Don't Quit on Me

Rest and Recovery - the Keys for Long Term Success

Nick Propper is a sought after expert, keynote speaker and facilitator on the topicof building sustainable human performance.

Nick works extensively within the senior leadership groups of some of the world’s leading organizations, including Yale School of Medicine, Goldman Sachs, Procter & Gamble, Morgan Stanley, DaVita, G100, United States Ski & Snowboard Team, United States Air Force and the United States Federal Intelligence Community.

Prior to co-founding Impact Human Performance, Nick was a leader at the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute. In this role Nick was both a performance Coach, leading clients through high impact programming in the fields of Energy Management and Resilience, and the lead for the Professional Service Business Unit.

Before specializing in the Human Performance industry Nick held several senior leadership positions in a fifteen-year career at Omnicom, the world’s leading holding company of marketing and communications agencies. After running agencies in the UK and Europe, Nick’s last role was Global Chief Operating Officer and Chief Client Officer at Porter Novelli, a Global Communications

Consultancy.

Nick studied at Loughborough University in the UK where he earned a BA in European Business Administration and he remains an avid sportsman, spending his free time on the tennis court, on his road bike or skiing in the mountains with his family.

Nick on LinkedIn

Impact Human Performance – We help people perform at their best, more often.

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Contact Nick at Don't Quit on Me Podcast

Mark McConville is a seasoned comedian and a respected lecturer in Suicidology. With over two decades of experience in the entertainment industry, he has become one of Australia’s most reliable and professional comedians. Mark’s academic journey in mental health is equally impressive; he graduated from Griffith University with a Master’s Degree in Suicidology and received the Griffith Award for Academic Excellence in 2016. His work now bridges the gap between laughter and serious discussions about mental health, emphasizing the power of humor in suicide prevention. As an Adjunct Lecturer at The Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention, Mark continues to enlighten and engage audiences with his unique blend of comedy and compassion.

Mental Health Resources

Lifeline13 11 14

Beyond Blue1300 22 46 36 - for online chat (3pm-12am AEST) or email responses within 24 hours

MensLine Australia1300 78 99 78

Kids Helpline1800 55 1800

13 YARN13 92 76 - 24/7 for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people

SANE Australia1800 18 7263

headspace1800 650 890

youthbeyondblue1300 224 636

Veterans Support Service1800 011 046

PANDA(perinatal anxiety and depression) 1300 726 306

The Eating Disorders Centre(eating disorders)(07) 3844 6055

Butterfly Foundation(eating disorders) 1800 334673

QLife(LGBTI) 1800 184 527

Griefline1300 845 745

Grow Australia (support through peer groups) 1800 558 268

Suicide Call Back Service1300 659 467
24-hour national telephone counselling and online service for people 18 years and over

Kids Helpline1800 55 1800
Free confidential 24-hour telephone and online counselling for young people aged 5 to 25 years

Beyond Blue1300 22 4636
24-hour telephone support and online chat service with links to local services

e-headspace
Online counselling for young people 12 to 25 years

Mindhealthconnect
Website aggregates mental health resources and content from the leading health

Blue Knot Helpline and Redress Support Service

Supporting adult survivors of childhood trauma and adult survivors of institutional child sexual abuse around the National Redress Scheme

Call 1300 657 380
[email protected]

1800 Respect

Support if you, or someone you know, is experiencing sexual assault or domestic and family violence. 1800 737 732

available 24/7 - Online chat - available 24/7 - 1800respect.org.au

Maggie O'Shea is a relationship therapist and mental health social worker in private practice with over 30 years of experience in the field.

Maggie livesinCastlemaine in Australiaand teaches Masters of Counselling students in Melbourne at Swinburne University and Relationships Australia.

Maggie’s practiceMindfulPresencespecializes in group-work and retreats for individuals and couples. She is trained and registered to teach the 8-week mindfulness based stress reduction and mindful self-compassion programs, as well as positive neuroplasticity, yoga, and Brene Brown's Daring Way and Rising Strong. She offers the Mindful Self Compassion program and her own Relationship Renew program live and online most school terms as well as transformative residential retreats for both individuals and couples in Australia and Bali.

