Alchemize Your Pain

By Jami Allred

Reclaim your life from chronic pain! 

 

Are you sick of feeling like a prisoner in your own body? Is your chronic pain affecting your career, and even your relationships? Are you not content with merely managing your pain for the rest of your life?

 

In Alchemize Your Pain, author and chronic pain survivor Jami Allred will help you shift from being a victim of your pain to being in control of it. After suffering a back injury and then being diagnosed with fibromyalgia, Jami's life was forever transformed because her once healthy body was now wracked by chronic pain. Conventional medicine was unable to help, so she set off on a journey of exploration to learn how to manage her pain—a journey that in time led her to living the life she now loves, a life largely free of chronic pain.

 

In this book, Jami covers topics that you might expect, such as diet and exercise, but she also delves into more nontraditional subjects such as cultivating a creative outlet, and even psilocybin. By combining the holistic approaches discussed in this book, Jami has learned how to alchemize her own pain. Because of her successful results, she has been compelled to share her approach in this easy-to-use reference guide so that you, too, can alchemize your pain and reclaim your life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jami Allred
• Release date: Aug 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9798988793717

Book preview

Introduction

The motivation that compelled me to write this book came not only from my own personal journey of navigating chronic pain, but also from having spoken to numerous sufferers of chronic pain who have signed up for my virtual chronic pain workshops in the past year or so. After having the privilege of learning about the difficult and frustrating journeys of many chronic pain sufferers, whose stories are woven with many of the common threads that can be found in my own, I realized that there are some gaping holes in the cloth that makes up the complex life of a chronic pain sufferer.

I will be the first to admit that I do not have all of the answers, and as you have undoubtedly noticed from the lack of capital letters behind my name on the cover of this book, I am very obviously not a doctor. While I do have some very basic and incomplete college education on topics pertinent to chronic pain, my wisdom on the subject comes from my own personal journey and willingness to experiment with my own life and body. As I started to achieve improvement and benefits through various modalities, I realized that most doctors treating our various forms of chronic pain have woefully limited training in the subject.

In entertaining the idea of writing my own book, I did some research beforehand, and discovered that most of the good books available for chronic pain sufferers are written by the few doctors who do have a better understanding. I also discovered that there are very few books available that are written from first-hand accounts and experience. As the idea of sharing my story slowly became a reality, I realized that I had a beautiful opportunity to share with you just how much I can empathize with you and your own painful journey. Unlike the callous messages that we have received from many medical professionals, such as It’s all in your head or You need to just get over it, I am here to share that I know from experience that it is just not that easy or simple—not to mention the fact that those messages are neither helpful nor appreciated.

As I detail my journey with chronic pain in the following chapters, I will simply share here that my life was completely derailed and shifted by my experiences with pain. I was a travelling construction worker—a woman working in the high-voltage electrical industry—when I incurred a back injury on the job in 2019. This injury would become just a minor contributing factor in comparison to the pain I experienced when I developed the condition called fibromyalgia in 2020. My story is not unique to most chronic pain sufferers: I was a competent, independent human being who thought I had a plan and a pretty good handle on life. When I was forced to shift from my go-getter attitude to becoming a prisoner in my own body, and was subject to torture in and by my own body, I had to completely reevaluate my life and my priorities.

In the beginning stages of my journey, I faced many of the frustrations common to all chronic pain sufferers, such as being treated with skepticism and even suspicion. It was my stubbornness and unwillingness to acquiesce to a lifetime of limited mobility and pharmaceutical cocktails that drove me to take the longer route of exploring just how much I could gain an understanding of my own pain. I wanted to explore just how much control I could learn to exert over this powerful force that had transformed my life. Essentially, I wasn’t going to settle for the opinions of just a handful of medical professionals.

In my willingness to implement several forms of self-care into my life over time, I began to experience seemingly inexplicable, almost magical improvements in my life that I can best describe as alchemy. While alchemy is traditionally understood as the medieval practice of attempting to transform less valuable materials into gold, today it is often referred to in terms of spiritual transformation. Indeed, in consistently combining practices of nourishing my mind, body, and soul, I was beginning to transmute my pain into pure gold, which in my case came in the forms of joy and purpose.

I imagine myself, not unlike those medieval alchemists, in my self-care lab (so to speak) mixing a little of this and a little of that, tossing in a sprinkle of love and a healthy pour of grace, giving it a little stir and poof. The resulting gold may appear in the form of pain relief, a deeper understanding of myself, or a leveling-up of self-acceptance, just to name a few outcomes.

