began to return upright. My brain releases tension while still paying attention to the pain.

As I was writing this article, I began to believe that the first step towards human prosperity, physical and mental health and resilience in the community.

This is the first step in stopping the loneliness epidemic and avoiding scourge of change in climate. But only last year did I forget that it was the pain relief that convinced me for the first time that everyone should be able to walk, not the privileged class.

Whether we are walking with our feet, sitting in a wheelchair, walking with a walker or leaning on the arm of a trusted person, if we are powerless, if we have no any answers, we all must have the opportunity to walk.

THANKS