Amber Lea Starfire is a writer and writing coach who has published two memoirs and several journaling how-to books. She has also developed a series of online classes and workshops that have helped many people journal and deepen their writing practice.

Amber says "Bringing truth and creativity into the world — and empowering others to do the same — is the work of my life.

I truly believe that there ispower in thestory of people’s lives. My work here combines what I’ve learned from a careerin teaching and writing, anMFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of San Francisco and an MA in Education from Stanford University, as well asmore than two decades of developing an audience for my own life-writing. I’m fascinated with the unique path each writer takes in finding his or hervoice.

You can absolutely do this.

I’d love to know what project or inspiring idea has led you here!Let me know what you’re working on and how I might support you.

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.~Helen Keller

https://writingthroughlife.com/

Rick Hanson, Ph.D., is a psychologist, Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, and New York Times best-selling author. His seven books have been published in 31 languages and include Making Great Relationship, Neurodharma, Resilient, Hardwiring Happiness, Just One Thing, Buddha's Brain, and Mother Nurture - with over a million copies in English alone.

He's the founder of the Global Compassion Coalition and the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom, as well as the co-host of the Being Well podcast - which has been downloaded over 9 million times. His free newsletters have 250,000 subscribers, and his online programs have scholarships available for those with financial needs.

He's lectured at NASA, Google, Oxford, and Harvard. An expert on positive neuroplasticity, his work has been featured on CBS, NPR, the BBC, and other major media. He began meditating in 1974 and has taught in meditation centers worldwide. He and his wife live in northern California and have two adult children. He loves the wilderness and taking a break from emails.

https://www.rickhanson.net/

https://www.globalcompassioncoalition.org/

“ … it's really fascinating actually like the human, at the biological level at the psychological level, we are built to tolerate pain, and we're built to grow stronger from enduring difficulty, we're actually made for it. That's like how it works. Joy matters too - don't get me wrong, you know, but the difficult stuff is always there. So, we might as well get good at utilizing that end of the spectrum as well.”

Ralph De La Rosa

Music with kind permission from Krishna Das

https://www.krishnadas.com/

Gathering in the light-Om-Narayani. Krishna Das. https://krishnadasmusic.com/collections/music/products/gathering-in-the-light

What is this and why read or listen?

What follows is an exploration of my journey of living with chronic pain and accompanying mental health challenges. I now understand, the experience of mental ill health has contributed to the degree and severity with which I have felt this pain.

I started collating my thoughts around the idea of exploring chronic physical pain, and how meditation might help as an intervention to assist people living with these conditions, to experience less suffering. As we will discuss in a bit, pain, whether is physical, emotional, or social, is experienced in similar parts of the brain. So is you know someone who experiences any of these challenges, there may be something in here that might help.

So primarily, we will look at how using a meditative practice might help to reduce suffering, reclaim access to moments of joy and openness and foster the ability to be able to pursue a life worth living, in the presence of pain. Someone once sent me a post on social media with a picture and a quote saying “Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning to dance in the rain.” I was near vomiting with a migraine at the time, so there was no dancing to be done and the message was not received with the love it was sent with.

I think it's important to mention that there is no part of my life that living with chronic pain has not affected. I remember sitting in a psychologist’s office on the North Side of Brisbane, and I was quiet for quite a while, trying to curate the thoughts so that I could adequately relay how desperate I felt, but not so much so that I have a short involuntary time in hospital. The words that came out of my mouth spoke to the total sense of loss that I felt as a result of living with chronic pain and the ‘things’ that I was not able to do or participate in as a result – “Am I even lovable?” I choked out, in tears. I am not sure what my psychologist answered.

In mental health circles they often talk about the biopsychosocial contributors to understanding mental ill health, and that a clear understanding of these can be the bedrock to solid recovery. It's fair to say and not at all dramatic to say that living with chronic pain for the last 14 years has nearly cost me my life, my marriage, and my grip on sanity. So, the fact that I am writing this, and that this episode is being produced is testament to the fact that recovery is definitely possible.