This is also how I imagine you, the reader, can use this book. Think of yourself as an alchemist, and this a book of reference. By your willingness to experiment with mixing and matching various self-care modalities that resonate with you, I believe that you can discover on your own much more powerful insights than by dabbling in just one area of focus or just one concept.

I cannot offer you one surefire way to feel better, for the same reasons that medical professionals cannot give us one prescription that will alleviate all of our symptoms. Each of us has unique symptoms and unique mental, physical, and spiritual needs. It is for this reason that in order for you to achieve some magic, some relief or improvement, you must be willing to experiment with and explore for yourself several different forms of self-care.

As I do not have a strict formula for success to apply here, I would like to reiterate your using this book as a reference or even a textbook. Explore the chapters that are relevant to your current journey and take plenty of notes. In fact, I strongly urge you to keep a journal while reading this book. On top of that, I encourage you to mark up these pages with your notes and thoughts, and dog-ear the important ones. I have even included blank pages after each chapter to encourage you to self-reflect and brainstorm before moving onto the next chapter. So, grab a pen, maybe a highlighter, maybe your journal, and let’s get started on this journey of positive transformation.

This book does not need to be read in any particular order, and I would recommend reading it at the same pace at which you are willing to work on yourself. Take your time. Almost none of my progress was made overnight, and while my current daily routine does include various forms of self-care, I did not begin to implement all of these things all at once. I don’t want you to start off overwhelmed, because if you do, the likelihood of you sticking to any commitment that you’ve made to yourself is really slim. So choose one concept at a time, set aside what doesn’t work for you, and keep what does work before integrating another concept.

Just one of so many lessons that I have learned on my own journey is that we are all connected to the Divine. We are each an extension of something very powerful and unseen, and because of that we are each capable of tapping into the power of self-healing. Without exception, I believe that every one of us has the ability to explore our own unique needs and to utilize what God has gifted us in order to improve our lives so that we may experience the maximum potential that the gift of this life can afford us, despite chronic pain. This only requires a willingness to learn and apply what we know to be true in our hearts.

From the bottom of my heart, I truly hope that you will be willing to explore and experiment with my suggestions in order to discover what it will take to transmute your own pain and alchemize it into the valuable gold that will adorn your most precious gift: your Life.

1

My Journey of Pain and Healing

While I was not diagnosed with fibromyalgia until early 2021, my chronic pain story really began with a back injury that I incurred on the job in the spring of 2019. I was a substation electrician apprentice at the time, and had strained several disks in my lower vertebrae by lifting very large and heavy substation batteries at work. The next couple of years were a waiting game for insurance and medical professionals to come to an agreement on the best way to proceed with treatment. During that time I was assigned various light-duty tasks to keep busy. While the powers-that-be deliberated over my treatment, my back pain became a daily fixture in my life, and my hopes for an effective solution were dwindling as time dragged on. In 2020, due to COVID and other administrative reasons, I ran out of light-duty tasks and was told to simply sit at home and wait. Looking back, I will forever be grateful for that time at home, despite the painful events I had to endure to receive it.

But at that time I was in a perpetually anxious state. I was not used to sitting at home, and I felt like I had an audience of peers with judgments, expectations, and cynicism watching my every move. I had spent my whole adult life working very hard. I had dedicated the last thirteen years to developing my career in the high-voltage construction industry, and I was hell-bent on proving to the world that women could do anything that men can do. Beyond that, I was driven to prove it to myself—and to my father.

Because I had spent well over a decade working long hours and traveling on the road, I hadn’t developed healthy habits, or healthy coping mechanisms. Now stuck at home, I had suddenly gone from living a fast-paced life of working hard under rough conditions to a complete standstill. I felt like I had let everyone down around me, including myself, and I was drowning in depression and anxiety. Up until the fall of 2020, I had used alcohol to cope with these difficult emotions, as well as my perceived stagnancy. At the point where this story begins, I had read the writing on the wall that alcohol was doing me no favors and had quit. Yet I was still young in my sobriety.

Not long after I had sobered up, I received word that my father had suddenly passed due to complications from his life-long abuse of alcohol. This news hit me hard on many levels, and how I managed to stay sober through the mourning of his death is the subject for another book. My father’s death not only affected me emotionally, it triggered a physical reaction in my body that proceeded to torment me for many months.

The day I received this devastating news is the same day that my entire body began to hurt. It was almost unnoticeable at first because I simply wanted to lay down and weep all day. But as I tried to carry on, I found the regular tasks that most of us take for granted on a daily basis—tasks such