Recovery as I've come to understand it is a concept which is defined by each person as to how they might like to live despite the challenges they face, be they mental health, chronic physical health or other challenge.

Having a living experience of chronic and persistent pain, has also come with many gifts. This is one of the reasons for this episode - I would like to be able to pass these gifts forward so that hopefully, wherever you are on your journey, whether it's living with chronic pain, mental health or other challenge, that you may find a point of resonance here and maybe a tool that you can add to your toolkit. The second reason is that this forms part of an assessment for an advanced diploma in meditation. Having skin in the game as it were, I feel like I may have a bit of an advantage, by way of lived experience. However this works meets you, may you be well, play be happy may you be safe and may you live at ease of heart with whatever comes to you in life.

“What counts in battle is what you do when the pain sets in.”

John Short

The quote above comes from a book that I read about 14 years ago from Dean Karnases called Ultra Marathon Man. In the book Dean talks about nearing the end of one of the ultra marathons, that he ran, with several injuries and nothing left in the tank. Dean’s dad offers some advice and empathy, but as he's about to walk away he says “what counts in battle is what you do when the pain sets in”. This has become somewhat of a guidepost for me, as I explored the terrain chronic physical and emotional pain.

Towards the end, I will include a selection of resources and links. In hosting the Don’t Quit on Me podcast, I have spoken with a variety of subject matter experts, in an effort to understand ways to navigate intense stress and pain, in the most intelligently, i.e with the least amount of suffering possible.

A key point from the show comes to mind, talked about by Dr Dan Harvey and Insight Meditation teacher Sebene Selassie, about the experience of emotional, social pain and physical pain being processed in similar parts of the brain. In my very limited understanding, this means that tools that help to reduce suffering for physical pain, may also be useful for the experience of social and emotional pain.

Skin in the Game

“It is indeed a radical act of love just to sit down and be quiet for a time by yourself”.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

It’s just after 4am and the birds are starting to sing. First one … then another… during the dawn chorus their songs seem louder, livelier and more urgent than during the day. Maybe they seize this space to sing, before the noise of the day can interrupt their beautiful, melodic songs that call each day in to being.

I am awake at this time most mornings. This morning a sequence of experiences; a conjoined blur - pain from a decent tension headache that has been hanging around for days, coupled with pain from fibromyalgia, panic and it’s cousin a dense cognitive fog – the residue of a nightmare – I still sense, something dark, very close, too close to see, temporarily I can’t move.

As consciousness returns, and with-it, limited movement, I go through the morning ritual, an attempt to ease the pain and fog, and see how much I am able to function and extract from the day. Off to the loo, two bottles of water and then into a portable infrared sauna, to warm up the heaviness living in the muscles and connective tissue, and with any luck subdue the constant companion.Infrared Sauna is also starting to be looked at as a tool for living with chronic pain conditions. (Tsagkaris et al., 2022)

I have a living experience with chronic migraines, tension headaches and fibromyalgia, something that has been around for roughly the last 14 years. Each day is a balancing act between the pain, the anxiety caused by the pain, my energy levels, and as I am beginning to understand and will touch on later, any sense of imminent danger that I may perceive. Each day, an attempt to balance accomplishment withoutovertaxing a system in survival mode, so much that I pay for it for the coming days.

There are a couple of reasons why the pain may have become such a permanent fixture in my life, and I'll explore them briefly, but one thing I have noticed, is that focusing on why is nowhere near as helpful as what now. If I look back for a point of origin with the physical pain several things happened around the time it started; my mom's passed away, I also trained for a marathon, before which I came down with a respiratory virus. Post race I had blood work done which showed Ross River virus and another virus had been present in my system but were not currently active. I am also a survivor childhood trauma which in and of itself heightens someone's baseline perception of threat and as we'll explore can accentuate and amplify the body's attempt to report pain signals. There is also a strong correlation between trauma survivors and chronic pain sufferers (Asmundson, PTSD and the experience of pain: Research and clinical implications of shared vulnerability and mutual maintenance models).

In 1994 Dr Paul brand wrote the book Pain the Gift That Nobody Wants, describing his work with leprosy patients in India, and the essential role that pain has in keeping us safe. Without , he argues, we would be exposed to an unacceptable level of danger, leaving us devoid of mechanisms to warn us of impending threat.

If I think about my own experience, this is certainly a truism - pain by its very nature, and the way we experience it, is deeply unpleasant, very real, and is designed to get our attention and cause us to recoil. It is a message for us to act, to protect ourselves from the perceived threat. What happens through, when these signals fall out of calibration, when they report pain too loudly or for too long - when there is no longer a present threat that requires us to act, or the message we are receiving is disproportionate to the threat?

This is something I have sat with and worked through for many years, leading to this exploration of how the practice of meditation may be helpful to those, like me, who live with chronic pain.

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 Deon Bird is a husband, a father of four, an ex professional rugby league player, a mental health advocate, a proud Aboriginal man, a trainer, a coach, and one of the wellbeing and education officers at the Redcliffe Dolphins for both the NRL team and the state league.

Deon says that he once thought that he was put on this earth to play rugby league, but through becoming a mentor for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, Deon realized his true purpose, assisting people to develop self awareness and build skills to navigate challenging times, in particular, Indigenous youth.

Deon's professional rugby league career spanned 11 years, starting with the Brisbane Broncos in 1994, before travelling to England and France to play there. Now three of Deon's kids are playing rugby, and he's working hard to assist in creating a pathway NRLW.

James N. Kirby, Ph.D.,is a Senior Lecturer, Clinical Psychologist, and the Co-Director of theCompassionate Mind Research Groupat the University of Queensland. He has broad research interests in compassion, but specifically examines factors that facilitate and inhibit compassionate responding. He also examines the clinical effectiveness of compassion focused interventions, specifically in how they help with self-criticism and shame that underpin many depression and anxiety disorders.

James also holds a Visiting Fellowship at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Educationat Stanford University and is an Honorary Member of theCompassionate Mind FoundationUK. In 2022 he authoredChoose Compassion, and in 2020 he co-editedMaking an Impact on Mental Health.

He serves as an Associate Editor for two international journals MindfulnessandPsychology & Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice.

 Edwina Kempe lives and works on Turrbal, Jajera and Jinibarra Country in Meanjin, also known as Brisbane. Edwina is an accredited mental health social worker and a qualified yoga teacher. Edwina's, also qualified in trauma center, trauma sensitive yoga as a facilitator, trainer, and mentor. Her framework is trauma informed and committed to social justice issues that underpin her work.

Having worked in the community sector in a range of service environments, including homelessness, refugee health, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, and Women's Services, Edwina currently offers canceling trauma sensitive yoga. Supervision and training online and in Red Hill in Brisbane. Edwina believes connection to self and others through the body can provide a pathway to healing and feels privileged to support individuals.

Through a safer integrated approach to treatment. This treatment facilitates connection with themselves, their bodies, and also with others as they guide their own personal healing journey or professional development.

https://www.edwinakempe.com.au/

Kelly Boys is a mindfulness trainer and author of The Blind Spot Effect. She has created mindfulness programs for UN humanitarians and veterans with PTSD, and directed a teacher training for Google. She has worked with the United Nations Foundation, Search Inside Yourself Institute, and the Integrative Restoration Institute, and is the founding advisor for the Simple Habit meditation app. She currently works with the Foundation for a Mindful Society helping to grow their Mindful Cities program.

Kelly is a warm & insightful human, with a huge amount of experience in utilising and sharing meditation and compassion based tools in the most intense arenas. I hope you enjoy the chat.

If you feel moved to provide support to the show, please get in touch on Instagram at dontquiton.me

Find Kelly at:

https://www.kellyboys.org/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnTQCQQSelxQnJ7XrI32UyA

https://www.instagram.com/kelly.boys/